Public Libraries and People in Jail

Abstract

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. affects one directly, affects all indirectly.--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. That detention can turn into a horror like that at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison is hard to fathom, but incarceration of any sort always seems to exist on the edge of sanity, ready to transmute into grim, even fatal, encounters. (1) The inhumane treatment of prisoners in Iraq or Afghanistan is emblematic of the worst sort of pendulum swing tracked in Harun Farocki's study of prison control in California or mass beatings at Chicago's Cook County Jail. (2) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writing from a cell in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 when jailed by Bull Connor for demonstrating without a permit, wrote, Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Dr. King's words give succor to those who want to make a difference. While we may not be able to change the prison-industrial complex that has grown so much over the last decades we can, as working librarians, take first steps. We can seek to ensure that people held in local jails have library service. There are some public libraries and projects that provide guidance in this path. If we help one even one person, we help all. The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the developed world. There are more than two million people in prison or jail and more than 50 percent of the people incarcerated are of Latino or African American heritage. (3) Educational support programs that might prevent imprisonment in the first place have been cut. For the United States, prisons are the primary weapons against crime and drug abuse--a real failure of national responsibility to the poor and ill educated. The prevailing ideology of the twenty-first-century United States' prison-industrial complex seems to be retribution rather than rehabilitation. In an increasingly privatized corrections system, there are fewer resources available to assist the incarcerated in reentry to the larger society. (4) In this Community Building column the intent is to provide a brief look at library philosophies of service relating to incarcerated people and examples of public libraries providing service to people in local detention centers. Philosophy of Library Service to Prisoners Inmates may be in jails or prisons. Prisons are federal or state institutions for offenders who have been convicted of crimes. Prison library service is generally outside the purview of local public libraries because state and federal prisons have their own libraries. Brenda Vogel's 1995 prison library handbook, Down for the Count, provides the philosophy of service to prisoners, procedures, resources, and a thoughtful commentary for librarians working in state or federal institutions. (5) Sadly, prison library service has an ever-larger constituency. In 2000 there were 1,668 adult correctional facilities--a 14 percent increase from 1995. These included 94 federal, 1,320 state, and 264 private. (6) A jail is a local (city or county) facility that receives individuals pending arraignment and holds them awaiting trial, conviction, or sentencing. A jail also holds inmates sentenced to short terms (generally under one year). The median sentence for all inmates sentenced to jail is 8.7 months. There are 3,365 jails in the United States and these held 691,301 people at midyear 2003, an increase of 25,826 from the 665,475 held at midyear 2002 (3.9 percent). From 1990 to 2003 the number of jail inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents grew from 163 to 238. The jail population is 43.6 percent white, 39.2 percent African American, 15.4 percent Latino, and 1.8 percent other ethnicities (Asian American, American Indian). (7) The total number of people who spend time in jail over a given year can be much higher. …

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