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Texas prison list of banned books includes ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’

By November 13, 2020News, Political

Texas Department of Criminal Justice has kept A Charlie Brown Christmas on its list of banned books.

Alongside A Charlie Brown Christmas on the banned books list is Where’s Waldo? Santa Spectacular and The Night Before Christmas pop-up books.

“I can’t believe ‘Where’s Waldo?’ is banned,” said a spokesman for the Huntsville-based Texas Correctional Employees Union. “Is Waldo tunneling out of prison or something?”

Sexually explicit content, drugs and weapon glorification, nudity, graphic descriptions of incest, suggestive criminality or material “designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons” such as maps, are all banned by the TDCJ policies.

Sticker books and pop-up books are banned for their potential to carry contraband within the folds and pieces which is how books like Where’s Waldo and Charlie Brown are considered dangerous.

 

Interestingly political books like Mein Kampf that could be used to ‘radicalise’ inmates are deemed safer than a Christmas themed pop up book. However Hitler’s playbook and a book by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke don’t include any of the forbidden topics, so are considered appropriate.

“The agency might want to look at reexamining that policy,” the spokesman said. “I think ‘Mein Kampf’ should be banned. White-supremacist groups use that as a recruiting tool.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called for a review to the policy.

“‘Mein Kampf’ is a highly inflammatory work that could even cause violence against the individual who is the reader or make a cellmate feel very unsafe,” said Abbie Kamin, associate regional director for the ADL. “But there is a much larger issue here and ADL is concerned with the apparent arbitrary and superficial nature in which various books are restricted and the subjective way in which their rules are implemented.”

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