The Story Within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading

Introduction: "All us women have a story within us"

Introduction “All us women have a story within us” During the late 1960s, The Communist Manifesto was one of the most popular books at San Quentin prison. Incarcerated men copied pages of the book by hand and shared them with each other by way of a clothesline strung fromcelltocell.Thisimageofmaleprisonersreadingradicalliteraturestandsin sharp contrast to the picture of reading that emerges in contemporary women’s prisons. Currently incarcerated women tend to circulatepopularreadingmaterials such as evangelical Christian self-help books, narratives of victimization, and African American urban fiction with titles such as Forever a Hustler’s Wife and Thugs and the Women Who Love Them. Yet as I have discovered through more than twenty years of involvement with women prisoners—first as a social worker, then as a volunteer GED tutor and book club facilitator, and finally as a scholar researching women’s reading practices in three different prisons—this contrast indicates far more about the climate for prisoners’ reading in the two time periods than about the readers themselves. Prisoners’ opportunities for reading and education have sharply declined over the past thirty years. As the prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s gave way to the retributive justice framework of the 1980s, prisons radically reduced their library budgets, converted library space into prison cells, and installed televisions as a pacification tool. In the prisons where I have conducted research, the libraries are now funded entirely by revenue from the vending machines, and that funding is shared among several programs in the prison. Furthermore, owing to security concerns, prisoners can only receive brand-new books sent directly from publishers, which means that buying books is far too expensive for most women. Even women’s access to prison libraries is limited; because some penal officials fear that libraries serve as a “gay bar,” women must sign up one week in advance to visit the library, and their visits are limited to thirty minutes. Many books are also banned, from Harry Potter (because it depicts witchcraft ) to medical texts (because they include images of women’s breasts). Racialized restrictions on reading, which have been in place since the birth of the penitentiary, likewise delimit prisoners’ access to books. As one example among many, while allowing Ku Klux Klan publications such as Negro Watch and Jew Watch, the Texas penal system has banned Toni Morrison’s novel, Paradise, on the grounds that it contains “information of a racial nature” that seems “designed to achieve a breakdown of prisons through inmate . . . strikes or riots” (Morrison letter 154). Penal officials fear that Morrison’s references to the KKK and the civil rights and Black Power movements will lead to a “breakdown of prisons,” yet they argue that Klan publications do not threaten their ability to “maintain . . . order and security” (Vogel 17). Prisoners’ opportunities for reading have been further curtailed by recent legal precedents. In its 2006 decision Beard v. Banks, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed it constitutional for a Pennsylvania prison to deny secular newspapers and magazines to prisoners in its long-term segregation unit, on the grounds that this denial of reading materials serves as an “incentive[e] for inmate growth” (qtd. in Breyer 2). Because these prisoners have no access to television, radio, telephone, or visitors, they receive no current news. The two dissenting justices insist that access to the full range of ideas is crucial for preserving one’s sense of humanity and citizenship, but the majority opinion deems such claims moot when “dealing with especially difficult prisoners” (Breyer 11). The fact that African Americans and Latino/as are overrepresented in supermaximum prisons makes this denial of citizenship even more troubling. Exacerbating these trends, Congress eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners in 1994, which sparked dramatic cuts in all levels of educational programming and contributed to an increase in the presence of evangelical Christian educational programs and reading materials in prisons.1 At a time when the Supreme Court has authorized the denial of reading materials as an “incentiv[e] for inmate growth,” it seems more important than ever to recognize incarcerated people’s humanity and to illuminate the roles that reading plays in their vital and varied efforts to think, understand, grow, and remain connected to the world beyond the prison gates. In this spirit, The Story Within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading features extended interviews with eleven women prisoners. I was privileged to hear these women’s reflections while conducting research for my recently published book, Reading is My Window: Books...