Ending Carceral Censorship

I’d just sent a report I wrote on prison censorship out for peer review when, scrolling through Instagram two days later, I saw a post from Inside Books, a longstanding, Austin-based prison book program that provides reading materials to incarcerated people. Though deflating, its contents were not surprising.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had quietly implemented an approved vendor policy without advance notice, debate, or a legislative proposal. This meant that books could now be sent only from certain official entities—mainly big retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Books sent directly from family, for example, would be rejected.

Approved vendor policies like this have been proliferating in recent years. The number of carceral facilities nationwide that limit literature to certain vendors rose from roughly 30 percent in 2015 to 80 percent in 2023.

Read the full article on Inquest: A Decarceral Brainstorm