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.