librarypunk - 029 - Prison Librarianship

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

We're joined this week by Rebecca, a public librarian and former prison librarian to talk about her experience working in a state prison library.  https://twitter.com/britlitgeek  Items mentioned: Abolitionist Library Association  Increasing Access to Quality Educational Resources to Support Higher Education in Prison Advancing Technological Equity for Incarcerated College Students Outside and In: Services for People Impacted By Incarceration J Pay drafts update https://twitter.com/ChrisWBlackwell/status/1432726185201389574

Take a sip. It's library punk. Justin, I'm a scholarly communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I am a cisadmin at a public library. My pronouns are she and they. And we have a guest. I'm Rebecca. I'm a public librarian and former prison librarian. My pronouns are she, her. There's the hype train. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For some reason, I thought that was just two.

Pioop, yeah. Oh, no, I've got a whole soundboard. That's part of the reason I had to upload. I had to wait for my voice to load in. Excellent. Yeah, we are finally doing this episode. We've been wanting to do a series on prison libraries, issues of library services to prisoners. And so I put out a call a while ago now for anyone involved in prison libraries who'd ever worked in one before.

And Rebecca reached out. And so we finally got her on. Both Carrie and I are part of Ablo, which is the abolitionist library association. So there's lots of subgroups that we take part in that have to do with like getting information services to prisoners or issues of working with other groups like Books Beyond Bars and all of the other issues

that sort of surround just providing any kind of library services to prison, prisoners, incarcerated people, There's always disagreement within the group on how to refer to certain things. But I want to have someone on who had worked in a prison library because it's obviously going to be very different. And I want to know what your experiences were. Just as a bit of background, I did read that book that everyone has read about the accidental prison librarian guy who was like a master's in. He had an English degree and he got a job as a prison librarian. What was the name of that book?

I've got it. Running the books. I have opinions about that book. A lot of people do. Yeah. You want to start there with your opinions about the book? Oh, wow. It's going to come off super dushy for me to just jump in and start talking about this book.

I have not made it all the way through the book. And it's really interesting to me because I was actually, I've created a book in an NEH institute, and I'd actually showed up last week or two weeks ago. when we were about to record. Finally, after three years, I created an artist book about my experience working in the prison library. And I had a conversation with a book artist and scholar from Berkeley at this institute that I was in. And I was talking about, you know, I have all of these little vignettes and notes and journal entries

and things from my experience because it's a really intense job. It's very intense emotionally. it's somewhat intense physically. I just had a lot of thoughts and things to work through. Still do, kind of. And so I was talking to her about creating this book. And I was talking about some of the stories that some of the offenders, we had to call them offenders in my systems that the offenders had told me.

And the way I was planning on doing it, she was like, well, don't do that. Okay, what's wrong with it? Like, I thought it seemed like interesting and compelling. And she's like, well, they're not your stories. You don't get to tell other people. stories. And I was like, ooh, that's a really good point. Like, these are people with their own stories. And I really second-guessed my plan to tell other people's stories or to share their stories, especially since, you know, I didn't and couldn't have discussed it with these

people before I left the job at the prison library. So she really made me stop and think about what I was thinking about doing. And I did write about my experiences with some of the inmates, the offenders, excuse me, they had to correct me about that all the time when I was there as well. But I decided not to tell stories the way that a lot of people do. Like I wanted to make sure I wasn't appropriating anybody else's story. And the biggest thing that bothers me about that book is that I feel like he does a lot of that. He does a lot of sharing a lot of information about people that, number one, he really shouldn't have known as a prison librarian because there is a level of separation between yourself and your patrons that you should keep for the health

of everybody involved and the safety of everybody involved. But also just kind of that appropriating other people's stories to, yeah, for entertainment value really, to kind of tell you, well, here's the seedy side of prison libraries or whatever. It just hits me wrong. I don't know if I'm explaining it very well. And I really hope that the author of the book isn't going to, like, find me on Twitter and yell at me. But yeah, it just doesn't sit well with me to share so much information about the people that you worked with while you were in prison. It just seems wrong. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's been a long time since I read that book now, but I remember him telling the stories about sort of like the inmate run legal library and the classes that he

was running and stuff like that. I remember those got pretty personal, but I can't remember all the details. Yeah, and there's just a lot of things that were huge, huge safety. risks that he talks about in the book, you know, being lax about certain rules that really are there for your safety. And I know he didn't get a lot of training. I actually had to go through the same month-long training institute that the security officers did. And then when they were out doing their like field training about how to like restrain people and all that kind of stuff, I was in the library getting ready to open it. But yeah, we had, you know, safety precautions and protocol and things really drilled into us, and it really was for our safety, because you have no idea when

somebody's going to just kind of lose it. And, you know, staff have been assaulted in my system. I think two years ago, we had a security officer killed. It was after, after I left. But, yeah, it was a big deal. It made national news and things. So things like that also kind of make me cringe in any environment when I hear someone, well, we're just going to do it this way. Well, but it would be great to be able to do that, but your safety and other people's safety could be really, really compromised. So yeah, it was just, it was a whole book full of cringe, even though I appreciate the premise. Yeah, it makes sense. Since it seems to me to be a pretty big discrepancy of like what prison library services are like, simply because there's a big

a big range of all the different ways we incarcerate people. You have state systems, federal systems, jails, county systems, so it's all over the place. What did your library look like in terms of as part of the broader institution? Well, I feel like I ended up working in one of the better library situations in the country from what I've read and discussed with people. I had a dedicated library in the education building. And my direct supervisor was the director of education for the facility. And I was very highly trained. And there was always a security officer in the building whenever it was open to offenders to come in. And I had specific library times and each living unit would come down at their assigned times. I was in an all-mail prison and the guys would

sign up to go to the library in a little binder in their unit. And then the officers would scan that and send it to me. So I knew who was coming. And I didn't take attendance or any of that kind of stuff. That was more the officer's job. I just wanted to kind of have an idea of how many people were coming. And yeah, so they would come in and they would have their like hour and a half. And in some units, they could only come once a week. In some units, they could come, they could sign up for every library time. It really depended on who was running their unit. And they would come in. I, I tried to make my library everything. I had tons of fiction, lots of nonfiction.

I had a separate room in the library that was a law library, and I had an offender law clerk to help the guys look up legal information. I had a good budget. The warden of our particular location had come from an education background, and she really actually appreciated what the education department was doing and understood the value of the library. for the inmates as people, not just, you know, a lot of the officers were like, well, we need the library to be open so that they can have something to do so that they're not like, you know, throwing their own shit against the wall or whatever. Oh, am I allowed to curse? Is that okay?

Yeah, that's fine. I thought on a library punk podcast, I thought it'd be okay, but just in case. So, yeah, I mean, they did all kinds of crazy stuff when they just didn't have anything to do. And so for a lot of them, books were that thing to do. And so the security staff kind of respected that, but it was also like a secondary kind of privilege thing to a lot of them. So they didn't really see anything wrong with keeping people from going to the library or, you know, just dropping an offender's books anywhere and letting it get lost. And then I'm supposed to charge the offender for it. There was all kinds of that kind of just lack of a cohesive communication system going.

But yeah, that got a little rambly, but I think I had a pretty good setup going. My supervisor was pretty supportive. The couple of books that I had a security officer challenge, she went to bat for me and made sure that the books stayed in the library. There was some stuff that I just flat out wasn't allowed to have in the library. The warehouse wouldn't even let it in. The books had to be, when I ordered books to purchase for the library or to do what we called inner library loan, which was basically me going to the public library.

to borrow books to bring back to the prison. The books had to be searched in the warehouse by the drug sniffing dog. So they had to go through all of that. And the warehouse would look through the books and see if there was any, quote, contraband in the materials that I was having come in. And there were certain books that they were not going to allow in, like, Robert Green's 48 Laws of Power. That was always, they were always asking for it.

At the time, 50 Shades of Gray was also still really, popular and the movies hadn't come out yet. So of course, you know, they want 50 shades of gray and 48 laws of power. So were those books like, were they like, was this an official denial or like an unofficial denial? As far as I know this was unofficial. So they just like would see it and just remove it and not let you know and not document what was being disallowed? It already wasn't there when I got there. Somebody had decided before I even got there. Somebody had decided before I even got there that it was not going to be allowed. And so, yeah, there were, like, and I would always look up a book and I would, I would let them

know, like, hey, I have rules that I absolutely have to follow. I need a job. I don't want to get fired. So I'm going to follow the rules that are set out for me. I don't care what you read. Like, I would get whatever was available to purchase if I could. But, like, I need you to understand that there are things at the warehouse and the security. are just not going to let you have.

And so I would go through and, you know, stuff that was really blatantly, I knew there's no way they were going to allow this in. I would tell them. Sometimes I would say, look, I'm going to order it. I'm going to see if it'll get through the warehouse, but I can't make any promises. I have a feeling it's not coming in. And most of the time those books didn't come in. But there were also some times, you know, I got my 746th request for the 48 laws of power.

and I'm just like, dude, they're not going to change their mind on this one. Like this, you can't. It's literally a book about how to manipulate people and control them. They're not going to allow it into a prison. Come on. And when you were working with, you mentioned going to the public library, you would like go to the public library and bring them to the warehouse, or did it get moved, did it get sent to the warehouse and then sent to you?

I would physically go to the library once a week. I had the offenders fill out a little form for what we called an ILL request, and they could have one or two in at a time. And the wait list were huge because there were only so many books I could check out. I had two library cards for the public library and each could have 50 items checked out at a time. So for a 1,200 offender library, I could have 100 ILL books out at a time. And a lot of the time, there were a bunch of them in the, in the warehouse and things. It got really complicated. It was kind of a mess. It was one of my least favorite things to take care of. So I would request that they hold these books or send them to the location that I

would go to when I would go physically check them out from the library and then bring them and drop them off at the warehouse on my way back into the facility. Yeah, it's been on my mind recently after I did like a committee meeting on information resources for incarcerated people, which was, you know, the big thing is really like the book for prisoners program because there's not a whole lot of public library prison library overlap. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. I figured you were the one physically going there, but like the public library knew what you were doing. Like obviously, they must have known if you were in there every week checking out the few books. But like, could you kind of talk about like the public library prison?

library connections and just how they do or don't work? Yeah, so having worked with a public library as a prison librarian, and now I work in a large public library system that has a Books to Prisoners program, I don't know a ton about that, but I have a general idea of how it works. We had an institutional relationship with the public library. So I had a like correctional facility library card. I had two of them, and they had their own library accounts. And I kept in touch with their, they had like a liaison librarian who did a lot of the outreach work.

And she was the person that if I ever had any questions or if I was interested in trying to do something like borrow like a book club kit or something like that, she would have been the person that I worked with on that. Unfortunately, my job had previously been done by two people and it had gone down to just me. And there was no time that I was there and security was in the building. and the library was empty so that I could do a book club. So I was never able to do any programming outside of just getting them to the library. So I had to do a lot of like passive programming and stuff. But yeah, the librarian at the public library was really great. I didn't really do a lot of like reference work with her,

but she made it very clear that, you know, if I needed recommendations or things like that, she was there for that. It was a really positive interaction. I was sad when it was my last day to go and pick up the books and let her know that I was leaving. And then in the larger public library system that I work in now, it's a county system. And there is one specific librarian. I don't know if it's their entire job or just part of their job, but they do the outreach to the county jail. So I worked in a state prison.

This is for the county jail. And I believe they just, you know, make a selection, fill up a card or fill up some bins of things that they think are high interest and bring them over. Not positive that that's how it works, but that's the impression that I get from people that I've spoken to that have been around a bit and know this person. They also field some of the general law library questions. but I do remember actually as a prison librarian getting emails from the person who works in the system and I'm in now with sort of more complicated legal questions so that we could use our state resources to mail that information to the offender in the county jail. Gotcha.

So they in the county library system were reaching out to the state prison system to get the information to send out to the county jail? Yes. Yeah, the law library materials are very expensive. And every time the new printed statutes come out, which I think in my state is every other year, they are required by policy, the state library, state prisons library policies to buy the most updated copies of the state statutes. and to retain older copies for a few years. And so those are really costly resources that we can kind of pool together and buy as a state system that counties can't buy. And we also had access to a program through the state law library where librarians from the state law library would come specifically to do reference for the guys in all of the prisons. They visited me on Friday afternoons, and so any offender could request an appointment with the law librarian.

Even if they were in segregation, if they were in segregation after she came to the library and spent her hour, hour and a half there, she would walk over to segregation and meet with them outside of their doors. In segregation, that's solitary? Yes. Yeah, that's colloquially solitary confinement. Sure. Yeah, it goes by, I wasn't sure, like special housing. stuff like that. So I just want to make sure. Yeah. Well, my offenders called it prison jail.

It always always makes me giggle. Don't do that. You don't want to go to prison jail. So, you know, got to have a sense of humor inside, I guess. Wow. Yeah. Were there any like electronic resources? I know that the public library that I worked at before had access to all of our state statutes, but most of it was electronic. Was there anything like that? Yes. Or was it all printed? No, we did have electronic. resources. We had several computers that were specifically law library computers, and they had

access to word processing software. And when I first got there, we would get a basically a hard drive every quarter, I think. And I would have to walk it over to IT and have them update the software that had all of the, it had the U.S. Constitution, state laws and statutes. and a selection of federal materials. We were a state prison, so we didn't have a lot of federal law. But a lot of the time, there was, you know, federal stuff related to what they were doing or what they were working on. And then we also had quite a few, not quite a few. We had a few guys inside who were doing their state sentence.

And then once they finished out their state sentence, they were headed off to federal prison. So they, you know, they were interested in some of that kind of seeing. seeing what they could do. But yeah, they had originally a hard drive sort of situation that had to be updated, and then eventually we did get an online resource. Prison was very, very cautious about any online resources. Our library catalog was online. And then we ended up with this secure online statute situation.

But that was pretty much all the Internet access that they had. How long ago was this? I was in the prison library from early 2015, early 2015 until mid-2017. Yeah, there was a lot of vendor changes that I was keeping up with. Like I think last month, the secure iPads, just not iPads, but secure pads, whatever they're called. Yep. Those just recently changed so that you can't save drafts anymore, which was kind of a big deal for people who are writing who were composing longer letters. So people who were doing like prison journalism where people who were, you know, sending these things via, you know, they would do their, they would draft it and then I guess do it by phone during visitation.

And they would dictate it. And this last update stopped that. And so there was also a separate group that's focused on prison education, which was talking about the securest laptops, which are slightly different. But they were also talking about just all the technical challenges that go into trying to have this particular, all of these restrictions on doing that work. So I'm not really surprised. Yeah, they got the tablets, I think about six months before I left. and they were they were not a disaster

when they were rolled out but of course there were some glitches and guys would come in and be really frustrated that they couldn't their tablet wouldn't connect or whatever. I hadn't heard about laptops

though that would be pretty neat. Yeah, it's the same vendor. Same thing, everything's see-through but I think those are specifically for people in college programs probably for GEDs too But I think it was specifically for like college programs that are working with the university.

And they were trying to, the problem was moving all the stuff that is supposed to be on computers most of the time anyway, moving that into a high security environment where all the assumptions just don't work anymore. Yeah. And there's licensing issues and all that kind of stuff. That also does remind me that we had, they had online access to a career site, like a career and professional development kind of site that we have. in our state that has, like, typing skills, letter writing skills, all kinds of, you know, basic skills that they might want to work on. They had little, like, typing quizzes and things like that that they had available. They were also looking at this, like, internet in a box thing where they basically, like, crawled Wikipedia and stuff and did a similar thing to the legal information

where they gave us a hard drive every quarter or whatever, but I don't think they decided to do that. Yeah, I think the big thing was building a prison intranet was one of the things they were talking about with the, with the, I think it was maybe specific to the laptops, but yeah, just have it completely cutting it off from the, from the internet. Mm-hmm. The technical challenges of that, I'm just going through in my head as, like, somebody who works in public libraries, like, what are the things I don't want my patrons doing on, like, the laptops we check out and stuff? And just adding to that seems it's got to be such a challenge. Yeah, and so many of them are so tech savvy. I mean, you have the guys that have been in for 30 years and have never held a cell phone, but then, you know, you have guys that are in for technology-related crimes.

And, like, they showed pictures in one of our trainings of the Wi-Fi network that two inmates built that allowed them to access the external Internet with just, like, little bit of the Wi-Fi network. parts that they could steal here and there. And it was intense. Like, it looked like a server room in there. So, yeah, there's a lot to, you know, they're, they're very intelligent people and they're quite crafty and highly motivated. So it's, it's really, it's really a huge challenge. No, don't have anything else going on. Yeah, there's, there was a guy on, I think he just got out on parole, but I was following him for a while. And he was tweeting from a contraband phone the whole time. So he was just like, yeah, you know, if you can send me some money, I'll be able to keep writing, you know, from, you know, I'll be able to keep paying this phone.

So I gave money because, you know, that was really interesting. Yeah. So when, where do I want to go to next? I haven't really been sticking to the notes very strictly. That works well with my ADHD brain. So thanks. Yeah. Well, I mean, the notes are to keep me from ADHDing out and going the wrong direction.

What a surprise. A librarian has ADHD. Yeah. You were mentioning books that couldn't come in. And since I think, what was it last week was banned books week or is it this week? It's this week. It's this week. A lot of people are talking about or are focusing the attention to banned books week more on books that are not allowed in jails and prisons. Was that part of the list that you would go through or did you really just go, okay, I know this roughly isn't going to, because you said the system was. and all that formalized. Yeah. I mean, so we had this huge library policy and everything, you know, if I ever had any kind of question my super, read the policy again, read the policy again, see what the policy says

and what we can figure out from that. There wasn't a specific list of books, but there was a list, like there were things in policy that were specifically forbidden. So, you know, books with sexually explicit material. Okay, well, that's kind of subjective, but it is very clear that, you know, I can't have just, like, hardcore porn in my collection. So my way of managing that with everything else that I had to manage was if one of the subject terms when I was cataloging or when I was looking at, like, Mark Records to see, you know, to get information about a book before I ordered it was if one of the subject headings was erotica, I generally didn't. buy it, which is why we ended up with some of the Anita Blake series, but not all of it. And I just read that series.

I'm actually going through random series that I couldn't keep on the shelves in my prison library. And I really love the Mercy Thompson series. And that gets a little spicy, but it was okay. Like I feel okay that I had that on the shelves in the prison library. But yeah, there are a few titles from the Anita Blake series that I'm like, this is pretty much just born. Like, even the description on the back of the book doesn't actually talk about a plot. It just talks about how spicy it is.

So those kinds of books were the kinds of things that I was like, I mean, if you really want to use your ILL slot for this, I'll request it through ILL, but I'm not buying it because I don't want to get fired. Like, they're constantly having to tell me your choices are bad. Stop doing this. Then, you know, they're not going to trust me with anything. So if you want me to be able to kind of get away with the stuff that we get away with now, we need to, like, fly under the radar as much as we possibly can. And I don't remember where that started. So I don't remember if the thought is finished.

I apologize. I really do have ADHD. No, no, I was just asking about. Oh, Band Books Week and that kind of thing. I actually had pretty much everything on the banned books list, except for like 48 laws of power and a couple of other titles. But like I had the Art of War. I had the Prince by Machiavelli. You know, like the books that are challenged in schools, like Harry Potter and all that kind of stuff.

Like I would look at the most recently banned books and be like, well, I'm going to buy that one. Because, you know, smart allocity librarian. I want, I want them to have access to all this stuff. So yeah, I had a lot of that kind of material. I would get really sad when I would buy certain graphic novels because they seemed really great, but then they'd have very explicit sex in them. Like I bought one of the Best American Comics collections,

and two or three people had checked it out, and I hadn't even really seen it since it had come in, and I flipped through it, but I didn't flip through it closely enough, and there were multiple selections that had very explicit that sex in them. And I had to pull that one from circulation. And I'm just glad that I didn't get in trouble for it. But yeah, banned books were one of my favorite things to market because, you know, oh, it's banned books week. What? I want to read the stuff they tell me I can't read,

which is human nature. Yeah. I think that kind of goes into the critique of banned books week, which is, you know, these books are challenged. They're not really banned in the United States most of the time. So if you want to talk about band books, you want to talk about things that are, it makes more sense to me to focus on things that, like, actual lists of books that prison systems would, would just have actual list of titles. But yeah, it makes sense that it was more subject-based. I'm sure it's, it varies a lot between systems. Yeah, I mean, I would have guys come in and either complain about how, you know, one guy in particular, the Iowa prison system was way better than Minnesota and South Dakota. Like, don't go to prison in Minnesota.

Go to prison in Iowa because he's apparently doing a tour of all of the prison facilities. And then I would have other guys would come in and, you know, some young guy would be complaining and this older guy would be like, yo, I did 10 years in Mississippi and this, this happened. And this is like Shangri-La up here. So enjoy what we have because it's actually a good life going on right here. So I'm sure that, you know, it varies widely. I'm guessing based on your description, you were working alone. If you also had one incarcerated person as the law library staff, right? I also had a team of offender clerks that I got to hire.

I had usually six to eight at a time and they would work. We had my facility was very heavy on programming. We had a sex offender treatment program, a chemical dependency treatment program, and there was like a faith-based program that wasn't officially Christian, but it was basically Christian. And so guys had programming a lot of the time, so it's not like they could come in, you know, and work Monday through Thursday night every night. So I had sort of a rotating cast of guys that would work depending on the night and when they were free from programming and stuff. and they were great. Oh, man. Some of them were really amazing.

Some of them should be, if their supervised release would allow them to be around children, they would have made great librarians, but they unfortunately wouldn't be able to work in a library because of the nature of their convictions. I was also wanting to ask about kind of aligned to the books for prisoners, tangent. What was the case for personal ownership of books?

books in your system? And how did that kind of interact with the library? Yeah, they were, we had kind of a pretty liberal system, I think, compared to what I've heard about other places. They were allowed to have, I believe, a total of 10 books in their property. And they were allowed to check out five library books. They were allowed to have five library books out at a time. And they could buy books themselves. They had to buy from like a major seller or directly from the publisher and everything had to be new. They couldn't buy used books. They couldn't go to like a half price books or anything like that and have relatives send stuff in. They had to order from a reputable source, which just meant that a source that, you know, was a major business as far as

the warehouse people were concerned. And it had to have a printed receipt. seat in it, which was a huge problem when Amazon stopped putting packing slips in their boxes. And like we as the librarians in the system, we had kind of a leader librarian at one of the other facilities. And she contacted them to try to get them to, you know, we are, we're getting books into prison for prisoners. Like this is the only way they can get books, but they can't accept the books. It gets returned if it doesn't have like a packing slip in it. it can you help us out? And Amazon was like, no. Oh, okay, thanks. Like, I guess that's not a big enough chunk of your customer base to care about. But yeah, it was really frustrating. Now I think you

could do a gift receipt, I believe. But that could also be an issue because books are pretty much, not pretty much. There was a cost limit to how much a book could be worth. And I think it was like $75. And I think that was implemented so you didn't have people sending in these gigantic $150 coffee table art books because they don't fit in your property. They had bins that went under their beds and they're pretty narrow and they could have two of those narrow bins. So if the book doesn't fit in your bin, you can't have it. So I think the cost thing just helped with that. But yeah, they were allowed and they could order in pretty much anything that I had in the last. library too. Usually they didn't because it was in the library, but it was pretty much the same rules

for offender borrowing as it was for me buying. Sorry, offender buying as it was for me buying. Gotcha. So nothing could be sent in from the outside. It would be orders only and then go through the warehouse and then go to the inmate. Yeah. And like family and friends could send them books as gifts, but they had to follow the rules for where it came from. So it had just had to be new. with a receipt inside and I guess wrapped or something. Yeah. Gotcha. What happened if one of them hit like the limit and they wanted to buy a different book?

Could they like donate those books to you? That happened a lot. And then you could also send it out. So a lot of guys, you know, they did arts and crafts and they bought tons of books and all that stuff. So when they were done with something and needed to lighten up their property load, they would mail stuff home. I can imagine some of their book collections when they get out. Like hang on to this for me.

How big of a bookshelf can I fill while I'm in here? Yep. What do you see as, what do you imagine, I should say that rather than, because I always try and get a question in that we don't have to think about, we don't have to be stuck in the world the way it always is. So in an ideal world, in a perfect society, in fully, I'm not doing the fully automated one anymore. Although Grimes did break up with Elon, but I said I wasn't going to do the fully automated luxury, gay space communism anymore.

But in a world where the way I phrased this in the notes is there are going to be certain people who can't live in society. So there's going to be people like Anders Breivik who are going to have to just live out their lives in some way. And that's a separate discussion from abolitionism because abolitionism is about a systematic change in the way. So if in an ideal world where if we were on the road to abolitionism, working towards the dismantling systems, what would you imagine the role of the library and the prison would be and how would it change? What would it look like? Ooh. Thinking about my specific library, not much would have changed. I tried to make my location as much of a combination of public library and academic library as I could,

because we did have guys working on college stuff and whatever. And I had a lot of materials on starting your own business. A lot of guys were interested in investing in real estate, tons of books on how to do different crafts and skills and farming and homesteading and living off the grid and all kinds of just everything that they were interested in that I was allowed to buy I bought. So I really, you know, my view of my role in that situation, aside from, you know, maintaining the management logistics of the library, was to provide them materials for

both entertainment and kind of enrichment and development. So I had a lot of, you know, self-help materials, materials about dealing with trauma and depression. Yeah, I just, I don't know, I feel like I had, or I was working toward having kind of all of the materials that you would need to access the development to become the person you want to be, if that makes sense at all. And that's part of why I'm glad I worked where I did because I was allowed to do that. I was allowed to focus on trying to help them see what their life could be like after prison. If they wanted to, you know, put in the effort and, and learn about opportunities, I was able to put that information in front of them most of the

time. Does that make sense? Does that answer your question? Yeah, I think so. It's because so much of your work is contextual within, you know, the system is, you know, preparing people to leave. Whereas in an ideal system, the only people who would be physically incarcerated would be people who they're just really aren't going to be able to integrate to society for whatever reason. And it's really hard to imagine a world, an abolitionist world. It's the same sort of problem we have imagining alternatives to capitalism and things like that. You know, capitalist realism, Mark Fisher. Every dude who has a podcast talks about Mark Fisher. I know it's fine.

I'm going to stop doing it eventually. No, you're not. Don't lie. No, maybe I'm not. He really likes Joy Division. I was just reading his book. It was extremely deep dive into Joy Division, and someone made a playlist of all the music he mentions in his book goes to my life.

And I was like, wow, this guy really likes stuff that just sounds like Joy Division. He wrote so much about it. I really appreciate you coming on because it's a really tough thing to talk about. And it's also really, yeah. But it's also really important that I think librarians talk to prison librarians about their experiences because one thing I've noticed in Abla is a lot of people have no experience with prison libraries. And so you're trying to organize with groups with more experience where you're trying to get in to learn more. And very few people who are involved actually have worked in like a books to prisoners program where I've worked in a public library that's integrated into a prison library system. we've worked in a prison library.

So there's always so many questions that I feel like could be answered if someone like he was in the conversation at least to give the conversation grounding and focus. Yeah. So along that line, there are, I think I put in the notes something about mental health care for prison staff. I think that it's really easy to just like anybody who works in a prison or or anybody who works in any of the systems of oppression that we have in our society, it's really easy to jump on prison librarians about not providing, you know,

well, the prison library is a joke. It's just a few, you know, novels to pass the time or whatever. It's a really, I've mentioned earlier, emotionally intense job. You really do, or at least I did. I did try to get to know my patrons at, to a level that was appropriate to my position. You know, I wasn't making friends. They didn't know. They knew very general things about me. Like, they knew that I was from the East Coast and they knew that I was the youngest from a big family of kids and things like that. Like, you know, stuff that they're not going to be able to like find me on the street, although they knew my first and last name.

So I'm sure that they could find me if they wanted to, which is a little discontious. concerting. But it's a really emotionally draining job. It was incredibly fulfilling work, but it was horrible for my mental health. I have trauma that I'm working through from being a prison librarian. Because, you know, one good example of how it's traumatizing is that there was a guy who had had 27 extensions of his sentence due to his behavior in prison. And because one of those 27 instances was a staff assault, I refused to be alone once with him. You know, like we had a, there was a window in my law library that the security officer could see into. So even though there wasn't a camera in that specific room, I was visible to the security staff.

but I refused to be alone with this guy after finding out that, like, oh, when he was in a level five facility, he had assaulted a staff member. I read his jacket just because I need it. Like, I need to know the context of this. Like, is there some trigger that I need to know about or whatever? And his crime was pretty heinous. And I don't, anybody who's a prison librarian or thinking about it, don't ever read their jacket unless you absolutely have to because you don't need that.

in your life. But, you know, I had to kind of do what I could to feel safe and I read his jacket. And I, you know, had a rapport with him and I smiled at him and I helped him find the legal information that he needed to sue me. That's like a weird thing to deal with, you know. And then, you know, you're accused of, you're accused of all of the things you could potentially be accused of. Honestly, all from that guy. I was accused of so many random things. And, you know, there are a lot of guys that try to use passive intimidation. They try to use a lot of manipulation tactics.

There's a book that I never actually got around to reading while I was there called Games, Criminals Play. And everybody that worked in, not everybody, but a few people that worked in the department had recommended that book to me. And it really, I kind of wish I had read it because there was a lot of stuff that sometimes you learn the hard way or sometimes you just let somebody get away with something you shouldn't have because you didn't see the manipulation coming. And it really messes with you. It messes with your trust issues. I had like, it threw into sharp relief some of the reasons that I am a raging feminist because of some of the male behavior that out in the world before that I would, you know, some man would do something and I'd be like was that that feels a little bit nah it's just me and then you know that times 10 five times a day in the prison and I'm like oh yeah that that's definitely a trend I've noticed in in male presenting people and I'm not happy about that so yeah it's that's

a long roundabout way of saying that it's it can be a traumatized experience to be a staff member as well. And it's really tough to navigate. You know, even in running the books, he talks about how his mental health tanked. And yeah, it's not just that the people in prison are people. It's that the people who work there are people too. And, you know, librarians get into stuff because we, we like people and we want to help them and we want to help them, you know, learn and find fulfillment in reading. And that can be really, really hard to do and sort of mess with your whole sense of self when you enter this sort of culture of no, absolutely not. So from what you're describing, I'm just kind of thinking like it's like people who are already traumatized get

moved into a traumatizing system where the people who also work in that system are also being, it just sounds like a big cycle of trauma basically. So, you know, you. You know, you and librarians, aren't they're going to burn out a lot faster than maybe you would in public library or something like that. But, I mean, did you see, while you were in there,

did you see any way to kind of interrupt that cycle of trauma? Or was it just too much to just sort of self-protect that you couldn't even kind of look at it that way? It depended on the day and the patron and the situation, honestly. too personal of a question too. That's fine. Nope. It's totally fine. If you hit a hard limit, I'll let you know. No, I mean, there were, there were certain people that I hit a point where I just couldn't deal with them anymore. You know, they were, I would, I had this conversation many times when I would have a big group of guys in the library and, you know, somebody would say something about

being a criminal or whatever. And I was like, well, you know, you need to be aware that there's a difference between a criminal and a person who committed a crime. Like some, and I said to the, you know, that caught everybody's attention. And I said to the group, like, you know, some of you are in here because you just continually made bad choices and circumstances have led you to be in here. Some of you in here because you're sick. You have an addiction that you need help with. And some of you were in here because you fucked up big time and landed yourself in here.

And those are all very. very different types of people. You might be some combination of them, but like you're not necessarily a criminal just because you're in prison. And like a few of them were like kind of nodding and they're like, okay. I'm like, you know, I know the messaging is that while you're in here, you're a criminal, stay in your place. But, you know, there is some letting them know that you know that they're human that I think is necessary if you're going to be any good at the job, if you're going to make any kind of positive difference. But then there's also the people that hear that and well, now they're going to unload their life story on you and they're going to want you to fix all their problems and they're

going to expect you to, you know, break rules for them and get yourself into trouble and, you know, and I never knew. I still to this day don't know who was really positively responding to their mental health care and their addiction treatment and who was just a phenomenal, phenomenal like Oscar worthy actor. I don't know. There are a few guys where I'm like, this is not the human that walked into this facility 20 years ago. You know, there were a couple people whose, you know, jackets I needed to read for various reasons. And you can see their old mugshots and things. And like, just even the guy's face was a completely different human. Like I would not, having the two images together was just really jarring because they were just too very very. different people. I'm really pretty confident that that guy really responded to his treatment and understood that what he did was wrong and was trying to make restitution and all that. But I don't know. He could have just been really amazing at manipulating me. I don't know. Which is, you know, a big part of the reason that you don't bend the rules because you don't know

who's sincere and who isn't. You just can't tell. It'd be lovely to trust everybody, but you have to keep yourself safe and employed. So get to. be careful. Yeah. We're nearing an hour and we always wrap up in an hour. I wanted to know if there was anything that I might have skipped over that you wanted to hit on before we finish. And if not, if there was anything, you wanted people to know any plugs. He just said you finish your book. Well, it's an artist book and I need to play around with it, see if I want to play around with it and do anything else. Yeah, I don't know. I'm looking over the notes real quick. I don't think. there's anything in particular to mention? I mean, like, I could talk about this for days.

There's so much, especially, you know, if you're leftist abolitionists trying to, you know, let's head off the problems at the past that make these people end up in prison in the first place kind of a thing. But I think, yeah, I think the most important thing to me was letting people know that not all prison libraries are these horrible, like, you know, you can't access anything kind of places. You know, they do have some pretty good amount of intellectual freedom in a lot of contexts, and also that prison librarianship is hard on the librarian. Yeah. And like I said before, I really appreciate you coming on. And I think we're definitely going to have more conversations with other people, but I really am glad we got to start it off with someone who worked in a prison

library. So I think it grounds the whole beginning of the conversation. And then I just, as you were talking, I was getting other ideas. I'm like, oh, man, I'm going to have to follow up on this idea in another episode. So we're definitely going to do more. But yeah, different frameworks. But I really wanted to start with someone who worked in a prison library. I, myself, when I was unemployed for a particularly long time and I was applying everywhere, I did apply and was offered an interview at a prison library. And that was, it was one I wouldn't, I didn't even, wouldn't have been able to go to. I don't even know why I applied because it was like, they're not going to fly you out. It was like an understate. So I was just applying for everything. I was going kind of nuts,

sitting in my house for five months underemployed. But yeah, it's, it's complicated. And I really need people to approach it with a good grounding. So I'm really glad we did this one first. Believe it or not, that's actually how I ended up in the prison library. I had moved from the East Coast to the Midwest, and I had been severely under-employed since moving, and I was just applying to everything that I was qualified for. And I was a high school teacher in a suburb of a major city on the East Coast,

and they were like, ooh, she was a high school. teacher in this area. Let's see how she does in a prison library. And I did get street cred for, you know, I had an offender tell me, ask me on the first, you know, are you nervous about like opening the library and being around all of us at once? And I was like, no, it'll be fine. He was like, I don't believe you. I was a high school teacher in a particular area. And he was like, oh, you got this. You're fine. So that was kind of nice. But yeah, I don't think very many people have prison librarian on their bucket list. But it's an interesting experience. I'm really glad. I did it and I'm really glad that you guys are looking into it and I'm really looking forward

to hearing the whole series because I want to see what else comes of it. Yeah, me too. Okay. I think that wraps it up. We just plan it slightly over an hour. All right. So thanks, Rebecca. And yeah, thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you for having me. It was a really good experience. Good night.