“But there’s nothing about ‘Chokehold’ that threatens day-to-day safety of inmates or jailers,” he said. “‘Chokehold’ is all about threatening the institution of prison. My book wants to abolish prison, but it wants to do it in the same nonviolent fashion that Martin Luther King took down Jim Crow.”

“I found the ban somewhat ironic,” he added, “because it’s kind of supporting the thesis.”

The ban on his book is similar to those that had been imposed on another book about racism in criminal justice — “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander — in states including North Carolina and New Jersey. The A.C.L.U. successfully challenged both of those decisions, and last week it wrote a letter to the Arizona Department of Corrections asking officials not to censor Mr. Butler’s book.

“Chokehold” was published by the New Press, a Manhattan-based publisher, in 2017. Its title refers to a maneuver that police officers have used to restrain people — one that became well known when Eric Garner, 43, died after an officer appeared to use the maneuver on him on Staten Island in 2014.

Mr. Butler wrote in the book that black men were disproportionately incarcerated and mistreated because the system was supposed to work that way. “Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do,” he wrote. “The police, as policy, treat African-Americans with contempt.” He said the solution is not to reform law enforcement, but to rethink the entire structure of the criminal justice system.

The book does not pose any danger to people in prisons, Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney with the A.C.L.U., said in an interview on Tuesday.