Walk into Morris Library at the University of Delaware on the afternoon of October 8, and you will find a table set up with materials about a kind of censorship that rarely makes headlines. The event, titled "Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read: Prison Book Bans," runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and is a drop-in affair, free and open to anyone who wanders past. It is presented in partnership with the UD Department of English and is part of the campus-wide Banned Books Week programming.
The framing question on the table's materials is blunt: who gets to read, and who is denied that right? The answer, according to a growing body of reporting and advocacy, is that the most aggressive censors in the United States are not school boards or local libraries. They are the mailrooms of prisons and jails.
Prisons and jails ban more books than all public schools and libraries combined, according to Prison Banned Books Week, an annual campaign now in its fourth year that brings together more than sixty organizations working on free expression, including independent booksellers, libraries, prison book programs, and civil and First Amendment rights groups. The campaign's central claim is stark: prisons are the largest censors in the United States.
The mechanics of how this happens are less dramatic than a legislative vote and more mundane, which may be why the issue stays under the radar. Mailroom staff at each prison are often the first to review publications arriving for incarcerated people, and they get to decide which books are approved and which are rejected. In practice, that means a single employee flipping through a book during mail inspection can determine whether it reaches its intended reader. As the Dallas Morning News reported in 2017, the results can be idiosyncratic: Texas prisons banned Freakonomics while permitting Hitler's Mein Kampf. The Big Book of Angels and a collection of Shakespearean sonnets were both rejected for containing nude images of children.
The scale is enormous. Texas alone has banished nearly 10,000 titles, a figure that includes Memoirs of a Geisha and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. The Marshall Project has compiled a state-by-state database of banned books, a resource that makes the breadth of the practice visible in a way that individual anecdotes cannot.
The targets are not random. Books about race, social justice, and history are frequently restricted, as are basic educational materials. In 2018, reporting by the New York Times revealed that prisons in multiple states had banned Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, a critical examination of the American criminal justice system. North Carolina explicitly banned it on the grounds that it was "likely to provoke confrontation between racial groups." The ban was lifted after public outcry. A year later, at the Danville Correctional Center in Illinois, officials ended a prisoner education program run by the University of Illinois and purged more than 200 books from the program's library. The stated reason, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request, was that too many of the books had "racial" content and that the program placed too much emphasis on things like "diversity and inclusion." The Education Justice Project had been offering for-credit courses at Danville, ranging from calculus to "Intro to Critical Race Theory in Education."
The restrictions extend well beyond politics. Books featuring sexual content and nudity are routinely restricted, a category broad enough to sweep in classics such as Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. A total ban on nudity also catches figure-drawing manuals, art and art-history magazines, and books on human anatomy, according to the National Coalition Against Censorship. The guidelines governing these decisions tend to be worded broadly, allowing for varied interpretations and producing sweeping bans that go far beyond any stated security concern.
The human cost of these policies is not abstract. In October 2024, the Guardian told the story of Lupe Constante, a Texas man who spent more than twenty years in solitary confinement and who wrote a book while locked in isolation. When a copy of his own book arrived at the prison, it was denied, with staff explaining that it contained information that could disrupt the system. Texas keeps more people in bathroom-sized cells for three years or longer than any other state surveyed, according to a 2022 report from Yale Law School, and more than 500 people there have lived in such conditions for at least a decade. The United Nations has called for an end to solitary confinement, considering it a violation of human rights.
Against this backdrop, the organizations that mail free reading material to incarcerated people have taken on outsized importance. The first Books to Prisoners projects were founded in the early 1970s, including Seattle's Books to Prisoners, Boston's Prison Book Program, and the Prison Library Project, founded in Durham, North Carolina, and later relocated to Claremont, California. Books Through Bars NYC was founded in 1996 as a collaboration between Blackout Books, the Nightcrawlers Anarchist Black Cross, and the prison abolitionist Victoria Law. Today there are more than fifty similar projects across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, communicating through a listserv created in 2006 and gathering at national and regional conferences, including one in Philadelphia in 2003, one in Urbana-Champaign in 2007, and one in Boston in 2019.
These programs have themselves come under pressure. In March, the Washington Department of Corrections issued a policy banning nonprofit organizations from donating used books to prisoners. After public outcry, the department reversed the ban and scheduled a meeting with Books to Prisoners, the Seattle nonprofit. The outcome of that meeting has not been made public.
The legal picture is more settled than the policy picture. Federal courts have repeatedly affirmed that prisoners have a First Amendment right to read, and that publishers and others have a right to send them reading materials. Those rights can be restricted in the interest of security, but as the National Coalition Against Censorship argues, blocking the free flow of ideas serves no penological purpose. Proponents of stricter controls contend that some information is inherently dangerous, but the First Amendment exists precisely to prohibit the suppression of information.
Advocates also point to practical benefits that have little to do with constitutional theory. Access to books plays a significant role in rehabilitation, and prison literacy programs have been shown to improve inmate behavior and lead to lower recidivism rates. Allowing prisoners access to books provides a low-cost educational alternative, in addition to its rehabilitative effects.
That is the argument the table at Morris Library will be making on October 8. Visitors can learn about the history and impact of prison book bans, explore why the issue matters beyond those behind bars, hear how communities and organizations are fighting back, and find out what they can do to support the right to read. The event is part of a broader campus conversation at Delaware, but its subject is national in scope, and its timing is pointed: it falls in the middle of Banned Books Week, a week traditionally devoted to fights over school and library shelves. The table asks visitors to consider a set of shelves they rarely think about at all.