The main job of prisons is enhancing public safety. Firstly by holding dangerous people behind bars and secondly by bettering those that can be bettered and pr

The main job of prisons is enhancing public safety. Firstly by holding dangerous people behind bars and secondly by bettering those that can be bettered and preparing them for a successful post-prison life. They might not do a very good job with the second of these tasks (and indeed make some offenders more dangerous), but I don't see why, in the pursuit of it, government should not take a view towards what books would be very likely to do more harm than good. If you don't accept this why not? And if you do, what better criterion than "moral outrage" do you propose? Keeping people you want to re-integrate into society away from what most of society would see as morally outrageous does not strike me as a priori unsound. Maybe violent Neonazis are easier to re-integrate if they don't read Mein Kampf whilst in prison?