Category: Incarcerated Adults

Incarcerated Adults, Incarcerated Youth

Grant work continues!

The Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People grant initiative has received additional funding! From the press release

San Francisco Public Library is thrilled to announce that its Jail and Reentry Services program (JARS) has been awarded a grant of nearly $2 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This grant ensures continued support for the groundbreaking Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People initiative, which provides a foundation for creating and sustaining meaningful library services for people who are incarcerated or in the process of reentry. The initiative focuses on building libraries’ capacity to provide services to the nearly two million people currently incarcerated and the millions of people who have formerly experienced incarceration. This marks the third time JARS’s nationally recognized, groundbreaking work in the field of carceral justice has been awarded a grant by the Mellon Foundation.

Powered by funds from the Mellon grant, San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) and the American Library Association (ALA) have collaborated on materials that support the professional development of library and information professionals, resources for advocacy, in-person and virtual events and the construction of ALA’s Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated or Detained. The grant has facilitated greater connections between librarians and information professionals, library students and community members while centering the experiences and knowledge of people who have been negatively impacted by incarceration. The renewal grant term continues and extends this work.

The full press release is available at https://sfpl.org/releases/2024/12/20/san-francisco-public-library-receives-2-million-grant-continue-work-expanding.

Incarcerated Adults, Incarcerated Youth, Standards

Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated or Detained updated!

From “ALA Issues First Revision to Standards for Incarcerated and Detained Individuals in 32 Years,” in Library Journal…

In the past 30 years, access to knowledge has undergone a massive transformation. Libraries have, by and large, kept pace with those shifts—but not in every sector. Despite a growing focus on prison librarianship and outreach in libraries and MLIS programs, there has been a national decline in investments in community health, education, and opportunity, and that has included libraries, notes Tracie D. Hall—distinguished practitioner in residence at the University of Washington Information School, former American Library Association (ALA) executive director, and longtime supporter of library service to incarcerated individuals.

While ALA has provided support to its members who work with prison libraries, particularly through its Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services (ODLOS), the last revision of its Library Standards for Adult Correctional Institutions was issued in 1992, and a standard for detained youth in 1999. Over the past three decades, access to information across much of the world has shifted to digital formats—yet support for services to incarcerated people has not kept pace with those changes.

ALA has recently issued a revised document, Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated or Detained. It will help support libraries and library staff to meet the literacy, learning, and recreational needs of people held in jails, prisons, detention facilities, juvenile facilities, immigration facilities, prison work camps, and segregated units within any facility, whether public or private, military or civilian, in the United States and its territories. The guidelines also include a history of prison library standards, a definition of the document’s intended audience, the “Prisoners’ Right to Read,” and legal policy contexts.

The new standards were released in September to coincide with Prison Banned Books Week, a time when librarians, educators, journalists, and others raise awareness about the profound destructiveness of censorship in carceral contexts, and advocate for better information access. The updated document reflects the current needs of people who are incarcerated or detained, 95 percent of whom will be released and require information seeking skills to thrive and reestablish a life on the outside. It also takes into consideration concerns that have come to the forefront over the last 32 years: rises in mass incarceration, inequitable incarceration rates for BIPOC individuals, and increases in the numbers of incarcerated women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, undocumented people, and youth. The expanded standards now explicitly speak to the information needs of women, LGBTQIA+ people, the aged, people with dementia, people with disabilities, and foreign nationals.

Read the full article at https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/news/ala-issues-first-revision-to-standards-for-incarcerated-and-detained-individuals-in-32-years.

Many thanks to Victoria Van Hyning, one of the project managers for the Standards, and to Lisa Peet at Library Journal!

Access, Incarcerated Adults, Incarcerated Youth, Resources

Censorship in Prisons & Prison Banned Books Week

Censorship is common in prisons–from blanket bans on vendors to specific titles. In preparation for Prison Banned Book Weeks (which begins today!), colleagues and I discussed the realities of censorship inside. You can view the recorded training on censorship in carceral settings by registering at

https://www.everylibraryinstitute.org/censorship_in_carceral_settings.

Interested in joining the campaign against pervasive book bans inside? PEN America has released a new report and toolkit for raising awareness of these practices and engaging in advocacy. Their report and action steps are located at

https://pen.org/campaign/prison-banned-books-week-2023/.

The toolkit for a Banned Books Week social media campaign is at

https://pen.org/prison-banned-books-week-toolkit/.

Want to see what books are banned in prisons in your state? The Marshall Project is continuing to collect this information and to make it publicly available at

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/12/21/prison-banned-books-list-find-your-state.

Access, Incarcerated Adults, Incarcerated Youth, Resources

White Paper on Technology in Carceral Facilities

As part of San Francisco Public Library’s “Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People” grant project, we have recently released a white paper titled “Technology in Carceral Facilities: Trends, Limitations, and Opportunities for Libraries.”

This white paper covers relevant literature published from January 2020 to December 2022. It glosses emerging and continuing trends in the use of technology in carceral facilities. It provides an overview of trends in recent publications in library and information science and similar fields about how technologies inside shape people’s experiences of incarceration and reentry. It closes by highlighting work by libraries that may indicate possibilities for supporting incarcerated people and people in reentry through making library services and programs that utilize technology available within facilities, and by offering some examples of how libraries can support patron’s digital literacy development after they are released.

The white paper is freely available online at

“Technology in Carceral Facilities: Trends, Limitations, and Opportunities for Libraries.”

or through the grant page at

“Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People.”