Arizona prison officials have banned inmates from reading "Chokehold," a critically-acclaimed critique of the American criminal-justice system.
That makes sense. If the inmates knew all about the for profit prison system and back door slavery they’d be very enraged about it.
The book is “Chokehold,” by Paul Butler, a former Washington DC prosecutor who wrote it after being wrongly arrested. From the article:
Butler, who is African-American, wrote the book after he was arrested on false assault allegations, an event that dramatically changed his view of the justice system.
“During the trial, I experienced for myself a lot of things that defendants I’d prosecuted said were evidence of how unfair the system was: Police lied, witnesses who knew what happened didn’t come forward,” Butler told The Guardian in 2017.
“The jury took less than 10 minutes to acquit me,” he said, because “I could afford the best lawyer in the city, had legal skills and social standing, and because I was innocent.
“But the experience made a man out of me. It made a black man out of me.”
According to the article they also banned one of Maya Angelou’s book too.
So I’m guessing that the officials want to keep them 100% imprisoned, physically and mentally.
End slavery.
This is literally the reason prison education programs and libraries have been defunded, neglected, and often straight up removed from even low security sites.
In the 70s and 80s (and frankly before that, but those decades coincide with the general Tough On Crime™ push that’s still running amok) there was a boom in self-taught and correspondence taught lawyers coming out of jail. These people then turned around and became advocates for reform and/or defense lawyers in relatively large numbers.
Can’t have that, so what do you do? You narrow the options for prisoner education. The less options an incarcerated person has, the more likely they’ll wind up back in prison.
This is slavery, yes. And it’s also a wholesale attack on the (spurious, but still) idea of rehabilitation through imprisonment.
