Bureau of Idiocy, Posing as the Bureau of Prisons
September 10, 2007
Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries
Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel 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.
. . . 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.”. .
. . . The bureau has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained. . .
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A train wreck, as the conservative religious and evangelical Republican base come slam bang up against Chertoff's commandos, decimating the prison libraries of religious works.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons was established in 1930 to provide more progressive and humane care for Federal inmates, to professionalize the prison service, and to ensure consistent and centralized administration of the 11 Federal prisons in operation at the time.
That opening line from the Bureau of Prisons web site doesn't square with what Mike Chertoff and his cripplers of freedom are up to. No dough to buy replacements for the decades of books that are being stripped?---not because they are evil books or even controversial books, but because they are not on an arbitrary list compiled in secret by people we are not allowed to know.
* For more in-depth articles by Jim on Civil Rights, check out Opinion-Columns.com