What to Read in Jail

There is no need for a comment here on the Congressional testimony of the General and the Ambassador and the Bush speech about the war in Iraq. All this dog and pony show was quite easy to predict, as I did here in July in “Filibustering Iraq”.

What caught my attention this week was an interesting article in the NY Times about the Standardized Chapel Library Project, a program under which the Justice Department’s Federal Bureau of Prisons decides what religious books make it into prison libraries. Concerned that some religious books might incite violence, this censorship project took the unusual approach of not just banning books deemed dangerous, but instead banning all religious books except for those on an approved list. Apparently the secret experts identified twenty religions or religious categories and then arbitrarily chose particular books and other media to represent each category.

Typical of the Bush Administration in general and the Justice Department in particular, the approved list has not been publicized, and the standards used for selection as well as the names of the persons who adopted the standards have been kept secret. This calls to mind the self-censorship used by the Motion Picture Association of America, whose ubiquitous film ratings, in what would be a total surprise to most Americans, are also made by secret panels applying non-published standards. An excellent documentary about the MPAA ratings sham, “This Film Is Not Yet Rated”, is definitely worth watching.

The Times article mentions the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. There is also a subsequently passed Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. As the previous Wikipedia links to these articles indicate, the Acts were passed in 1993 and 2000, in an attempt to clarify or modify Court rulings on conflicts between religious rights and general societal interests. I don’t recall any public dialog at the time these laws were passed. Particularly now, after the 9/11 religious fanatic attacks, with America embroiled in the middle of a religious was in Iraq and with a disastrous Presidency enabled by a religiously motivated voter base which disregards our Constitution, we need to have a significant dialog about the place of religion in our own lives, in our country and in the world. The next Democratic Presidential administration could play a significant role in encouraging such discussions, publicly and with all views welcome.

The trampling of prisoner religious reading rights has prompted the expected class action lawsuit, succinctly covered in this blog entry from Melissa Rogers. I expect the prison censorship project to be ruled unconstitutional. As in the film on the MPAA ratings, a major point of interest is who are the people on the secret panel. The assumption regarding the movie raters, since the ratings supposedly exist to guide parents, is that the raters would be concerned parents. But it turns out the panelists were mostly people involved in the film distribution business, using the ratings system to assist distribution of their own films while encumbering distribution of independent films. Perhaps the same will be revealed about the Standardized Chapel Library Project - the secret panel may be composed of religious book publishers and distributors.