How Sharing Books with My Dad in Prison Made Life Bearable for Both of Us

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.

Dad was lucky. He had family and friends who regularly sent him books and he had funds in his personal disbursement account to purchase what he wanted. He was also a college-educated white man who had already benefited from a lifetime’s access to education and literature. The majority of people do not enter the American prison system with these privileges. For the majority of the 2.3 million Americans currently incarcerated, access to the books they want to read is severely restricted—and increasingly so.

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.

The situation is worse now than it was during my father’s incarceration in the 1990s. And prison authorities continue to put forward policies that, in practice, deny inmates’ right to read. In a 2017 measure ostensibly to counter contraband, the New York State Corrections Department piloted a policy that eliminated package deliveries from family members, mail catalogues, or online retailers, and banned all used books.

It is worth noting that there is no publicly available evidence of used books being used to smuggle in drugs, though a more general 64 percent increase in package-room contraband between 2013 and 2017 has been cited as a rationale. The program was suspended in January 2018 after significant backlash. But 30 other jurisdictions in the US have implemented similar policies. A bill to bring libraries to all New York jails recently faced opposition from the Corrections Department.

Access isn’t the only problem; censorship is broad and the motives for banning books arbitrary. Charlie Brown Christmas and The Essential Gore Vidal—amongst the estimated 15,000 books banned in Texas— hardly seem likely to incite a riot. According to federal regulations, officials can censor material which is sexually explicit—The Nude Female Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist included—or that is “detrimental to the security, good order or discipline of the institution,” and “might facilitate criminal activity.” The latter category becomes a black hole, swallowing up whole shelves of books on political history, the civil rights movement, and social justice.

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We are gathered in the dusty basement of Freebird, a secondhand bookstore in Cobble Hill. There are no windows and the ceiling is low enough that the silence of our work is occasionally punctuated by the bang and curse of someone hitting their head. We work our way through a pile of letters sent from prisons around America with a request for literature. This is the de facto HQ of Books Through Bars NYC, an all-volunteer group that sends books to prisoners. They currently fulfill over 700 requests per month.

The handwritten letters feel personal. Requests vary from the specific (indigenous stories from the Amazon, Lee Child novels) to the general (crime fiction, coloring books). Our task is to match a letter with a handful of books and package them according to that prison’s regulations. I dissect each letter compulsively, scanning for signs of the writer’s personality. I long to furnish the sender with the right book, a book that will offer a momentary reprieve from reality. This longing speaks to my child self, when a book was one of the few things I could send my father to make his time better and one of the few gifts that made it past prison authorities.

Each package takes me too long, and I’ll never know if I chose well. It is a one-sided conversation, the package of books in place of a response. For some indigent or segregated prisoners, these packages could be their only point of contact with the outside world. One man wrote the organization this note: “I would like to thank you for the books you sent me last month. I’m going to be executed May 30th but I’d like you to know these books will give me much pleasure in the days remaining to me.” The letter was dated May 9th.

My dad started writing while in prison. There were three typewriters in the library, each on its own desk. They were usually empty. He visited during the hours between meals and counts (when you had to be at your bunk at prescribed times). He worked on his memoirs and, later, on a screenplay. A friend recommended he read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and so I ordered a copy as well. Together we studied the craft of writing—me at 14, him at 54—on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It gave us something to talk about on those crackling long-distance phone calls, brainstorming plot and character development. I wanted a dad who came to school plays or awkwardly shook the hand of my teenage boyfriends; that was never going to happen, but this was something we could share instead.

Dad wasn’t interested in being a writer prior to his incarceration, but he applied himself with seriousness once inside. It was a way to engage his mind and curb the regretful thoughts that crowded his breeze block cell during unoccupied hours.

Similarly, in the letters we receive, one prisoner writes about how books helped him rally against the “constant companions” of “despair and sheer boredom.” Another man muses on the “importance of educating ourselves as opposed to wasting away.” Requests come in for books to study the origins of Islam, to learn Hebrew, to start a small business, to crochet, for Nordic noir novels of the noughties. One man asks for books on dogs; his dream is to open a kennel for strays once he is free.

Without facilitating access to books and the educational or rehabilitative opportunities they represent, the American prison complex is no better than a holding pen, enacting a short-sighted punishment of segregation and deprivation. People are released back into society without the tools or support necessary to build a new life. The single most cost-effective method of reducing recidivism is education. One 2013 study showed that participating in correctional education programs lowered the odds of reoffending by 43 percent. Other countries have acted on this research; in Italy, prisoners can reduce their sentences by three days for every book they read.

Standing in the dusty basement of Freebird after packing up dozens of books bound for Texas—which operates one of the toughest book policies in the country—I ask Beena Ahmed, a Books Through Bars NYC coordinator, why she thinks prison authorities resist efforts to improve access. “It seems callous to restrict packages, but they resist anything that adds to administration,” she says. More packages bring higher labor costs to process the books and check for contraband or censored material. Furthermore, private vendors, who provide services and products to government prisons, capitalize on a captive audience, charging exorbitant fees for everything from phone calls to canned soup, while lobbying Congress for lengthier sentences. Undoubtedly, these private vendors would benefit from any policy that forced the prison population to only procure books through their services.

The problem is also more insidious, though. Operating a system of mass incarceration requires an act of aggressive dehumanization, placing the needs of the individual—and the community from which that individual has been taken—beneath the perceived economic imperatives of the prison industrial complex. This dehumanization occurs at every level. Daniel McGowan, a Books Through Bars volunteer, told me: “During my own incarceration I would think, ‘How is it that this guy can sit in the lieutenant’s office and read a book all day, and not understand that I’m in a cage and I have the exact same needs and desires?’ If you’re not seeing people as people, as worthy of respect, then it’s easy: ‘Why do they need books? Who cares?’”

Prisoners do not have full constitutional rights, allowing prison authorities to bypass the First Amendment and practice, amongst other infractions, censorship. When challenged in the courts, however, these bans are often overturned. In a 1974 case, the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall ruled in favor of the prisoners’ right to free speech, writing: “When the prison gates slam behind an inmate, he does not lose his human quality; his mind does not become closed to ideas; his intellect does not cease to feed on a free and open interchange of opinions; his yearning for self-respect does not end; nor is his quest for self-realization concluded. If anything, the needs for identity and self-respect are more compelling in the dehumanizing prison environment.” The American Library Association’s Bill of Rights, while it has no legal standing, echoed this sentiment, asserting the right of incarcerated people to read, to choose what they read, to access information, and to practice intellectual freedom.

The mass incarceration of people, and predominantly people of color, since the 1970s through the War on Drugs has stripped millions of their rights as American citizens in a manner Michelle Alexander argues is strikingly similar to elements of Jim Crow. (Ironically, Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness was banned in several correctional facilities, a ban since challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union.) This system of oppression continues not only throughout an individual’s incarceration, but for the rest of their lives, when a criminal record stands in the way of finding a job or a home. Keeping books from incarcerated people only perpetuates this cycle.

Looking at Books Through Bars’ list of most requested books, there is an inherent hopefulness in the will to learn––Astrophysics: A Very Short Introduction––and the will to imagine––The House of Spirits, Black Panther. There’s a hope for life beyond the prison complex, whether that life be imaginative or literal. By limiting access to books for the 2.3 million Americans in prison, they are curtailing 2.3 million minds from learning and from imagining, and from the hope of education, empathy, and––for a brief moment––escape. As C. S. Lewis said, the only people who rally against escape are the jailers.

Before my dad’s release I worried about him rejoining a world that had changed in his absence. He was a few years shy of his 60th birthday. While he was inside, the Internet had happened. Mobile phones now fit in his pocket. His last two decades of business experience had been largely illegal; the logistics and financial acumen required to be an international pot smuggler didn’t read well on a resumé. But Dad remained optimistic. His favorite book while inside had been Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder, the true adventure of one man’s quest to uncover a 19th-century sunken ship carrying 21 tons of Californian gold. It had everything he needed to believe in: that a quest against all odds could succeed and that, with perseverance, the riches at the bottom of life’s ocean could still be his.

Dad never made his screenplay––and I don’t know if that man ever started his dog kennel––but this ability to imagine a future version of himself succeeding at his quest saw him through his sentence, and out the other side.