Books to Prisoners: Huge Need, Consider a Donation
Seattle nonprofit answers 1,200 requests a month
Have you ever been cooped up at home, maybe with an illness, and wished for a new book to read? I know I have, but I am fortunate to always keep a big stack from which to choose.
Now imagine if you were really cooped up, let’s say for years or for life.
How important would books be to you if you were in prison?
There’s a great prison literacy nonprofit in Seattle called Books to Prisoners (BTP) that helps solve that problem for incarcerated people by mailing them free books. If you plan some holiday or year-end giving, I hope you’ll consider supporting this effort. You can buy books off their wish list, give your own books or, of course, donate money.
An Early Prison Literacy Leader
The local BTP has been operating since 1973, when there were only a few similar projects around the country, mostly back east. Today there are about 40, serving state Departments of Correction facilities and federal prisons—and increasingly county jails—across the U.S.
Prisoners hear about BTP through word of mouth and write to request books. BTP fills their requests—averaging 1,200 a month—as best as possible. It’s that simple.
But what it does for the recipient, says my friend Kris Fulsaas, who’s the board secretary and has been volunteering with BTP since 1989, when they got 50 requests a month, is much more profound.
Kris and I are sitting at one of four work tables in BTP’s northwest Seattle facility, surrounded by bookshelves. I’ve just dropped off my carload of donated books from our recent Holiday Bookfest.
The ability of prisoners to request these books is “a tool for empowerment for them to find a different path, to educate themselves, since prisons aren’t doing as much rehabilitation job training as they used to do,” Kris tells me. BTP offers “practical books that help people find a job once they’re out.”
“Also, [prisoners] read genre fiction. They want to escape.” I smile, knowing she doesn’t mean that literally, and then she clarifies: “They want an outlet for the imagination.”
Being incarcerated, whether for a short sentence or long, is life-changing. Family, work or school is interrupted, and sometimes cannot be restarted after the prisoner has done their time. It’s not necessarily a hopeless situation, but it is dire.
“There’s just so many stories of people who, when they’re young, they do dumb stuff and they’re in prison,” says Kris, “and they reeducate themselves, whether it’s prison programs inside or books that they get from prison literacy projects all over the U.S.”
The most popular books requested—after the dictionary, which is the perennial number one—are self-help legal books and job-training books from which a person can learn the building trades or commercial driving license rules. Cookbooks are even popular, which Kris says might indicate a person wants to work in restaurants when they get out or, quite possibly, reads them to fantasize about eating real food.
A Bit of Personal Property
But when BTP sends a book, they’re also sending empowerment of a different kind.
“Prison libraries are very limited,” Kris explains. “We know from what the prisoners tell us that, if they’re in for life, they’ve read all the books in a few years and they’re out of things to read.”
Also, a book received from BTP becomes that prisoner’s personal property.
“If they go to the prison library, sometimes they have to read them onsite, sometimes they can’t take them to their cell. Sometimes they get an hour a week in the prison library,” says Kris.
“But when they own a book that we send them, they can read it whenever they want. When they’re done with it, they can trade it to somebody for cigarettes, they can donate it to the prison library,” she says.
“One guy said he gave it to his kids because he had nothing else to give them for Christmas.”
What Prisoners Want to Read
We walk the stacks, filled with donated used books and spine-shiny new ones, as Kris ticks off the types of books most requested. In genre fiction, it’s thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, urban and westerns.
If they ask for literary fiction, it leans toward the classics, Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Prisoners might not be up to date on current authors.
In the historical fiction realm, right now the Civil War and World War II are popular.
“It’s so interesting,” she says, “to see the ebb and flow of what gets sent out.”
It is a bit harder to generalize about nonfiction requests, but along with the types already mentioned, there are shelves for travel, art and gardening books.
Many prisoners send a list of books they want, and BTP will send a few at a time, based on stock on hand or the prison’s rules. They maintain a 40-page database on that. Various facilities have restrictions on what can be received by prisoners.
Sometimes if they don’t have what the requester wants, BTP will send a substitute item, or a short-story collection or anthology that might hit the mark.
Two years ago, BTP got a $100,000 grant to buy new books, and they went big on a book called The Prisoner’s Self-Help Litigation Manual. “It’s a big, beautiful, heavy, $85 book,” says Kris, “and we got 2,400 copies of it.” Of course they got a discount. They also invested in a stack of books on getting a commercial driver’s license. All that supply is nearly gone.
They used some of that grant to build a stock of new books of all types, because some prisons will only allow new books to be sent.
Smaller grants also bolster the new book supply.
BTP has seven Seattle bookstore partners (Left Bank Books, Phinney Books, Outsider Comics, Queen Anne Book Co., Charlie’s Queer Books, Couth Buzzard and Third Place Books) who will get grants to fulfill BTP wish lists during Banned Book Week or around Independent Bookstore Day. Some will post those wish lists and their customers will buy the books in the store, which BTP then picks up.
“We’re constantly improving our new book supply that way and supporting local bookstores,” Kris says.
A Shoestring Operation
Until last year, BTP had been a bit nomadic, renting space and having to move regularly. If you’ve ever moved your own book collection, imagine how it would be for BTP—your shelves time ten or a hundred. But a large grant of $530,000 recently enabled them to purchase a location in the Greenwood neighborhood and settle down.
Kris says that more shelves, wider aisles, good lighting, a floor that’s comfortable for shift work, and a ground-floor location with covered parking for loading and unloading are other benefits of the permanent location.
Their annual budget has risen from $10,000 a year when Kris first started to more than $100,000 a year now, most of it spent on postage, with packaging their next largest expense.
“Postage has crept up,” she says, and hardback books are heavy. Even with library rate shipping, “we’re spending on average $5 a package.” When they send textbooks, the cost rises to $7 or $8 an item.
Today, BTP runs six shifts a week that are filled by approximately 70 volunteers who answer letters, wrap packages, sort and shelve books. It’s basic work, yet so necessary. Demand, says Kris, always exceeds supply.
The organization gets some memorable letters from prisoners (Read “Letters from Inside”), which they keep in a notebook to show to the public at events.
But Kris says there’s also a high volume of thank-you letters, “people saying, boy, this book really made a difference.”