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Posted by: David Bunch

"Oh no," you'll say (as I did), when you read the following headline from the New York Times.

Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

Can this really be going on in the United States? Yes, and here's why:

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Ahhh....now that places things in a different light. But what do we really want to go down a path in which we block access to all religious titles just because there are a few "bad apples"?

To work out a compromise, the Bureau had done the following:

The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories — everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and there will be occasional updates, Ms. Billingsley said. Prayer books and other worship materials are not affected by this process.

The article goes on to point out that the problem with this approach is that the lists reflect author bias and do not seem very representative. So what to do?

Hmmmm......