Overcoming Censorship: The Story of Contrabanned

In a creative and bold effort to combat unjust censorship in prisons, the Prison Library Project helped develop Contrabanned, the first women’s health book to bypass book bans targeting depictions of female anatomy. State prisons often classify such content as “sexually explicit,” denying incarcerated women access to essential health information.

Legally "Smuggling" the book inside

The team behind Contrabanned found a way to outsmart these bans by sending the entire 250-page book, one page at a time, as individual letters to a single incarcerated woman. This woman, a former nurse whose name is kept anonymous for her safety, took on the incredible task of stitching each page together using dental floss from the prison commissary, creating a complete, physical book. But her efforts didn’t stop there—she made copies of the book and shared the individual pages with other incarcerated women, encouraging them to assemble their own books.

This effort was more than just an act of defiance; it provided crucial education on topics like menstrual health, breast cancer, and sexual health—issues often ignored in prisons, especially for women. Designed by health literacy experts and medical students, Contrabanned was written specifically for incarcerated women, with a focus on making the information accessible for readers with low literacy levels. Statistics show that 70% of the 975,000 incarcerated women in the U.S. read below a fourth-grade level, making this resource even more critical.

Contrabanned represents a lifeline for women who are denied even basic health information due to systemic censorship. It's more than just a book—it was a revolutionary effort to empower and educate women behind bars, and the Prison Library Project was proud to help bring it to people's attention.

The petition campaign has since closed, but the issue it raised hasn't gone away. Censorship policies in state prisons continue to block incarcerated women from accessing basic health resources. The push to adopt the American Library Association's carceral library standards, and to pass the federal Prison Libraries Act, remains as urgent as ever.

If this story moved you, the best thing you can do is stay informed, share it, and support organizations like ours that are working every day to get books and information to people behind bars.