Please consider shopping off these wish lists (#PrisonBooksWishlists) or stopping by the stores if you live in the Bay Area:
Books Inc. (Berkeley)
East Bay Booksellers (Oakland)
Green Apple Books (San Francisco)
Pegasus Books (Berkeley)
Cape & Cowl Comics (Oakland, in-store sales only)
These donated books will allow PLP to fulfill a range of requests from incarcerated letter writers including these recent ones:
We’re very happy to share some of the wonderful thank you letters we’ve received over the past months. These notes have helped keep us warm this unusually cold and wet California winter. Enjoy!
Many, many thanks to Tor Books for donating hundreds of titles to us! (They’ll get sent out – for free – to incarcerated folks across the U.S. who requested these genres.)
Some of the prisoners we send in to demand new or ‘new-like’ books, so it’s particularly helpful to have publishers send us their ‘advanced reader copies’ or remainders. If you can also help with this, please contact us!
Albany High School’s chapter of Amnesty International, advocates for global human rights through campaigns, letter-writing, protests, and more! Senior and club President Anika coordinated a book drive for PLP recently and we just received 3 bagfuls of great books to send out.
Thanks much to Anika and other students in the club for taking action to support incarcerated readers.
As we round out the year at the Prisoners Literature Project, we wanted to thank you all for keeping up on us, volunteering, or financially supporting us during the year with donations.
It’s not too late to make tax deductible-donations to our programs before year-end! But this newsletter is mainly sent to celebrate a year in which we:
– Sent out over 10,000 book packages (and 30,000+ books) to incarcerated folks in almost every U.S. state.
– Moved into our new library space in Berkeley, CA, as showcased in our ‘what happens in volunteer sessions?’ blog.
– Hosted over 150 group volunteer sessions, with many of you helping us to fulfil requests.
– Partnered with over 10 local Bay Area book stores featuring in-store displays, and 1,000+ books bought from wishlists by online/in-person customers.
– Received scores of thank you letters from appreciative book recipients and readers.
As we move into 2023, the pace of request letters we receive is increasing, thanks to word of mouth on the quality & quantity of books we send out for free. (We received 1,226 individual letters in a recent month, 60% up on mid-way through the pandemic!)
That’s why we appreciate your help with what we do. Our list of requests to answer is never-ending – but we love doing it, as can be seen from this new San Francisco Public Library virtual panel on our work. as part of the One City One Book festival.
Happy New Year, and thanks again for keeping up with us!
The Prisoners Literature Project volunteers.
The Prisoners Literature Project partnered with the San Francisco Public Library, as part of its One City One Book festival on December 1st, to share about our work sending books to incarcerated people across the country.
Check out this thoughtful and informative video. People in the audience asked great questions!
Check out this wonderful new video that explains more about our long-running books-to-prisons program. (Thanks to Krishna Hawk for making it!)
While we have your attention —
Our work at the Prisoners Literature Project continues, sending out 1,000+ book packages per month to incarcerated folks all over the U.S. But we need your help to keep sending high quality books & paying for postage!
So we’re delighted to announce that if you donate now to PLP, leading up to this Giving Tuesday on November 29, 2022, all of your generous financial contributions will be matched up to $4,444, thanks to some anonymous donors! Please double your impact by donating now through Tuesday the 29th.
Our primary costs continue to be postage (thousands of dollars a month!) and bulk orders of books we simply can’t keep in stock due to demand.
Books on self-education, GED study materials, and self-sufficiency/tradeskills books on building and construction are always in extremely high demand, and we’ll use some of your donations to get even more.
If you can contribute, thank you so sincerely for making the Prisoners Literature Project part of your Giving Tuesday generosity!
This is just one of many great thank you notes that we have received recently.
Banned Books week (Sept. 18-24) is upon us once again. Books-to-prisons groups such as PLP contend with the reality of book banning and restrictions every day in the course of our efforts to get reading material into the hands of eager incarcerated people. We have a thick binder that lists the book sending restrictions for prisons across the country. It’s a lot to track and it’s ever changing! Here is one page for CA prisons:
A prison may require new books only or newish or used but with strict guidelines about no text underlining, highlighting, or “suspicious stains.” This clearly limits our ability to accept donated books! Each letter must be marked with its relevant restrictions so we can do our best to ensure the books are successfully received by the letter writer. A few examples:
This article “The Cruel Practice of Banning Books Behind Bars” provides an update on the current state of the prison book banning challenge.
Therefore, we’re super pleased that a generous donor has offered to match the total of all books purchased from our independent bookstore wishlists (or in-store displays) during the Banned Books 2022 week. PLP has four local bookstores who are partnering with us for the matching grant. These purchases will help us “beat the ban” in instances where new books are required!
Please consider shopping off these wish lists or stopping by the stores if you live in the Bay Area:
Finally, because we have such fabulous and committed volunteers we thought we’d share some of them holding books that we CAN (well to most prisons) send to incarcerated readers. These are commonly requested books that we try to keep in stock via our wishlists!
Wow! This is a particularly great batch of letters we’ve received recently. It is our good fortune to have such appreciative book recipients and readers.
Here are some volunteers processing book requests in our new space:
A volunteer at work opening letters for upcoming sessions:
Our official request box waiting for volunteers to pick a letter:
Each letter has to be checked in our restrictions binder. We have a section for each state with each city listed as every prison has their own rules about what can be sent:
There is a handy library directory mounted on the wall for volunteers to locate books on a particular subject:
Volunteers browsing for books that will match the book requestor’s stated interests. This is the fun part!
A volunteer with a book selection:
An invoice receipt listing each book title has to be completed and included in each package. Volunteers are encouraged to write a note on the back. It’s sometimes the only contact an incarcerated person has outside the prison so they are much appreciated:
This is a poster on our wall that includes tips about how to fill out the address label and receipt. It’s very important to do it correctly. Points for good handwriting and double checking the prison id!
This is a “half slip” that we send in response to some letters. The dreaded “Do Not Send” is because some prisons won’t accept packages from us for whatever reason and we need to let the book requester know. Sometimes we simply want more info from the writer as to what types of books they’d like to receive.
Our supply station. Lots of envelopes and lots of tape!
It’s postage time! The ideal package will be under 3 lbs though sometimes the perfect book requires some extra weight.
A completed package ready to send!
We do a fair amount of special handling of letters. For example, some Pennsylvania letters have to be sent through a security processing center so we pull those out for volunteers to package up in a specific manner. This is becoming more and more common for different states, alas. Fortunately, we have volunteers willing to handle these controlled cases.
This is our thank you letter rack. It holds letters that have been sent to the attention of a particular volunteer. This is usually because the volunteer wrote a particularly nice note on the back of a receipt and the incarcerated person is responding with appreciation for the personal touch:
Some of our favorite really great thank you notes are posted on a bulletin board for all to see and be inspired by. (There are more online too)
The Prisoners Literature Project is an inclusive, all-volunteer, grassroots nonprofit whose purpose is to encourage reading, the pursuit of knowledge, and self-determination among incarcerated people. By sending free reading materials to those behind bars, PLP aims to foster learning and critical thinking and help people prepare to lead successful lives after incarceration. We believe that all people have a right to read.
