George Orwell, John Updike and Barack Obama are among the names PEN America says have been illogically withheld from prisoners
In one prison in New York, authorities tried to ban a book of maps of the moon, arguing that it could “present risks of escape”. In Florida, prisons have prevented inmates from reading Klingon dictionaries and a colouring book about chickens. In Texas, prisons have a banned list of more than 10,000 books by authors including Alice Walker, John Updike, George Orwell and Joyce Carol Oates.
With bookshops and libraries across the US marking Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of the right to read, a new paper from PEN America says that the largest ban in the US is in state and federal prisons, where more than 2.2 million people are currently incarcerated. The free-speech organisation is calling on the US Congress to convene immediate hearings on book-banning in prisons, with a petition signed by almost 40,000 people saying that Congress must “shed light on this critical right to read where it is being thwarted most severely”.
Related: Want to write fiction in US prisons? It might be censored on 'security grounds' | Caits Meissner
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