librarypunk - 031 - Information Services for Incarcerated People feat. Dr. Jeanie Austin

Episode Date: October 17, 2021

This week we’re joined by Dr. Jeanie Austin to discuss their research on information services for incarcerated people. We discuss the way mailroom policies and content bans have inherent anti-Black and anti-LGBT bigotry, and how these policies cut off incarcerated people from their communities. We talk about how LIS as a field has abandoned its role in providing information services to incarcerated people and how we can learn lessons from the librarians of the 70s.   Austin, J., Charenko, M, Dillon, M. and Lincoln, J. (2020). Systemic oppression and the contested ground of information access for incarcerated people. Open Information Science. 4(1), 169-185. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opis-2020-0013/ Austin, J. and Villa-Nicholas, M. (2019). Information provision and the carceral state: Race and reference beyond the idea of the “underserved.” The Reference Librarian. 60(4), 233-261. Jeanie’s book - Library Services and Incarceration: Recognizing Barriers, Strengthening Access https://www.alastore.ala.org/lsai  Jeanie’s website - https://jeanieaustin.com/ Jeanie’s research in the ALA archives -  https://jeanieaustin.com/2021/09/24/timeline-additions/  Referenced in the episode: Abolitionist Library Association: https://abolitionistlibraryassociation.org/  Earhustle podcast - https://www.earhustlesq.com/ Drakeo - GTL the prison phone https://www.npr.org/2020/08/28/906807077/prison-telecom-business-indicted-by-rap-album-recorded-in-jail  Tracie D. Hall, A Hurting Thing - https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2021/05/03/a-hurting-thing-school-to-prison-pipeline/  Tracie D. Hall, Defending the Fifth Freedom -  https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2021/01/04/defending-fifth-freedom-information-access-prisons/  Resist Everything Except Temptation - https://www.akpress.org/resist-everything-except-temptation.html  Prisoners Pay to Read - https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/prisoners-pay-to-read-prison-tablets/  When Biometrics Fail - https://www.dukeupress.edu/when-biometrics-fail  Organizations: Prison Book Program - https://prisonbookprogram.org/prisonbooknetwork/ Find a local organization here.  A Room of One's Own wish list for LGBT prisoners - https://www.roomofonesown.com/wishlist/82  Books to Prisoners - https://www.bookstoprisoners.net/  TGI Justice - http://www.tgijp.org/  Reforma Children in Crisis - https://refugeechildren.wixsite.com/refugee-children  PEN America - https://pen.org/prison-writing/  Black and Pink PenPal Network - https://blackandpinkpenpals.org/  Prison Library Support Network (PLSN)- https://plsn-nyc.tumblr.com/  Chicago Books to Women in Prison - https://chicagobwp.org/  LGBT Books to Prisoners - https://lgbtbookstoprisoners.org/

Discourse, more like Piskorse. Which is for Tom Hanks. What? Tom Hanks' Pisscourse. He pisses in every movie. Like, if you want someone to piss in a movie, bring in Tom Hanks. You McGregor's always wanting to get his dick out in movies. I'm Justin.

I'm a Skalkom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Saddam. I'm a Cidman at a public library, and my pronouns are she and they. I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian, and I use he-him pronouns. I'm Carrie. I'm a health sciences librarian, and I'm she-her.

And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Jeannie Austin. I guess officially I'm a doctor. My pronouns are they them. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I've got too many drops. Wait. Jeannie, Dr. Jeannie, if I may. Thanks so much for coming on. So we've been trying to do this series about library services and incarcerated people and prison librarianship. and just the back and forth. So I was introduced to your work via the abolitionist library association. We were talking in a meeting about information services in the subcommittee.

And your name came up, and I believe they were trying to get you to do a presentation. And so I thought, well, this is obviously information people want to hear if they're interested in library services for incarcerated people. So I thought, yeah, I'll just get them on the podcast. And that'll be great. And here you are. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. To prepare for today's episode, we went through a couple of your articles.

I really only had time to go through one because I was busy decompressing with lots of weed and park rangers and alligators. And then I saw call her Smancia, which was really weird. Oh, the mind thereof? Yeah. He's like still touring and being a person. And stealing jokes? He stole the opener's joke. He said the exact same joke as the open.

Open her. He's still stealing jokes. Sorry. I was like, did I just stroke out? Did that really happen? Yeah, he was like called out on it too. Wow, that did learn nothing for a while. That was a long time ago.

I mean, if all the reasons to get canceled as a comedian these days, that's really not the worst one. Like, everyone's done it. Yeah, it's fine. But yeah, my friend works at a club that tends to have people who need to work up some new material because they don't want to be in public public. You mean like Carlos Monsia? Yeah. So anyway, so I didn't get to finish reading the second article, but I really did like

the first one, which is systemic oppression and a contested ground of information access for incarcerated people. I will, of course, put all of these in the show notes for everyone to check out. But the main point of the article is information, and what we're here to talk about today is information services for incarcerated people and the ways that those get limited. And just as a way of introduction, it takes on many forms through many policies, both formal and informal. However, it doesn't seem to be very strongly informed by library practices. It's mostly focused on carceral policies, centered on quote unquote safety, and mailroom

policies, which of course has implications for contact with the outside world, which is important. So we'll discuss all those issues and hopefully come to some action-oriented outcomes. Sound good to everybody? Well, I mean, not really, but I read the article and it is, you know, like this is something I've been working on a little bit too kind of canonically. Also, I don't know if you remember me. We used to party together in grad school, Jeannie. And I think you're around when I was in the canoe accident with Sarah Roberts. So anyway, just thought I'd bring that up real quick, see if you're remembered.

But yeah, I've been following your work a lot too, which has been really great. And I'm really glad you've been working on this stuff. I was really glad you brought up the Wisconsin stuff about role-playing games, about how they've banned both Magic, the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, and anything having to do with role-playing and things like that because they say it inspires gang-related activity because Dungeons and Dragon was actually invented in the state of Wisconsin too, which is the grand irony of that as well, which I was really, really pleased you highlighted that because a lot of times, especially even when you go through like the basic

list of like commonly banned prison books and state by state things, Wisconsin often gets overlooked because there's no like big blanket policy on certain types of material, but they have a list by list. They have like a master Excel list, which you went through. And I really appreciated the attention to detail on that because I, went through that recently because I'm working on a mutual aid project potentially on some stuff. And I wanted to make sure that like that would be kosher and I've done some Wisconsin books to prisoners stuff with work before. And like, yeah, that list is fucked up. And I was really glad that that was highlighted in this article. So yeah, anyway, no role playing in Wisconsin prisons.

Yeah, it feels like a very 90s kind of or like 80s panic of Satanism or something kind of rule. Right. But it's also a little odd because if you listen to podcasts coming out of prison like Ear Hustle, when people talk about Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons, they talk about those spaces as one of the few kind of interracial spaces that can exist in a prison without there being a lot of tension, which is not historically how people have defined gangs by any means, you know. So you can wonder what are the implications of banning those kinds of materials that allow people to come together and share something that is created. and world building. I want to say, too, I wrote this article with mostly books to prisoners people. And in part because library science has not attended very much to people who are incarcerated or library services and incarceration, books to prisoners people are the default. They're the people who know the most actually about what information access, or some of the people who know the most about what information access is actually like for people who are incarcerated. And they're often

the people who are leading public campaigns around what's happening. They're the people who will suddenly experience every book that I send into this prison is getting sent back. And so they have an idea of it also at scale. And I'm really thankful that so many books to prisoners people wanted to write with me because they were bringing that kind of like area, region, state level expertise to the article. Yeah, that seems to be the theme I was hearing in Abla meetings. And so I was like, we have got to get some people in to talk about books to prisoners. And so, So it definitely isn't the last one we're going to do on this topic. But I would love to get some books to prisoners people on as well.

I think this was a good way to open because you opened your article with it, which is mailroom policies and censorship. And could you tell us a little bit about the New York Department of Corrections and what they were trying to do in 2018? Yeah, it's been a while since I've thought about this. but basically, and this is not specific just to New York, but there was a big campaign around it. In New York, I believe the first step was that they tried to say, we're getting tablets in the prisons, and so now everything's going to be through tablets, and there won't be access to any physical books anymore. Under the security-minded notion that books presented a security threat or a way for contraband to get in. And then there was public pushback, and instead New York said, okay, we're going to allow books,

but people can only buy books from these specific vendors. And I think it's important for people who don't have any kind of background knowledge about getting books in prison. Most people can only receive brand new books. Some prisons do a kind of restriction that is like you can only have soft cover books inside. So that means anything that's coming out that's new and very popular probably won't be able to get in. Even things like underlining on a page can be viewed as a security threat because it could be coded communication. And so already, I mean, those are just a few kinds of restrictions that are pretty across the board. And that means information access is already just limited by basic policy.

But then to say like only these specific vendors, often what happens is it's a vendor who might have some popular titles and then a religious materials vendor. And that is like, I mean, if you think about how we get books right now and all of the ways and the options that we have just to access information, if you had to say just like go to a Barnes & Noble and you. you could only get what's at the Barnes and Noble. You know, it might feel like a lot of selection, but if you, if your only range of knowing about what's out there is what's at Barnes and Noble, then you have no idea what information you can't even have access to. Yeah. So this was outlined as one of the two types of bands that work together.

So the one you just described is restricting outlet, which is you described as content neutral from approved vendors and then there's content-based. So that's usually for sexual or violent content. And we talked about this with Rebecca on our first episode about this. And she mentioned, you know, reputable lenders had to be used.

But family could still provide new books and you could also for a while get them through Amazon until the receipts went away. And the way she was describing it, it sounded very, very nebulous and just kind of up to the warehouse people. And so I think that came across in your article, but did you want to talk about that nebulousness, that sort of arbitrariness?

Yeah, yeah, totally. So I'll talk about this both with mail and books. And then I'm going to talk about Pennsylvania a little bit, too, because they have implemented a model that I think is likely other states and maybe even the Federal Bureau of Prisons is going to follow. So a lot of times things are banned under that big umbrella, right, of like sexual or violent content. but that tends to be really racialized. Actually, until this week, last week, I had never heard of a James Patterson book being banned by a prison. And this is kind of a historic or a stake post.

How do you say that? The phrase that Aaron Boyington, who's been a prison librarian for a long time in Colorado or worked with incarcerated people, made this point of like, you can have a James Patterson book, but you can't have an urban fiction book and what, what's the difference between the two and the difference? is pretty obvious. It's that urban fiction is written for a black audience and with black vernacular. But for the most part, content-wise, they're the same. Also how prisons and facilities define sexuality and something being pornographic varies a lot. So one of the things in the article we talk

about specifically is materials around trans being trans. And there have been bands on books like trans bodies, trans selves, which is a health guide for trans people. In Washington, there was one where people were told that having access to the book, if they had access to the book, they were creating a security threat for themselves because people would know that they were trans because they had access to the book. As though there was no other way that people who were around someone 23 hours a day would know that they were trans or that a person could be claiming a trans identity publicly in prison. I've talked to librarians who have had to do things like black out the covers of books because they showed a certain amount of cleavage or a certain amount of somebody's ass.

And so the only way to have the books inside was to be physically doing like old school like FBI document censoring of them. It's also that banning for gang is really common or special threat group banning. that's like a broad term for gangs, but that does tend to encompass things like black political history or revolutionary thought or critiques of the prison. I'm sure you all have seen the bands around Miriam Kaba's new book, which is all essays that were published in like reputable sources. You know, it's not just like somebody talking.

And so these things, it's like, it just is such a, it's hard to conceptualize if you don't experience it, I think. how constrained the information environment is and especially this kind of like whitewashing that occurs either by either intentionally or not I mean I think there's some level of intention in it but it's not necessarily explicit and often it's actually kind of couched under these other categories yeah there was um it's really like the the next thing I had on the the notes list which was you know LGBT incarceration rates which are extremely high especially for black trans women And then the mailroom policies, aside from trans bodies, trans selves, which is, you know, like regular health information that you would need to know, it also stops a connection with the trans community outside. And it seems to be a big point of your article was how important it is to remain connected and how these information policies stop that connection. So I'm hoping that people who listen to this will kind of get why we're. so concerned about book bans and prisons. Right. Yeah. And in my, I mean, on that topic, I have a book that's coming out about

library services and incarceration, maybe this month. And one of the things I point to, because I think it is so important to look at who is actually doing this work if library and information science people aren't doing it. I think it's TGIJP, Transgender Intersex Justice Project, has this guide that they distribute to trans people inside who are members of their network that is written by trans women who were incarcerated and is about surviving incarceration as a trans woman. And the reason that I point to that is not only because it's this incredible act of production and information sharing and care that's crossing walls,

but is also what are the limitations of not only librarianship, but of traditional publishing. It's hard to imagine that the guide, if you read it, would ever have been put to get published by a traditional publisher, or that it's almost hard to imagine prisons actually letting the information out and in because it's so factual about the lived realities of being a trans woman who is incarcerated in men's prisons. You know, things like you need to find somebody that is like looking out for you and maybe you're doing sex work for that person so that you have this kind of protection. And it's, yeah, I think it's really powerful to look

to those networks and to really attend to information that people who are incarcerated are producing because they're often sharing that information at great risk to themselves. Actually, there's been a few situations where people have been told that they can't publish if they're incarcerated because they're not allowed to make money. That's usually the justification. Or even Willie Lamb was a person who was doing a lot of prison writing stuff and there's some critique, I think, of him out there. But he had published a book with incarcerated writers and they were the women who contributed

were told by the prison system, they fought it eventually, that they had to pay for each day of their incarceration because they had broken a rule by publishing to the tune of thousands and thousands of dollars. That ultimately didn't happen, but that's the kind of pressure that they were under just for sharing information. Could you talk a little bit more, actually,

about how people are publishing in prison? I guess particularly trans people would be really interesting to know, like, what are some difficulties are coming up against? Because I follow some prison journalists, and they were saying, you know, oh, the secure pads just updated and I can't save my drafts anymore and I can't get anything out. And luckily, I think that got fixed. Small victory.

But yeah, could you talk a little bit about a little bit more about publishing on the inside? Yeah. I'll say I don't know a ton about it, though I do know some people who are incarcerated who have published while they've been incarcerated. But every step of the way, I mean, so let's say somebody's going on a traditional route, unless they're connected to a group like Penn America, which has a. an incarcerated writer's program that, and they put out a free guide that people who are incarcerated can get about how do you write? How do you publish? It's really difficult to understand

everything about publishing, even for people who have gone in recently, for people who have been inside for decades, right? There's this whole barrier of understanding how we access information at all. And also finding an agent, how do you find a publisher? How do you know how to write in a genre? Many people who are incarcerated are writing. Another restriction might be, limits on the amount of pieces of paper that can be in an envelope. I said I was going to talk about Pennsylvania, so I'll go back to it now and its model. The Pennsylvania DOC a few years ago, there was a spate of COs who got really sick, and the prison said officially that it was like a fentanyl kind of trafficking thing from the mail. And there's some, some people have contested that maybe

you can't get sick from a fentanyl exposure that is minimal. But the prison, used this, the prison system in the entire state, use this as justification to shut down all communications that weren't legal and all access to information for several months. And then what they did in that interim period of time was due to push back from groups like books to prisoners, groups, they set up a central processing center in the state where people have to send the books and the books are all searched and screened. And search and screen processes differ by facilities for sure. So these are probably going through a metal detector and they probably have canine units or something there. And then they contract.

with this company called Smart Communications, which bills itself, how to describe it, when it's billing itself to police, it bills itself as, or to prison officials, as an ability to have a comprehensive and searchable database of all communications that have gone into the prison. And so when Smart Communications is located in Florida and the way it works is that people write to the address in Florida, their letters are scanned and digitized. and searched by AI, made searchable. And then that scan is forwarded electronically to a prison in Pennsylvania where a CEO either prints it out or a person has access to it

as a digital scan on a kiosk or a tablet. What people are saying who receive the scans is that they're really shitty. It's difficult to read the materials, and often things don't get allowed in the scan that would have come through the physical mail. And beyond that, the scans end it typically, like 10 pages. So if somebody has written a letter longer than that, it's just the end of it. It's just gone. Do you mention the reverse also process of getting information out given that kind of

restriction, which if you're writing, like if you're writing a book and it's 200 handwritten pages unless you have access to a typewriter or if you're writing it on a tablet where you can save, you're paying, there's restrictions on the amount of words that can be in each email and all of it. there's some form of payment that's happening. It's really, really difficult, let's say, to get any kind of information out in those circumstances. People do it. People find all kinds of ways to do it.

But I mean, prison TikTok exist, you know. But just considering all of those barriers, it's so incredible that people do get their work out. And I don't know if you all have heard about this book, marking time. It's awesome. And it's all about incarcerated artist, just to take a little bit of a turn.

It's Marking Time, Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole Fleetwood. And part of the book is talking about, like, how do people get their art supplies in? And there's all kinds of clandestine ways that people are getting access to art supplies. Things like certain colors are prohibited in present. So you can't get a paint that is that color. You can't get a phantom black? I think it tends to be like colors that are the colors of people's clothing, colors that are supposedly affiliated with gangs

and colors that are used to mark areas that are only for COs to go into. But then there's several artists in the book who are not only making, like there's an artist who's making 3D sculptures and is smuggling his sculptures out the entire time that he's incarcerated, at times with help from COs.

You know, so these, I think it's important to say like there are these major, major barriers, but not to think of prison walls as never being porous, not for reasons that are like even necessarily illegal. But because if we think about the wall as a hard and fast line, then we don't imagine ourselves as able to share information across it. Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing. If you want to sell drugs, you go to prison.

If you want to traffic drugs, you become a cop. I mean, that's how you go big time. I live on the border, man. Our whole police department for drugs, they were all huge cocaine dealers. Like three years ago. So the whole thing had to be cleared out. Yeah. And there's research that shows, I mean, to go back to like the clandestine cell phone, right,

or prison TikTok, that the reason most people are getting, most likely the reason that most people are trying to get cell phones when they're incarcerated is actually it's just too expensive to talk on the prison phone. It's not about not being surveilled. And it's mostly COs that are bringing the phones in because how does the phones get in? Yeah. Yeah, I mentioned, I think last time there was a guy I followed who was a, incarcerated for a while and he was just, you know, tweeting about his experience. And every once in

while he would say, hey, here's my sister's Venmo. Send me some money. I'm getting out soon. And if you follow someone like that, do give them money, man. They bleed them dry at every turn. So, you know, it's not, it's now is not the time to get self-righteous about how you spend your money. So you said the Pennsylvania system might go national. Is this with the whole scanning and sending that the whole Department of Corrections, DOJ might do this? Yeah, I haven't looked it up recently. but the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is the largest prison system in the U.S., they tend to be, like, high-level drug trafficking or crossing state lines while committing a felony of people end up in federal prison.

Unless they're cops. But they were considering smart communications as a vendor, and I haven't checked in the last month or so to see if they finalized that decision. Okay. And I recently heard two North Carolina is going with a different vendor that's doing a similar thing, Just a funny kind of smart communication story, if I may, is they, I can't remember where it was, but they did like a demo of their service at some local jail in the upper Midwest. And then the jail didn't contract with them, but people who worked for the jail created a similar system.

And then smart communications just sued the pants off of them because they want to be the only company, I guess, that is providing this kind of service, in quotes. So I wonder, would this new North Carolina service program company if smart communications is going to come after them, they seem really, really aggressive. So sort of speaking of like this program, maybe going at like a federal level in federal prisons, I was, unless there's more you want to keep saying on that, it's making me wonder, what are the differences between like information services and getting information in and out? and library services in like federal or public prisons versus like for-profit prisons, like what kind of differences are there? Or is it basically a meaningless distinction at this point? Yeah, it's difficult.

So it's easy to say like you have a jail, you have juvenile detention center, you have a prison and a state, you have a federal prison, have an ice facility. But actually a lot of local jails have like three cells that are reserved for ice. and there's all of this kind of like intertwinedness of what seemed like they'd be distinct institutions. So I've actually been meaning to look more into federal. I think that there are some here. Let's say here's information that's important.

Everyone is legally entitled as determined by the state to have access to religious information and meaningful access to the courts. So that means that most facilities will have a room full of law books. That's typically how that gets interpreted. Some might have people who are trained as legal librarians. My experience talking to prison librariansians is most of them do not have a background in legal librarianship, although that ends up being the majority of their work unless there is a legal library and a recreational library. State prisons are, in my experience, more likely to have a recreational library, but they don't always have one.

And in some states, what that means is that there's one person who has an MLSS who advises on library services for like 10 prisons and does not necessarily work inside of any of them. Maybe does collection development or does some like training for people who are incarcerated workers in the library. But some systems like Washington State, their library services for the state are part of their state libraries work. And so they run their, they run prison libraries, like little branches inside of the prisons. And they're doing really cool stuff. Like they're connecting with public libraries throughout the state of Washington to help people get library cards for their public library when they're getting released so they can go out and they have

an immediate like warm handoff to a public library. Even good services are limited by things like is there enough staffing or staff who want to make sure that people are getting access to the library? Is there a lockdown? You know, for COVID, it's been lockdown conditions across the U.S. For a lot of people, they didn't leave themselves from within an hour a day for over a year or a year and a half. And so library services were running like through the enter prison mail, like as kites, people would put a request in and then the librarian would copy something and send it back. In jails, because people have this idea that jails are short-term facilities and ostensibly they are. So supposedly people are in jail for like a year. And then if people are sentenced to more than a year,

they're sentenced to prison. But so that means that jails typically aren't infrastructurally created to have the kinds of resources that a prison would have. Like they don't have a library. They don't necessarily have education programming. They don't necessarily have all this other stuff that, like, not to be like prison isn't necessarily better than jail, but these are just some of the differences. But in reality, people in jail can be there for a really long time as they're fighting their cases or going through the entire court process. So people might be in for up to a decade, you know. And there's a difference between like if, think about just regular, or not regular, but think about library services on the outside and how. if you knew that you were going to have a new group of patrons, like as a teen librarian, every set of years, you would do a different kind of collection development than if you have people who are going to be your library patrons for a really, really long time because they're going to read every book that you have in your library. And especially libraries inside, if people are dedicated readers literally will potentially read every book that's available in the library. So to be in a jail for 10 years can mean also that it's a different information world than people who are like passing through.

And federal, I've been trying to find out more about, I think, a few years ago, and this is not quotable because I can't back it up with fact, but there was a turnover towards the kind of like education media specialist instead of librarians in federal outside of the meaningful access to the law. I haven't confirmed that. I did recently learn of a private prison with a librarian, which felt shocking. But I've only heard of one. There are significantly less. private prisons and there were a year and a half ago. And so that is also notable. And ice facilities are like the dedicated ice facilities, people are like having rights because they can't get access to legal information in the language that they read or speak. And there's like two articles

about information access and ice facilities that I've seen. And they're both just like, there is no information. Like it's not here. How can you justify it. So I really, it's possible that there's a librarian somewhere in one of them, but I kind of doubt that there is. No, not unless they're in a state facility, which in Texas, a lot of the current asylum seekers are getting funneled upstate into a prison system because we ran out of ice spaces in the jails in the valley. So there was a massive migration of asylum seekers who have committed no crime. But, just have nowhere else to be held as if they need to be held.

Yeah. I've flown out. I've seen these people on airplanes. You can't look at someone in the face who's holding a packet with all the information they've ever been given. And on the front it says, I don't speak English, please help. That's all they give them, and they put them on a plane. And they're just sitting there going, it's terrifying. It's the worst thing they've ever seen.

Yeah, that's awful. And I do want to say Reforma has a group called Children in Crisis. that is doing some support for kids who are crossing the border and are being basically incarcerated. So they work with different community groups along the border to donate children's books that are in Spanish. And it's a crowdfunded project, I guess is how you would describe it. So if you all are looking for other places to put, I'm sure your copious amounts of library and money, there's one. But they're really... We have so much of it.

They're really amazing. And they've worked with groups even to meet people at like bus stops, like the bus stops where people are getting dropped after they're being taken out of the centers so that when big kids first experience is not just being completely isolated and stuck but is like being acknowledged and given a book. Yeah, it's usually you're dropped outside. In my town, you're usually dropped outside Catholic charities unless you have to do a PCR test first in like a field. and then you're in Catholic charities for about a day or two before you get on a bus to wherever you're going.

So I don't know if there's a program like that, but I should check. Obviously, at the end, we'll do a roundup of places that can definitely deserve people's money, and I'll put it all in the notes. And I'm going to start continuing my tradition of the discourse task tax, which is whenever people spend all day like dunking on someone for a library thing, I said, okay, you've all had your fun. Now you've got to give $5 to this charity. for discoursing on Twitter all day. So I'm going to maintain the discourse tax. So I'll do like books to prisoners for the next one. I like that idea.

A discourse tax? It's like a swear jar, but good. I'm just like fucking sick of seeing this tweet all day. So now if you retweet about it, you've got to pay five bucks. Yeah. You were dumb fucking engaged. Do your thing and give back. Like if you posted about banned books week, you have to donate money to books for

prisoners. Like, you are legally obligated. We'll put you in jail if you don't. I fucking hate banned Books Week for that reason alone. The fact that they ignore all of the prison

in like carceral banning during banned books week is the biggest thorn in my side. So that's like my only that's my number one band books tweet. That's the one tweet that I get on banned books week. That was actually something I wanted to

ask you, Jeannie, which is, how involved do we want the ALA to be in, like, you know, tying band books week into Oh, the big question. Yeah, man. I'm fucking asking the profound challenge.

Do we trust? Do we tready, big L.A. Rating. Ricting. Y. F. Y. F. Y.

Y. Well, I just spent, I'm going to start this way. I just spent a week in the ALA archive actually digitizing. I was trying to digitize a bunch of stuff about libraries and incarceration, because I am interested, right? Like, how do we think about, it's, I think it's really important that we see ourselves, people who are doing this work or are interested in this work, in a historical tradition of librarians that have done it?

we're not necessarily inventing anything. And actually, the work has looked really the same for a really long time. So if anything, it's like become, since in the 70s, there was, you know, this huge activist push, both from incarcerated people and people on the outside, including librarians, that led to things like meaningful access to the courts and in the 60s. And that's really important. If anything since then, information access has gotten more restricted. And There's been kind of this like chipping away at what qualifies as meaningful access to the court or what information people can have and what their information rights are. ALA can be an advocacy organization and has in the past been one to advocate for things like in the 70s, there was probably the most, my take at least is there was the most library service for people who were incarcerated of any recent decade. And part of that was because of things like ALA advocacy for federal funds to support prison libraries.

In the 70s, I think every juvenile detention center in Illinois and every prison had a librarian, which has not been my experience as a librarian who's been doing academic work around this for over a decade. So things like that are important, right? And organizations can push for that. I also, one of the things I walked away from over that week from the archive is there's kind of my inspirational thing. And I put links up to it on my website and I steal their imagery and whatever is this newsletter that was called Inside Outside. and it's written by incarcerated people and librarians, and it's very, it's like a very critical document, as many documents in that period were.

But it's things like, how do, like, is this a good legal guide or like fuck the government or like Eugene Debs quote or, you know, hands pulling bars apart? And I had up until this week, always seen that as something that was separate from the archive. I'm kind of like tracing the lives of different people through these records that I can find. And when I was looking through the archives in the seven,

there were several mentions of inside outside, none of them descriptive, but it was obvious that this tool being created outside of ALA was also facilitating some of the advocacy work that ALA was doing, right? And maybe could not ever be engaged with because it has certain parameters of what it is and what it is not. And a base of librarians that maybe don't all agree that there should be library services for incarcerated people and especially don't agree on what those should look like. But if you are, I will say in this moment, this is important, if you get American libraries somehow around you, please read the essays that Tracy D. Hall, who is the new executive director of ALA is writing, because she is really passionate about this work and about social justice and about the possibilities that exist for ALA as an institution to really make change. And she's writing about incarceration, you know, the school to present. pipeline. She wrote, one of her essays was, what if we had a different model for how we're funding libraries and redistributed all of the tax-based monies that are district across the state

in a way that was more equitable so that no matter where you were, you were getting library services that were quality and weren't influenced by the poverty of the area that you're in, which is so obvious, right? But until I read that essay, I had never even considered that as a funding model that especially ALA would pursue. So I do hope that we are in a hinge moment. And I think that there will be changed hopefully from ALA, but there will also be changed from this generation of librarians and library students that are coming up. Like I said, I've been doing this work for a long time, and it's only in the last couple of years that there's been widespread interest in this topic. No one would have asked me to be on a podcast five years ago. So thank you.

I was going to say something like, oh, wow, ALA is doing something surprisingly good. Thanks, Tracy Hall. Like, that's pretty cool, though. It's always nice when, like, something good happens. Like, it's a nice surprise. Like, thanks, Dad. Thanks for looking out. So that's cool that you've been digging through that.

And, like, I think I read about the mention of Inside Out in one of the article, or Inside Outside in one of the articles. So that's pretty cool, too. This is actually a pretty, one of those, like, weird, like, life coincidences where It's like, oh, that's very prescient that we're talking about this. So I really like the fact that you're putting this in like a historical context and like looking back to see like, okay, what has this looked like and not just now? Like what have we done in the past? What's worked and what hasn't.

And sort of I also see in the notes like, you know, is getting ALA involved? Like, do we want that? Like, is that like reifying this system? And I know that's like the classic. like abolition versus reform. And that's always been like a, you know, that's a very historical argument. Because I'm very gay yesterday I spent the day reading this book about Oscar Wilde and like anarchist philosophy.

You know, he wrote sold man under socialism, but also wrote like Ballot of Reading jail and which has been used in a lot of abolitionist writing, actually. And what I found, because there's a whole chapter of the book talking about his, incarceration and reading that was like breaking my heart it was disgusting and people went back to Reading jail in the 80s and it was the same if not worse than when Wilde was there which is you know not surprising but depressing as hell and one of the things that talked about was that like before he um because he was in several jails during his his hard labor and before that he was very much like an abolitionist like he very much agreed and as

especially, like, wrote in Soul of Man Under Socialism that, like, by trying to reform something you are validating its existence, and that, like, you just, you need to get rid of it entirely. And then after he got out of prison, he actually was more for reform. But, like, in a lot of ways, it was sort of, like, in his letters while he was in, like, while he was incarcerated, and he was, like, trying to, you know, appeal to be released. The first thing, he would say was like this whole institution sucks and it's doing all of these things to me please let me out um as if he thought that would work um but when he got out he was like one of the leading voices of reform and actually like some of his reforms got put into place apparently and most of them like

were obviously like about like health and stuff because he was getting so ill he almost died in in prison because they just didn't believe him and stuff but a lot of it actually to do with information services. It was like making sure people had access to books, that people could write and had access to pen and paper, that people could send letters out and receive letters in. And I think his thing was like at least once a month. And children were also incarcerated with the adults at this time.

So it was like making sure that the kids had books they could read too. Like he actually sort of did like librarian work while in prison after the warden at his place got replaced and was actually kinder. And so yeah, and a lot of these reforms, he talks about like, this shouldn't exist and we shouldn't be doing this. But if we have to right now, in the meantime, like the way he talked about reform was very much like the way that we talk about socialism, where it's like this isn't the end goal. But while we're working on the end goal, let's make something better. And so I think this discussion of like, do we get the ALA involved is us doing this work, validating this system.

I don't know, just like, especially you doing all of this historical work on it. It seems like it's just like always been such a important aspect of abolition work and such a concern for the mental and even physical well-being of people who are incarcerated. Yeah. Just to summarize, maybe do we approach this? in a framework of harm reduction? Or is that a bad framework to look at information services for incarcerated people? I mean, I'll say my personal approach is to be concerned with the people who are currently incarcerated to do whatever is possible to create information access.

Because with the circumstances as they are, we can't even imagine what that might, what kind of change might happen just with basic access to information. And I think it's very important to remember in conversations about incarceration that we're talking about nearly two million people because of a slight drop in how many people it is at any given time in the United States who are incarcerated, who are connected to people on the outside in so many different ways and who are complex human beings who might not even be allowed to make a basic choice like what book do I get to read. and what information do I want to have access to? And there are so many ramifications of the situation that we are in right now that are unexplored and undiscussed that could lead to in so many different directions. You know, while there are a lot of people who are sent sense to life or virtual life, and I believe that they deserve access to information also.

There are also a lot of people who are going to come back out of prison. And because of this kind of deprivation, are forced into, this is like, saying systemic oppression is a very academic language, right? But this is the reality of what it is, how this kind of curtailing of access to information is a form of systemic oppression that is state enforced. It's a form of state violence that creates systems that are just circular, that whirlwind people, more and more and more people into carcoral facilities and to experiences that are completely shaped by incarceration. Yeah.

ultimately, I mean, it is a pragmatic approach and we get caught up in the academic language of it. So, no. Thank you for grounding that. That's very important. Yeah, and people can disagree with me too on it, you know, but it's just, that's just the approach that I've taken. Yeah. I mean, the most important thing is to give a shit. Everything else seems to follow afterwards. Yeah, and I think if people are concerned about incarceration in any way, not necessarily abolitionist or necessarily even from a political perspective, but just have a feeling about it, then it's important to try as you can to connect with people who are actually incarcerated. So maybe even just get a pen pal.

You know, there's like black and pink has a pen pal network for LGBTQ people inside to write to people outside. And they always have a wait list. Yeah, I've been thinking I just found this is something with ALA. In the archive, I found one letter from a woman who I'm not going to share her name because it's not my own business. but it's from the early 90s, so when mass incarceration is like ramping up, and she's sentenced to life, she's still inside now. And it's a letter where she says, you know, having access to books is one of the most valuable things that I have.

Please don't forget us as you are doing your work. And I think how would it change our field if we saw that kind of testimony from people who are incarcerated about the value of accessing information? also in my to-do list is to write to her and tell her, I found your letter 30 years later in this archive and maybe ask for permission to share it because it just is, I was like, when you look at LAS and the history of LAS, there isn't a lot of information from people who have been incarcerated or formally incarcerated who are claiming that experience publicly. There's so many reasons not to, right? But I think we could really benefit from it instead of making assumptions about what it is that people want or need.

Yeah. I've really been toying with this idea of, you know, if I could get in contact with someone who is a formerly incarcerated library worker, but I've got to weigh the ethics on that in terms of, do I want to find someone like that, reach out to something like that? But if someone like that does hear about this episode and wants to talk about their experience, I mean, obviously get in touch. And Elton, Ray, James, he goes by Ray, is, he claims that publicly. he was in federal for, I think, over a decade, and he's librarian now.

He actually, he wrote an article recently about tablets charging people to read by the minute. So people were getting charged five cents a minute to read a book, which meant like $20 to read 1984. This is what he brings up in his article. But that's like a month's wages for an incarcerated person. And because of his work and advocacy, ALA passed a resolution against charging people to read by the minute to read, which is one of the first kind of signposts. post activities that ALA has done around incarceration in a really long time. And like you would think that that would be just like a no-brainer. Like, you know, you're the American Library Association.

You should say, hey, maybe charging people to read is a bad idea. But then again, there are lots of libraries that are just now considering getting rid of overdue finds. So that's part of the whole structure. But yeah, I've heard about the tablets. And I didn't know that you were charged to read. by minute. That's ludicrous. Yeah. That's not all of them are that way, but definitely, and they're like, if we can squeeze a penny out of any activity on this tablet, it will most likely get squeezed.

It's like I've read up on like the stamp markup in prisons, like it for sending mail and stuff, especially for photo delivery and things like that. That's really fucked up too. I mean, everything is just marked up insanely and then with prison wages on top of that being so just sub-eract, subterraneanly low. I wanted to say astronomically low, but that's not how astronomic works. Like, it's subterranean low. But also, I think to follow up on that, so like, ALA passes these resolutions, what kind of grounding does that have in, you know, making sure that people have access to read in incarcerated environment? and read freely. And that goes back to the question of reforms, right? It's like if people are not allowed, if there's no oversight of what is being implemented

inside, then how can anyone be sure that it's actually happening unless people who are incarcerated are able to share that information out? And that that's a real issue, that's what I'll say. And also if we're not pushing against like, you know, the institutions that are trying to to pull this shit off essentially who watches. And I guess that's part of it too. Sorry. No.

Yeah. And even and especially in this like move to tech, there's this book by Shoshana Magnet. I'm looking at it now called When Biometrics Fail. And there's a chapter on it that's about it's probably one of the earliest things written about technologies in prisons. It's about the history of biometric development in prisons. Things like Iris Scanners were used in prisons for a long time. people outside don't want to use them because they are weird and uncomfortable and you put your

eye up on something. But people in prison have to use them. And so that's how they got refined was through their use in prisons. But one of the points that she makes in that chapter is about how as the technologies come in, people are less and less witnessed as like a whole being in a whole set of circumstances. And I think, I just made this point at a conference the other day that part of this is not just the institution. You know, part of it is us as a society. Like, people do volunteer and do work and do programming, both inside of jails and prisons and juvenile detention centers and from outside. It's just that the volume of people that are doing that is not very high. And that is a reflection back on, and there are people who are deeply traumatized in many ways by the judicial system.

So I don't want to say, like, this is an across-the-board implication of us as a system. society, but is in many ways an implication that goes beyond our field, right? And there are like reference by mail programs send in hundreds of letters to people in prison every month across the U.S. I think there's like seven or eight of them now who are serving statewide prison populations. And most of them don't have a high rate of rejection for what they're sending in as long as it's within like prison mail room rules, which are things like not a map, not how to to make weapons, not explicit materials that you wouldn't get from a library anyway because it would constitute sexual harassment, you know, and no hate materials. However, whoever is

responding or who's working in a mailroom interprets that. But if that was standard library procedure to answer letters from people who are incarcerated, then there would be so much more information that's going in. And if more people were thinking, like, oh, people who are incarcerated, are people are part of my community or part of my patron base, then this would be also a really different set of circumstances. Yeah, I believe there's some volunteer reference. for prisoners services, the big ones in New York, right? I'm blanking on their name right now. Yeah, PSLN, or PLSN, sorry, Prison Library Support Network.

Yeah, I think it's a great model. I'd like to learn more about it. Their website was having issues last time I looked at it, so hopefully I can follow up and maybe get some more information from them. So we're at an hour. I want to help wrap up. We've really already hit a lot of the action-oriented questions, which is great. I'm glad that we've really given people something to work with.

Is there anything in particular you want people to know that they should be supporting so that way we can just rattle off a few and throw one on the notes and hopefully send some dollars their way? Yeah, books to prisoners are everywhere. They're amazing. It is not difficult to work with them. If you don't have any time to spare at all, you can donate materials. And money. I'd also suggest they make a great, if you have a library that wants to, like my library,

I organized a books to prisoners project with my library. And it's a great way to get your staff involved and get them aware of carceral libraries and their needs. So also something you can do within your library as programming. So another idea. We should do a whole episode on how you did that. It wasn't that hard. And like I actually have another hall to give to them right now too.

And I'm potentially trying to do a mutual aid project with libraries to prisoners. And like you can actually, you know, other people do stuff where like you can put together book sets with them too. Like they have like I know in Wisconsin we have a really good program where like you can, they have wish lists and stuff that you can go through to. And if you're an LIS student listening, it's a really good project to get involved with while you're a student as well. I mean, if you're at UYUC, I hope it's still happening there, but at that cool independent media center, they normally have books to prisoners like meeting. and you can just show up and help. I think it's like every week, maybe multiple times a week. I would go on Saturday mornings where you get to help,

like respond to letters and stuff. So I hope there are other programs like that near other library schools. But yeah, LAS students, if you're listening, definitely try to get involved with them. It's a good thing to do while you're in school. Yeah, and if you are interested in writing only to women, there's Chicago books for women in prison and trying to remember how the LGBT.

It's only LGBT. There's no Q, I think, in it. But there's, I can't remember the order of it. If it's Midwest LGBT books to prisoners or the other way around. Yeah, there's that specific one. Yeah. Yeah. And we do have LAS students listening.

So if you do have questions and would like us to follow up, I mean, just DM us or send us an email or something. I'm happy to help you find other librarians who care about the shit that you care about. If you're feeling a little isolated at library school, which I know sometimes you can. So thanks so much, Jeannie. This has been amazing. I really wanted to keep doing more episodes with you. When's your book coming out, by the way?

And what is your book so people know? Okay. It's called. Let me look it up. It's called Library Services and Incarceration, Recognizing Barriers, Increasing Excess. It's a subtitle, I believe. The entire textbook I wrote. It's a textbook.

So get ready for that if you're trying to buy it. and it's being published by, to return to this, American Library Association, I think due to a phrase we use now, delays in the global supply chain, it may not come out this month, but it's on its way to be out in the world. Awesome. LA doing something good. You can call an 800 number to order, you can call an 800 number to order the item, by the way. You can't order it online, but you can call an 800 number, just so you know.

They just call you an idiot and hang up. Yeah, you can call the 800 number and they're just like, fuck you, fuck off, you idiot. Why did you think this would work? Go listen to a podcast. It's just the Chicago wind. It's like Michigan. It's like, go jump into the lake. Okay.

Okay, anything else before we let you go? No, thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. This is wonderful. Thank you for being here. All right. Good night.