Why are books important to prisoners?  I will answer that, if you will allow me to give you a little history of myself first.
 
I came to prison at the age of nineteen.  I was a very ignorant individual, and even worse, or dangerous, I actually thought I knew what was the truth in all things.  I didn't graduate High School because I was too busy running the streets and knew I didn't need a diploma.
 
I could shoot-the-breeze on the yard and not miss a beat talking about drugs and ripping people off and everything in between; but if you were to begin talking about Existentialism or Syllogistic logic, Thucydides or Virgil or anything slightly educational I would be completely lost.  Even more detrimental was the fact that I was being fooled every time I turned around, and mostly by myself.
 
The prison has different programs to help educate prisoners but they are mostly to fill a quota, not to educate.  I really got tired of not understanding too much and I could see that even though the programs did have one or two teachers that put forth an effort I really wasn't getting anything out of them.
 
So I stopped hanging around the drug users, gamblers and everyone just "doing their time," and began to associate with the guys discussing higher concepts than ways to cheat at cards.  And from these guys I learned one important thing about knowledge:  Read everything!
 
But once I started reading educational material I noticed something that was otherwise hidden:  the prison library is made up of mostly fictional books.  I quickly read most educational books around and began to have to purchase my own or write a book program for them.
 
For the past four or five incarcerated years I have been in maximum security and have had an extremely limited selection of reading material.  Without organizations like Lucy Parsons Center it would stay limited.
 
So why are books so important to prisoners?  Firstly, prisons don't rehabilitate or teach anything useful to prisoners, they have to do that themselves.  And without a wide variety of books this can never happen, for without the source of information that information will never be found.
 
Secondly, prison is a very hateful and discouraging place.  A person could easily lose their mind and many do, many come in lost and leave mentally ill.  Books are anchors to sanity; they give prisoners something to focus on beyond the anxiety, the torment and the hate.
 
Thirdly, and by far the most important, prisons are full of low-income, uneducated people.  Prisoners reoffend because have nothing else nor know nothing else beyond the criminal life.  The recidivism rate for college graduates is sickly low in comparison the prisoner who did his time playing cards.  Things will remain as they are with the prison's failure to rehabilitate prisoners until prisoners gain an education.  Some of us are trying to, but it isn't as easy as simply enrolling in a class when there are none beyond High School level.  In all actuality there are not many of us struggling to gain some sort of education, but for those that are books are the only thing we have.
 
Joseph L. Lee
Draper, UT 

 

National Prisoner Resource List in Large Print