Purging religion from prison

The NYT reports today that federal prisons are quietly purging books on religion from prison libraries. Excerpt:

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group. “There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”

This is politically correct idiocy. The problem is not Christianity or Judaism. The problem is radical Islam. That Justice Department Office of Inspector General's report is all about trying to keep radical Muslims from recruiting in federal prisons. It is an Islam-specific report. Among the 16 recommendations the OIG report offered was this:

15. The BOP [Bureau of Prisons] should conduct an inventory of chapel books and videos and re-screen them to confirm that they are permissible under BOP security policies. The BOP should consider maintaining a central registry of acceptable material to prevent duplication of effort when reviewing these materials. Of the institutions we visited, several did not have an inventory of the books currently available to the inmates, and none of the collections had been re-screened since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Among the Christian books federal inmates can't read in libraries? Works by Pastor Robert Schuller, Cardinal Avery Dulles, and Reinhold Niebuhr. All of whom are famous for preaching worldwide Christian jihad, as we all know.

Aside from Aryan Nations'-style white supremacist Christianity, is there any evidence that Christian literature is causing violent Christian militancy in prison? Is there any evidence that Jewish literature is doing the same with Jewish prisoners? Or that literature from any religion other than Islam is doing this?