Censorship Behind Bars

October 15, 2025

In 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1078 into law. Now, school curricula in the state are protected from gender- and race-based book bans. Certainly, this is a good thing; fighting censorship at every turn is critical to protecting our 1st Amendment rights. And it also inspires and gives us hope for the additional work that can be done.

AB 1078 does not address all censorship, nor does it address all Californians. As Mikaere Todd cautions, California law can be interpreted as follows: “We don’t ban books here — except in our state prisons.” 1st Amendment rights are among the many that incarcerated people lose. Just take a look at the mind-numbing list of “disapproved publications” on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website. Much of this censorship centers around sex and sexuality. For example, a simple “Ctrl+F” search for “nudity” has 1,415 hits; “sex” has 214 hits, and “erotic” has 60. And materials such as Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party are banned for supposedly posing a “serious threat to facility security or the safety of incarcerated persons and staff.”

Content made accessible to students in California schools under AB 1078 should also be accessible to incarcerated people in California jails and prisons. Don’t we want to ensure that incarcerated people, many of whom will be released at some point, have the ability to re-enter society with further education and information?

We at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation praise anti-book ban measures like AB 1078. They provide a roadmap for future fights against censorship — to keep pushing until freedom of speech is not just for those of us who are free. The 1st Amendment and all our rights that are interconnected to it — including our right to sexual freedom — are for everyone.