Back in 2018, The Philadelphia Enquirer reported that
"Book deliveries to prisons across Pennsylvania were terminated this month as part of a multi-pronged security overhaul meant to eliminate avenues for drug smuggling. That meant an abrupt end to direct donations from programs like Books Through Bars, as well as orders shipped from Amazon or publishers.
The Department of Corrections says inmates will still have abundant access to books, including... as of Sept. 18, [access] to a library of 8,500 e-books that inmates, who make as little as 19 cents per hour, can purchase and read on $149 tablets provided by the vendor GTL.
...Many of the books are public-domain titles that are available free through Project Gutenberg... but that cost anywhere from $2.99 (Moby-Dick) to $11.99 (The Federalist Papers), all the way up to $14.99 (Joseph Conrad's The Rescue). Many more recent titles also are priced far higher than the same Kindle e-books. For instance, Stephen King's prison tome, The Green Mile, costs 66 percent more on prison tablets than out in the free world."
Access to books varies widely from one facility to another, but a few common themes arise when the multitude of rules are examined. Prisons rarely allow hardback books, almost never allow used books, and often limit how many books incarcerated persons can have in their cell.
Prison libraries sound like aa good solution at first glance, but often times these are not rooms full of books where prisoners can sit down and flip through books - it may just be a one-sided piece of paper with book titles and authors listed. No matter the format, access hours and days are usually severely restricted. Finally, the contents of the libraries are usually pretty slim. This isn't necessarily caused by a lack of donations -- instead, whoever accepts a package full of donated books has the last say on whether o accept the books or not. This results in arbitrary and biased stock that usually reflects the thinking of workers who come from a very different world.
For example, many incarcerated people want access to dictionaries so they can build their vocabulary - oftentimes because they want to be able to write to family or to write short stories. The person screening books may think dictionaries are boring - they can look up words on their phone after all! In addition, the most sturdy dictionaries are hardback and are therefore rejected. While we all have at least one used dictionary sitting around at home, prisons don't accept donation of used books.
Another common request seen of prison book donation groups is books on trade skills to help prisoners learn about being a plumber or an electrician. These can be fairly expensive, too, and also come on hardback more often than not.
In addition, incarcerated people often want an escape from their daily life through fantasy or science fiction books. When geared to a more generally applicable reading level, these books are relatively small. Prisoners who only have access to the library once a month may read their book in only 2 or 3 days. Anthologies or collections of a trilogy bound together on one spine are again, usually hardback and very expensive.
There are huge opportunities here. Someone might apply better library stock management so prisoners can access more books through inter-library loans. A cheaper tablet would be more affordable and make tablet owners less of a target in the prison, especially if most prisoners already had a tablet as well. Free e-books with much broader subject matter could change many incarcerated people's lives. Better scanning technology might enable donation of hardback or used books, again opening up a broader range of books for prisoners to have access to.
