During Prison Banned Books Week, it is important to acknowledge that books have long served as a bridge to the outside world for incarcerated people. They allow people cut off from their normal lives — and often from their families — to engage with thinking and ideas that can open their mind and stories that transport them anywhere on earth and beyond. But carceral authorities have also always restricted access to books, and reading behind bars has only become harder in recent years.

This year’s Prison Banned Books Week highlights the role tablets are ironically playing in further restricting incarcerated people’s access to reading materials. To better understand these changes, we looked at data collected by the Prison Banned Books Week campaign on prison book bans, policies around books, and the availability of ebooks on tablet computers. What we found is that tablets limit access to important modern writing and knowledge behind bars.

Prison Banned Books Week Presents an Opportunity to Examine the Impacts of Tablets Replacing Books

When we last looked at the availability of prison tablets during Prison Banned Books Week in 2019, they were relatively new and rare behind bars. Only 12 states had them. Since then, the technology has quickly spread. Today, at least 48 prison systems indicate they have tablets or, as in the case of Alaska and Nevada, are in the process of implementing tablets.

The two companies providing tablets to the most state prisons are Securus/JPay and ViaPath/GTL. Perhaps this should come as no surprise since these two companies have long been the largest providers of telecommunication services for incarcerated people. They control roughly 80% of both the phone and e-messaging markets behind bars.

Importantly, these companies have shifted their focus to tablets as the prison and jail voice and video calling market has come under increasing scrutiny and regulation. Tablets behind bars have not undergone the same oversight, leaving companies like these free to use the devices to continue squeezing money from incarcerated people and their families for services like e-messaging, digitized mail, and music streaming.

Read the full article about Prison Banned Books Week by Mike Wessler and Juliana Luna at Prison Policy Initiative.