*Prisons Purge Books on Faith From Libraries

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*Prisons Purge Books on Faith From Libraries - New York Times*

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: September 10, 2007

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.

Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in
a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last
month claiming the bureau's actions violate their rights to the free
exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious
Freedom Restoration Act.

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.''

Ms. Billingsley said, ''We really wanted consistently available information
for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by
reliable subject experts.''

But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an
administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social
problems has effectively blocked prisoners' access to religious and
spiritual materials -- all in the name of preventing terrorism.

''It's swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,'' said Mark Earley, president of
Prison Fellowship, a Christian group. ''There's no need to get rid of
literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you
have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents
extremism.''

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 lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions. There are nine
titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold
Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor
Robert H. Schuller.

The identities of the bureau's experts have not been made public, Ms.
Billingsley said, but they include chaplains and scholars in seminaries and
at the American Academy of Religion. Academy staff members said their
organization had met with prison chaplains in the past but was not consulted
on this effort, though it is possible that scholars who are academy members
were involved.

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.

A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison system, who spoke
on condition of anonymity because he is a bureau employee, said: ''At some
of the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and
now they are told that this material doesn't meet some kind of criteria. It
doesn't make sense to them. They're asking, 'Why are our tapes being taken,
why our books being taken?' ''

Of the lists, he said, ''Many of the chaplains I've spoken to say these are
not the things they would have picked.''

The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because chaplains routinely
reject any materials that incite violence or disparage, and donated
materials already had to be approved by prison officials. Prisoners can buy
religious books, he added, but few have much money to spend.

Religious groups that work with prisoners have privately been writing
letters about their concerns to bureau officials. Would it not be simpler,
they asked the bureau, to produce a list of forbidden titles? But the bureau
did that last year, when it instructed the prisons to remove all materials
by nine publishers -- some Muslim, some Christian.

The plan to standardize the libraries first became public in May when
several inmates, including a Muslim convert, at the Federal Prison Camp in
Otisville, N.Y., about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, filed a lawsuit
acting as their own lawyers. Later, lawyers at the New York firm of Paul,
Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison took on the case pro bono. They refiled
it on Aug. 21 in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New
York.

''Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish religious books, many of
them donated,'' said David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government
and public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group.
''It was decimated. Three-quarters of the Jewish books were taken off the
shelves.''

Mr. Zwiebel asked, ''Since when does the government, even with the
assistance of chaplains, decide which are the most basic books in terms of
religious study and practice?''

The lawsuit raises serious First Amendment concerns, said Douglas Laycock, a
professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, but he added that
it was not a slam-dunk case.

''Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend
to incite violence in prisons,'' Mr. Laycock said. ''But once they say,
'We're going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that's all you
get,' the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They're
picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the
government can't do that without a compelling justification. Here the
justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so
they're going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a
little money.''

The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were made available
to The Times by a critic of the bureau's project. In some cases, the lists
belie their authors' preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120
titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house.
A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who looked over some
of the lists were baffled at the selections.

Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian
Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for
''Other Christian'' and ''General Spirituality.''

''There are some well-chosen things in here,'' Professor Larsen said. ''I'm
particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I
would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.'' But he continued, ''There's a lot
about it that's weird.'' The lists ''show a bias toward evangelical
popularism and Calvinism,'' he said, and lacked materials from early church
fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of
Notre Dame (who edited ''The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,''
which did make the list), said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions,
few spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.

''I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic chaplains in federal
prisons if they're complaining that this list is inhibiting,'' he said,
''because I know they have useful books that are not on this list.''