Trejbal: Holy books in holding cells
Don’t restrict new inmates to the Bible
Christian Trejbal
Trejbal is a Roanoke Times editorial writer. He is stationed at the paper’s New River Valley bureau.
Was anyone surprised when Giles County School Board voted unanimously to repost the Ten Commandments in schools? This is Southwest Virginia.
In Southwest Virginia, government and religion embrace and kiss. The faith of the majority trumps the rights of the minority, at least in the minds of too many.
No, the surprise was not the school board’s decision to violate the Constitution. The surprise was that it took so long for groups like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union to notice. Even our best-managed agencies slip into the religion trap.
Consider what’s happening at Montgomery County Jail.
February 6, 2011 - 8:59 AM
This is almost as sure to backfire as did your ill-conceived concealed carry permit editorial a few years back. Ever been in the jail Christian? The holding cells you’re talking about aren’t exactly spacious. Not like there is room to put a bookshelf with a lot of choices on it. At times the cells are packed with prisoners (VT game days spring to mind as days when the cells are SRO). The jailers are not bellhops at a high priced hotel with a lot of extra time to run back and forth to the library because some drunk wants to read ‘High Times’ until he sobers up. Oh and by the way, I just love how you characterize it as the government forcing religious books on them. It’s not like they hand them a bible at booking. Those books are available on request. They are not required reading, though given the behaviors of most that end up there, it probably wouldn’t hurt some of them to read a religious text every now and then. As I understand it, the jail isn’t required to provide ANY form of reading material or entertainment while they are in holding cells. I suspect if your little issue actually takes legs the answer will be to just not give them anything. Are you so zealously anti-religion that you have set that as your goal? Even the people who request religious material can’t have it?
Yes, Chuck, I have been in the jail. The book shelf I propose would not be in the holding cell, but outside it, probably wherever they store the bibles now.
I’m not zealously anti-religion on this, I’m zealously constitutional. Are you so zealously religious that you would have our public officials ignore the founding document of this great nation?
Where does it say in the constitution that any want-to believe in God should be shot down at every turn? It seems too that only Christianity is the enemy of the Constitution. How about the Quran? No one seems to want to visit that subject for fear of being labelled,eh?
#2 – “Are you so zealously religious that you would have our public officials ignore the founding document of this great nation?”
Congress does it all the time.
Not all Christian, I am actually not very religious at all. I haven’t been to church or picked up a bible in years, but to someone like yourself, who clearly loathes all things religious, I can see why an objective person would seem biased in your eyes.
This doesn’t seem like a violation of the Constitution to me. They aren’t making them read it, they are giving it to them if they ask for it. I suspect it would be more of a Constituional issue of they denied the request because despite the assertions of your new favorite group, the Constituion guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
Jails can easily provide one or two types of material to the newly committed, but it becomes onerous to require them to make everything that is in the library accessible to every short term detainee. Do you know there are generally only four jailers working at any given time. Those men and women aren’t there to make book runs for every inmate. Quite frankly I hope they take your idea to heart and stop giving them anything at all.
Chuck, you keep trying to put words in my column. I never suggested that that new prisoners be given library access or that guards be required to make book runs. In fact, I quite explicitly wrote that such an approach was not feasible. It is, however, eminently feasible to have a few different books on hand where there are now only Bibles so that prisoners can have a choice other than a Bible.
BTW, they do make library runs now when a prisoner requests a Quran. The problem is not that they allow these two books, but that they allow only these two books.
6 they’re in freaking jail, why do they need books at all, they shoud be working off the crime, growing their own food, cleaning up the city and streets instead of lounging around reading and watching tv and playing on computers…puleeeze !
Here’s a solution that shouldn’t frighten you, Trejbal: offer no books at all. Nothing. There should be no obligation to provide a lending library to offenders for this short time. However, in the interest of protecting citizen’s right to practice their religion, perhaps the state IS obligated to allow them access to religious texts. So maybe what you’re reflexively rebelling against is, in fact, done in order to preserve constitutional rights.
#7 We certainly wouldn’t want the prisoners learning anything, would we, Morgan?
9 that isnt the point they arent there to learn they are there to pay a debt to society. They can learn in school.
I have to agree with Morgan once again. We have all of these roads that need fixing and well, us Americans just don’t want to do those kind of jobs, right? The answer? Put the convicts and those big old muscles to work rather than for show. It would teach a good work ethic to those who obviously had too much time on their hands. Learn something, Gdad? Yes they can!!!
Great, foist convicts off on private business. Or did you mean for the government to start road businesses and compete with private business? People will surely be lining up to work with convicts.
“The problem is not that they allow these two books, but that they allow only these two books.”
There is a reason for that. It is a Constitutional requirement. People don’t have a Constitutional right to read Huckleberry Finn or Popular Mechanics, or Ladies Home Journal in jail, but courts have repeatedly ruled that the jails and prisons have to make reasonable efforts to accomodate religious expression as long as it does not compromise security and safety. Like it or not, the vast majority of prisoners who pass through the Montgomery County Jail who ascribe to any religious belief at all subscribe to some form of Christianity. That’s why the Bibles are kept close by. Islam is the next most highly represented faith in jail/prison environments and the Koran is made available on request.
Can you cite any instance of a detainee asking for but being denied another religious book? If you cannot, it would seem that legally speaking, this issue is not yet ripe for discussion. This seems like yet another instance of the local government, in this case the jail, trying to and succeeding in doing the right thing and the self-righteous RTEB coming along yet again to stir discontent by creating an issue where none exists.
I had a friend I use to visit in jail and he told me that was all they could read was the bible. I think that is plain wrong and also sounds a lot of brain washing to me.
If a person is in there I think when they come out they should have some sort of maybe something, hell anything that they could of learned. Music is a good healer and I am sure it would ease the tension in there. Billy Bragg was donating guitars to prisoners over in England for a while.
Damn communists! Billy Bragg is one.
#11 Keith (and Morgan), a number of road construction jobs actually require some experience AND others require the physical stamina. Having prisoners out working on roads or anything else also requires manpower to guard them and to transport them back and forth. Lunch would need to be delivered or at least packed ahead of time. You can’t just send them out to work. And some of them you wouldn’t want to send out anyway, although others might benefit from learning a job.
Both of you can call for all the revenge and punishment you want, but the plain fact is that rehabilitation and education for some is the best and cheapest thing for society in general.
Besides, what are you going to do when they form a union and call a strike?
@13 Chuck: This is a very interesting point, if it is true that courts have ruled that jails and prisons are required to supply religious texts to those who request it (and it makes sense since the Constitution protects the free exercise of religion). It seems like a pretty tall order, however, to require that jails provide religious texts upon requests for inmates. What if an inmate requests the Masoretic Text or the Vinaya Pitaka?
Well, I guess since the majority are Christians, we don’t need to worry about Buddhism or Judaism.
So, we do accommodate all the different Christian sects that use different bibles with different biblical canons, right? I mean, King James, of course, doesn’t work for all Christians. There are several hundreds of different versions of the bible each of which include books that others exclude or arrange them in different order, depending on whatever any given Christian religious sect subjectively believes to be Absolute Truth (TM). Our jails at least have the Septuagint and the Vulgate (St. James version), right? The Douay–Rheims Bible? No? Do they have any of the over 100 different English versions of the bible, all of which are considered to be the only pure and sacred Word of God(TM) by whatever Christian sect somehow came to use it?
I mean, if an inmate belongs to one of three different Catholic traditions–Roman, Independent, and (though debatable as to whether it is a part of the Catholic tradition or not) Anglican–we must be able to provide the version of the bible used in their religious practices, right? Let’s not forget all of the conflicting Protestant sects that with their own biblical canons (Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Arminian, Adventist, Evangelical, Holiness, Penecostal, etc.) Oh yeah, what about the different bibles used in Eastern Christian denominations such as Eastern Orthodox (in which there are many different sects with different bibles, such as Greek Orthodox and Syriac Christianity), Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Assyrian Church of the East.
Let this be my point: it is not the role of government to accommodate religious practices. Lack of accommodation does not mean prohibition or infringement of religious freedom. There are thousands (perhaps millions!) of different religious beliefs–the organized religions, of course, all claiming to have exclusive domain on objective Truth (TM). Religion is, ironically, the epitome of relativism and subjectivity, despite each claiming be the opposite and being the source objective truth. Trying to accommodate every religion with the book they claim as Truth is the same as trying to accommodate every child with picture of the Tooth Fairy that looks exactly like what they believe it to look like.
18 – there is an economic answer here.
Jails will keep most readily available those religious texts for which there is the greatest demand (I’m sure there is a language in the regs regarding “reasonable” requests met within “reasonable” amounts of time,too), whether the Bible, the Koran, what have you.
While they may be obligated to provide more obscure texts (i.e., those with less demand), the likelihood of someone demanding the Masoretic Text or the Vinaya Pitaka – the likelihood they would have to procure such a text – is so rare, it is not worth it for the jail to have it on hand. If someone DID make a reasonable demand for it, they could procure it within a reasonable time frame; but to have it sitting in a shelf, unused, takes up the space needed for something of greater demand. A lost opportunity cost.
If anyone here is truly interested in the subject of religion and prisons, Howard Friedman at ReligionClause blog always covers the subject very well. His blog is well worth a read and one I follow regularly.
http://religionclause.blogspot.com/
As a matter of fact, he’s got some stuff up right now.
Personally I say we get rid of the Free Exercise clause of the 1st Amendment to remove all these trivialities. I think we get enough protections with the Establishment clause.
http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2011/02/recent-prisoner-free-exercise-cases.html
In Ofeldt v. McDaniel, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 8661 (D NV, Jan. 19, 2011), a Nevada federal district court rejected an inmate’s claim that his 1st Amendment and RLUIPA rights because the prison chapel has no Asatru materials and he is not allowed to order materials from outside.….
Doggone Constitution, always getting in the way of a great idea
#16 Yes and all those shovel ready jobs out there for us, we’ll have to learn too, don’t you think, Gdad? An average prisoner costs us thirty plus grand a year. I just think it is wiswer to get a little something out of them but hey, we don’t expect anything out of able bodied welfare recipients either. Go figure………..
#21 Can there be a FREE EXERCISE clause in a Communist run country, Scott M.? I mean you say you are a Communist but seem to like all the freedoms we have here. Definitions , definitions………
shovel ready jobs and people screaming in videos ‘ I wont hafta pay my mortgage” ..whatta legacy
@24, Mr. Carver, of course you could have the Free Exercise clause. Why not? Jesus, for example, was a communist. Christianity is based on communism (a Christian community).
Remember, communism only has something to say about economics, not about politics or government.
Oh so now President Obama is responsible for stupid people too? Wow, you folks are reaching. He did not invent the phrase “shovel ready jobs” and he did not inspire the world’s only idiots either, both existed before Obama and will long after.
It may stick in your craw that the Free Exercise and every other right in this nation belongs to citizens who are Communists or Socialists or Atheists or “able bodied” Welfare citizens but it remains true nonetheless.