Religious Literature in Federal Prisons

If you haven't been following it, the Federal prisons in an attempt to prevent prisoners from reading religious literature that promotes violence and terrorism, has decided that each religion can have only 150 books in the libraries. No one knows exactly who is making that decision and who decides which books should be on prison library shelves. In fact, an important question is how the government can make this determination in light of the 1st Amendment.

An article in the New York Times this morning reports on the continuing saga. It is an issue on which the left and the right seem to agree and about which the Bureau of Prisons is not willing to change. Sojourners, a liberal evangelical organization, had 15,000 of their readership send emails to the Bureau of Prisons demanding that they change this policy.