At POP, several times a year we make large book donations to maximum security prisons. We spend week beforehand lining up permissions and details so that we can leave a stack of books at their front door.
We are never invited in.
Prisons are designed to be a world separate from our own. A place devoid of color and indulgence, and largely invisible to those who have never been inside. For many, the only time we think of prisons is when we’re forced to by action films or horrific news stories. Made alternately exciting and terrifying, our view of prisons is always bleak, dangerous, and completely distanced from what we call “the real world.”
It is for that reason that I found “Running the Books” so intriguing. Subtitled “the Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” this memoir by Avi Steinberg offers a view of prison work, and by extension prison life and culture, that is at once revealing and completely relatable.
An outsider both to the inmate population and prison guard staff, Steinberg continuously teeters on a fine line created by the dictates of prison regulations. Occasionally he falls off, sometimes for good and sometimes for worse. However, Steinberg learns a great deal about hope, despair, pride, compassion, revenge, duty, and the depths of the human condition along the way.
Most striking to me were the descriptions of the prison’s library and the inconsistency of its stated purpose. Throughout the book, Steinberg adds reasons for the library, “roles” as stated and unstated by various staff and inmates he encounters. Some believed the library served to calm the inmates during their captivity. Staff came to gather information on the inmates, inmates came merely to gather. Some inmates also came for valuable information from the law collection; others hoped for education, productivity, or just a place to waste some time.
The most colorful description was Steinberg’s own. In a world where libraries are more often translated as stark and solitary places for quiet introspection, it was both refreshing and revealing to read that prison libraries are the one spot to escape from those very things while doing time. To Steinberg, the library served as the area’s speakeasy, a dynamic “escape” of sorts from the various confines of imprisonment through conversation, information, and camaraderie.
At the POP Project, it is precisely these sorts of interactions that we believe books should create.