My girlfriend volunteered with a program that supplies books to children and teenagers in juvenile prisons. As you might expect, those facilities tended to take

My girlfriend volunteered with a program that supplies books to children and teenagers in juvenile prisons. As you might expect, those facilities tended to take a very paternalistic attitude. In general, young adult literature dealing with drugs, crime and gangs was not permitted. In other words, inmates were not allowed to read books reflecting their own life experiences. Often it was single administrator in charge of banning books and that person would operate without any formal policy. It was difficult to appeal individual bans, because that administrator usually also had the power to ban the program from the prison entirely and didn't respond well to people questioning their decisions.