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When I was a teenager, my father and I shared books. We didn’t share the physical copy, at least not often—my dad was serving a ten-year sentence in California, and I was at school in Bath, England—but we did share the imaginary landscape offered within its pages, a place we could occupy together from afar.
I would find the books Dad was reading in my local library branch. Wilbur Smith’s The River God, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, a handful of Michael Crichton novels—the books themselves didn’t matter. While I curled up with my library-stamped copy of The River God before bed, he was reading his, 5,000 miles away in his prison bunk. These words offered a point of connection between us, when there were few others to be found, and, for him, a touchstone to the world outside, the world he would one day rejoin …
… Some prisons have libraries, but they are woefully understocked, with books often shared amongst thousands and left threadbare. A former inmate told me that sometimes the final chapters of a prison library book had fallen out, which he would only discover, to his devastation, once he reached the end. People in low-security facilities and camps can receive books from their families and charities, but at most medium - and high-security facilities they must be sent directly from the publisher or bought from prison-affiliated vendors, often at prohibitive prices for those without an outside support network. For those in punitive segregation—who are in their cell for between 17 and 23 hours a day—there is, at best, a fortnightly book cart wheeled past the cell with a limit on the number of books the individual can take out. Operating a system of mass incarceration requires an act of aggressive dehumanization.
The situation is worse now than it was during my father’s incarceration in the 1990s.
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Witholding access to books is without doubt a cruel act. With all the time in the world and little to fill it with. Let us not forget the story of Thomas Clarke and his disvovery of a stash of newspapers as described in his prison memoirs. A story about reading which is worth readimg.
ReplyDeleteNo matter the crime, incarceration is the punishment and adding furher sanction is not conducive to rehabilitation.
The author describes education as a proven method of reducing recidivism. Perhaps the authorities have no interest in rehabilitation as the private prison system is designed to be profitable. The more convictions the better. With 1% of the population of the USA in prison you must have to wonder!
Books were also banned during the prison protests to gain political status here. Whether the prisoners needed rehabilitated is another question. If they weren't criminals I guess they didn't, but the withdrawal of reading materials apart from the bible must have added to their sufferimg. If it wasn't for oral story telling, something denied to Clarke, fewer would have made it.