Books to Prisoners is an umbrella term for several projects and organizations that mail free reading material to prison inmates. The first Books to Prisoners project was founded in Seattle, Washington, USA in 1973. There are approximately twenty similar projects in the United States and Canada. In keeping with the anarchist cultural roots of the project there is no centralized organization, and each group runs autonomously.
These projects accept donations of books from bookstores and individuals. Each project solicits letters from prisoners requesting books, usually by genre or by naming a preferred author. Project volunteers read the letters, and reply with a few books taken from the project's collection. There is no cost to prisoners.
Generally, volunteers answer letters, mail packages and complete administrative work. Many of the projects are affiliated with a local independent bookstore in their home city, which provides a drop-off place for donations, and sometimes a small supply of books as well. Postage for mailing the books is a major expense that must be met through donations.
Often-requested materials include dictionaries, how-to books, educational books, and historical works, especially those focusing on African-American, Latino, and Native American history.
Famous quotes containing the words books and/or prisoners:
“Mr. Alcott seems to have sat down for the winter. He has got Plato and other books to read. He is as large-featured and hospitable to traveling thoughts and thinkers as ever; but with the same Connecticut philosophy as ever, mingled with what is better. If he would only stand upright and toe the line!—though he were to put off several degrees of largeness, and put on a considerable degree of littleness. After all, I think we must call him particularly your man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought for the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)