Vicki White remembers a letter she once received from an incarcerated woman asking for help.
“She needed glasses, but she had to pay for them herself and couldn’t afford them,” White says.
The woman was asking for large-print books so she could still continue to read, even though the prison she was at wouldn’t provide her with the seeing aids she needed.
These are the types of stories that drive the mission of White and her organization, Chicago Books to Women in Prison.
Like the name indicates, the Chicago-based non-profit focuses on providing books to incarcerated women, transgender and nonbinary people across the country.
What began in 2002 as a local effort to bring literature behind bars in the state of Illinois has since expanded to send books to women, transgender and nonbinary people in prison in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio, as well as all federal prisons. The organization also hand delivers books to the local Cook County jail.
“We all, I think, would prefer not to have this mission,” White says.
White feels strongly that books and literature should be readily available to all people in prison. But that’s not always the case.
Some prisons have libraries but many don’t. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many prisons closed their libraries to decrease high-touch spaces.
A woman held at Folsom Women’s Facility, a prison in California, wrote to Chicago Books to Women in Prison that the library in her prison had closed during the pandemic and access to books was impossible. Another woman held at a federal prison in Aliceville, Alabama said she and other prisoners were only allowed out of their cells for one hour a day to shower and use phones during the pandemic and she needed books to read.
Even now, with the initial wave of the pandemic shifting to the back of many people’s minds, access to books behind bars remains a challenge for many in prison. Many prisons require books to be new. No hardcover books are allowed. Many individual titles and genres remain banned.
White and her organization are working to fill that gap in access.
Donated books are shipped to prisons based on requests from prisoners themselves. The organization will receive a letter from someone in prison requesting a certain type of book and a volunteer workforce of about 30 will then gather a selection of three books related to the prisoner’s interests, package them and ship the books to the prison.
“A few months ago a woman in a California prison asked for books in Vietnamese and we put out a call on social media and found some we were able to send to her,” White says. “And we got a nice thank you note from her last week.”
The group has found over time that some genres or types of books are more popular than others.
“Education books are big,” White says. “We send a lot of GED books and language learning books.”
The books requested often act as mirrors of the larger issues people face in incarceration.
Between 1993 and 2013, the number of people in state prisons over the age of 55 increased by 400%, according to data from the National Institute of Corrections.
“The prison population is aging and we get orders from people well advanced in age,” White says, noting the growing number of requests for large-print books. “It reflects the typical poor state of health in prisons.”
Another important need to many in prison is queer literature. The partnership between Chicago Books to Women in Prison and the Women and Children First bookstore helps fill that niche area of focus.
LGBTQ people are overrepresented in all stages of the legal and criminal system and prisons are no exception. According to data from Prison Policy Initiative, a national non-profit criminal justice think tank based in Easthampton, Massachusetts, a third of all women in prison identify as lesbian or bisexual. This statistic doesn’t accommodate for transgender and nonbinary people in prison.
It’s important to White to make sure incarcerated women, trans and nonbinary people know there are queer books available to them.
Lynn Mooney has been a co-owner of Women and Children First, with business-partner Sarah Hollenbeck, since 2014 but the partnership between the two groups dates back before her ownership. The shop was originally opened in 1979 and the partnership has been in place for “years and years,” Mooney says, with pride.
“They decided to center incarcerated people and what they wanted and needed and were asking for, and then put the work on all of us to come up with those books,” she says. “And I just think that is so smart, and so right.”
It’s not only the bookstore itself that is helping out. Customers of the shop can purchase gift cards to donate to the organization or buy new books off of the organization’s ongoing wish list it has with the bookshop. This list varies in nature. It includes popular titles like “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel van der Kolk, Mooney noted. But also crochet and calligraphy books.
The numbers show the level of community support.
In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the non-profit mailed 1,964 orders of books and composition books to women and trans people in prisons across the country. Another 1,600 sets of composition books, crayon packs, and folders were sent to the women and trans prisoners at Logan Correctional Center in Illinois. The organization also delivered three individual orders of 600 books and 700 composition books to the women’s division of Cook County Jail in Chicago.
These days, White estimates that the organization fills about 80 orders every weekend.
Sending and receiving mail in the corrections system in any state is a slow and convoluted process. Sending books to prisons often adds extra complications to that process. On average, an order is received, filled and returned in about a three month time period, White says.
But having books and shipments rejected by prisons is a common issue.
“Some states are harder to deal with than others, some prisons are harder to deal with than others,” White adds. “There’s one federal prison that does not allow any organization to get books inside. There is a state prison we have to deal with that continually rejects books that every other prison accepts. It’s a constant challenge.”
It’s easy to feel powerless when so much of the system works to keep people out, Mooney notes. Doing this work helps her and her customers feel like they are achieving meaningful change.
“It’s not my destiny to, you know, solve the problem of the prison industrial complex,” Mooney says. “But a lot of us working around the edges can make real differences.”