For seventeen years Moira Marquis, the lead author of PEN, America’s report on carceral censorship, “Reading Between the Bars” has served as a one-person human land bridge for those living in confinement and clawing at literacy. The Saxaphaw Prison Books Program exists because of her, as does the Prison Banned Books Week initiative she founded and directs while teaching at Fordham University. Because of Moira’s digital solution acumen, and her feisty pursuit of pedagogical freedom, the Barz Behind Bars poetry workshop deployed at eleven California prisons was successful in defeating a book ban effort deployed by a local cabal of prison administrators determined to stiff-arm resident autonomy and censor free expression.
Consider this a gesture of gratitude, as much as it serves to inform you, the taxpayer, of just how pernicious the prison leviathan can be when nobody is looking.
The Mellon Foundation funded an effort to direct-mail to indigent residents of the carceral state PEN America’s The Sentences That Create Us: Creating a Writer’s Life in Prison (2022), the definitive carceral writing guide edited by Caits Meissner, the former director of the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program. When Benjamin Frandsen, the executive director of the nonprofit Ben Free Project ordered eighty copies of Sentences and had them shipped to Valley State Prison (VSP), local administrators impounded the books, though they’d been properly received, inspected by security personnel, and delivered to the Community Resource Manager Carmen Maroney, and her subordinate staffer Heather Betts.
Then the books vanished. Requests went ignored. Appeals were denied. Emails went unreplied to. The facility quickly became a duck-diving Newport surfer trying to evade the shore pound of scrutiny. Who took the books?
Marquis crafted two PEN-letterhead advocacy letters and mailed them to two different VSP Wardens (McVay/Dotson), citing the “impoundment” of the eighty books. VSP has never denied receiving the books, but after more than a year still has not made them available to our population for use, absent explanation. It paints a fairly brazen picture of just how unaccountable prison managers are when their superiors allow them to evade the ethics, policy, and law constraints designed to prevent such abuses. We didn’t litigate it—we simply wrote about it here.
Marquis did us one better. She placed the entire book as a digital PDF file upon the Edovo app, and now more than 700,000 incarcerated citizens across the country can read this valuable resource on demand and for free using their DOC-issued tablets. Censorship never succeeds. It merely amplifies the sequestered content—in this case 8,750-fold. Do the math: 700,000 ÷ 80 = 8,750.
We swallowed the local humiliation, toiled in the cypher with our fading photocopied versions of Sentences’ chapters for over a year, and now all of our brothers and sisters have the book in their digital hands, without it counting against the arcane prison practice that limits the number of personal books a confined citizen can possess as personal property. Take that.
Why might there ever be a sound penological basis to limit the number of paperback books a person might be allowed to possess and read while in prison?
Just saying that out loud should make you throw up in the back of your mouth, regardless of what you think about the role of prisons writ large, or how you feel about spending money on rehabilitation. In this case, the banned and impounded books were donated for free. Why might any prison, let alone the supposed home of the ‘California Model,’ limit resident access to free pedagogically sound literary knowledge while 38% of California’s prison population wades in the functional literacy gap? I thought Freedom Reads.
Via email, Marquis recently told us, “Free expression is the bedrock of a free society. Without it, we are all relegated to the whims and mandates of others. If we allow suppression of free expression in prisons it creates a social license to do that in other public institutions and in society at large.” Here here.
It didn’t matter to VSP’s unaccountable bad actors that Meissner, the editor of Sentences, is a public-facing and online-declared advisor to the Ben Free Project’s Board of Directors, or that Marquis, one of the world’s most vocal anti-censorship advocates whose op-ed perspectives are normatively posited via platforms like Time, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The Progressive, were implicated by the impoundment. Prison officials never fear intellectual or scholarly scrutiny – in California, if headquarters doesn’t hold them to account, nothing ever changes. They laugh at the academics. It takes a Warden who cares about literacy to actually reign in those who don’t.
Regional Dwayne Betts and his Mellon-funded Freedom Reads organization donated over 9,000 books and 18 micro-library units valued at nearly $200,000 to VSP more than a year ago, only to see VSP confiscate the 80 books mailed from PEN America that would have served to instruct residents on how to best organize peer-facilitated writing workshops and build communities around Betts’ gift of literature. Though the two previous Wardens are gone, and Moroney has since retired, their minions remain. The swamp is real.
Prison Banned Books Week is a national campaign to raise awareness that carceral institutions are the largest censors in the U.S., having secured policy wins in Texas, Wisconsin, and solved our problem in California, while growing its partner organization cohort to 65, including the ACLU, Prison Policy Initiative, American Bookseller’s Association, and the Equal Justice Initiative.
Thank you for having our back Moira.
To support freedom, visit: www.prisonbannedbooksweek.org
