What’s on the naughty list of media sent to Ariz. inmates?

Arizona’s public prisons have a naughty-or-nice list of reading and listening materials that can be sent to inmates, and a few on the list might make Santa blush.

Naughty: titles like “Russian Girls: Hot Sexy Lingerie Girl Models Pictures,” or “The Mammoth Book of Gangs,” and the CD “Hatebreeder” by Finnish death-metal band Children of Bodom.

The allowable “nice” stuff is a bit more staid — titles like National Geographic Traveler, Architectural Digest, Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” to name just a few.

The state doesn’t have a blanket list of banned magazines, newspapers, books or compact discs, but mail clerks throughout the state prison system are tasked with figuring out whether there is “unauthorized content” that should be withheld from in-

mates.

The Arizona Department of Corrections spends roughly three pages in a policy manual defining unauthorized content that’s not allowed to go to inmates. No-nos include items with nudity, racism, or depictions of riots; howtos on dissembling locks or tying special knots; items that promote drugs; or instructions for identity theft, escape and survival skills.

The policy is not intended to be punitive, Corrections spokesman Andrew Wilder said. Instead, it’s designed to ensure the safety of prison staff, the public and inmates, and to maintain secure prisons, he said.

The agency provided The Arizona Republic with the list of a few hundred materials banned during the past year. Other titles include”Spicy Sexy Latinas,” “The Heroin Diaries,” “Thugs and Women Who Love Them,” “Naked Prey,” “Reign of Evil,” “The Secrets of Houdini,” several issues of the Phoenix New

Times, and a bevy of CDs ranging from rock to hip-hop.

And there were a few head-scratchers, too.

Certain editions of mainstream publications like ESPN, Esquire, Men’s Fitness, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair were excluded, as were many editions of Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine, and books like “The Life of Charles Dickens” and poet Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.”

Corrections did not disclose on the list why a publication or CD was banned.

Wilder said each contained certain unauthorized content. He noted that Der Spiegel was not authorized because Corrections does not have enough staff members proficient in German to review that publication, and it would be administratively burdensome to review.

The agency does not have that problem with Spanish-language publications, he said, because so many staff members are fluent speakers.

The Dickens book was banned because it included nudity.

If an item is placed on the excluded list, the inmate has the choice of mailing it to a home address or Corrections can give it to a person visiting that inmate.

“Our complexes do an amazing job sorting through incoming daily mail for over 42,000 inmates,” Wilder said. “Most of the time, we get it right the first time. But, if an inmate disagrees with an exclusion decision made by the complex, we provide a means for them to file an appeal.”

Inmates can appeal to the agency’s Office of Publication Review, which can redact — black out — material and return an item in its entirety to an inmate. Typically this is done for magazines.

Corrections will not redact books or CDs. If those items do not meet standards, they are banned from the prisons. Or, they can be sent to the inmate’s home.

In a few cases, inmates during the past year made appeals regarding the same magazine publisher and got different results.

For example, an appeal regarding the April 25-May 1, 2016, issue of Bloomberg

BusinessWeek was approved and the entire magazine was returned to an inmate, following initial concerns about content that promoted gambling, Wilder said.

However, an appeal was rejected regarding the March 28-April 3 issue of

Bloomberg BusinessWeek being banned. In that instance, there was a large article on drones delivering items to prisons and Wilder said it would be administratively burdensome to redact such a large article.

“There is a level of care that goes into this to ensure that the inmate receives the content that is authorized, and only unauthorized content is redacted or withheld,” Wilder said. “It all comes down to the content.”

“There is a level of care that goes into this to ensure that the inmate receives the content that is authorized, and only unauthorized content is redacted or withheld. It all comes down to the content.” Andrew Wilder Department of Corrections spokesman