Nothing but Bibles for Inmates at South Carolina Prison

Mark Twain once quipped that the single best thing the state could do to promote literacy would be to ban reading. The inmates at South Carolina's Berkeley County Detention Center must then be the most well-read in the country, then, as prison officials have for years enforced a strict no-reading policy that bans everything from Dickens to Shakespeare. The only exception: the Bible.

"Our inmates are only allowed to receive soft back bibles in the mail directly from the publisher," First Sergeant K. Habersham wrote in an a July 12 e-mail to the editor of Prison Legal News, which provides prisoners across the country with publications explaining their legal rights. "They are not allowed to have magazines, newspapers, or any other type of books."

In fact, according to the prison's formal policy, outside of the Bible, inmates are allowed to receive "letters only," as well as up to three pictures, but -- strangely, and unfortunately for shareholders of the struggling electronics company -- "they cannot be Polaroid." And since the prison doesn't even have a library, that means detainees are more or less stuck re-reading their favorite parts of Leviticus day in and day out.

Now with help from the ACLU, Prison Legal News is suing officials at the prison, with a complaint filed Wednesday in a U.S. district court charging that Berkeley County Detention Center's book-banning policy violates the Constitution. The lawsuit notes prison officials also refused to deliver any letters -- not just books and magazines -- sent by the publication.

"This is nothing less than unjustified censorship," said ACLU staff attorney David Shapiro in a statement. "There is no legitimate justification for denying detainees access to periodicals and, in the process, shutting them off from the outside world in draconian ways." (Read more after the jump.)

But as the ACLU of South Carolina's Victoria Middleton points out, the policy isn't just legally dubious -- it's just plain stupid if one's goal is reduce recidivism and ease prisoners' reentry into the community (but then maybe that's not their goal). "The Berkeley County Detention Center is totally out of step with most other jails around the country that recognize not just that censorship of this sort is clearly unconstitutional but that providing prisoners with access to books and periodicals is an important lifeline to the outside world. We should do as much as possible to aid prisoners' successful transition back into society, not impede it."

Though it may have the most extreme policy in the nation, Berkeley County Detention Center isn't the first prison to try and censor prisoners' reading. For years, Virginia barred inmates from receiving classical literature containing "sexually explicit" passages, while confusingly permitting them to read (ha!) Playboy and other soft-core pornography. That policy was overturned last month by a U.S. district court; may the same happen in South Carolina.

Photo Credit: J. Mark Bertrand