In one of the more bizarre prisoner-related free exercise stories, Virginia's Rappahannock Regional Jail has been exposed for its practice of censoring incoming mail in a very peculiar way: excising any Scripture.
Anna Williams, the mother of an inmate, said that while her son was detained at the jail, her letters to him were stripped of Bible passages and religious messages.
According to the ACLU, a three-page letter she sent to him in January was cut with scissors, leaving only the salutation, the first paragraph of the letter and the closing, "Love, Mom."
A letter (pdf) from the ACLU, demanding an change in policy, chides: "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 Dostoesvsky had ready access to Scripture while incarcerated in a Siberian prison camp in Tsarist Russia…"
