During the day I work as a librarian at a college, which I must confess, is a really terrific place to be. In my profession, working at a college library is often considered the top of the heap in terms of desirability. Somewhat lower on my list of preferences would be military libraries, then government libraries, corporate libraries, then a public or K-12 library. But the absolute lowest of the low in terms of desirability is the Prison Library.
And yet, this article blew my mind, and almost made me want to turn in my resignation papers as soon as I could find a prison library that was hiring.
Avi Steinberg wrote a fascinating memoir about his two years working in a prison library. He was very frank about the inmates who use it as a means to pass notes to one another or check out mindless pulp. And yet, who knows when one of those pulp novels might help an inmate to take a different perspective on their life? Books can have a powerful, transformative effect on people, and it is likely that the typical home environment of these inmates was not bursting with a wide selection of reading material. In a world where Facebook and text messaging is the extent of pleasure reading for a huge swath of our population, it makes perfect sense that the typical inmate may not have had steady exposure to good books, but in a prison, what else is there to do? Avi writes of people who came to the library every day in order to delve back into the world of the printed word they had discovered, one without walls and dead ends. He writes of a young mother who had never even been inside a library until she was incarcerated, and was unaware she could apply for a free library card as soon as she was released.
As I read the article, I kept thinking of the phrase, whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. Who is more marginal in society than an incarcerated inmate? What am I doing at a plush college working with students who are on the launching pad to a glittering future? I can’t say that I am brave enough to walk away from my very cozy position, but the next time I see an advertisement for a prison librarian in one of my trade journals, I will certainly give the position a much greater deal of consideration.
Photo courtesy of Greg Klee and The Boston Globe