Reading bans are rising at an alarming rate in prisons across the country, with new PEN America data revealing that those incarcerated are being robbed of the occasional magazine and even recipe books on how to make ramen.

For almost 22 years, Zeke Caligiuri subscribed to the New Yorker magazine from prison in Minnesota. He was meant to receive 52 annual issues but claimed during his sentencing to have never gotten the full amount. Instead, a non-delivery notice with vague wording would arrive at the prison post room, sometimes flagging an advertisement that was deemed inappropriate or just one article in an issue of many. After searching for information about what he couldn’t read, Caligiuri would sink into a period of overwhelming defeat.

“I realized that my world needed to get bigger,” he said. “But the things I needed to see and know were being held back.”

During this time, the words of New Yorker writers like Adam Gopnik, Ariel Levy and Emily Nussbaum were means of escaping the monotony of incarceration. Prison was programmed by a rigorous schedule, with days hardly extending beyond what was for lunch or when inmates could watch television. Searching for meaning, Caligiuri sometimes slept on the bunks with a book next to his head. When he could get it, poetry was the first thing he read when he woke up.

“If you take the books and culture out of these places, you have a zoo,” he said. “Language is the building block of creation. For me, in prison, it was the biggest thing. Words were the only thing connecting me with the world, with my family, and with my community.”

Reading bans inside prisons are happening at a more concerning rate than those in public schools and libraries and are often less documented, making it hard to determine the extent of the censorship.

“This is an underreported area because prisons are generally not visible and are isolated environments,” Moira Marquis, the report’s lead author and senior manager in the prison and justice writing department at PEN, said. “The people making decisions are not publicly elected officials, so there is very little accountability. They do not keep track of the censorship they oversee and don’t feel the need to justify what they are doing.”

With no centralized authority determining which reading materials inmates can access or why they can’t get hold of certain titles, censorship in prisons across the country remains a gray area. What is allowed varies state by state or by individual prison. The reasons can range from the size of a book to its sender to the color of the mailed wrapping paper. Even when a book makes it into the mailroom, there is no guarantee it will reach the recipient on the envelope.

Florida now has the highest number of titles banned behind bars, at 22,825, followed by Texas, with 10,265, according to PEN’s new report Reading Between the Bars. Other states like Kansas, Virginia and New York follow behind.

Prison Ramen, a 2015 paperback of recipes with ingredients widely available in prison stores, is currently the most banned book, disallowed in prisons across 19 states. Robert Greene, the New York Times bestseller known for The 48 Laws of Power and The Art of Seduction, is the most banned author.

PEN refers to the restriction of these sorts of titles as “content-based” banning. However, the report notes a steep rise in another prison-specific kind of censorship: “content-neutral”. This is when reading materials are disallowed not for what’s in them but because prisons only allow books from a handful of approved vendors. Increasingly, this has become more restrictive. The year after a vendor policy was approved in Idaho, the state denied one book for every four incarcerated people.

Aneka Nelson, the club coordinator at Free Minds Book Club, a Washington DC-based organization using literature to support convicted or formerly incarcerated people with their education, is frustrated with the process.

“Books are an outlet, a way for us to keep our minds free,” she said. “This isn’t affecting us; it’s affecting our members. We won’t give up on our mission just because of these obstacles they are trying to create.”

Free Minds runs book clubs, workshops and subscription plans for people currently serving sentences, and about 95% of their members are African American. Subscribers can sign up to receive magazines and discussion plans from inside their facilities, emphasizing longer-term career development, resources and opportunities. Recently, they have been experiencing problems with USP McCreary, a high-security institution in Kentucky. This is because DC residents who serve the majority of their sentences in federal prison often get sent to institutions across the country.

“They are saying they are technically not banning books,” Nelson said, “yet they’re making it extremely difficult for us to get anything in.”

• This article was amended on 7 November 2023 to clarify what types bans – “content-based” and “content-neutral” – PEN describes in its report.