Banned Books Week—October 5th to 11th—is an annual celebration of the freedom to read, and the aspiration that books should be accessible to all. In recognition of Banned Books Week 2025, Haymarket is highlighting the unjust censorshop of political books which impacts countless incarcerated readers each year. 

We've put together a Books Are For Everyone reading list: ten books that reflect the spectrum of urgent writing often targeted for censorship by prisons across the country.

As part of our Books Not Bars program, Haymarket will donate one book to someone who is incarcerated for every book purchased from this reading list until the end of October.

Books are for everyone! Abolish prisons!

Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.

Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.

A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics.

In We Grow the World Together, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.

These powerful poems of witness seek to address the oppressive systems that make up the US prison-industrial complex, revealing cracks in a criminal punishment system that too often appears unchangeable.

A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

A vital history of organizing within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons in the 1970s, illuminating a crucial chapter in today’s abolition feminist struggles.

Corridors of Contagion brings to light the experiences of five people incarcerated across the United States as they navigate the onset of the pandemic—and the many months, stretched into years, that followed. Journalist Victoria Law combines this storytelling with a trenchant analysis of the structural failures of the US carceral system: failures that made prisons uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks, from overcrowding to solitary confinement, from insufficient healthcare to life sentences.

A damning account of the latest transformation in mass incarceration, revealing how powerful nonprofits and so-called progressives used the language of social movements to build new jails.

This gripping graphic novel tells the story of the 1891 Coal Creek War—one of the most significant yet overlooked labor and abolitionist uprisings in the history of the United States.

Haymarket's Books Not Bars program connects people who are incarcerated with radical books and opportunities for political education. Find out more about our Books Not Bars program, make a donation, and/or request books for loved ones inside here.