Prison Banned Book Week Report: E-Tablets Limit Reading Selection

Reading behind bars has only become harder in recent years, according to a new analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative, timed for Prison Banned Books Week. The analysis looks at data collected by the Prison Banned Books Week campaign on prison book bans, policies around books, and the availability of e-books on tablet computers.  “What we found is that tablets limit access to important modern writing and knowledge behind bars,” the analysis concludes. Tablets are now being used, or being implemented in, at least 48 prison systems, the analysis finds, a big jump from 2019, when a similar analysis found that only 12 states had them.  The two companies providing tablets to the most state prisons are Securus/JPay and ViaPath/GTL, companies that now control roughly 80% of both the phone and e-messaging markets behind bars.

The rapid expansion of electronic tablets behind bars has occurred at a time when access to physical books in prisons has become increasingly rare. Libraries are often under-resourced, strictly regulated, and have limited and outdated selections of books making them unreliable for accessing books and information. Even facilities that still allow people to send books to their incarcerated loved ones dramatically restrict what they can read. The most banned book in American prisons is a cookbook. Prison Ramen details how incarcerated people can use ingredients often sold at commissaries to add flavor to ramen (another common item in prison commissaries). But not all tablet even offer e-books. For those that do, most of the available books come from Project Gutenberg, a collection of e-books that are free because their copyright expired when they reached 100 years old. Though it includes some classics, people in prison usually won’t find e-books by author and civil rights activist James Baldwin, though they will find century-old books known for racist ideas and sentiments. “The single most important step that prisons can take to make tablets work in the best interest of incarcerated readers is by forcing the companies to offer other apps that give incarcerated people access to the catalogs at their local libraries,” according to the Prison Policy analysis.