According to the Huffington Post, Mark Melvin, an inmate at Kilby Correctional Facility in Alabama, has filed a lawsuit after prison officials refused to give him a copy of the book Slavery By Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon. The officials claimed the book was a security threat, referencing regulations by the Federal Bureau of Prisons which state that publications may be barred from use by prisoners if they are deemed “detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution or if it might facility criminal activity.” The intention, of course, is to bar prisoners from reading books that might explain, for instance, how to build a bomb or a makeshift weapon. Slavery By Another Name won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

The issue this brings up is that of arbitrary censorship, where prisons throughout America have made some pretty heavy restrictions on what they allow inmates to read: Central Mississippi Correctional refuses any books containing legal, medical, or violent content; Virginia’s Staunton Correctional only allows access to “nonfiction, educational, or spiritual books.” A report by the Texas Civil Rights Project claims that U.S. prisons have made “unreasonable and astonishing decisions…largely because material is twisted entirely out of context.” The report adds that “rather than unlawfully censor(ing) books, (prisons) should encourage prisoners to read.”

The state of Texas’s Department of Criminal Justice records all the titles banned in their prisons. There are over 12,000 titles, including works by Shakespeare, George Orwell, and Norman Mailer. Although there is an appeal process for the banned book, 85% of the appeals have been denied.

The Texas Civil Rights Project claims that, “if there is any activity prisons should encourage during incarceration, it is reading.”

Separate rulings in Supreme Court cases from the 1980s declared that “prison walls do not form a barrier separating prison inmates from the protections of the Constitution,” and “a warden may not reject a publication ‘solely because its content is religious, philosophical, political, social, or sexual, or because its content is unpopular or repugnant.’”