These requests were filed by MuckRock journalist Dillon Bergin.

Across the country, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and each state’s departments of corrections ban books from entering jails and prisons for different reasons. In 2023, The Marshall Project’s investigative series laid the groundwork for the Data Liberation Project’s growing collection of data and records on carceral book bans.

The Marshall Project originally obtained policies from 37 states and banned books lists from 24, and published 18 lists in a searchable table for its 2023 investigation. DLP has filed requests to those 18 states and has received data from 17. Each request so far has been made public on MuckRock, and each list has been added to a GitHub repository where volunteers are collaborating to extract data and organize the lists.

The lists have come in a variety of formats: Excel, CSV, PDF and XML. DLP volunteers are working to standardize the title, author and ban date columns. Often, the reason or policy cited for banning the book isn’t included. Titles are often approximate or misspelled, and authors are frequently missing. The lists include magazines, zines, trade publications and instructional or vocational material. Lists obtained by the DLP show The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood banned from prisons in California and Bird Uncaged by Marlon Peterson in Florida.

Don’t see your state on the list of states that we’ve received banned books lists from? We can help you file for that too. DLP’s goal is to keep expanding to other states and request not only lists of banned titles, but data on how many times each book is rejected when requested by someone who is incarcerated.