I first volunteered at a prison book program after college at Open Books, a used-book store in Pensacola, Fla. Organizers kept a tiny backroom stocked with used paperbacks, and we picked three books based on requests from inmates who sent handwritten letters. Volunteers sat around a table working together to assemble and address packages of books.
The first letter I opened read: “Thanks so much for the books. I’m 61 and I am getting [my] GED. I have only been knowing how to read for 3½ years.” Five years later, I went back to Open Books with my mother and sister while living in Florida during the pandemic.
It was a comforting experience; my father, an avid reader, was incarcerated at the time, so we knew firsthand how important books were to his mental health — and how expensive procuring books in prison can be.
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Recently, it has become harder to get books into prisons. In Florida, more than 22,000 titles are banned by the Department of Corrections, the highest number of any state. Rejected books include how-to manuals like “Nutrition for Dummies” and works including “The Innocent Man” by John Grisham and “Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements.”
Books are returned to the sender or tossed into the trash if they arrive without an invoice, are sent from a nonapproved mail carrier (most prisons allow books from Amazon sent via the U.S. Postal Service), or if the pages have highlighting, underlining or are too worn.
Moira Marquis, a senior manager at PEN America’s Freewrite Project, recently edited Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement, a collection of essays chronicling the history of prison book programs. She said overall access to books in prison is diminishing as the list of approved vendors for sending books shrinks: About 85 percent of prisons allow books only from approved vendors, according to a 2023 study. In 2015, just 30 percent of prisons surveyed had those restrictions.
Each correctional facility has its own rules about books. Some allow a regular flow of titles and are well-stocked with books to borrow, while others don’t have a library and have restrictive rules about what they’ll accept. In Arizona, for example, the Department of Corrections bans books with information on ciphers and computers, among other topics.
In Athens, Ga., the independent bookstore Avid Bookshop recently filed a lawsuit against the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office arguing that bans on books from independent bookstores violate First Amendment protections. It stemmed from a situation in which the store sent new paperbacks to a person incarcerated at Gwinnett County Jail near Atlanta and the jail rejected the books, saying that for safety reasons only approved vendors such as Amazon can send books.
Luis Correa, operations manager at Avid Bookshop, said other independent bookstores in Georgia have experienced similar rejections from local correctional facilities.
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“As long as we're following the rules and safety guidelines about what can and can't be sent, there shouldn't really be these kinds of blanket bans,” Correa said. The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office said in an email that they “do not limit the content or subject matter of the publication, but only the origin of the shipment.”
When prisons allow only new books from certain sellers, books can become inaccessible for inmates who don’t get paid for their prison work or are paid pennies per hour. This means only inmates with loved ones who can afford to buy new books can get them. Otherwise, inmates must rely on prison libraries, which increasingly are subject to book bans and state budget cuts, limiting the number of titles available.
Sterling Cunio, an activist who served 26 years in an Oregon prison, credits one book for changing his life: William Styron’s 1979 novel “Sophie’s Choice.” Cunio told me that he went to prison for homicide at 16 as a “disconnected and desensitized” child. He spent the first years inside fighting and trying to survive, never confronting the harm he had done. Then he structured his time like school while he served almost a decade in solitary confinement, studying different subjects through the day. On a whim, he picked up “Sophie’s Choice,” a book he said made him “emotionally distraught” after learning that the novel’s title character was forced to pick which of her children would be killed in a Nazi death camp.
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“Up until that moment, it had just been about me. My survival. My pain. My recovery. My education,” Cunio said. “But that book triggered that empathetic connection and sent me into a two-year depression. To get out of that, that was when I realized that the only thing that I could do was become a better person.”
While he was in prison, Cunio received his degree from the University of Oregon, wrote poetry and was a 2019 Oregon Literary Arts Fellow. After then-Gov. Kate Brown commuted his sentence, he began working in public services like homelessness prevention.
A 2013 study found that fiction can unlock empathy, helping readers better understand social situations and interact with others. It’s an age-old idea: After World War I, physicians would often prescribe reading as a way to calm soldiers returning from the front lines with post-traumatic stress disorder. A 2014 Rand study showed that inmates who participate in any type of educational program in prison are 43 percent less likely to commit crimes after they’re released.
The used-book store Freebird Books, in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, is home to NYC Books Through Bars, a program that provides free books to incarcerated people across the United States. It’s one of 31 prison book programs across the country and sends about 10,000 to 12,000 packages per year to 40 states.
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Daniel Schaffer, a longtime volunteer with Books Through Bars, said it’s not easy to predict which books will be rejected. “Within the same state, you can have different standards, different people who are making the rules, different people you have to call,” Schaffer said.
Examples he cited of rejected books include a photo book of Mary Cassatt’s art, an Italian dictionary, almanacs and a copy of Kenneth M. Stampp’s “Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.” The rejection letter for Stampp’s book said it was “detrimental to security, good order or discipline of the institution or it may facilitate criminal activity” because it had underlined words throughout the book.
“The only thing I look forward to is my book packages,” reads one letter I read at Books Through Bars. Another, which the program has saved for more than 20 years, is from a man on death row: “I’m going to be executed on May 30th, but I’d like you to know that those books will give me much pleasure in the days remaining to me.”
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Another letter, from 2015, explains how much books have changed the writer’s outlook. “I have been studying and reading everything I can get my hands on this past year. … Now I fully understand that I have a choice and can choose my future. That I don’t have to think and act like the environment I grew up in. Reading has given me a new life.”
The activist and writer Victoria Law co-founded Books Through Bars in 1996 to provide prisons with books that their libraries wouldn’t stock. Prison libraries might have Bibles or women’s prisons might have romance novels, she said, but not necessarily books about feminism or Black history.
As a volunteer, it’s rewarding to share a good book with someone I will never meet. A slightly worn copy of Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” — a favorite of mine — would be a good fit for someone requesting a real-life survival story. Even amid increasing book bans, volunteers continue to pack and ship paperbacks, knowing that these books bring hope to people behind bars.
