Damascus James , The Guardian; They wrote a book while locked in solitary confinement. Texas won’t let them read it
"Our correspondences inspired me to put together Texas Letters, an ongoing anthology by nearly 50 writers who have spent more than 550 combined years in the bowels of Texas’s solitary confinement. In their contributions, they describe the loss of humanity, sanity and family connections in solitary. They say they have experienced copious violence, including assault and sexual abuse, at the hands of prison staff – one writer said a woman in a nearby cell had died after being beaten by a guard – and rampant neglect. Many describe poor mental and physical health that often leads to a desire to self-harm. Rates of suicide in Texas solitary confinement are disproportionally high, as these writers can attest.
One of the letter-writers was Lupe.
“It is hard to accept being locked in a 9x5 cage, for 24 hours a day, for years on end, with at most one hour a day out of your cell to shower, or to recreate alone in a slightly larger cage,” Lupe wrote to me in November 2023. “For the last few years,” he added, “the one hour a day out-of-cell time was cut down to one hour a week on a good week.”...
Texas is one of the most suppressive places for books in the country, alongside states such as Florida, Missouri and South Carolina. These states also have high incarceration rates; tough-on-crime states tend to be tough on the written word. And while book bans are a hot-button issue, particularly when it comes to public schools and libraries, prisons are actually some of the most restrictive reading environments in the US.
In Texas prisons, Texas Letters rests among banned titlesincluding The Color Purple; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire; and A Charlie Brown Christmas, in addition to New York Times bestsellers and books by Nobel peace prize nominees, civil rights leaders and even the Bard himself.
The Texas department of criminal justice (TDCJ) denies books for myriad reasons, as the Dallas Morning News reported in 2017. Where’s Waldo? Santa Spectacular was banned because it had stickers. Freakonomics was banned because it “communicat[es] information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through … strikes, riots, or security threat group activity” – books that talk about social justice movements or race often fall into this category. Shakespeare’s Love Sonnets was banned because it used “sexually explicit” imagery, as were reading materials about filing taxes, which could be used to commit fraud.
In reality, this censorship is a ploy to limit knowledge – about connections between slavery and mass incarceration, about literacy’s role in inspiring the desire for freedom, and, in the case of Texas Letters, about what takes place in solitary confinement under the guise of “justice”. It pits the ensemble behind these letters against the large-scale ignorance prisons try to cultivate and the enforced silence they apply."
