Summary Of Restricting Books Behind Bars By Timothy Inklebarger

across various platforms, efforts to ban books have sparked a debate on the impacts and ethics of limiting a person’s scope of knowledge. In Texas, The Dallas Morning News revealed a list of banned books for inmates that overshot 10,000 (Inklebarger 23). Tries at limiting literature have surfaced all across the United States, as ALA writer Timothy Inklebarger covers in his work Restricting Books Behind Bars. Taking statements from organizations dedicated to providing books to prisoners, he describes attempts to subvert them with shoddy, illusive and arbitrary limitations. Prisons, he’s explained, have a tendency to ban books covering specific topics, or books that address their topics in diverse ways. Along with this, he discusses the value

She rallies to critically analyze why one may be inclined to censor a topic for a group, and what that means for those impacted. Combining both sources reveals a consensus: limiting public access to information on any subject can have serious impacts on a person’s intellectual and emotional development, which impacts how they relate to the rest of society. Timothy Inklebarger succinctly introduces book bans across America, specifically in prisons, in his functional retrospective Restricting Books Behind Bars, published by the American Library Association. The work was prompted by the recent New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision decision to limit books imported into prisons only to specific vendors. Many protested the change, largely due to the fact the suppliers nearly exclusively stocked crosswords and coloring books. He related the decision to a New Jersey incident where the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age Of Colorblindedness was banned in Jersey prisons (Inklebarger