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Fearing Radicals, Prisons Remove Religious BooksOfficials at the federal prison in Otisville, New York, removed hundreds of books from the chapel library on Memorial Day, mostly titles of a religious nature. The action was part of a belated response to an April 2004 Department of Justice review of the way prisons choose providers of Muslim religious services that resulted in a federal directive designed to prevent violent inmates from access to radical Islamic religious texts, the Associated Press reported June 10. Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Feldman said the new rules limited the number of books for each religion to between 100 and 150 in each prison, adding that the number would expand after officials chose a new list of permitted books. Feldman said the study was prompted by a concern after the September 11 terrorist attacks that prisons “had been radicalized by inmates who were practicing or espousing various extreme forms of religion, specifically Islam, which exposed security risks to the prisons and beyond the prisons to the public at large.” Three Otisville inmates have filed a lawsuit over the policy, saying their constitutional rights were violated. Inmate Moshe Milstein told U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain by telephone that the chaplain removed about 600 books from the chapel library, including Harold S. Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Judge Swain declined to block the book removals, noting that the lawsuit might be premature because the inmates had not yet followed prison administrative complaint procedures. Posted June 15, 2007. |
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