Texas Prison System Bans Prisoners from Receiving Hardback and Used Books
by Matt Clarke
On April 1, 2026, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) instituted a ban on prisoners receiving hardback books and used books. TDCJ claimed the book ban was instituted in response to finding 385 books mailed to prisoners that tested positive for synthetic drugs in 2025.
That number, however, represents only 0.086% of the 450,000 books mailed to prisoners that year. There was no breakdown as to how many of the rejected books were hardback or used. There was also no breakdown on how many of TDCJ’s 129 overdose deaths in 2025 were attributable to drugs smuggled via books.
The book ban was apparently adopted without considering less drastic methods, such as requiring all books to be sent from known and trusted vendors, similar to a policy already in place for vendors supplying craft shop supplies to prisoners.
TDCJ already bans 10,827 books, including The Color Purple by Alice Walker, the Alex Cross series by James Patterson and the Jimi Hendrix biography ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky by David Henderson, based on ‘objectionable content.” The new policy greatly expands the number of banned books—especially trade books, textbooks and legal books, which are often available only in hardback and are urgently needed by prisoners seeking to increase their employability or challenge their convictions.
TDCJ previously restricted who could mail prisoners books to “publishers and publication suppliers, including bookstores.” However, as reported on The Daily podcast, in a May 26 episode titled “A Flood of New, Deadlier Drugs,” some prisoners at the jail in Cook County, Illinois had their girlfriends register as book vendors with Amazon to circumvent the jail’s mail rules and send in books that had been soaked in synthetic drugs. Such a scheme would be easily thwarted by a “trusted vendors only” policy.
“My concern is that they are restricting access to really, really important things, information, ideas to prisoners as a way of saying ‘we’re doing something,’ [about contraband],” said Larry Hawes, cofounder of Texas Freedom to Read Project, which provides free books to prisoners. “But one of the biggest concerns we had is, did they bring in all the solutions they could, or did they just say, let’s just make the easiest solution and just say this and this.”
In the past, TDCJ claimed that visitors and volunteers smuggled most of the drugs that find their way into state prisons. Then COVID-19 caused a six-month lockdown with no visitors or volunteers coming, yet overdoses increased. After that, TDCJ said most of the drugs were coming in through the mail. Yet overdoses increased again after TDCJ stopped allowing prisoners to physically receive personal mail, scanning it to their tablets instead. It seems likely that the book ban will also have no positive effect on the number of disciplinary cases for drugs and overdoses.
The Inside Book Project (IBP) sends 30,000 to 40,000 free books to Texas prisoners every year. About 80% are donated by the public. Most are used and about 15% are hardbacks. The IBP recently turned away hundreds of used books because of the new policy.
Scott Odierno, the IBP’s coordinator, said his organization checks each book twice for contraband before sending it to TDCJ. “We have a very rigid policy of checking all of our books for contraband and things like that,” said Odierno. “So, we’ve gone above and beyond what they’ve required for years, but it feels like they take advantage of the resources we provide.”
It has incorrectly been reported that TDCJ prisoners can purchase ebooks for their tablets. In fact, the purchase of ebooks is not permitted. The tablets can download ebooks from a public domain ebook app, but the vast majority of those ebooks predate the Vietnam war, often by centuries, and many are not in English or Spanish. Allowing the purchase of ebooks would be good idea to reduce the volume of books sent to TDCJ prisoners. Along with a trusted vendor policy, it would likely end the miniscule problem of drugs smuggled in books.
Source: The Texas Tribune
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