Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons

FIVE: To Set the Captives Free: Self-Help Reading Practices

chapter five To Set the Captives Free self-help reading practices “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” Kafka wrote. Self-help is how we skate.— wendy kaminer, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional It don’t matter if it’s foreign to me. If I feel it’s going to help me, I’m going to read it, and I haven’t found a book yet that didn’t help me.—ellen, Northeast Pre-Release Center in women’s prisons, narratives of self-improvement and religious transformation have largely replaced narratives of political transformation, reflecting a broader cultural shift from the politicized climate of collective activism and social critique during the early 1970s to the self-help climate of the 1980s and beyond.1 As Eva Illouz argues in Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (2008), therapeutic discourse has gained primacy across the spectrum of U.S. social life, from families to prisons to corporations. Such discourse has become a central means to “express, shape, and guide selfhood ” in the United States, Illouz contends, and “self-change is perhaps the chief source of contemporary moral worth.”2 Self-help discourse has a Christian inflection in the women’s prisons where I conducted research; indeed, the majority of available self-help books are written by Christian authors and geared toward a Christian audience. As I explained in Chapter 2, the chaplain’s libraries in both the Northeast Pre-Release Center and the State Correctional Institution at Muncy consist entirely of donated books, most of which come from Christian authors, ministries, churches, and volunteers. In prisons throughout the country, the decrease in state and federal funding for rehabilitative programming has been matched by an increase in the 174 | self-help reading practices presence of Christian volunteers, reading materials, and educational programs. As a 2007 federal appeals court decision underscored, this influx has meant that some opportunities, privileges, and reading materials are available only to prisoners who are willing to embrace a Christian perspective.3 In the Ohio and Pennsylvania prisons, Christian self-help authors who have gained some popularity include T. D. Jakes, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Max Lucado, Merlin R. Carrothers, and Joel Osteen. Some women have also developed a fondness for the Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul series edited by Jack Canfield, Mark Hansen, and Tom Lagana, which is distributed free to prisoners across the United States.4 These authors and materials are overshadowed, however , by the tremendous popularity of Joyce Meyer, a world-renowned televangelist , prolific author of 104 books, and keynote speaker at the 2002 Christian Coalition convention.5 Meyer’s popularity among women prisoners stems, in large part, from the widespread availability of her books. Joyce Meyer Ministries has adopted the slogan “By faith and God’s grace, we will reach every nation, every city, every day through the spoken and written Word.” The ministry might well add “every prison”; indeed, its prison outreach group has distributed more than 1.6 million “hygiene gift bags”—each containing soap and/or shampoo and one of Meyer’s books—to prisoners in all fifty U.S. states and in twenty-five other countries. “Basic hygiene products, like soap and shampoo, are something most prisoners can’t afford,” the ministry’s website explains, “and they are often the very things that open their hearts to reading the enclosed book.” The prison ministry often holds religious services as part of its book distribution, in an effort to bring “eternal freedom” to prisoners.6 Women incarcerated in Pennsylvania received gift bags from Joyce Meyer in 2006, and many continue to trade the books that they received. Prisoners regularly borrow the books that Meyer has donated to the chaplains’ libraries, and some women write to Meyer for free books; they can receive a total of eight free books during their incarceration, chosen from a limited range of Meyer’s works. Once they start reading Meyer’s books, women often begin buying them through the Crossroads Christian book club, and many also subscribe to Meyer’s monthly magazine, Enjoying Everyday Life.7 The popularity of self-help books in prisons generates considerable anxiety among a range of academics. As a colleague asked when I was discussing prisoners ’ engagements with such books, “Is this what’s good for them?!” Many critics argue that self-help discourse effects “an individualization of social conflict” by focusing on individual transformation rather than addressing broad...