Maybe he should try “Harry Potter.”
Jailed “fire fiend” Peter Braunstein is burning mad that prison officials won’t let him read kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard’s 2011 autobiography, “A Stolen Life,” and another book about sexual predators.
Braunstein, a former Women’s Wear Daily writer serving an 18-year sentence for posing as a firefighter to chloroform and kidnap a beautiful co-worker, mailed The Post a self-prepared press release to gripe about the jailhouse censorship.
“NEW YORK STATE OFFICIALS ACCUSE CHILD ABDUCTION SURVIVOR JAYCEE DUGARD OF ‘PROMOTING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’ IN HER AUTOBIOGRAPHY,” the release’s headline spins.
Braunstein’s mailing, sent from Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate Dannemora, goes on to complain that state correction officials have confiscated a copy of “A Stolen Life” that had been sent to him by an unnamed pal.
“A New York State Corrections official has banned the book ‘A Stolen Life’ written by Jaycee Dugard, whose abduction at age 11 and subsequent enslavement by a depraved couple gripped the nation and made Dugard a household name,” Braunstein writes in his release, assuming the tone of a buttoned-down, agenda-spinning publicist.
“Her harrowing memoir, published by Simon & Schuster, has been banned by the Department of Corrections,” states the imprisoned perv, “on the grounds that it constitutes ‘child pornography’ and ‘promotes the sexual performance of children.’ ”
The Dugard book “violates Directive #4572,” according to a June 10 Clinton Correctional “Facility Media Review Committee” disposition notice Braunstein enclosed in his mailing.
Specifically, pages 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, and 17 promote “CHILD PORNOGRAPHY/SEXUAL PERFORMANCE OF A CHILD,” in violation of Guideline II B, the corrections censors complain. Not to mention the promotion of “RAPE/VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN,” in violation of Guideline II C, on pages 18, 19, 21, 24, 31, 32, & 33.
“The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision censorship of this particular book is by no means meant to disrespect Jaycee Dugard or her memoir,” state Department of Correctional Services spokeswoman Linda Foglia said when asked about the matter. Braunstein has the right to appeal the decision, she added.
Dugard’s is the second banned book on Braunstein’s vicariously nefarious reading list. Earlier this year, prison officials nixed “Dark Dreams,” published in 2001 as a discussion of profiling techniques for the capture of sexual predators.
Then in April, a Manhattan judge denied his request to get back the bondage porn that cops had seized from his home as evidence in his 2007 trial.
Braunstein had claimed he really, really needed the materials on legal grounds, so he could prepare a post-conviction motion stating he’d actually been addicted to “outré porn,” and that his defense lawyers had been too prudish to raise that defense at trial.