13 Book Censorship Posts to Revisit: Book Censorship News, October 30, 2026

We Can’t Forget People Experiencing Incarceration in Our Fight for Readers’ Rights (September 2025) – Guest post from Michelle Dillon “Volunteer groups like BTP have operated since 1972. For fifty years, we’ve assisted tens of thousands of incarcerated readers. However, we face constant battles to maintain our services. Jails and prisons sporadically restrict access from publishers and community groups like ours (what advocates have termed “content-neutral censorship”), and facilities have incredible latitude to censor the contents of books under an all-purpose rationale of “safety and security”. Under such questionable “security concerns”, prisons have banned maps of the moon, encyclopedias of dog breeds, and books about learning to draw birds, among many other plainly overreaching bans. Even more troubling, research shows that jails and prisons routinely target books about Black history and civil rights activism under those same alleged security concerns. The result is that prison book programs spend substantial time trying to stay ahead of new restrictions and carefully stocking their libraries with books most likely to make it past censors—all of which takes away from the core ...