Prison Library Purge
by Michael Gerson from The Washington Post
The immediate effect of the new policy has been to decimate prison libraries collected over decades. A policy directed at jihadist literature has, for example, resulted in the removal of three-quarters of the Jewish books at the Otisville Prison in New York ... Few would dispute that prison security and the prevention of terrorism are compelling state interests. Convicted terrorists such as Richard Reid and Jose Padilla seem to have been radicalized while doing time for previous offenses. Subversive Wahhabi literature in American prisons is a threat as real as a smuggled knife ... By all means, the Bureau of Prisons should weed out hate-filled literature in prisons. But it needs to remember that the enemy is radicalism, not religion.