Prisons Purging Books on Faith From
Libraries
Published: September 10, 2007
Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have
been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious
books and materials that were once available to prisoners in
chapel libraries.
The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear
the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not
on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the
chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had
thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the
prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.
Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an
Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York,
filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau's
actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion
as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act.
Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons,
said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the
Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The
report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of
the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for
militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an
agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which
it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of
barring access to materials that could, in its words,
"discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or
radicalize."
Ms. Billingsley said, "We really wanted consistently
available information for all religious groups to assure
reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject
experts."
But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners,
say that an administration that put stock in religion-based
approaches to social problems has effectively blocked
prisoners' access to religious and spiritual materials — all
in the name of preventing terrorism.
"It's swatting a fly with a sledgehammer," said Mark
Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group.
"There's no need to get rid of literally hundreds of
thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a
problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that
presents extremism."
The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce
lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources
for each of 20 religions or religious categories —
everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded
in October, and there will be occasional updates, Ms.
Billingsley said. Prayer books and other worship materials are
not affected by this process.
The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions.
There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none
from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal
Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.
The identities of the bureau's experts have not been made
public, Ms. Billingsley said, but they include chaplains and
scholars in seminaries and at the American Academy of
Religion. Academy staff members said their organization had
met with prison chaplains in the past but was not consulted on
this effort, though it is possible that scholars who are
academy members were involved.
The bureau has not provided additional money to prisons to buy
the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves
were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.
A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison
system, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is a
bureau employee, said: "At some of the penitentiaries,
guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and now they
are told that this material doesn't meet some kind of
criteria. It doesn't make sense to them. They're asking, 'Why
are our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?' "
Of the lists, he said, "Many of the chaplains I've spoken
to say these are not the things they would have picked."
The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because
chaplains routinely reject any materials that incite violence
or disparage, and donated materials already had to be approved
by prison officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he
added, but few have much money to spend.
Religious groups that work with prisoners have privately been
writing letters about their concerns to bureau officials.
Would it not be simpler, they asked the bureau, to produce a
list of forbidden titles? But the bureau did that last year,
when it instructed the prisons to remove all materials by nine
publishers — some Muslim, some Christian.
The plan to standardize the libraries first became public in
May when several inmates, including a Muslim convert, at the
Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, N.Y., about 75 miles
northwest of Manhattan, filed a lawsuit acting as their own
lawyers. Later, lawyers at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss,
Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison took on the case pro bono.
They refiled it on Aug. 21 in the Federal District Court for
the Southern District of New York.
"Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish
religious books, many of them donated," said David
Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public
affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish
group. "It was decimated. Three-quarters of the Jewish
books were taken off the shelves."
Mr. Zwiebel asked, "Since when does the government, even
with the assistance of chaplains, decide which are the most
basic books in terms of religious study and practice?"
The lawsuit raises serious First Amendment concerns, said
Douglas Laycock, a professor of law at the
University
of Michigan Law School, but he added that it was
not a slam-dunk case.
"Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out
things that tend to incite violence in prisons," Mr.
Laycock said. "But once they say, 'We're going to pick
150 good books for your religion, and that's all you get,' the
criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They're
picking out what is accessible religious teaching for
prisoners, and the government can't do that without a
compelling justification. Here the justification is, the
government is too busy to look at all the books, so they're
going to make their own preferred list to save a little time,
a little money."
The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were
made available to The Times by a critic of the bureau's
project. In some cases, the lists belie their authors'
preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on
the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing
house. A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar
who looked over some of the lists were baffled at the
selections.
Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair
of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical
school, looked over lists for "Other Christian" and
"General Spirituality."
"There are some well-chosen things in here,"
Professor Larsen said. "I'm particularly glad that
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want
to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer." But he continued,
"There's a lot about it that's weird." The lists
"show a bias toward evangelical popularism and
Calvinism," he said, and lacked materials from early
church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant
denominations.
The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the
University
of Notre Dame (who edited "The HarperCollins
Encyclopedia of Catholicism," which did make the list),
said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions, few
spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.
"I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic
chaplains in federal prisons if they're complaining that this
list is inhibiting," he said, "because I know they
have useful books that are not on this list."
WATERLOO,
Sierra
Leone — Although the rainy season was coming on
fast, Zainabu Sesay was in no shape to help her husband. Ditches
had to be dug to protect their cassava and peanuts, and their
mud hut's palm roof was sliding off.
But Mrs. Sesay was sick. She had breast
cancer
in a form that Western doctors rarely see anymore — the
tumor
had burst through her skin, looking like a putrid head of
cauliflower weeping small amounts of blood at its edges.
"It bone! It booonnnne lie de fi-yuh!" she said of the
pain — it burns like fire — in Krio, the blended language
spoken in this country where British colonizers resettled freed
slaves.
No one had directly told her yet, but there was no hope — the
cancer was also in her lymph glands and ribs.
Like millions of others in the world's poorest countries, she is
destined to die in pain. She cannot get the drug she needs —
one that is cheap, effective, perfectly legal for medical uses
under treaties signed by virtually every country, made in large
quantities, and has been around since Hippocrates praised its
source, the opium poppy. She cannot get morphine.
That is not merely because of her poverty, or that of Sierra
Leone. Narcotics incite fear: doctors fear addicting patients,
and law enforcement officials fear drug crime. Often, the
government elite who can afford medicine for themselves are
indifferent to the sufferings of the poor.
The
World
Health Organization estimates that 4.8 million people
a year with moderate to severe cancer pain receive no
appropriate treatment. Nor do another 1.4 million with
late-stage
AIDS.
For other causes of lingering pain — burns, car accidents,
gunshots, diabetic nerve damage, sickle-cell disease and so on
— it issues no estimates but believes that millions go
untreated.
Figures gathered by the International Narcotics Control Board, a
United
Nations agency, make it clear: citizens of rich
nations suffer less. Six countries — the United States,
Canada, France, Germany, Britain and Australia — consume 79
percent of the world's morphine, according to a 2005 estimate.
The poor and middle-income countries where 80 percent of the
world's people live consumed only about 6 percent.
Some countries imported virtually none. "Even if the
president gets cancer pain, he will get no analgesia," said
Willem Scholten, a World Health Organization official who
studies the issue.
In 2004, consumption of morphine per person in the United States
was about 17,000 times that in Sierra Leone.
At pain conferences, doctors from Africa describe patients whose
pain is so bad that they have chosen other remedies: hanging
themselves or throwing themselves in front of trucks.
Westerners tend to assume that most people in tropical countries
die of
malaria,
AIDS, worm diseases and unpronounceable ills. But as vaccines,
antibiotics
and AIDS drugs become more common, more and more are surviving
past
measles,
infections, birth complications and other sources of a quick
death. They grow old enough to die slowly of cancer.
About half the six million cancer deaths in the world last year
were in poor countries, and most diagnoses were made late, when
death was inevitable. But first, there was agony. About 80
percent of all cancer victims suffer severe pain, the W.H.O.
estimates, as do half of those dying of AIDS.
Morphine's raw ingredient — opium — is not in short supply.
Poppies are grown for heroin, of course, in Afghanistan and
elsewhere. But vast fields for morphine and codeine are also
grown in India, Turkey, France, Australia and other countries.
Nor is it expensive, even by the standards of developing
nations. One hospice in
Uganda,
for example, mixes its own liquid morphine so cheaply that a
three-week supply costs less than a loaf of bread.
Nonetheless, it is still routinely denied in many poor
countries.
"It's the intense fear of addiction, which is often
misunderstood," said David E. Joranson, director of the
Pain Policy Study Group at the
University
of Wisconsin's medical school, who has worked to
change drugs laws around the world. "Pain relief hasn't
been given as much attention as the war on drugs has."
Doctors in developing countries, he explained, often have
beliefs about narcotics that prevailed in Western
medical
schools decades ago — that they are inevitably
addictive, carry high risks of killing patients and must be used
sparingly, even if patients suffer.
Pain experts argue that it is cruel to deny them to the dying
and that patients who recover from pain can usually be weaned
off. Withdrawal symptoms are inevitable, they say — as they
are if a diabetic stops insulin. But the benefits outweigh the
risks.
Too Poor for Medicine
In Mrs. Sesay's case, Alfred Lewis, a nurse from Shepherd's
Hospice, is doing what he can to ease her last days.
When he first saw her, her tumor was wrapped with clay and
leaves prescribed by a local healer. The smell of her rotting
skin made her feel ashamed.
She had seen a doctor at one of many low-cost "Indian
clinics" who pulled at the breast with forceps so hard that
she screamed, misdiagnosed her tumor as an infected boil, and
gave her an injection in her buttocks that abscessed, adding to
her misery.
Nothing can be done about the tumor, Mr. Lewis explained
quietly. "All the bleeders are open," he said.
"Her risk now is hemorrhage. Only a knife-crazy surgeon
would attend to her."
Earlier diagnosis would probably not have changed her fate.
Sierra Leone has no CAT scanners, and only one private hospital
offers
chemotherapy
drug treatment. The Sesays are sharecroppers; they have no
money.
So Mr. Lewis was making a daily 10-mile trip from Freetown, the
capital, to change her dressing, sprinkle on antibiotics, and
talk to her. He asked a neighbor to plait her hair for her, so
she would look pretty. Mrs. Sesay said she could not be
bothered.
"It's necessary for to cope," he said. "For to
strive for be happy."
"I 'fraid for my life," she said.
"Are you 'fraid for die?"
"No, I not 'fraid. I ready."
"So what is your relationship to God? You good with
God?"
"I pray me one."
He asked her, half-jokingly, if she still had sex with her
husband.
No, she said, since the illness, he stayed in his room and she
stayed in hers. She, too, was joking. In their hut, there is
only the one room.
Life has become hard, she added, and her husband is getting too
old for farm labor. She, too, is getting old, she said — she
is somewhere in her 40s.
"We are really being punish."
For her pain, Mr. Lewis gave her generic Tylenol and tramadol, a
relative of codeine that is only 10 percent as potent as
morphine. It was all he could offer. "I would consider
putting her on morphine now, if we had morphine," Mr. Lewis
said.
In New York, she would have already started on it, or an
equivalent like oxycodone or fentanyl.
Even if his hospice could get it, Mr. Lewis could not give it to
her.
Under Sierra Leone law, morphine may be handled only by a
pharmacist or doctor, explained Gabriel Madiye, the hospice's
founder. But in all Sierra Leone there are only about 100
doctors — one for every 54,000 people, compared with one for
every 350 in the United States.
In only a few places — in Uganda, for example — does the law
allow trained nurses to prescribe morphine.
And pharmacists will not stock it.
"It's opioid
phobia
," Mr. Madiye said. "We are coming out of a
war where a lot of human rights violations were caused by drug
abuse."
During the war, the rebel assault on the capital was called
Operation No Living Thing. Child soldiers were hardened with
mysterious drugs with names like gunpowder and brown-brown,
along with glue and alcohol.
Esther Walker, a British nurse who sometimes works with Mr.
Lewis, said she once gave a lecture on palliative care at the
national medical school.
There were 28 students, and she asked them, "Who has seen
someone die peacefully in Sierra Leone?"
"Not one had," she said.
The Burden on the Young
In the poorest countries like this one, even babies suffer.
Momoh Sesay, 2, (no relation to Zainabu) is a pretty lucky
little guy — for someone who tumbled into a cooking pot of
boiling water.
He lost much of the skin on his thighs, and his belly is
speckled with burns as if he had been sloshed with pink paint.
But he was fortunate enough to live close to Ola During
Children's Hospital, the leading pediatric institution.
No doctor was in. There was not even any electricity. At night,
nurses thread IV lines into babies' tiny limbs by candlelight.
"And our eyes are not magnets," one of them, Josephine
Maajenneh Sillah, complained.
But they knew Momoh would die of shock and pumped in intravenous
fluids and antibiotics.
If he had been born in New York, Momoh would have had skin
grafts. Here, that is unthinkable.
Momoh was given saline washes, and his dead skin was scrubbed
off with debridement, a painful procedure. In New York, he would
have had morphine.
So probably would Abdulaziz Sankoh, 7, in another bed, who has
sickle cell disease. He moans at night when twisted blood cells
clump together and jam the arteries in his spindly legs, slowly
killing his bone marrow.
As would Musa Shariff, an 8-month-old boy whose scalp is so
swollen by
meningitis
that his eyelids cannot close. Dr. Muctar Jalloh, the hospital
director, said he would not prescribe morphine to babies or
toddlers if he had it. Only in the case of third-degree burns,
like Momoh's, did he say: "I would consider it —
maybe."
That flies in the face of Western medicine, which allows careful
use even in premature infants.
The strongest painkiller that Momoh, Abdulaziz and Musa can
take, if their parents can afford $1.65 per vial, is tramadol.
It is impossible to know what morphine would cost if it were
here, but it is sold in India at 1.7 cents a pill by the same
company that makes tramadol.
The nurses know the prices because they sell the drugs that are
available. They have not been paid for three years, they say, so
they support themselves in part by filling the prescriptions
that the doctors write. Kind as they are — they do extend
credit, and are sometimes moved to charity by the children —
it is a business.
That is the other reason Dr. Jalloh said he would not order
morphine. "I wouldn't want to leave my staff in charge of
morphine," he said. "The potential for abuse is so
high."
Worries About Abuse
If morphine were to be imported to Sierra Leone, it would be
overseen by two agencies: the National Pharmacy Board and the
National Drugs Control Agency.
Kande Bangura, the rangy, sharp-eyed former police commander who
runs the drug control agency, said the country had a serious
drug-abuse problem, especially among former child soldiers.
It also is a smuggling route. He spread out pictures of an
autopsy on a British citizen with Nigerian roots who had dropped
dead in line at Freetown's airport. His intestines were found to
be packed with
condoms
full of cocaine, one of which had burst.
Mr. Bangura said he had no objections to morphine, however,
"as long as it's for medical use and is strictly controlled
by the country's chief pharmacist."
Wiltshire C. N. Johnson, the chief of the enforcement arm of the
National Pharmacy Board, explained why painkillers were not
imported.
Scarce funds must go to the top five causes of death, he said:
diarrhea,
pneumonia,
tuberculosis, malaria and
sexually
transmitted diseases. "I'm not saying that
palliative care doesn't top the list, too," he said.
"But it's officially a very small percentage of the
requirement."
He also had fears like those of Dr. Jalloh. "There's no way
we're going to put morphine in the hands of a pharmacy
technician," he said. "In the wrong hands, drugs, like
guns, are a greater evil than a cure."
Mr. Madiye, who predicted exactly those answers before the
interviews started, vented his frustration later.
He founded Shepherd's Hospice in 1995, saw it destroyed in the
civil war and rebuilt it. But he cannot get the one drug that
would let him give people like Zainabu Sesay the dignified
deaths that in the West would be their birthright.
"How can they say there is no demand when they don't allow
it?" he asked. "How can they be so sure that it will
get out of control when they haven't even tried it?"
______________________________________
Contaminated Food!!!
September 5, 2007
Doctor Links a Man’s Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit
A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a
53-year-old Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition
that until now has been found only in people working in
popcorn plants.
Lung specialists and even a top industry official say the
case, the first of its kind, raises serious concerns about the
safety of microwave butter-flavored popcorn.
“We’ve all been working on the workplace safety side of
this, but the potential for consumer exposure is very
concerning,” said John B. Hallagan, general counsel for the
Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association of the United
States, a trade association of companies that make butter
flavorings for popcorn producers. “Are there other cases out
there? There could be.”
A spokeswoman for the
Food
and Drug Administration said that the agency was
considering the case as part of a review of the safety of
diacetyl, which adds the buttery taste to many microwave
popcorns, including Orville Redenbacher and Act II.
Producers of microwave popcorn said their products were safe.
“We’re incredibly interested in learning more about this
case. However, we are confident that our product is safe for
consumers’ normal everyday use in the home,” said
Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman for ConAgra Foods, the
nation’s largest maker of microwave popcorn.
Ms. Childs said ConAgra planned to remove diacetyl from its
microwave popcorn products “in the near future.”
Pop Weaver, another large microwave popcorn producer, has
already taken diacetyl out of its popcorn bags “because of
consumer concerns” but not because the company believes the
chemical is unsafe for consumers, said Cathy Yingling, a
company spokeswoman.
The case will most likely accelerate calls on Capitol Hill for
the Bush administration to crack down on the use of diacetyl.
The
Occupational
Safety and Health Administration has been
criticized as doing little to protect workers in popcorn
plants despite years of studying the issue.
“The government is not doing anything,” said
Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who leads
a subcommittee with jurisdiction over the food and drug
agency’s budget.
Exposure to synthetic butter in food production and flavoring
plants has been linked to hundreds of cases of workers whose
lungs have been damaged or destroyed. Diacetyl is found
naturally in milk, cheese, butter and other products.
Heated diacetyl becomes a vapor and, when inhaled over a long
period of time, seems to lead the small airways in the lungs
to become swollen and scarred. Sufferers can breathe in
deeply, but they have difficulty exhaling. The severe form of
the disease is called bronchiolitis obliterans or “popcorn
workers’ lung,” which can be fatal.
Dr. Cecile Rose, director of the occupational disease clinical
programs at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in
Denver, said that she first saw the Colorado man in February
after another doctor could not figure out what was causing his
distress. Dr. Rose described the case in a recent letter to
government agencies.
A furniture salesman, the man was becoming increasingly short
of breath. He had never smoked and was overweight. His illness
had been diagnosed as hypersensitivity pneumonitis, an
inflammation of the lungs usually caused by chronic exposure
to bacteria, mold or dust. Farmers and bird enthusiasts are
frequent sufferers.
But nothing in the Colorado man’s history suggested that he
was breathing in excessive amounts of mold or bird droppings,
Dr. Rose said. She has consulted to flavorings manufacturers
for years about “popcorn workers’ lung,” and said that
something about the man’s tests appeared similar to those of
the workers.
“I said to him, ‘This is a very weird question, but bear
with me. But are you around a lot of popcorn?’ ” Dr. Rose
asked. “His jaw dropped and he said, ‘How could you
possibly know that about me? I am Mr. Popcorn. I love
popcorn.’ ”
The man told Dr. Rose that he had eaten microwave popcorn at
least twice a day for more than 10 years.
“When he broke open the bags, after the steam came out, he
would often inhale the fragrance because he liked it so
much,” Dr. Rose said. “That’s heated diacetyl, which we
know from the workers’ studies is the highest risk.”
Dr. Rose measured levels of diacetyl in the man’s home after
he made popcorn and found levels of the chemical were similar
to those in microwave popcorn plants. She asked the man to
stop eating microwave popcorn.
“He was really upset that he couldn’t have it anymore,”
Dr. Rose said. “But he complied.”
Six months later, the man has lost 50 pounds and his lung
function has not only stopped deteriorating but has actually
improved slightly, Dr. Rose said.
“This is not a definitive causal link, but it raises a lot
of questions and supports the recommendation that more work
needs to be done,” Dr. Rose said.