The Burning

When the Mongols invaded Baghdad in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they are believed to have done two things that have since been etched in cultural memory. In 1258, they gathered all the books in the storied House of Wisdom and set them ablaze during the Siege of Baghdad. Then, more than a century later, they built towers from the skulls of those they’d killed.

As a child growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, in a family steeped in military tradition, campaigns and battlefield tactics were topics of dinner table conversation. Reading Islamic history was my escape, and I was fascinated by the Mongols. Berke Khan, Genghis Khan’s great-grandson, would later embrace Islam, weaving his people’s story into ours. But that earlier act—that burning—always stuck with me like a splinter in my mind.

Books, you see, have always been dear to me. I was an avid reader—my family’s ancestral home in Lahore held a large library. My Aunt Naseem once told me, “Indiscriminate killing seeks to destroy a population, but the wholesale destruction of knowledge extinguishes a people.” She was right.

Years later, in 1992, I sat in the Commack Cinema on Long Island, New York, watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The movie flashed to Berlin, Germany, in 1933, where Nazis heaped books into a pyre engulfed in flames. The image felt personal, a reminder of my childhood readings; it was Baghdad all over again. 

Inever imagined being imprisoned; landing here was a tragedy. Inside, survival isn’t just physical—it’s also a fight for your mind. There’s an old axiom that echoes around the prison blocks: “Don’t get institutionalized.” It’s an impossible feat to accomplish without an anchor. Some men find solace in endless weightlifting, others in religion or legal work. For me, that anchor has always been books. I lift and exercise, I have studied law to appeal my sentence (which was commuted earlier this year) and those of others, and I let faith be my guide. But my books are my refuge. They are why, even while incarcerated, I can still feel free.

Between these walls, books are not just paper—they are windows to philosophies and faraway streets. They let me see life through the prisms of other minds. Sometimes, when I open a page, I feel almost home. They grant me a liberating sense that I belong everywhere and nowhere at once. Both are blessings here. Books remind me most of us who are incarcerated are all travelers, here for a time, and then we move on. My sentence is not in perpetuity. This sliver of liberty is the system’s to give.

Unfortunately, the government has a different view.

For more than two decades, the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC) and New Jersey State Prison (NJSP), where I was incarcerated before being transferred to a lower security prison this February, have systematically banned books in the name of security. In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union urged NJDOC to lift a ban in two prisons on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, a book about mass incarceration; the department reversed the ban after receiving a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union calling the measure unconstitutional and “ironic, misguided, and harmful.” 

Book banning isn’t unique to NJSP or the New Jersey correctional system. In 2023, the Marshall Project reported that more than 50,000 titles were banned in prisons across the country—and that was just in the states that kept such records. The same year, PEN America found that corrections departments in twenty-eight states, including New Jersey, had centralized banned-books lists; in the remaining twenty-three states, books were theoretically evaluated on a case-by-case basis. 

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are banned in Kansas prisons, but Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is available. Wisconsin has banned some books on coding and tech literacy, calling them a “threat to institutional security.” Florida has banned more than 22,800 titles—the most of any state.

As in some other states, the campaign has only expanded in New Jersey: There is now a complete ban on used books, which many incarcerated folks rely on because they are cheaper than new versions. The NJDOC website states that it has “temporarily suspended the acceptance of used publications by NJDOC facilities,” but doesn’t provide an explicit rationale. Wisconsin enacted a similar statewide ban in 2024 to “prevent drugs from entering” the state’s prisons. 

“For years, the NJDOC has deceived the public, claiming that massive amounts of drugs are being smuggled in through the mail and by visitors. In reality, the largest culprits are officers themselves,” wrote Shakeil Price, an incarcerated writer at NJSP, in September 2025. “Sting after sting, bust after bust, officers keep getting jammed up for smuggling cell phones and drug paraphernalia into prisons and jails. But model prisoners like myself are left to bear the burden of these corrupt authority figures’ conduct.”

There is a concerted effort to control not just what we read, but where our books can come from. The department requires all publications to be sent directly from the vendor, distributor, or publisher, stating that “sending books yourself will almost always lead to rejection in New Jersey state prisons.” The prison has also forbidden sending books through Amazon and eBay, common sites used to send incarcerated people books, and the existing rules on approved vendors are a maze of confusion.

Buying books in prison isn’t easy. Incarcerated people are paid very little, if at all, for their labor. Last year, the Economic Policy Institute reported that when incarcerated workers are paid, they earn between 13 and 52 cents an hour on average. Especially for prisoners who don’t have some form of financial support on the outside, buying a book often means foregoing deodorant, food, shoes, and other items from commissary. 

The financial burden of the used book ban is deliberate and punitive, says Raymond “Hamza” Franklin, who has been incarcerated for more than two decades and is a keen analyst of the prison’s bureaucratic machinery as a former teacher’s assistant in NJSP’s Donald Bourne School. This ensures the poorest among the captive are also the most intellectually isolated. “If commissary debts are something [incarcerated people] must worry about,” he tells me, “how are they supposed to purchase books?” 

He adds, “If college students are searching for used books—what makes this prison believe that incarcerated persons can afford new books all the time?” 

“These book bans are a slow, bureaucratic burning of knowledge—not with the dramatic flames of Mongol hordes or the Nazis’ rallies, but with the cold efficiency of a stamp: ‘RETURN TO SENDER.’”

The power granted to correctional staff—who are given discretion to decide which books enter the prison and if incarcerated people receive their books—is total and arbitrary. The 2016 Inmate Handbook at NJSP, which I received when I was at that facility, stated: “This list is subject to change without prior notification at any given time. Publications not mentioned on the list above that are considered to be a threat of any sort will be confiscated immediately.” This blanket decree means a mailroom officer at the lowest level can refuse any book they decide is inappropriate. Some publications are confiscated for months without explanation. Other times, an officer returns a book to the sender before an inmate can file an appeal; the prisoner then loses both the book and money they had to spend on shipping fees—a small, cruel tax on the attempt to read in prison.

Franklin sees this arbitrariness as part of a system designed to be obstructive. “Too much paperwork exists, which is odd in this digital world,” he says. “Packages of any sort should be received, scanned, hand-searched if needed, logged, and then delivered. The only paperwork that should exist is the mailroom and prisoner’s proof of receipt.”

These book bans are a slow, bureaucratic burning of knowledge—not with the dramatic flames of Mongol hordes or the Nazis’ rallies, but with the cold efficiency of a stamp: “RETURN TO SENDER.” The fuel for this fire is the NJDOC’s “Unauthorized Publication List.” Flip through its pages, and you will find the expected titles: pornography, explicit sex guides, and material that any reasonable person might agree has no place here. 

Franklin acknowledges the state’s stated rationale: “Let’s not kid ourselves. Some very valid and invaluable people derived a way to disguise harmful drugs as paper. What are books made of? So the problem is unfortunately very real.” But he immediately identifies the failure. “The solution, however, is not fair. [At some point] a need arose to ban mail, but this should have been a temporary ban until authorities could devise a suitable solution.” Instead, a specific security concern has become a permanent pretext for expanded book banning. Scan further, and you see not a reasoned protocol, but the blueprint for a managed mind. The logic becomes a hall of mirrors.

The banned titles trace the outline of a forbidden education. Books about African American history, racism, and civil rights movements are common targets for banning. As of April 2025, you cannot read Testimonies of Torture in New Jersey Prisons, in a New Jersey prison. An Updated History of the New Afrikin Prison Struggle is deemed a threat, as are Revolutionary Suicide by Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton and Once Upon A Time in AmeriKKKA. Stony the Road, a history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow South by African American historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., is banned. 

They have banned Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook and novels like American Gods. They have banned an issue of GQ Magazine. They have banned some editions of New York Magazine. They have banned a book titled Find Out Anything About Anyone, Anytime and another titled How To Find Out Anything.

The restrictions reach their cruelest apex with legal books and the work of incarcerated authors themselves. As legal texts grow to encompass new rulings, incarcerated people are denied them. But, prison libraries prepare individuals for reintegration into society and lower recidivism rates. “Now this was a blow,” Franklin says of the ban on oversized volumes. “An [incarcerated person] has to now have someone who can find legal info for them and email it . . . . But what about those who have outlived their loved ones?”

As an author and publisher behind the wall, Franklin has experienced censorship firsthand. His own books are mailed to him for review, only to be “confiscated in the mailroom . . . . Supposedly, they are also read. Then they are delivered sometimes several months later.” For authors and publishers like Franklin, these confiscations and delays cost them money and cause a ripple effect that impacts their ability to conduct business. Here, the bureaucracy doesn’t just burn books; it strangles the very act of creation, ensuring that even the stories born of this place are delayed, vetted, and controlled by the state.

The intention is no longer disguised as security. It is the intent to sever the mind from its own reflection, its history, its skills, and its solace—to confine not just the body but the context around it. It is the logic of the tower of skulls, translated into policy. They are not building monuments of bone here. They are building silences.