Grits loved the
Dallas News' coverage of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's 10,000+ banned books list, both for
books dubiously banned and for those allowed. But my
Reasonably Suspicious podcast partner, Mandy Marzullo, noticed an interesting tidbit the stories didn't highlight. We discuss it in the podcast which will be out this week. Lauren McGaughy reported that the book
Freakonomics was banned for:
"racial content" that could be construed as being "written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption."
This was reported without comment, but there are at least two problems with this determination. First, there's no mention whatsoever of race or "racial content" in the actual
TDCJ policy (which is quoted near-verbatim and linked in the story). Both were put in quotation marks by the mail clerk who rejected the book, but only one is quoting anything. There's no legitimate justification for rejecting a book under TDCJ policy based on "racial content," which means the policy isn't really being enforced and the mail clerks and review committees are using subjective (in this case, race-based) criteria to make their decisions.
Second, the idea that the book
Freakonomics was "written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption" is absurd and laughable on its face. Not only was it not written solely for that reason, the authors might find it surprising to learn that anyone, anywhere, ever interpreted their writing that way. Meanwhile,
Mein Kampf and books by David Dukes get in without a hitch. (No "racial content" in those books, I'm sure!)
In a lot of ways, TDCJ has promulgated a stupid policy. (After McGaughy's coverage, and interest from House Corrections Committee Chairman James White, that policy is now under review.) Can anyone name a book "written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption"? If so, I'd like to read it. Grits has never heard of such a thing.
Even books like Angela Davis' autobiography, for example, which in part describes her own efforts to organize California prisoners to disrupt that prison system in the '70s, wasn't written "solely" for the purpose of communicating that information; it was part of a broader black power movement whose purposes where diverse and extended far beyond the prison yard.
I'm curious: if anyone knows of some devilish manual that meets the precise description in that policy, including the "solely,"
please leave the title in the comments. As I write this, I'm not certain such a volume exists.
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