Take Action to Provide Books Behind Bars
UPDATE: The Virginia DOC has reversed its decision! Read more here.
For more than two decades, an organization called Books Behind Bars, in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been sending books on request to prisoners in the state system. Last month, the Virginia Department of Corrections abruptly stopped allowing the store to send books directly to prisoners, citing security concerns of sneaking contraband into the prison inside a book and the time spent by officers to scan the books. The organization has sent over a million books to prisoners in the last 20 years, however, and the benefits of this program far outweigh the costs.
I wrote a letter this morning urging Virginia Department of Corrections Director Gene Johnson to reconsider the suspension of this program. Please join me by sending your own today.
Although the Virginia DOC didn't elaborate on why it stopped the program, Kay Allison, the founder of Quest Bookstore and the Quest Institute (the parent organization of Books Behind Bars) said the group had accidentally missed two disallowed items on its regular checks of books this year - a paperclip and a CD packaged inside a textbook. She told the Washington Post that she's disappointed in the decision and hopes the ban will be lifted:
"All these people would be sitting in their cells doing nothing," said Allison, 78, the program's director and owner of Quest Bookshop in downtown Charlottesville. Officials, she said, "are not looking long term."
Prisoners have earned their GEDs with the help of books from Quest. Others have learned to read, learned trades and new languages. It's a backwards decision to quash a nonprofit project like this rather than simply devoting a few hours of a guard's time to searching the books when they arrive. Guards are already searching prisoner mail for contraband, adding a few books - or a few thousand books - is well worth the cost in manpower.
I spoke with Department of Corrections (DOC) spokesman Larry Traylor about this issue and he stressed that all prisons have lists of vendors approved to send books directly to prisoners. Families are usually not allowed to send books directly. What the Virginia DOC did was remove Books Behind Bars from its list of organizations approved to send books directly to prisoners. The program can still help to stock prison libraries. This is a big difference however, and I still think the DOC is making a mistake by limiting a program that has served its prioners well for 20 years.
For opportunities to volunteer with similar programs and donate books in your area, check out this map.
Matt Kelley
is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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