Library Services and Incarceration: Recognizing Barriers, Strengthening Access is featured in the 2023 In the Margins 2023 Social Justice/Advocacy award list! Many thanks to the In the Margins team!
The Social Justice/Advocacy Award list is available at https://inthemarginssite.blog/2023-social-justice-advocacy/.
The full award lists are available at https://inthemarginssite.blog/awards-list/.
At one point, there was a proliferation of activity undertaken by librarians working with incarcerated youth, some of which is represented in the Library Services for Youth in Custody website in the Internet Archive, and the continuing In the Margins book award.
While engagement with this area of library service seems to have diminished, there are still great–and recent–materials available to support librarians beginning these services.
Two recent publications I’ve come across are Jess Snow’s Outreach Services for Teens: A Starter Guide (ALA, 2020), which contains example related to beginning and continuing library services in a juvenile detention and Kristin Zeluff’s chapter titled “Collection development policies in juvenile detention center libraries” in Dawkins’ Intellectual Freedom Issues in School Libraries (ABC-CLIO, 2021).
It’s exciting to see that librarians are still thinking deeply about these services!
From PEN America: “Over the course of the past year, PEN America’s Right to Read in American Prisons Project focused on ways prisons and jails across the country restricted access to literature and educational materials through book censorship and state book ban lists. During PEN America’s recognition of Banned Books Week, we are excited to share several essays written by incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and allied people on the crucial role of books in their lives.”
The series is available at https://pen.org/pen_tags/pjw-bbw-2022/.
My work is featured in the most recent episode of Steve Thomas’ Circulating Ideas podcast. You can give it a listen (or read the transcript) at
The use of “they” as a nonbinary pronoun has official been added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary as of September 17!
Dr. Jeanie Austin 