Nineteenth-century prison libraries had diverse book holdings. The imaginative literature or novels that appeared most frequently in mid-nineteenth-century British prison library catalogs were, in descending order of frequency, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Johnson’s Rasselas. Pilgrim’s Progress was “the runaway winner in all categories {of prison library books}.”^ Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Rasselas were in New York state prison libraries about 1850. The 1848 Sing Sing Prison library catalog included five copies of Pilgrim’s Progress. Nineteenth-century prison libraries did not contain merely stern theological books.

Consider, for example, the holdings of the Philadelphia County Prison library in 1854. That prison library was founded in 1844. A catalog of its holdings was printed in 1854. The Philadelphia County Prison library in 1854 held Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. It also held three of Chambers’ collections: Miscellany of instructive & entertaining tracts (10 volumes), Papers for the People (12 volumes), and Papers for the Poor (6 volumes). The chaplain at the Pentonville penitentiary in England was asked to remove from the Pentonville prison library volumes 4 and 6 of Chambers’ Miscellany “because they contained accounts of the escapes of Trench and La Jude.”^ Both of these volumes were in the Philadelphia County Prison library in 1854.

The Philadelphia prison library held many other books of diverse types. The Philadelphia Prison library held Knight’s Half-hours with the best authors (4 volumes) and Goodrich’s Boys’ and Girls’ Library (16 volumes). For prisoners with greater reading ambitions, the prison library offered collected works of Shakespeare (5 volumes), collected work of Byron (8 volumes), Cervantes’ Don Quixote, collections of Alexander Pope’s and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 volumes). Early nineteenth-century authors with many popular works were also represented: Walter Scott (2 titles in 5 volumes), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (12 titles in 12 volumes), and Washington Irving (13 titles in 16 volumes).

Traditional religious works did not dominate the Philadelphia prison library’s collection. Religious works of various sorts comprised 16% of the volumes in the library. The English Puritan leader Richard Baxter’s long-famous work, Saints’ everlasting rest: or, A treatise of the blessed state of the saints, in their enjoyment of God in glory (1650) was in the library in five copies. The eighteenth-century American spiritual revivalist Jonathon Edwards was represented with his book, Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. The late eighteenth-century British politician, philanthropist, and influential abolitionist William Wilberforce was represented with his book A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of This Country Contrasted With Real Christianity. The library also included two copies of Sales’s translation of the Qur’an, a biblical dictionary, collections of sermons, and books such as Lamp and the lantern: or The Bible, Light for the tent and the traveler.

The most common theme among the religious books seems to have been natural theology. William Paley, Thomas Chalmers, and Thomas Dick, leading exponents of natural theology, were authors of at least twelve of the religious volumes in the Philadelphia County Prison library in 1854. Other volumes that considered religion from secular standards of reason included Hall’s Christian Philosophy, Knox’s Christian Philosophy, Alexander’s Evidences of the Christian Religion, McIlvaine’s Evidences of Christianity, Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic, Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature, Smith’s Scripture and Geology, and Bell’s The Hand; Its mechanism and vital endowments as evincing design. Bell’s book on the hand was part of a series, known as the Bridgewater Treatises, which also included Prout’s Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology. Prout’s book fits well within the current style of titles for U.S. law review articles. Bell’s work probably meets the intellectual standard of much modern work on intelligent design. Narrow-minded piety no better characterizes religious books available to prisoners from the Philadelphia County Prison library in 1854 than it characterizes intellectual life today.

State prison libraries in New York about 1850 held a larger share of religious books and a smaller share of fiction than did the Philadelphia County Prison library. The prison library at Auburn state prison of New York began in 1840 with a donation of fifty copies of Lindley Murray’s Power of religion on the mind, in retirement, affliction, and at the approach of death; exemplified in the testimonies and experiences of persons distinguished by their greatness, learning, or virtue, along with twelve copies of Abigail Mott’s Biographical Sketches and Interesting Anecdotes of Persons of Colour; To Which is Added, a Selection of Pieces in Poetry.^ The prison library in New York’s Sing Sing prison began in 1842 when the governor of New York personally funded the purchase of schoolbooks and seventy-five copies of Richard Baxter’s A call to the unconverted to turn and live, a Puritan classic.^ ^

Nineteenth-century New York state prison libraries rapidly acquired a wide array of books. In 1848, the Sing Sing prison library included Charles Dickens’ novels Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist, other novels and travel tales, George Combe’s Constitution of Man, and, reportedly, Orson Fowler’s Amativeness; or Evils and Remedies of Excessive and Perverted Sexuality. Such book holdings led to a press scandal, an official investigation, and a purging of prison staff and books. This scandal may have motivated newly appointed prison inspectors to include the catalog of the Sing Sing prison library in their first annual report. The inspectors also reported books purchased for the Auburn, Sing Sing, and Clinton state prison libraries from 1848 to 1853. The Sing Sing catalog for 1848 and these lists include 14% fiction and 32% religious works, compared to 23% fiction and 16% religious works in the Philadelphia County Prison in 1854. Even in the high-profile circumstances of New York state prison libraries about 1850, religious books accounted for only about a third of the volumes. The Sing Sing prison library catalog in 1848 even included Wilhelm Meinhold’s tale, Mary Schweidler, the amber witch: the most interesting trial for witchcraft ever known. In 1864, the New York Prison Association reported with respect to the Sing Sing prison library:

The books most desired by the convicts are tales and magazines, and the latter more on account of the stories they contain than of their discussions of the great questions. … the chaplain excludes novels, as far as possible, from the shelves of the library, admitting (of this category) only the works of standard authors, such as Scott, Cooper, Edgworth, Sherwood, James, Arthur, and a few others. Biography, travels and history afford the best reading for convicts, and these, next to fiction, are most relished by them.^

A wide range of non-religious books were available in mid-nineteenth-century prison libraries. Nineteenth-century New York state prison libraries held biographies, travel books, history books, and novels. They even included recent best-selling novels and books that some public libraries refused to hold.

Nineteenth-century U.S. prison libraries included recent best-sellers. The 1848 Sing Sing library catalog included Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales, both best-sellers published in 1840. In 1853, Clinton State Prison acquired Grace Aguilar’s Home Influence and Donald Mitchell’s Reveries of a Bachelor, best-sellers published in 1847 and 1850, respectively. A best-selling novel, Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World, published in 1850, was available in the prison library in 1854. Warner’s 1852 novel, Queechy, was also in the prison library. Literary scholars now perceive a central theme of Wide, Wide World to be male dominance and female powerlessness.^ Lacking literary education, imprisoned men probably didn’t appreciate that theme.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in 1852. It achieved instant popularity. It was reprinted numerous times and went on to become the best-selling novel of nineteenth-century America. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in the Clinton State Prison library within a year of its publication. It was in the Philadelphia prison library within two years.

Like everyone else, prisoners sought popular books. A prisoner in Sing Sing from 1896 to 1903 observed:

The convicts who make up the requisitions {for the prison library} have the cravings of all prisoners for some new thing, and they see to that no record breaker could pass without being caught up in Sing Sing as quickly as by the Booklovers or Tabard Inn.^

San Quentin and Leavenworth state prison libraries in 1870 and 1874 included 14% and 25% of best-sellers published from 1840 to 1869 and 1840 to 1873, respectively. The Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet’s library in 1874 included 50% of best-sellers published from 1864 to 1873. These prison libraries’ popular book holdings aren’t idiosyncrasies. The recommendations of the N.Y. Prison Association, issued in 1877, included 39% of best-sellers published from 1840 to 1876.

Nineteenth and early-twentieth-century prison libraries also included publicly controversial titles. In 1854, the Philadelphia County Prison library included Thomson’s Occult Sciences: The philosophy of magic, prodigies and apparent miracles, Defoe’s History of the Devil, and Fowler’s Phrenology. Including such works in a public library probably would have been controversial. Darwin’s Origin of the Species was in the California State Prison library in 1870. Darwin’s work wasn’t particularly controversial in the nineteenth century.^ But some biblical believers would have been offended if they were publicly primed to take offense at it.

Prison libraries held books that public libraries refused to stock. In 1881, an American Library Association (ALA) survey of public libraries found fourteen authors whose book were not allowed in more than 20% of public libraries responding to the ALA inquiry. In 1883, the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet held a total of 231 volumes from those authors. The Illinois State Penitentiary prison library included books from twelve of the fourteen authors excluded from more than 20% of public libraries. A prisoner held in Sing Sing from 1896 to 1903 observed:

the {prison} library, never having had the guidance of a chaplain who knew enough to make up an index expurgatorius, has been selected by prisoners who knew books well. As a result, there are some curious books contained in its catalogue, some that a rigid librarian would keep in locked cases. This is true of some French and German books, as you may guess when I say that my first acquaintance with Le Peau {Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin} was made in a book of collected stories, labeled Gems of French Literature, and belonging to the prison library. I might have sought it in vain through the book markets of New York, certainly since the days of the Comstock Vice Society.^ ^

Lack of funding for censors is a buttress of free thought.

Some authorities expressed concern about prison library holdings. In 1912, a study of twenty-three prison library catalogs from prison libraries across the U.S. found that prison library fiction lists included many detective stories and “inferior fiction.” Inferior fiction meant books such as the work of Mrs. E.D.E.N Southworth. The study’s author soberly observed, “it would seem dubious policy to furnish stories of crime which suggest ingenious plans and point out the weak spots in the method of their execution.”^ In his highly influential 1931 book, correctional-education leader Austin MacCormick saw a need to reiterate this expert policy advice:

As for crime and mystery stories, it is undoubtedly wise to reduce them to the minimum in the prison library. Our efforts should be directed toward substituting interest in adventure books dealing with the hazards of exploration, the sea, and pioneer life for interest in the detective stories and crime stories which the average citizen outside the prison reads constantly and which the prisoner wishes to read.^

Controlling prisoners’ reading was part of the MacCormick’s progressive effort to promote prisoners’ reformation.

Prisoners were interested in salacious books. The study of prison library catalogs in 1912 declared:

Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks is probably not on the shelves of a single American public library, but it is listed in three of the twenty-three {prison library} catalogues examined. … Fiction of inferior merit, with characters and situations often at variance with real life, fills page after page {of the prison library catalogs} with such alluring titles as Wife in Name Only, Between Two Sins, Maid, Wife, or Widow, A Woman’s Temptation, The Changed Brides, and A Beautiful Friend.^

For selling Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks to the public in Massachusetts in 1908, a publisher was convicted of selling a book containing “obscene, indecent, and impure language, manifestly tending to corrupt morals of youth.”^ The 1912 prison library study declared:

Books which emphasize sensual detail are surely not good mental food for men taken out of normal human intercourse and shut away with their thoughts, yet the prison libraries contain the novels of the modern “realistic” writers: Lucas Malet, Robert Herrick, Robert Hichens, David Graham Phillips, Robert W. Chambers, George Gibbs, and many others.^

Men in prison are deprived of normal human intercourse with women. Books could help prisoners to escape imaginatively their sensual deprivation.

Prison library holdings counter-intuitively are less prone to public scrutiny than are the holdings of public libraries. Examining the books in a prison library is much more difficult for most persons that is examining the books in a public library. Consider twentieth-century Soviet prisons:

The most paradoxical feature of the prison libraries was that they were not as thoroughly expurgated as other Soviet libraries, whose stock was sifted over and over again. … “State security … forgot to dig in its own bosom,” says Solzhenitsyn. Thus in Lubyanka one could read Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Panteleimon Romanov, and Merezhkovsky. … There were even books in foreign languages in the prison libraries.^

Prisoners reading politically suspect books in the twentieth-century Soviet Union and prisoners reading morally disreputable books in nineteenth-century America were mainly political problems. Those were political problems difficult for the public to perceive. Today, what prisoners read tends not to be regarded as being seriously harmful. The public sense of what’s appropriate for prisoners to read probably matters more than the actual effects of prisoners’ reading.

The share of religious books in U.S. prison libraries declined from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. A prison library scholar has described books purchased for prisoners in the Walnut St. prison in Philadelphia in 1809 as “nearly all … religious works of one kind or another.”^ Excluding bibles and periodicals, 75% of books purchased for prisoners in the Walnut St. prison in Philadelphia in 1809 might be classified as religious works. Within that religious classification, however, would be six copies of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a allegorical tale, and six copies of Doddridge’s Life of Colonel Gardiner, a spiritually themed account of a soldier’s life.

A substantial share of works in the Philadelphia prison library in 1809 can be meaningfully grouped in a separate fiction, literature, and poetry class. That class would include the two copies of Young’s Night thoughts on life, death, & immortality, highly acclaimed poetry of the time, and two four-volume sets of Hannah More’s Stories for the Young Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. The Philadelphia prison library included 24 copies of “Pratter.” These probably were The Prater, a book published in London in 1757. It collected two-penny weekly issues of The Prater. That was published in London in 1756 under the name of the imaginary editor, Nicholas Babble. Modeled after The Spectator, The Prater offered non-pious civil-society guidance in an entertaining style. If these copies were included in the collection statistics under fiction, the share of fiction would be 37% and the share of religious works, 51%.

Classifying books is a cultural exercise, not merely a empirical fact. The catalog of Thomas Jefferson’s library from about 1810 and the classes that Ralph Waldo Emerson used in recommending books to his cousin in 1832 show that types and categories of books were not rigidly divided early in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, for understanding changes in library book distributions over time, the Philadelphia prison library in 1809 can be reasonably interpreted as having about a 50% share of religious books.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the share of religious works in prison libraries was only about 10%. Fiction, literature, and poetry then accounted for perhaps 30% of prison library collections. Biography, geography, history, and travel accounted for perhaps another 25% of the books. The libraries included scientific books of the time, as well as literary and philosophical essays. To the extent that prisoners in the late nineteenth-century U.S. had access to prison libraries, they had access to a wide range of reading material. By 1933, an authoritatively recommended book catalog for prison libraries included only 1% religious works.

Historically, prison libraries have not had narrower book holdings than have public libraries. The pioneering public libraries that Thomas Bray established in American about 1700 held a higher share of religious books than did the prison library in Philadelphia in 1809. Nineteenth-century U.S. prison libraries held recent best-sellers, as well as books that were publicly controversial.

Overall, the distribution of book holdings in mid-nineteenth-century U.S. prison libraries was roughly comparable with book holdings in broadly used libraries outside prisons. The New York Society Library, a subscription library, was the largest library in New York City in 1850. At that time, it held about 22% fiction, literature, and poetry and 11% religious titles. The Library’s leadership deliberately reduced the share of novels from 8.4% in 1838 to 3.3% in 1850 in order to better promote the “march of improvement” in society.^ The Apprentices’ Library of New York City, a large library open to apprentices at no cost, held 27% fiction titles and 10% religious titles in 1855.

Given considerable scope for inconsistency in classifying books, nineteenth-century prison libraries had broadly similar book distributions to those of public libraries. New York State prison libraries about 1850 held 16% fiction and 31% religious books. The Philadelphia prison library in 1854 held 20% fiction and 16% religious books. Prisoners, on average, almost surely were less educated and less wealthy than users of the New York Society Library and the Apprentices’ Library. Adjusting book holdings for library user characteristics other than imprisonment status would make the prison and non-prison library collections even more similar. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe were the novels most frequently found in prison libraries.^ Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe were also among the most popular books for the working classes outside of prison in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain.^

While the composition of collections in prison and non-prison libraries changed across the nineteenth century, both types of libraries still had roughly similar collections in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1893, the U.S. Bureau of Education and the American Library Association (ALA), with extensive help from the New York State Library and the enthusiastic support of Melvil Dewey, issued a premier, authoritative list of books recommended for the average public library. In a prefatory letter, the U.S. Commissioner of Education declared:

Sir: I have the honor to transmit for publication a catalog of a model library of 5000 volumes selected by experts of the American Library Association, and representing as nearly as possible the 5000 books that a new library ought to obtain first for its collection.^ ^

That list included 29% fiction, literature, and poetry and 4% religious works. In 1877, the New York Prison Association’s catalog of recommended books for prison libraries included 37% fiction, literature, and poetry, and 15% religious works. In 1883, the prison library in the Southern Illinois State Penitentiary at Chester held 47% fiction, literature, and poetry and 13% religious works. The relatively utilitarian, information-oriented ethos of the public library movement may account for the somewhat lower share of imaginative and religious works in the 1893 American Library Association model public library catalog. Across the nineteenth century, the share of religious books decreased, and the share of fiction, literature, and poetry increased, in both prison and non-prison library collections. Both prison and non-prison libraries maintained broadly similar book distributions across the nineteenth century.

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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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.

Scholars have argued vociferously about the relative merits of a public-library model versus a change-based model for prison libraries. The public library model is centered on the right to read:

regardless of the institution’s philosophy, the primary reason for a library is simple: inmates have an undeniable right to read.^

Inmate’s right to read can be interpreted as part of a conspiracy of cultural change and control:

Prison libraries and reading programs are instruments of cultural hegemony, designed to instill a desire to emulate certain behavior and morality. In short, education and reading are molders of character, but only through prescription, control, and compliance.^

A pragmatic change-based model of prison libraries emphasizes the state’s interest in reforming prisoners:

the state’s interest, reflected in the goals of correctional institutions, should therefore determine the nature and purpose of library services to prisoners.^

A right to read does not put reading material into persons’ hands, or provide much guidance about what and how much, at what cost, by whom, to whom, and in accordance with what procedure reading material and reading should occur. At the same time, the operation of correctional institutions isn’t reasonably understood as a unified, veiled conspiracy of cultural hegemony. The operation of incarceration facilities also doesn’t seem to reflect coherent, rational, humane public goals for changing offenders. What a prison librarian should do is far from clear.

For prison libraries, and for the justice system more generally, the fundamental democratic hope is that reasoned discussion and respect for human rights and dignity are the right course. Debate over the public-library model versus the change-based model has been dishearteningly violent:

The arguments he {Coyle} invokes do such violence to accepted canons of library service that examining them may shed light on the broadest goals of librarianship. … A large corps of frontline seasoned practitioners of prison librarianship disagree so vehemently with the tenets of this book that a formal published critique is essential. … Coyle’s “change-based” program goals chillingly echo those of Hans Löwe, whose 1938 “The Purpose of a Prison Library” outlined these aims…. Löwe cites several key works to achieve these goals: Mein Kampf, Gritzbach’s life of Hermann Göring, and Volke ohne Raum (A People without a Livingspace).^

A proponent of the change-based model seems to opposes prison libraries having as a purpose, or perhaps as a primary or only purpose, enjoyment and release from reading library books:

Enjoyment and release? Bullshit! This is what I meant when I said earlier that prison libraries had lost their way. Providing inmates with palliatives should not, cannot be our purpose.^

That declaration might charitably be interpreted as an emphatic statement to highlight a rhetorical dichotomy. However, it generated a scholarly call for punishment:

To suggest a movement away from the public library model, in which patrons choose for themselves what to read, view, think, and be, toward a philosophy of enforced use of collections materials based on the librarian’s own biases (even at the materials selection stage, this is still censorship) is a case of bigotry and discrimination that really should be challenged in court by ethically inspired correctional librarians or residents of correctional facilities. To my way of thinking, this is also a case for Judith Krug and the Office for Intellectual Freedom.^

That’s a sad scholarly development. Late-twentieth-century scholarship has highly valued obsession with relations of discursive power:

Between book and reader, in every sphere, stand relations of power, governing the process by which texts become available and interpretations are made.^

Dismantling the construction of mass incarceration requires more scholarly activity committed to truth and freedom.

In the U.S., state prison libraries developed in the nineteenth century more quickly than did public libraries. In 1875, prison libraries held 3.0 books per prisoner, compared to public libraries’ holdings of 0.5 library books per adult in the U.S. as a whole. Nineteenth-century prison libraries had diverse book holdings, including recent best-sellers and controversial titles.

Recommended holding of books per person were higher for prison libraries than for public libraries. In the 1930s, committees within the American Library Association (ALA) and the American Prison Association (APA) established standards for libraries. For public libraries in places with populations less than 10000, the ALA standard for book collections was three volumes per capita.^ The ALA-APA standard for prison libraries was ten books per inmate.^ ^ In 1962, the ALA and the American Correctional Association (ACA) adopted new objectives and standards for libraries in correctional institutions:

A collection within an institution should never be less than 6,000 well-selected volumes with at least 10 books per inmate. Institutions which have large groups of long-term prisoners should provide a minimum of 15-20 volumes per inmate.

The objectives and standards distinguished very small correctional institutions:

An exception may be made for a very small institution such as a camp or prison farm. Here there should be a small reference collection, supplemented by frequently changed books from a bookmobile, public library, or the State Library.^

These standards were incorporated into the ACA’s Manual of Correctional Standards in 1966.^ Both library and correctional professionals recognized the importance of books for prisoners.

Prison libraries continued to lead public libraries throughout the twentieth century in holdings per adult served. Public libraries in 1977 covered in their service territories about 87% of the U.S. population. Public libraries held 2.3 books per adult in their service territories. Prison libraries, in comparison, held 10.2 books per prisoner. U.S. prison libraries in 1977 thus held more than four times as many books per person served than did public libraries.

Prison libraries have held more than books. In the 1977 figures of books per adult, books comprised bound volumes, including bound volumes of periodicals. Some prison libraries also contained unbound current periodicals. A survey of state prison libraries in 1970 found 82 state prison libraries in 29 states held audio-visual materials and had audiovisual equipment.^ Some prison libraries responding to a survey in 1977 reported thousands of audiovisual titles.

Recent prison library recommendations underscore the importance of books to prisoners. In 1992, the ALA standard for prison libraries became “no less than five thousand (5000) titles, selected according to policy, or fifteen (15) titles per inmate, up to 2,500 inmates, whichever is greater.”^ The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions currently offers as a general guideline a minimum “2000 titles or ten (10) titles per inmate, whichever is greater.”^

Librarians have made extraordinary efforts to serve inmates. In 1971, Betty Barlow was a paraprofessional library staff member at the Lawrence Public Library in Kansas. On her own time, she personally initiated library service to the jail in Lawrence. Evidently both the jail staff and inmates appreciated Ms. Barlow’s efforts. In 1977, a new jail was built with facilities for a library. About 1979, Ms. Barlow reported, “We have over 1,000 volumes in the jail library and a back-up of about 5,000 paperbacks at the main library.”^

The extraordinary rise in incarceration in the U.S. since 1980 has reduced the quality of prison library service. By 2004, public library books per adult service had risen to 2.6 books per person. Prison libraries held about 7 books per prisoner in the year 2000, down from 10.2 in 1977. Prison library book acquisitions have not kept up with the rapidly growing prison population. But that’s not a good focus for policy concern. Mass incarceration is a much more serious problem than the shortfall in prison library books. The rise of mass incarceration underscores the importance of making prisoners relevant in public understanding and public action.

The decline of printed matter and the rise of digital works create fundamental challenges for prison libraries. Public libraries are exploring new, non-print media for providing public access to public information and public narratives. Prisoners, who retain their public citizenship, need access to public information and public narratives to make their public citizenship meaningful. That need goes beyond information legally required to uphold inmates’ constitutional right to lawful access to courts. Consistent with public safety, continuing prisoner access to public information and public narratives requires innovation in prison library services.

Prisoners have long been relatively active library users. In 1863, the Prison Association of New York reported on the operation of the prison library in New York’s Sing Sing state prison:

About two-thirds of the convicts (at present 550 to 600) {in 1863, Sing Sing’s held 837 inmates} make use of the library. The books are returned and others given out every third week. The prisoners come in squads, and each selects a volume (they can take out but one at a time) for himself. … In addition to his volume of secular reading, any convict may take out one or two religious books; and these he can return at any time and get others. There are about one hundred who patronize the religious department of the library.^

Assuming that religious-book borrowers, who comprise about a sixth of all library users, borrowed two religious books per three weeks in addition to borrowing one secular book per three weeks, library users on average borrowed 23 books per year. Circulation data from four other prison libraries about a decade later indicate that about 80% of prisoners used the prison library. Prison library users borrowed 42 books per year. Public library users about this time borrowed an estimated 17 books per year from public libraries.^ Public library users borrowed books less than half as frequently as prison library users did.

Prisoners’ interest in books in Sing Sing state prison in 1863 wasn’t exceptional. Prison culture has been described as primarily oral.^ Nonetheless, even in the nineteenth century many prisoners were reading books. In 1848 in Auburn State Prison, New York, the chaplain reported that 62% of prisoners could read when they entered prison. Another 23% learned to read while in prison.^ Across U.S. state prisons about 1875, 48% of prisoners could read better than “read with difficulty” and 78% of prisoners used the prison library.

Prisoners’ interest in books was greater than prison libraries’ provision of books. A prisoner in Sing Sing Prison in New York State from 1897 to 1903 reported that prisoners were allowed to borrow only one book per week. Secondary lending was forbidden. That prisoner observed:

this rule of lending books is simply disregarded (although the objectionable chaplain I have referred to attempted in vain to enforce it), so that by a system of exchange a group of readers can have half a dozen books a week, and by harmonizing their applications can have this supply assorted, some fiction, history, poetry, philosophy – in fact, the whole range of good literature.^

A social-scientific study of prison libraries in 1918 observed:

The prison library problem is not one of readers, but of books to supply the demand. In spite of the dead-wood gathered from attics and from Sunday-school libraries – the out-of-date religious books, and the moral tales, — the prisoners’ reading is far in excess of the circulation statistics from other libraries.^

An officer at the Indiana Reformatory at Jeffersonville stated that, from 1903 to 1909, the number of volumes in the library increased from 3500 to “more than 7000 volumes that were up-to-date and from seventy-five to one hundred of the best weekly and monthly magazines, all of which were catalogued and indexed, and a catalogue placed in the hands of each inmate of the institution.” As a result of this improvement, prison library book circulation rose four-fold to 182,000 volumes per year, or 165 volumes circulated per inmate per year.^ Prisoners also acquired their own books. While prison libraries held many more books per user than did public libraries, prison library books did not merely sit on library shelves.

Prison library authorities noted that prisoners used prison libraries much more than others used public libraries. In 1938, the Director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) declared:

A significant indication of the constructive value of the library service in the Federal prisons is found in the fact that the average inmate reads five to ten times as many books as the average citizen using public libraries.^

Other authorities made similar claims.^ ^ ^ For fiscal year 1939, the BOP’s Director reported that “average circulation per reader was 85 books.”^ ^ Approximately 75% of federal penitentiary and reformatory inmates used the library.^ That implies circulation of 61 books per inmate per year. A survey of prison libraries in large prisons (holding more than 500 prisoners) about 1949 found:

Most state {prison} libraries circulated less than 30 books per inmate, with a few circulating as high as 40 or more a year. The majority of the federal {prison} libraries circulated approximately 40 books per year.^

More detailed statistics for 1938 indicate that, for reporting prisons, inmates in federal prisons borrowed on average 45 books per year, compared to 29 books per year for inmates in state prisons. The corresponding circulation statistics limited to federal and state prison library users were 61 books per user in federal prisons and 43 books per user in state prisons. Public library book circulation about this time was 14 books per public library user per year.^

Prisoners’ use of prison libraries seems to have fallen from 1938 to 1977. Book circulation per prisoner can be estimated better than book circulation per prison library user. From 1938 to 1977, circulation per prisoner fell from 45 books per year to 15 books per year in federal prisons. The corresponding trend in state prisons was from 31 book per year to 17 books per year. Growth in time prisoners spent watching television may have caused that fall in reading.

Despite an apparent reduction in prisoners’ library use across the twentieth century, prisoners remained much more active library users than the general public. In 1977, public library circulation per person served was 5.2. That was about a third of the level of prisoners’ library use. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literary indicated that 66% of prisoners used the prison library monthly or more frequently. The corresponding library use figure for non-prisoners was 35%.

For more than a century, libraries have been more significant to prisoners than to the general public. From no latter than 1875 to the present, prison libraries have held many more books per prisoner than public libraries have held books per non-prisoner. Prison libraries have also circulated many more books per prisoner per year than public libraries have circulated books per non-prisoner per year. Prisoners’ relatively extensive experience of reading books is an under-appreciated aspect of prisoners’ communicative position.

Inmates in prisons and jails read much more than do persons not incarcerated. In the U.S. about 2003, inmates with access to television and reading material spent on average 2.4 hours per day reading. Persons ages 15 and over outside prisons and jails in 2004, sex-weighted according to the sex ratio of inmates, spent on average 0.3 hours per day reading. Inmates spend about seven times more time per day reading than do non-inmates.

While inmates’ possible activities are much more constrained than those of non-inmates, inmates spend slightly less time watching television than do non-inmates. Both radio and television have been omnipresent in prisons. A man who spent nine months in Canadian prisons about 1974 described the torment of radio:

Every cell and/or corridor is fitted with well-grated speakers, very occasionally flanked by a volume control but never by a kill button. We were, in other words, obliged to listen to rock music from 7:00 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., and no place to hide. … I couldn’t begin to count the number of times we asked the duty officer to shut the damn thing off, our ears were ringing and some of us wanted to sleep, to read, etc. – all to no avail. The camp staff insisted that we wanted the music, even if for some peculiar reason we didn’t realize that we did.^

Personal radios and music players subsequent became prevalent in prisons. Television became a media presence like radio had been. An academic has described television as a means to pacify inmates:

To regulate the mass of inmates, California’s prison officials have discovered a cheaper device {than books}: television. With sets in the cells, inmates can be pacified on popular entertainment. Cummins noted that whereas reading generates writing – all it requires is pencil and paper – viewing television has no tangible results. The political intelligentsia in prison bewails the strategy in language that recalls the mass culture critique. One inmate told Cummins: “I think the institution said, like, ‘What the fuck we doin’? Let’s give these motherfuckers a TV. That’ll stop ‘em from readin’ and writin’.’”^

Among inmates in the U.S. about the year 2004, 84% reported access to television as well as access to newspapers, magazines, or books. Inmates with such access spent on average 2.6 hours per day watching television. Non-inmates ages 15 and over, sex-weighted according to the sex ratio of inmates, spent on average 2.8 hours per day watching television. Television dominates the lives of inmates less than it does for non-inmates. Inmates read more and watch less television than do non-inmates.

Books are a relatively important type of reading for inmates compared to non-inmates. Among inmates in U.S. state and federal prisons in 2003 whose first language was English, 53% read books daily. Only 33% of non-inmates read books daily. Reading of letters and notes, in contrast, favors non-inmates. Among inmates, 34% read letters and notes daily. Among non-inmates, who spend much less total time reading, a larger share (53%) read letters and notes daily. Books are public works. Letters and notes are typically personal communication. Inmates’ communication is skewed toward public works relative to personal communication with friends and family.