List of books approved for prison
September 21, 2007, 11:32 am
Posted by Joseph A. Komonchak
The New York Times today has the list of books that have been approved for federal prisons.
I didn’t notice Dante on the list. Perhaps they are unaware of the interesting experiment of a few years ago when Dante scholars Ronald Herzman and William Cook taught the Divine Comedy at Attica prison in New York state:
“I learned this most poignantly in the eighties when my Geneseo colleague Bill Cook and I taught a four-credit course on Dante at Attica Correctional Facility. Dante’s issues were starkly real to our inmate students. It wasn’t simply that they lived in an Inferno of their own, or that they could relate to Dante’s exile through their own ‘exile,’ or even that Dante’s system of justice forced them to confront their own sense of justice or to ask questions about how they got where they were, important as all those connections to the poem were for them. They were even more interested in the possibilities for transformation and redemption offered them by the Purgatorio (their favorite part of the poem) and the Paradiso. At the end of the course, while we were giving the final exam, one of the students caught me at the water fountain and said, ‘You know, when I read this stuff, it’s like I’m out of here.’ For most of our regular teaching, we try to convince our students that what we teach really matters. What Attica taught Bill Cook and me above all is that what we teach matters in ways we would never have imagined.
“In Attica, the vocabulary to discuss these issues sometimes had to be transposed from the key of scholar-speak to inmate-speak. The process was by no means a dumbing down. Indeed, it may have been the opposite. The transposition taught us at least as much as it taught them. And that is exactly the point. I urge you to participate in this ritual for your own sakes.”
http://www.medievalacademy.org/medacnews/news_herzman.htm
The prisoners are adults and should have all the books they want. However, I was impressed with the Catholic list. Could we guess that most Catholic students in Catholic colleges would never run into as complete a list as the one posted on the Times.
The Catholic list looks impressive–178 books, 80 musical selections, and 120 video selections–but I have my doubts that all or even a significant number of items on the list are actually available in each federal prison.
Can people make donations? And can they make donations selectively?
The list itself is balanced, but I could imagine a subset that wasn’t.
I find the list rather eclectic. I would love to know who were the Catholic advisers. I can guess several who were not!
Seems a little heavy on de Mello-Girzone-Rohr-Rolheiser-Keating, if one might make such a list. There is a lot of spirituality and 30 year old pastoral theology. Maybe chaplains were among the advisors?
Plenty of N.T. Wright!
The odd thing is is that it’s a list. -and just a list
There’s no course of study proposed. It’s not “If you want history of Christianity, read 1, 2, 3, followed by 4. If you want theology, read, a,b, c, followed by d. If you want spirituality, read i, ii, iii, iv.”
Perhaps I’m betraying the prejudices of my profession, but I think order of presentation matters
in helping people learn in areas they don’t know very well.
Cathleen, you may indeed be able to make donations. I have donated to our state penal institutions often, though all books had to be paperback.
Check with your state library association; they usually have a subcommittee for “special libraries,” which often includes prisons.