Harry Potter in Guantanamo Bay

By Maryann Yin on GalleyCat  Aug 24, 2010

Currently 176 prisoners inhabit the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. Time magazine recently looked at the reading material available for prisoners there.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter joined other titles, including: J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga, and the self-help book, Don't Be Sad.

Here's more: "He may not come riding in on the back of a hippogriff to free his favorite captives from their own version of Azkaban, but he shows up once a week on a cart of books from the prison library, offering an escape of the imagination treasured by many. Indeed, the Harry Potter series has been one the most popular titles among the 18,000 books, magazines, DVDs and newspapers on offer from the prison library at Guantanamo."

The library offers books in 18 different languages Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, French and English. There seems to be a growing movement to make books more readily available for convicts. In early August, GalleyCat reported on the Changing Lives Through Literature rehabilitation program--where imprisonment is replaced with probation and mandatory reading.