On sale through AK Press or University of Georgia Press.
From 2018 to 2022, I volunteered with Inside Books Project in Austin, TX and eventually joined as a member of their collective. In 2021, Saxapahaw Prison Books invited us to contribute a chapter for their compilation of writings about the books through bars movement. On behalf of IBP, I wrote about the process, issues, and problem-solving involved in mailing books to incarcerated people. Within my four years of being at IBP, we had witnessed revisions of book bans by the state, all-out mail bans on us from a federal prison, accusations of contraband smuggling, and the effects of the pandemic on individuals, populations, and the lack of information available to those affected most by it.
In the chapter “Going Postal: Censorship, Policy, and Correspondence Rejection with Texas Prisons”, the details of some of these tribulations are outlined in detail. While this piece encapsulates a window of time in which these events took place, it is not an isolated experience or one that is relegated to the past. Books bans will continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future and they have shown up in ways more insidious than the arbitrary morality-policing of state officials and their lackeys. With E-reader tablets becoming a standard of media consumption in prisons, we are witnessing a new wave of information suppression with a profit margin to disincentivize access to free printed media as prisoners must now pay to read certain publications. While one of the most vile companies in prison profiteering, Securus, does make available 30,000 free titles (most in public domain, i.e. considered out of date), this increased availability of surveillance is also entangled with a pay-to-play mail service.
The stories do not end in this book as there are countless more to be told. What is contained in these pages is a glimpse into the endurance, passion, solidarity, and conviction of those who make this movement possible. Without these people, the world would be all the more grim and because of them they bring light to the shadows.
As described by the cover copy: “People organizing prison books programs have quietly gathered in basements, storage spaces, and the back rooms of secondhand bookstores for the last seventy years, reading letters written by incarcerated people and sending books in return. This diffuse and nonhierarchical movement operates on shoestring budgets with donated libraries in thirty states, and yet, there is little awareness of this long-standing social movement.
This book contains essays that explain the need for prison book programs and offer advice on how to establish or become involved with prison books programs, as well as shedding light on current challenges. While mass incarceration can make people feel powerless, this book details how ordinary people can organize and intervene in the largest imprisonment the world has ever known. The editors of this book hope it will inspire more people to realize that everyone has the power to treat each other differently and to foster a culture of care over cruelty.”
