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

INTRODUCTION

Introduction Ordinary people don’t know how much books can mean to someone who’s cooped up.— anne frank, The Diary of a Young Girl Books are a lifeline to people in here. We live life vicariously through books.—caesar, State Correctional Institution at Muncy “they lull us to sleep with romance! I’m telling you, four shelves of romance!” So says Solo,1 a fifty-six-year-old African American woman, in discussing the library in the prison where she is incarcerated. In Solo’s view, the library caters to imprisoned women’s “fantasy” of “being an entrepreneur or falling in love,” while offering few resources to help women address the issues that bring them back to prison. “You pack all these people into these compounds and you don’t have the staff nor the time nor the resources to really deal with why are you an inmate?” she explains. Solo then sharply criticizes current reductions in educational opportunities for incarcerated women, concluding, “You cannot beat the sin out. You have to nurture the sin out. . . . You just want to beat me, beat me, beat me, punish me, punish me, punish me, and then expect me to come out of prison reformed! . . . At some point I’m just gonna become what you expect me to. I’m gonna become that monster.” Solo’s critique of the diminished holdings in prison libraries, her insights about the dehumanizing nature of U.S. penal policy, and her conviction that reading and education enable prisoners to follow new paths speak to this book’s central concerns. Drawing on extensive individual interviews and group discussions that I conducted with ninety-four women imprisoned in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Reading Is My Window explores how some women prisoners use the limited reading materials available to them in creative and important ways: to come to terms with their pasts, to negotiate their present 2 | introduction experiences, and to reach toward different futures.2 My chapters focus on the material dimensions of women’s reading practices, as well as the modes of reading that women adopt when engaging with three highly popular categories of books: (1) narratives of victimization, (2) African American urban fiction, and (3) self-help and inspirational texts. My book also situates contemporary prisoners ’ reading practices in relation to the history of reading and education in U.S. penal contexts. Since the prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the retributive justice framework of the 1980s and beyond, prisoners’ opportunities for reading and education have steadily declined. Prison libraries became a very low priority during the prison-building campaigns of the 1980s, and many were severely depleted or closed due to diminished funding and space. Limited funding for prison libraries remains a pressing problem. As Solo indicates, the decline of prison libraries has been matched by a decline in opportunities for higher education in prisons. In 1994, Congress eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners, effectively defunding all college programs in U.S. prisons and sparking broader cuts in all levels of educational programming. In lobbying to eliminate Pell Grants for prisoners, Tennessee congressman Bart Gordon conveyed his sense of the wastefulness of educating prisoners by comparing them to disabled animals: “Just because one blind hog may occasionally find an acorn doesn’t mean many other blind hogs will. We can’t afford to throw millions of unaccountable dollars into prisoner Pell Grants in search of a few acorns.” Such images of incarcerated people help to justify their treatment as “members of disposable populations,” as “nothing but bodies—beyond or unworthy of rehabilitation.”3 Recent legal precedents indicate a similar dehumanization of prisoners and a concomitant dismissal of the importance of reading in prisons. In its 2006 decision Beard v. Banks—a case that I discuss further in Chapter 1—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 serves as an “incentive[e] for inmate growth.” Because these prisoners have no access to television, radio, or telephone, they receive no current news. The dissenting opinion argues that access to social, political, aesthetic, and moral ideas is crucial for preserving one’s sense of humanity and citizenship; according to the majority opinion, however, such claims are moot when “dealing with especially difficult prisoners.”4 The increasing curtailment of reading in prisons bespeaks a dehumanization of incarcerated men and...