ACLU Seeks to End Censorship of Religious Material

The ACLU has sent a letter to the Superintendent of Rappahannock, Virginia's Regional Jail demanding that he put an end to a policy that censors biblical passages from the incoming mail received by inmates. Here's the most forceful paragraph of the letter:

It is astonishing that such censorship of the Bible and other religious material could occur in an American jail in the Twenty-First Century. Even the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky had ready access to scripture while incarcerated in a Siberian prison camp in tsarist Russia, and on our shores, "[t]here is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country." "Even after the prison gates slam behind an inmate," the Constitution protects, "those precious personal rights by which we satisfy [the] basic yearnings of the human spirit."