Books Behind Bars

We interrupt these antiquarian reflections for a public service message.

This week, Northeastern University’s newspaper had a profile on Prison Book Program (PBP), a non-profit that sends books to prisoners. “The volunteers open letters from inmates requesting specific titles or genres of books, and match tem as best they can with titles donated by local philanthropists, professors or publishing companies” (Larocque 5). PBP has “served more than 100,000 prisoners in the last three years” (Capalbo 6), an impressive achievement for such a tiny organization relying solely on volunteers working out of the basement of a tiny bookstore in Quincy, MA.

But it also brings up some of the problems with our corrections system. As volunteer Pam Boiros points out, “Seventy-five percent of prisoners today reoffend, and are readmitted [to prisons]…. It’s called recidivism. The only thing proven to reduce the recidivism rates is when people get educated” (qtd. in Larocque 5). But the American prison system, the largest in the world, focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Prison libraries, whey they exist at all, are notoriously small, and most prisons have a rule that prisoners can’t receive books from individuals. Hence, the PBP.

The most commonly requested materials are dictionaries (PBP currently has none in stock), GED exam preparation books, books on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Westerns, and business books. PBP also tries to keep books on LGBT issues, Buddhism, native American topics and legal self-help, as these topics are also frequently sought.

Since I was at a 50%-off sale at a local second-hand bookstore yesterday, I picked up a few such books along with the ones for my work, and I’ll be sending them along with a few new dictionaries in a few days. (See address below.) I encourage you to join me in making the world a safer place. Remember, books change minds; minds change lives.

Prison Book Program
c/o Lucy Parsons Bookstore
1306 Hancock St., Ste. 100
Quincy, MA 02169


Capalbo, Danielle. “Reading into the Facts on Prisoners, Literacy.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 6.
Larocque, Mark. “Local Non-profit Puts Books Behind Bars.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 5-6.