Prison Legal News is also preparing a lawsuit against the Utah

Prison Legal News is also preparing a lawsuit against the Utah Department of Corrections for a policy that bars all books except those that are shipped directly from Barnes & Noble. Generally, prisons require that books be sent directly from the publisher or a major distributor, for security reasons. Otherwise, a spokesperson for one jail explains, “There’ s a possibility something could be in one of the pages that we don’ t want. There could be little bits of drugs in the pages.” “We have not yet sued them.” Wright told me, “since they only sporadically censor us and aren’ t letting us develop a good fact pattern.” A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’ s Department said that its jails allow inmates to receive books from booksellers after checking to see whether they can be fashioned into a weapon, promote violence or have sexually explicit content. Across the country, only paperbacks are accepted. Hardcovers are rejected because they provide “source material” for fashioning weapons. When the Supreme Court ruled that law libraries did not have to be provided to prisoners, jails in Montana not only removed the entire contents of the law library, but they also removed the typewriters. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015285