A curiosity

This afternoon I was alerted to a curiosity in Michigan's prisons, that is to say a list of books which prisoners may not see, a list which apparently includes books like 'Brave New World' and 'PC's for Dummies'.

The snap above which summarises the process by which a book gets on the list was lifted from the curiously addressed reference 1. No idea why one should want or need to use what looks like an IP address as part of a URL for public use. One hopes that nothing untoward is going on.

A process which looks entirely reasonable. This is not an attempt to build a huge list of banned books, rather a record of the process of checking that prisoners are not asking for unsuitable books. And while one might argue about how one decides that a book is unsuitable, or whether some particular book is indeed unsuitable, I think that most of us would agree that there are books which are unsuitable. It does not seem right that, for example, prisoners should have access to gross pornography or to recipes for making bombs at home - or in prison kitchens and laundries for that matter. There is also a concern that prisoners might use obscure languages - code for languages which the warders do not understand - to hold clandestine conversations for clandestine purposes. Maybe Welsh or Irish Gaelic would qualify.

An old version of the list is to be found at reference 4, an exercise of the public access feature of Microsoft's OneDrive offering. A list which appears to have been made by printing an Excel Worksheet to a pdf file, without troubling to make a line fit on the page, with the result that the first part of each line appears in the first 40 or so pages and the second part in the next 40 or so pages. Whoever made the copy might have done better simply to make the original Excel Workbook available.

One supposes that something of the same sort goes on with Internet access, assuming that prisoners in Michigan are allowed such access. Something which I suspect is a bit more complicated than simply listing websites which are banned. I seem to recall from the world of work, vetting programs which checked for improper amounts of flesh, early versions of which banned the 'Financial Times', printed then as now in an unseemly flesh tone. Fifteen years later, there is no doubt lots of stuff that one can do in that way. Put DeepMind on the case.

While references 2 and 3 are about the new-to-me National Public Radio (NPR) and its report of the Michigan business on its website. Reference 2 notwithstanding, I am not terribly clear what NPR does, beyond being some kind of radio broadcasting, not-for-profit collective in the US, with its website appearing to be a news operation. 

References

Reference 1: http://52.54.142.172/michigan-government/michigan-prison-inmates-need-job-skills-technology-books-are-banned.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR.

Reference 3a: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/02/1102164439/michigan-prisons-ban-spanish-and-swahili-dictionaries-to-prevent-inmate-disrupti.

Reference 3b: Michigan prisons ban Spanish and Swahili dictionaries to prevent inmate disruptions- Michelle Jokisch Polo, NPR - 2022.

Reference 4: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AvPvDT7vzzpQh-d3YCXeQQ3UsZ5O9g. This document is not anything like as big as might at first appear, as most of the tail end is blank.