The small but occasionally heated literature on prison libraries greatly depreciates nineteenth-century prison libraries. In 1931, Austin MacCormick published an influential work on educating prisoners.^ MacCormick then went on to help found the Correctional Education Association and the Journal of Correctional Education. In a presentation to the American Correctional Association in 1970, he stated:
It does not seem to me necessary to devote much time to the subject of libraries in 19th century prisons. … If a humane chaplain had a few books to pass out, they were usually printed in fine type and on dull and dreary subjects. … It may be presumptuous to write off a half-century or more of prison library history, but it does not seem realistic to me to believe that there were more than a very few collections of books deserving to be called prison libraries until the 1870’s, and very few more during the rest of the 19th century.^
In her 1995 book on prison librarianship, a leading prison librarian documented mis-imagination and quoted MacCormick:
It is not difficult to imagine the reading fare in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century prisons, remembering that these were times when society had not yet fully recovered from being God-centered. … According to MacCormick, “Before any other agencies of rehabilitation, except religion, secured the sanction of the old punitive penology, books came into prisons. Even in the dungeon-like cells of the early 19th century, where silence waged continual war on sanity, prisoners were permitted to read. Their reading, to be sure, was restricted to the Bible and other religious books, but they could read.” ^ ^
Another leading scholar of prison libraries has declared:
Throughout the nineteenth century most prisons had collections consisting primarily of spiritual literature, temperance tracts, and other books the convicts rarely read or wanted to read.^ ^ ^
A scholar suggested that a view in 1882 of a prison cell containing a book by Dante and one by Shelly was “a freak development in the hiatus between reform movements.”^ ^ That freak development was largely a scholarly construction. In truth, nineteenth-century U.S. prisons libraries had diverse holdings, including recent best-sellers and publicly controversial titles. About 1880, religious books made up only about 15% of prison libraries’ book holdings.