Each year, Prison Banned Books Week brings attention to a pervasive yet often overlooked form of censorship—the systematic restriction of reading materials in prisons and jails across the United States. This year’s campaign (October 19-25, 2025) is just coming to an end, but the efforts to bring prison censorship to light continue every day, as dedicated activists, advocates, and volunteers work to reduce barriers to information access behind bars. While the more expansive Banned Books Week (which is promoted each fall by the American Library Association) highlights challenges to literature in schools and public libraries, the prison censorship initiative focuses specifically on the intellectual rights of the approximately 2 million incarcerated individuals in the United States and the state’s control over what incarcerated people are permitted to read, learn, and imagine.
Across the country, thousands of books are banned from correctional facilities—including works by acclaimed authors such as William Blake, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and civil rights activist and lawyer, Michelle Alexander. In many cases, these bans are excused under vague claims of “security concerns,” yet they frequently reflect institutional bias and arbitrary decision-making. Educational resources on topics such as history, race, law, or sexuality are disproportionately restricted, denying people behind bars access to information that fosters critical thinking, personal growth, and self-advocacy.
The Prison Policy Initiative’s 2024 Prison Banned Books Week report underscores how these barriers to knowledge are evolving in new, troubling ways. Nearly all state prison systems now provide incarcerated people with tablets, often promoted as a solution to limited access to books. However, these digital libraries are typically filled only with public-domain titles and lack diverse, contemporary, or educational works. At the same time, physical books have become harder to obtain due to bans and underfunded prison libraries. Rather than expanding opportunities for reading, these digital platforms often serve corporate interests and deepen isolation, replacing one form of censorship with another.
The censorship of books in prisons is not a matter of logistics; it is an extension of punishment. Incarcerated individuals already endure profound isolation. Depriving them of access to reading and learning deepens that isolation and undermines the principles of rehabilitation and human dignity that the United States carceral system claims to uphold. Ample research demonstrates that access to books and educational programs reduces recidivism, supports mental health, and aids in successful reentry into society. Reading fiction, studies show, increases empathy, as readers learn to inhabit the minds of the characters they encounter on the page. Readers are connected to the wider world and reminded of their own capacity for growth, curiosity, and humanity. Denying incarcerated people this kind of imaginative engagement is punitive and does nothing to foster reform.
Prison Banned Books Week underscores the vital work of organizations such as Books to Prisoners and the Prison Library Project, which strive to ensure that incarcerated individuals can exercise their fundamental right to read. The freedom to access information should not end at the prison gate. Books offer knowledge, perspective, and the possibility of transformation—essential components of justice and humanity that must remain accessible to all—even those in state custody.
See below for a list of additional organizations working to ensure access to books and information for those serving time.
Further Reading
Inside Books Project: Sending Free Books to People Incarcerated in Texas
Prisoners Literature Project: Banned Books Week 2025
San Francisco Public Library: Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People Initiative
Prison Newspapers
The Texas Prison Echo: The Newspaper of the TDCJ - Features include recipes made with ingredients from the prison commissary, the Ask Darby advice column, sports pages, puzzles and games, and more. The Dear Darby letter, written by Self-Taught, pictured at right, appeared in the March/April 2024 issue of The Echo. Amy Small, Director of the Texas State Law Library, and Rachel Hardy, the TSLL librarian who handles all prison correspondence, generously shared several issues of The Echo with us at Harris County. This is an excerpt.
The Texas Prison Echo Archive at The Portal to Texas History (1928-present)
American Prison Newspapers, 1800s-present: Voices from the Inside