Recently one of our prison’s library clerks, Polo*, remarked in passing that the Georgia Department of Corrections prison system was like the picture of Dorian Gray—absorbing the state’s sins, hidden from public view.
One of the younger guys asked, Who’s Dorian?
We really have got to get these kids more access to the facility’s general library. The problem is, these days it’s even harder to get into than the law library.
We’re allowed to visit each library once a week for two hours, but if you have an active case you get an additional two hours each week in the law library, in theory at least. No such allowance for the general library.
“Access to libraries is another thing the pandemic changed,” Polo said. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, “we had night education, counseling groups and library call … for the people who worked during the day. But with no officers, there was no one to open the education building. Add to that the contraband being thrown over the fences, and night movements ceased.”
Library access never recovered from COVID, or rather from the staffing exodus prompted by COVID. And people have been throwing us packages over the fence ever since tobacco became contraband, but the uptick of this practice during the pandemic became a pretext for canceling all evening programming, as if that’s what was responsible for all the contraband coming in.
Maybe 20 percent of the books we’re allowed to check out are useful for something other than killing time.
So now, even with the pandemic behind us, we still have no evening programming and everyone who works during the day can only get their two hours of general library time on Friday mornings. Only 25 people are allowed in the library at one time. Each Friday morning there’s about 50 people lined up outside the door. It’s a tense line, not the kind you’d want to try to cut into, though that’s true of pretty much any line in this place.
Assuming a facility is running on schedule to begin with, which this one usually isn’t, then during your two hours you can check out three books. Except not from the reference station, which is where they keep the dictionaries, encyclopedias, photography collections, history books and other books everyone wants. With those you have to just commit whatever you can to memory during your two hours. Of the books we are allowed to check out, maybe 20 percent are useful for something other than killing time.
Which doesn’t mean the other 80 percent are without merit. But you want at least one of your three books to be teaching you something—otherwise you’re just killing time for years, or the rest of your life.
During the couple of years when we all had tablets, the electronic libraries were like the general libraries in that they were a bit lacking in current material, or rather current material that was interesting. They did have a lot of the great and wondrous books that were written a long time ago, except we were being charged a dollar per download. For books that outside prison were already free through Project Gutenberg.
People do pay to quietly check out the reference books, and that works fine as long as they don’t lose them.
“Yeah, greater access to the [reference] library is what drove me to obtain one of the library clerk jobs,” Polo said. “Renting books isn’t a good hustle.”
At every prison job there’s a built-in hustle based on whatever that position gives you access to; some are not as lucrative as others. But people do pay to quietly check out the reference books, and that works fine as long as they don’t lose them, which they generally don’t. A person who’s inclined to pay for extra time with an encyclopedia is generally a person who’ll remember where they put it.
Prison libraries are often cited in the context of literacy and reading comprehension, and of course those are worthwhile in and of themselves. But general library access is also how a lot of people get better at connecting with their loved ones in the free world.
Handwritten letters are the backbone of inside-outside communications, and the more books people read, the more their spelling improves. They become more aware of how punctuation changes the tone of what they’re trying to say. As time goes on and they read genres they wouldn’t have otherwise—just due to being hungry for material they haven’t already read—their vocabulary expands, too. It would be nice if they were allowed to read as much as they wanted to.
*Name has been changed to protect source
Image (cropped) via City of Alexandria, Virginia
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