Ban the bans: Prison Banned Books Week
Each fall, organizations working to push back against carceral censorship, collaborate to raise awareness and provide opportunities for public engagement for a week-long campaign called Prison Banned Books Week.
Prison Banned Books Week 2024 will focus on tablets, which are increasingly being used to justify the elimination of paper literature.
Follow #PrisonBannedBooksWeek and #BooksNotBans to learn more and participate in actions to support reading inside.
Grieved (2023) What’s so dangerous about books? Personal correspondence, books, magazines, and literature are powerful ways people connect with each other. Without sharing thoughts with others, people are isolated in our own consciousness. Paradoxically, prisons see human connection–the basis of human society–as dangerous. They limit what people can read and whom people inside can engage with. This collage makes visible some of the justifications for censorship, which is enacted behind the veil of barbed wire and cement walls. Like these physical structures, censorship silences incarcerated voices and prevents the rest of us from knowing what ideas incarcerated people are allowed to read, what thoughts they’re permitted to share and the lived realities they are authorized to acknowledge. Copies of denial forms, appeal forms and other prison paperwork that create the bureaucratic barrier to communication are interspersed with excerpts from narratives submitted by incarcerated people explaining their struggles with censorship. Many official forms are originals although they were scanned and scans have been kept in order to maintain documentation. Elements from censored mail are also included: envelopes that record the reasons for rejection, images of “return to sender” stamps that demand the post office return these materials, undelivered. The images of the book turning into a bird evoke the liberation reading offers. Stories and connections with others are the only escape incarcerated people have. Denying these fleeting, quiet and introspective moments should not be the focus. Why are books the danger? Paper on canvas. Glue and gold leaf. by Araya Ratanaphruks and Moira Marquis
The collage on this page, Grieved, was part of "Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship," an exhibit on carceral censorship curated by Mariame Kaba during the inaugural Prison Banned Books Week in 2023.
