In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter two The Underground Book Railroad material dimensions of reading I have to have a book. I have to, for when I’m bored or having a hard time sleeping, and I try to stay away from all this craziness here, and just to keep my mind right.—darlene, Northeast Pre-Release Center I eat at least three books per week. I devour them.—candy, State Correctional Institution at Muncy describing her reading habits in prison, a thirty-nine-year-old African American woman named Cassandra explains, “I read every night faithfully from nine to midnight. Lights have to go off at eleven, but I’m still up in the bed reading. I have the bathroom light on.” Because she often has to wait for months before a library book becomes available, Cassandra explains that she and other women cooperate among themselves to gain access to books. “All the book readers, we all hang together,” she says. “If [someone] is just about to bring this book back to the library, we say, ‘Let me go with you to the library so I can check it right back out.’ Or if they have a book that’s due the next day, I can read real fast and I’ll tell them, ‘I’ll give it to you in the morning’ or ‘I’ll take it over there.’ I mean, we got that bond and trust.” In her continuous search for good books, Cassandra regularly approaches women who own books and says, “Please can I read this book? I will not write in your book. I will not bend no pages in your book. I will not eat with your book.” By now, she explains, “everyone knows how serious I am about books so they’ll come up and they’ll give books to me and be like, ‘I have this,’ or ‘Have you read this?’ I run around here to find books, and if I don’t have anything, I’ll just be like in a real cruddy mood.” An African American woman named Denise coined the phrase “the Under- material dimensions of reading | 55 ground Book Railroad” to describe the informal networks through which she and other prisoners share books. The Underground Book Railroad serves as a crucial reminder of the historical continuities between slavery and incarceration , as well as the ongoing ways in which racial ideologies delimit conceptions of prisoners’ humanity and capacity for change. The phrase also underscores the connections that reading can foster in prison—connections that sometimes trespass the boundaries separating incarcerated women from one another, from people outside prison, and from the world of ideas. Furthermore, the Underground Book Railroad evokes the imaginative, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual ways in which reading allows some women to proceed to new destinations , even if they will spend the rest of their lives behind bars. In this chapter, I focus primarily on the Ohio and Pennsylvania prisons in addressing how the spatial organization, regulations, and material conditions of prisons and prison libraries delimit women’s access to books. I then explore the daily, pragmatic ways in which prisoners engage with books as “equipment for living” in spaces of confinement.1 Library Settings, Procedures, and Holdings Access to books is limited for women from the moment they pass through the prison gates. Consider, for instance, how the location, visiting hours, and physical setting of prison libraries affect access to books.2 In both the North Carolina and Pennsylvania prisons, the library is located in a building where educational classes take place. Some women thus have occasion to pass the library during the course of their day. In the Ohio prison, by contrast, the library is located in a building that houses several administrative offices, so prisoners only see the library if they have deliberately planned to visit it. The relative accessibility of the libraries in the North Carolina and Pennsylvania prisons is offset, however, by the fact that women can only visit the libraries by appointment. Prisoners in North Carolina can go to the library only when their particular housing unit has been scheduled for a visit. The Pennsylvania prison recently instituted a similar policy whereby women must sign up one week in advance to visit the library. Women whose names are on the callout sheet arrive at the same time and must leave together thirty minutes later; those who have scheduled time for legal research can remain for one and a half hours. Because this new policy makes it...

Share