I'm deeply sympathetic to this viewpoint, and definitely oppose book bans and restrictions. That being said, I think you're misinterpreting OP's perspective. They aren't (at least not deliberately) proposing these restrictions out as some punishment for immorality, they're specifically concerned about safety. If significant numbers of people die that wouldn't die if books were restricted, that's at least an argument for a ban.

Again, I'm not saying at anything near enough people die due to book-organized hits to swing the scales. That seems...unlikely, to say the least. I'd just argue that there's a difference between keeping all the kids in at recess and hits being called.

Even if librarian gangs were a widespread enough issue, focusing on the medium (books) instead of the cause (we're not living up to our stated purpose of rehabilitation) to me says that the prison isn’t as interested in inmate safety as they’d like to claim.

Oh yeah we're in complete agreement there.

> If significant numbers of people die that wouldn't die if books were restricted, that's at least an argument for a ban

The same argument is made for guns, and that hasn't gone very well to convince anyone.

It is an argument though, rather than blind word association. However bad these freedom restricting arguments are, the kind of moral panic the commenter I replied to implied the commenter they replied to felt.

Prison operators are held accountable for crimes committed in their prisons, but they aren't rewarded for teaching prisoners.

Prison operators turning a blind eye to guards openly selling contraband and cellphone access to prisoners is not only criminal but rampant. A federal prison in the southeastern U.S. recently transferred 90% of their inmates to other facilities and banned staff due to the incredible corruption there. And sorry, but teaching prisoners starts with the prisons funding teachers, not 'rewards.'

Was that Atlanta?

We all know it's just a pretext

This applies outside the prison system as well. See: Guns, Kinder Eggs, Hate Speech laws.

"A little bad is all bad," is an instance of hypodescent, the same morality that gave us the one-drop rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule