This article is part of Prison Banned Books Week, a campaign that aims to raise awareness of prison censorship.

When tablets were first introduced in correctional facilities over a decade ago, incarcerated people were promised a bounty of content and features, including educational materials, music and movies, games, and e-books. Since then, there have been countless reports about the predatory telecom companies behind these devices. New data, based on responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, reveals that in 47 out of 52 U.S. carceral jurisdictions, tablets are also a major contributor to prison censorship in America.

Prisons already censor more than any other public institution. In fact, single-state prison systems (Florida, Texas, New York, and Virginia) censor more titles than all schools and libraries in the country combined. It’s difficult to imagine how prison censorship could get more extreme, and yet tablets are limiting what people can read in myriad ways.

Consider the prison telecom JPay advertising 30,000 free titles on its tablets: FOIA requests revealed that all these books have been taken from the repository of lapsed copyright titles and Project Gutenberg and are over 95 years old. Titles such as A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary for the Use of Students, published in 1894, The Ruined Cities of Zululand, published in 1869, and The Euahlayi Tribe: A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia, published in 1905, are representative of the selection.

There are many older works that are worth reading, of course, and Shakespeare, Ulysses, Anna Karenina, Frankenstein, and Mrs Dalloway can all be found on Project Gutenberg. But these gems are few and far between. Shawn Younker, incarcerated in Pennsylvania, writes, “We might as well be rummaging the dusty old leftovers in some thrift store or back alley dumpster.” Indeed, marketing the figure of “30,000” is particularly pernicious when you realize that you could scan through this list of titles for hours and find only a handful of things you’d actually want to read.

As bad as this is, there’s an even worse consequence of the “thousands of titles” rhetoric. Prison officials often say that because there is such a plethora of reading material available on tablets, incarcerated people no longer need access to........

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