TITLE: Federal Prison Censors Reason Issue About How Federal Prison Employed Serial Rapists
https://reason.com/2023/10/09/federal-prison-censors-reason-issue-about-how-federal-prison-employed-serial-rapists/
EXCERPT: A federal prison blocked an incarcerated Reason subscriber from receiving one of our recent issues. It's the one whose cover story showed how the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) allowed a cadre of guards to sexually assault female inmates with impunity—and allowed them to escape legal consequences after they confessed.
Reason received a notice last week that FMC Devens, a federal men's prison in Massachusetts, rejected the October 2023 issue of the magazine. The cover story details how at least a dozen women were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. A Senate investigation later revealed that those officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control, yet they were allowed to retire without ever being prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The rejection notice from FMC Devens says the issue "is being rejected due to the nature of its content. The magainze [sic] contains an article about Bureau of Prisons staff at FCC Coleman including the names of Correctional Officers and victims. Such material jeopardizes the good order and security of the institution."
Of course, all the correctional officers named in the story are now retired. And the women all went on the record with their names when they filed a lawsuit, which the U.S. government eventually settled for about $1.5 million.
This is far from the first time Reason has had a run-in with prison censors. Issues of Reason have been impounded by Florida and Arizona prison officials. The latter found a on the deplorable conditions inside the Washington, D.C., jail "detrimental to the safe, secure, and orderly operation of the institution."
Prison censorship is pervasive across the country. A Marshall Project database published earlier this year of books banned in state prison systems lists more than 50,000 titles. Prisons and jails also restrict nonprofit groups and loved ones from sending incarcerated people used books, a policy that several groups around the country are challenging on First Amendment grounds.
The BOP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TITLE: A Children’s Book Was Flagged for Censorship in Alabama Because the Author’s Last Name Is Gay
https://www.themarysue.com/a-childrens-book-was-flagged-for-censorship-in-alabama-because-the-authors-last-name-is-gay/
EXCERPT: Even the most ardent book banners would be hard-pressed to find anything objectionable in [Marie-Louise ] Gay’s picture book, Read Me a Story, Stella. It’s the eleventh book in a bestselling series that follows two adventurous siblings, Stella and Sam. This latest story is especially heartwarming as it sees Stella teaching Sam to read and introducing him to the world of books. Hence, it sparked confusion when HCPL placed Read Me a Story, Stella on a list of books that were under review for “sexually explicit” material and set to be removed from the children’s section.
HCPL executive director Cindy Hewitt issued a statement explaining that the book had incorrectly been flagged due to the author’s last name. Disturbingly, “gay” is a keyword that the HCPL uses to determine which books to flag as “sexually explicit” and put on a censorship list. Read Me a Story, Stella was just one of 233 books put on the censorship list after being flagged by a system that uses “gay” as one of its trigger words. Hewitt stated that Read Me a Story, Stella would be removed from the list and would not be censored at the library. However, her statement is hardly reassuring.
The HCPL has still constructed a massive list of books they want to censor, specifically targeting LGBTQ+ books. Of course, Hewitt insists that the library isn’t targeting the LGBTQ+ community with its list. Yet, she admitted to vetting books for the word “gay,” and AL.com found that 91% of the books on the list had the words lesbian, gay, transgender, gender identity, or gender non-conforming in the subject header. Circulation manager Alyx Kim-Yohn revealed that these weren’t even books that anyone complained about and that the intent wasn’t to review them but to remove them. The library seemingly just formulated a massive list of LGBTQ+ books to remove, and it’s unclear what authority or reason it even has to do this.
It also proves, once again, that book banning isn’t about censoring books with sexually explicit material. This is just a tired excuse conservatives use to pretend they’re not attacking every book dealing with LGBTQ+ or racial topics. However, nothing so glaringly shows their true intents like a library feeding hundreds of books into a system looking, not for sexually explicit content, but simply for any mention of an LGBTQ+ related word. How many other books are getting pulled and banned for no reason due to libraries using discriminatory and faulty systems like this to determine which books they will censor?
Such an open display of discrimination in a public library should not be tolerated, and conservatives should not be allowed to use such ineffective and faulty methods to mass ban books they can’t even be bothered to research or read.
TITLE: Hey, Scholastic, Maybe You Could NOT Help Out The Censors
https://www. wonkette.com/p/hey-scholastic-maybe-you-could-not
EXCERPT: Normally, you’d think that Scholastic, a publisher of children’s books — especially a publisher whose website features pages titled “Diverse and Inclusive Books to Inspire Young Adults” or “Teach Diversity With Multicultural Books for Pre-K and Kindergarten,” among many others — would be a big opponent of school censors who want to “protect” the precious younglings from ideas that might corrupt them, like pictures of rainbows or those damn gay penguins with their Penguin Lust.
Heck, Scholastic even provides a handy dandy “Ultimate List of Banned books” on its site.
Scholastic could have taken the course of publisher Penguin Random House, which is joining parents, students, several authors, and PEN America to sue a Florida school district on First Amendment grounds, for censoring school libraries and teachers’ classroom book collections.
Then again, books is a business, and Scholastic in the last year has seen school districts cancel (or “reevaluate”) book fairs altogether, or rightwing groups like Moms for ‘Liberty’ demand the power to screen all the book fair offerings in advance. And of course there was that Georgia teacher who was fired this year after she bought the nonbinary fable My Shadow Is Purple at a Scholastic fair at her own school and read it to her class, although the book is completely non-explicit and doesn’t mention directly the terms “nonbinary,” “gender identity,” or “subvert the patriarchy” at all.
In a bright spot of resistance, though, when the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District in Texas canceled its Scholastic fair last November, a group of parents paid Scholastic and put on their own book fair — where they also registered voters. Goddamn right.
As of yet, it doesn’t appear that Scholastic itself has issued any comment on the matter. If it really is chickening out and giving schools the option to Just Say No to diversity, it wouldn’t be the first time Scholastic has shown cowardice under fire in the current Book Wars. Earlier this year, the company pissed off children’s book authors and fans of free speech when Publisher’s Weekly revealed that Scholastic had offered to publish its own edition of Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s 2022 picture book Love in the Library, a bibliophile love story (bibliophilephilia?) based on how her grandparents met in the library of Idaho’s Minedoka internment camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII.
But there was a catch, and it was a doozy: Scholastic, citing the “politically sensitive” book market these days, you know how it is, asked Tokuda-Hall to remove the phrase “virulent racism” from her author’s note about the USA’s virulently racist internment policy, and to delete a paragraph about the legacy of racism in the Land of the Free. After the inevitable social media storm, Scholastic soon apologized (archive link) and withdrew the request for changes to the book. As far as we can tell (updates on stories like this are hard to find!), no Scholastic edition of Love in the Library is yet in the company’s catalog.