Books as Bombs: Incendiary Reading Practices in Women's Prisons

I've read this piece before, with graduate students, but this time around, I read it differently.  I was fascinated, this time around, by women prisoners' arguments that the urban fiction they love to read can be bad for other prisoners.  Those others, apparently, cannot distinguish between "the books' elements of reality and fantasy," and stay hooked to a lifestyle that is destructive.  By contrast, those that can distinguish, can enjoy novels which remind them of their own lives while thinking critically about them and thus about their own lives.  Are they fooling themselves?  What about the prisoner who reads the urban fiction because it "will assist her in doing prison ministry for incarcerated women."  The books "'[help me] to really, really feel where these girls are coming from."  The same woman, however, doesn't think it's good for the women themselves to read these works and would never use them as part of her prison ministry.
Somehow this reminded me of the British attitude toward native Indian readers within the context of colonialism.  "Oriental tales," while entirely appropriate for English readers who knew to read them as fantasy, would prove morally destructive to Indian readers who, apparently, would not be able to make this distinction, but had to be taught first, by reading British Literature, how to read "their own."
Perhaps the British felt, like the prison administrators and guards, that giving Indians/Prisoners readings too closely aligned with their "culture" would jeopardize the mission of perfection, rehabilitation, and, in the context of the prison, punishment.  This is what makes such readings "incendiary."
Yet Sweeney makes the great point that such readings are "incendiary" to the extent that they provide "powerful tools for sparking critical reflection, igniting insights, and catalyzing dialogue among incarcerated and non-incarcerated members of the community."  Of course, within the colonial (and perhaps as well the penal) context, such purposes would have been viewed as "incendiary" as well, since they foster readers' agency and critical thinking.  Too much of that would have threatened the colonial enterprise. And are prisons really committed to helping the incarcerated become critical readers and thinkers?