 Hi everyone and welcome to a training on beginning library services for incarcerated people. This training is made possible through the Mellon Foundation through a grant to San Francisco Public Library titled Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People. This training is part of a series on a wide range of topics about library services and incarceration, including information about public library services, prison library services, legal services, and more. You can find all of the trainings in this series that have been put out thus far on San Francisco Public Libraries, Jail and Reentry Services YouTube channel. They're also available through the American Library Association's Learning Management System. If you'd like to receive a certificate for viewing this training, please log into the ALA link below this video on the YouTube and you'll receive a free certificate for viewing the training. There's also a transcript available at a link in the video description. Today we're going to hear from a few different library types about what it's been like to get their library services started. This includes information about academic library services, services for youth and juvenile detention, and services for adults in an adult jail. But first we'll hear from Brittany Lamar about some of her experiences accessing libraries and information while she was incarcerated. Hello, my name is Brittany Lamar. I currently serve as the project manager for Connecticut's Juvenile Justice Policy Oversight Committee and the assistant director for the National Prison Debate League. I'm also a dual degree master's in public policy and JD student at UConn Law. Prior to this, I was incarcerated for four years and during my incarceration, access to the library was extremely limited. Unless I was participating in educational or vocational programming, getting access to the library and reading material was few and far between. Furthermore, getting into those educational programs was also limited because they were constantly waitlist to participate in them. During my four years incarcerated, I was able to access the library four times. There were about four rows of books in the library and the material was outdated and mostly fictional. Nonetheless, when I started my higher ed and prison programs, access to resources and material remains limited. For class, we were given a textbook by our professor, which we were taught from. Access to supplemental learning material and research was not accessible. There were no computers, technology, relevant educational material in the library or access to online research databases to enhance my learning. I learned to read from a book and recite what it said. Furthermore, I lacked the ability to ask my teacher's questions, a librarian questions, speak and engaging dialogue with students outside of my class. And my understanding of things and concepts and ideas of which I was learning in class was very limited. What I found upon release when I continued my education, going on to complete my bachelors and now in pursuit of my master's and my law degree is that I severely lacked analytical skills and critical thinking. Learning on the outside in an educational setting required reading material through an analytical lens and conducting further research on conflicting arguments and perspectives to really get a better understanding and holistic picture on issues, fields and ideas. And I lacked the ability to think for myself and engage in text with critical thinking. Expanding access to library services and reading material inside carceral facilities is so extremely important because it allows for the decarceration of minds and it opens minds to things that individuals haven't thought of or known prior to incarceration. Part of human evolution and transformation requires the introduction of new information and a new way of thinking and that requires access to relevant reading material. Additionally, the library is a place, a quiet space for for studying and learning. And that does not exist inside carceral facilities or inside a dorm room or inside yourself. So a library also allows space for individuals to learn in a quiet setting. That's cohesive to learning. Being able to access a librarian, whether that's in person or virtually or even gain access to outside reading materials that exist in libraries in in local communities is quintessential to the normalcy. It would be extremely invaluable to be able to have access to that. For instance, as I mentioned, there's often waitlist to get to participate in educational programings or vocational programings, even more so for women, as a further marginalized population within the carceral system and facilities with oftentimes less resources than are given to the to the male facilities. And so being able to provide reading materials or access to reading materials or information, being able to explore ideas that one is interested in or wants to learn more about beyond what's just provided in the facility or given guidance on where to look for something or what to read to start to better understand themselves and their interests is quintessential to the to the role of an individual while while they're currently incarcerated. I think we can start by doing this by allowing access to librarians or those out in the community like librarians and libraries out in the community that can engage in either conversation or access to individuals who are currently incarcerated. I think it allows one's mind to expand beyond the walls that it that the bodies currently confined to and it will it will translate to better outcomes for individuals upon their release. Brittany, thank you so much for that just incredibly powerful testament to the real need for there to be not only books inside but access to librarians and staff that can provide not only more access across the walls, but also can advocate for people who are incarcerated to have access, even if they're not in programs, can make sure that libraries are staying open, can make sure that new books are coming in. And I'm really excited to highlight our next three presenters who are really getting that work going. Hi, everyone, I'm Matthew Reynolds. I'm a librarian with Cornell University Library. And my role is to provide library services to incarcerated students in the transportation program. So I'm this librarian. So my official title is Outreach and Information Services Librarian. When the position was created, CPAP or Cornell Prison Education Program decided to call it this because they didn't want prison to be in the title. This was to protect students' privacy about past incarceration if I were to write them a letter of recommendation, for example, after they were released. This position is very new. I started it in August and it's the first time that we've ever had a librarian with the Cornell Prison Education Program. It's really situated between CPAP and Cornell University Library, which is a very strategic location for it. The goal of my position is to develop a program to provide incarcerated students with library resources and to expand information access inside the prisons where we work. In the prison, students have no access to internet. So my job is to provide offline resources. This includes print materials and also digital materials for use on our computers in the prison computer labs. In addition to access services, I also do library instruction on how to use the resources and I work one on one with students. And in the future, I'm hoping to develop workshops and courses on things like research methods, but also just on basic computer literacy and some other aspects of reentry like resume writing. So who are our patrons? These are CPAP students. Just to give a little bit of history about CPAP, Cornell professors began offering courses in the 1990s in one prison, Auburn Correctional Facility. This was right after Pell was rescinded for incarcerated people. And then after getting several large grants, CPAP was formally created in 2008. We offer an associate's degree with two local community colleges, Cornell Corning Community College and Peugeot Community College. And we work in four men's prisons in upstate New York. So if you see here on the map, we're still working in Auburn Correctional Facility. We also work with two other maximum security facilities, five points in Almyra and then also one medium security facility, Peugeot Correctional Facility. So with the reinstatement of Pell this year and the tuition assistance program or TAP in New York State, we're working to launch a Cornell bachelor's degree in our prisons in 2024. So my position was really created to support the bachelor's degree to bring in library resources to the research side of the program and to allow students to research projects and build toward a senior thesis project. So who are our students? We have about 150 students across all four facilities. They are admitted by an entrance exam. So if they have a GED, they can sit for the entrance exam. The entrance exam is very simple right now. We're working to improve and expand it. But it's mostly in writing. The students are given a short story in our most recent exam. It was Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour. And then they were given two prompts to choose from to write a thesis driven essay about the story. So our program is very liberal arts based and very writing based. We don't test math or science skills for the entrance exam for now, but we're looking into that in the future. We have a very self selecting group of students. Usually they're very motivated to do courses and very devoted to their education. But as you see, this is still a very small proportion of each prison population, as you can see by our numbers. We have all ages of students, but most of them tend to be middle age. So we're really working with adult learners. And we'll be taking on a few cohorts this summer at all the facilities. So I was just reading entrance exams the other week. But we also have a number of students who have graduated and we still allow them to take courses. So here you see some pictures of our computer lab, one of our classrooms, and then one of our graduation ceremonies. So the process for beginning services for our program, what I've been doing basically since August. Of course, I want to just say that the position is specifically Mellon. So all of our salaries at Cornell Prison Education Program are funded by the Mellon Foundation, but this was through a special grant to launch the Cornell VA program. The position is actually housed in Cornell University Library. So we did that very strategically to have the backing of University Library services. So anything that Cornell University Library has and we can get into the prisons is fair game for us. And so I had to get full volunteer approval through the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision or DOCS. That's our Department of Corrections here in New York State at all four of the facilities. And once I had that clearance, I started doing listening sessions with students and I went to each facility and I talked to students about what they want to see in terms of library resources. So a lot of the ideas that they came up with were print resources. So having reference materials in the classroom, like encyclopedias, books that might provide background on course material and things like more Norton anthologies. Also books on topics that just interested students. So some of these were reentry related. So like building financial literacy, credit building, but also more personal social health books, meditation and yoga books. Students were interested in periodicals and magazines. And then kind of what I would think of as library guides. So we thought a little bit about what could be uploaded onto the computer. So they they came up with lists that they meant. So lists of books written by CPEP instructors, lists of books about publishing, lists of books about screenplay writing, lists like sample resumes, PDFs of that. And even listings of topic papers in different disciplines each year. So getting some of the top physics journals, for example, and putting some of the top papers from the year on our computers. And I believe students also said that they would like some help with data. So one of the projects that we've been working on this semester is working with JSTOR's access and prison initiative. So this is an offline index of JSTOR. And it's it includes the metadata, so the author and title. But it and sometimes an abstract, but it doesn't include full text. We were actually using this at Kayuga Correctional Facility before the pandemic, but it had fallen out of use because we were doing correspondence classes at that point. So we wrote into JSTOR. We got a new version of it and we got it installed at Kayuga. We've also been approved now to bring JSTOR to Auburn Correctional Facility. So that should be installed within the next couple of months. So this semester, doing a database pilot of the JSTOR at Kayuga to figure out how to time the research process and the delivery of articles and working with a world literature class that's looking at scholarly debates on classical sources. So the Bible, Plato, Sappho. And so first, I went and had a library instruction session with the students to talk about things like how to how to choose a topic, how to use keywords, how to use Boolean operators because it doesn't have an advanced search function and just generally how to navigate the database and understand the functionalities of it. Then I came into the study hall to work with the students one on one. I talked with each of them about their project and I helped them find articles that would help support their project. And then they used a paper request system to send me all their requests. I took that back to Cornell and then I printed out all the articles and I sent them back in with the instructor. And something that we wanted to help the students do was kind of approximate the iterative process of research. So oftentimes if you're researching, you may not find the right articles right away or you might realize your project needs to go in a different direction. And so we realized that the students don't have immediate access to the full text. So they may need to read the articles that they get and then request more articles later. So then we had another study hall where I went in and did a second session with them to get more articles. I'm hoping to expand JSTOR to other humanities classes so that it's integrated into the curriculum and then hopefully we'll also use more offline databases in the future, which we have a few in the works. Our second project that we're working on is collection development in the prison computer labs. So this is really to build print reference collections. And this would be on book shelves, hopefully at Cayuga and probably book carts at the other facilities. I'm meeting now with Cornell subject librarians to get recommendations on reference books for the subjects that we most often teach. So this would include English, biology, sociology, history, psychology, math, government, economics, philosophy and anthropology. And as I mentioned before, students have also requested items during the listening sessions, so aspects on reentry, like financial literacy, resume writing, job exploration and also more personal works like self-help books, creative writing resources. How this will be funded, we're still working that out. But the State University of New York has given us a big grant to provide funding for what they're calling core collections. Most of this will probably go to getting textbooks, class textbooks for each course, but there may be some money for these small libraries as well. So we'll submit the book list for approval at each facility, then buy copies for the facility and keep them in the classroom, probably in a locker between classes, because we don't have our own classrooms. We share our classrooms with other programs that take place at the prison. We're also hoping to catalog all the materials using library thing or a similar platform. This catalog could then be used to make a list of all the course materials that have been previously approved at each prison so that our media review process is much faster and more consistent. And overall, with this project, we're just hoping to get more books to students. And the easiest way to do that right now is to provide them within the prison classroom. We hope to work more on lending from Cornell down the road. Just to mention a few barriers to access that have come up a little bit in the talk before. We do have censorship from docs. So there is a media review of all course materials going into the facility. So works depicting violence or how to build a weapon or a band. Materials that are critical of mass incarceration and policing are often suspect in this process. But it can be so arbitrary, even sexually explicit materials have been banned. So that's why we're really hoping to catalog all the course materials that have been previously approved so that we can say, look, like we've had this we've had this material go in before so that the the review is just faster and allows for more more to get to our students. Also, as I mentioned, the students have no access to internet. We're looking for ways to bring in both print materials, so through the collection development and the offline databases like JSTOR. We were really hoping to get the library website and the catalog whitelisted at one facility. But that effort has really been stalled in upper levels of New York Department of Corrections. So we'll need to think a little more creatively in the future about how to share aspects of the catalog with our students. We're also looking for things that we can download from the internet and then upload onto the computers via flash drive. So I'm working with an undergraduate student here at Cornell right now to look into writing skills guides that are on University Writing Center's websites and learning strategy centers guides. Also from university websites to upload onto our computers to give students a few more study skills resources. We're also working with corrections libraries inside. This has been a pretty restrictive process, both for student use and also for visits from CPAP staff. So it can be very difficult for us to access the libraries and also to meet the librarians. So we did meet the librarian at Cayuga Correctional Facility last week and it looks like we'll be able to do some programming through the library and also potentially to route Cornell University Library into their existing interlibrary loan system with the Finger Lakes Public Library system. So that was a very exciting for us to have that meeting. Just to conclude what excites me most about this work is really working with the students. Before I took this job, I was teaching a lot of the English classes for CPAP and it's just so motivating to be in the classroom and and working with the students. And that's been really exciting in the library instruction sessions as well. I like working with students one on one about their research project topics and they just have such interesting and in-depth ideas. I've also been working at Cayuga Correctional Facility. There's a student led writing group and I've gone in and worked with them a few times during the year. They have shared really incredible writing with me. They take a lot of time and care to give feedback on each other's work. So we're looking for ways to expand that program and give them more opportunities in terms of writing and just advice to librarians who are also beginning library services that could seem like a small field. It's really like at its beginnings, but there are other librarians who are doing this work and really want to collaborate and we're in a really exciting and growing field right now. So feel free to contact me with questions. And I'm really excited to meet all of you who are interested in starting this work. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. My name is Jax. I am an library intern at the Santa Clara County Public Library District in Santa Clara County, California. And I provide I spend most of my time with the county providing support for our one full time librarian that works at our juvenile justice centers. So it's nice to meet you. This is what our current team looks like, but it is honestly really just one person, Chris Pennington, who spends her full time split between our two different juvenile justice sites. And then me as a half time employee, basically substituting and providing support about once a week per site. And then occasionally if Chris is sick and I'm unable to be there, Amatha will show up and Claire is very rarely on site, but she oversees everything that we do. So that is the team that we work with. And the structure of our services is that unfortunately right now, all of our juvenile justice center work falls under the umbrella of the Bookmobile and Outreach team. So Amatha, who is a supervising librarian for the Bookmobile, technically supervises all the services for the JGC's, which is just how it is right now, not ideal, but that is how it's set up. Our patron base is so we service the incarcerated youth of Santa Clara County, which is a geographically rather expansive area in the South Bay of the Bay Area. It is really just two sites through the high schools at both juvenile justice centers. Osborne School is located in the main juvenile hall in San Jose proper in downtown San Jose. And the other high school is Blue Ridge High School, which is located in the William F. James Boys Ranch down in Morgan Hill in South County. Our population is pretty much mostly boys. We have like one unit of girls at the main hall in San Jose, and it's never more than three to four girls. Everybody is aged between 12 to 24. Over 85 percent of our population is Latino or Hispanic. And I would say at any given point in time, around five to 10 percent of our population speaks only Spanish. A lot of our population is bilingual and speaking Spanish and English. But there is some groups that speak only Spanish and historically there have been people like Vietnamese people who youth who have been detained who only speak Vietnamese, but that has not happened in the time that I have been servicing the school. OK, so our work is really beginning the services because I would say even though this project started, really the ball got going last year of April 2022. I don't think neither nobody on our team, including Chris, would say that the services we provide now are at a point that feel sustainable. But and also, realistically, when I've tried to identify exactly which administrative entity like made the decision that it was necessary for library services to exist in these facilities, it's still somewhat ambiguous because I think basically my boss understands it as being in the past five to 10 years. At some point, the assistant superintendent of the Santa Clara County Office of Education and some of their principals in the alternative schools initiated outreach to like initiated contact with the county librarian of Santa Clara County Library District and wanted something to exist, whether it be Bookmobile showing up or just like, can we get a library in here? And the vague goals at the beginning and it's still vague because even now we're doing services without a formalized Memoriam of Operation MOU and the Office of Ed Superintendent wanted to provide some sort of I don't know if they saw it as recreation or educational support or just a way to pass time for the youth. Either way, just that the youth were miserable and needed something in addition to what was going on there. But we really did not physically start developing these sites until like pretty much after I was hired as an intern in April of last year. At that point, we had no like actual staff that was budgeted from the county designated to work there. So it was mostly patchwork building from like staff of the Bookmobile team. And what that looks like between April and October, which is when Chris came on as a full time librarian, was we had to physically prepare the sites because there was no space set up in which youth could come and look at books. So at both places, we scouted out and located a room and cleared it for safety hazards, measured out the different dimensions and had to order the different shelving that would come and be installed. And at the ranch, the youth installed it because the ranch has different sorts of programs like woodworking. So there was before that, it was all just patchwork like preparation and starting the collection, meaning ordering books for this when we had no official librarian involved. My supervisor sending out like an email basically to all the team team librarians in Santa Clara County with an Excel document being like, please place recommendations that you think would be suitable for this special population. And that is how we initially started ordering for the two sites. Besides those two tasks between April and October, all the other additional work was really just like communication, which is so far what I would say the majority of the beginning work is. We have to talk to so many different people. It seems like 20 times the amount of people that you would have to talk to a public library for one thing to happen at the JJC. So even now, we're still trying to regularly get meetings with the different entities involved so that everybody can be on the same page. All right. So what that kind of looks like, this is the most simple way that our team has been able to sort of parse out the different stakeholders involved. So the three official government entities that are involved are the Office of Education, us, the Santa Clara County Library District and then the Office of Corrections. Because they're youth, we see them during the day through the regulated instructional hours for all the youth who are under 18. And we partner basically with one teacher at each site in which during the weekday, one of their days, the English teacher at Osborne will take all her youth, every single class that she sees on a Tuesday during her class time to the library. And at the ranch, it's the chef's class. So on Wednesday, the chef will take well, during his class time, we instead of going to the chef, they come to see us at the library. So who's involved? Well, from our library district's perspective, you know, like me, Chris, Amatha and Claire, we would like obviously the services to benefit the youth. But in the practical steps of implementing that, what that really looks like is getting permissions through probation, whom we have to communicate to through the Office of Education, because from experience, probation has been very hands off. Up until even last month when we held our National Library Reception, we have been unable to contact any sort of administrative person on probation. Like the highest person we've been able to talk to at that level directly is just like a counselor. And even now, they won't really, you know, it's hard to identify who the right entities are to get the permissions going. And the roles are still, you know, this this visual on the left was created by Chris Librarian as as an attempt, basically, to try and address some of the problems that were coming up, which really likes them from a lack of definition of who does what and sort of probation, not knowing that we are a separate entity from Office of Education. And then oftentimes applying the same rules to us as Office of Education when we operate as a public county library. But again, right now, we are in sort of like this introductory mess where things aren't spelled out very clearly. People people on probation, Office of Ed, do not communicate. And we are often forgotten out of the loop. But I think basically we've taken the initiative to be like, this is what we want from our perspective to happen. So everything in this presentation, I'm speaking as a representative Santa Clara County Library District. I don't know if Office of Ed and the Correctional Department feels this way. So these are the roles that we have to work with in order to provide the services as of now. We would like this to look different in the future. OK, so what our current services look like is we have one full time library between two sites. Every week we have one regularly scheduled guaranteed library visit that is required for all the youth under 18 who are enrolled in the Alternative Education. There is a pop, like there's a very interesting group of youth in California, specifically, that has fallen under like the new California Youth Authority legislation where and I may be explaining this incorrectly because I'm not the most up to date with like the technical legal aspects. But I think recently a legislation changed such that there was a group of youth between 18 and 24 who were supposed to be who were kept at the adult jails, but now are being put back to the juvenile hall facilities. So there are youth who have spent some time in the adult jail and now are going back to the JJCs and those youth who no longer qualify for the required mandated like formal education have an optional additional visit not during the week during the weekends. And so at Osborne, the scheduled day is Tuesday every week and Saturday optionally every week for some of the college groups. And at the ranch, we see them Wednesdays and Fridays and on Wednesdays are their scheduled classroom visits and Fridays. We'll see them every other Friday for what we now call like a fun Friday through one of their their math class in which Chris will provide sort of like a literacy program usually involves like something along the lines of, you know, the National Poetry Month competition, if that's happening. And then we'll try and make that whatever is available at the public library also available at the JJC for them to participate in. And on those Fridays, I've had the capacity to come in every other Friday to also provide some sort of like arts hands on technology, whether it be like making a small clay object or bringing an iPad and designing a sticker, just giving these kids like something close to what they be able to get at a public library, because those are my my personal interests and what I'm able to provide and also things that kids like doing on the outside and they also like doing on the inside. And then beyond the regularly scheduled library visits, so much of what we do is trying to get ourselves established as a presence in the facilities so that it's never the youth that have issues with interest. We're actually trying really hard to get probation to recognize us as an entity that is there also for their support because probation honestly has a lot of time in different philosophy with what they're trained to do and their mission statement in this institution than what a public library comes in to do. So they're trained to be really like authoritative and corrections and penalty based and library staff tend to be more encouraging of like exploration and open-endedness and not just like anti-sensorship like what will happen is like we don't agree on the same things as what is permissible and appropriate. And that is like what's most troublesome while we don't have a spelled out MOU, more so just because what happens is it like probation feels like it's necessary to establish like authority. And if someone has to get in trouble, usually it's the youth. So we're trying to we're working really hard on trying to get an MOU like written and signed so that all the rules are clear and no more issues of basically like kids getting in trouble for activities of the library has done despite us having communicated to probation to our knowledge that this was OK and then them not communicating to the rest of their staff and then just like usually it's personal biases that come up among different staff of the environment that come up that that end up. Becoming an issue and there's nothing spelled out. There is actually in the juvenile hall realm of library services, not actually a formal list of what is supposed to be banned and what's not banned. We spoke with Alameda County and what they follow is like the California directory of corrections, having like a list of just certain topics like making weapons and like tattooing and etc. But right now. At most of the censorship issues that arise are personal biases from staff. And since we lack the formal. Documentation to sort of have a standardized procedure around how to discuss the appropriateness and what is and isn't allowed. What that ends up happening is just like kids getting trouble. So. So while we're working on that, the other big issue that we have really is just that like our team is simply not big enough for what. The kids want and what probation. Has expressed wanting out of library services. One staff is not enough to. Not only like provide library services, but do all the clerical administrative page related things that need to happen in order for a library to run. And also it would be nice to have a supervisory position to do all the communication and enter departmentally because right now a lot of that work does fall on Chris and she just doesn't have time to do it. And. We need. Institutional support and really like codified funding because. Um, that goes back to sort of another question I'll address later, but so some statistics on how much usage our library has gotten just in the past four months. I think the statistics. Um, for the first three come from both sites. And then the last one, we only have been recording them at Osborn because our collection is not cataloged yet, as we haven't had capacity to do that. But yeah, between January and April this year, we provide 60 different library programs, 164 different library visits. And I believe this number 1696 patrons served means repeat. It includes like patrons who've been served multiple times and staff because a lot of staff from behavioral and mental health. And as well as educational staff use our library. Okay, so some of the current frequently recurring questions that come up when I've spoken about this type of work before is I'm going to go a little backwards. So firstly is just how is Chris's position currently funded? And is it written in the MOU? So, um, I can't, I will, I will say what my boss and her supervisor understand, but we cannot confirm this like a hundred percent. It was initially under under the, um, belief that probation, the office of corrections will pay for Chris's full time position, whether or not that happens practically because I think Amethyst said that sometimes how that happens between different departments at the government level is we'll front it and they'll pay us back later or something. But when I asked Chris directly and Claren Amatha, none of us can actually confirm right now who have, who has been directly paying her. It was supposed to be probation when all this stuff started. And no, it is not spelled out in the MOU because we don't have one. The one that we are basing ours off of is from our neighboring county, Alameda County Public Library, who has a, I think, like social justice team and a really nicely established, um, team and process for their juvenile justice centers. And they service about the same amount of youth that we do, but with a much larger team and their MOU spells out the funding and who pays what for each position. We do not have any of that yet. The second frequently asked question about the specific services that we provide are about the experiences and challenges in servicing a population that is largely bilingual, especially in California. The more in general, it's a lot of people speak Spanish. So our collection, our Spanish collection is really limited. It basically consists of like popular titles that we know of from bookmobile stopping into communities that have really high Spanish speaking populations and sort of mimicking what we see gets circulated a lot there and just requesting. So all the collections purchases, I think, are mostly funded from the Office of Education. We will request the titles in an Excel sheet, but we'll send it to them and they'll order it. And also we are limited right now in the avenues from which we can order. I think pretty much we would buy only from Barnes and Noble or Ingram and their available Spanish collection is like insignificant. And ideally, we would really like to have the staff on the library team that is proficient in Spanish. Alameda County has a full time staff member that is fluent in Spanish. So the officers who bring the youth to us at the facilities, a lot of them are bilingual or fluent in Spanish. And currently we rely a lot on them translating for us requests in Spanish. So truthfully, the challenges are great. I would not say that our services to our Spanish speaking population are sufficient at all. But hopefully that will change. That's sort of where we're at with a lot of things. Ongoing challenges, things that are difficult about this job because it's been pretty new. And I will say I'm speaking as an intern, like I'm training to be a librarian and I'm new to this organization. But because of how new this whole project has been, I don't feel that working on it as an intern has been any sort of disadvantage compared to working on it with staff who have been here for like 10 years in County District because of how new it is. We all have equal amounts of familiarity of what's going on with here. So the environmentally specific challenges they're emotionally and physically demanding in ways really unique to carceral environments. And, you know, things that me and my coworkers talk about a lot is just like of all the interactions that occur, servicing the youth is like the easiest part. It is never the youth that cause struggle for us at least. It feels like, you know, government bureaucracy and lack of transparency is at like an all time high in these particular institutions and lack of communication between departments and even within departments between like management and staff results in a lot of mistrust and confusion. And resulting in mostly arbitrary penalties that fall on the kids. And yeah, I think that is a lot of a challenge of what happens with communicating. And also I say I mentioned reentry, but really what that challenge looks for us is just there's no current wave really that that our services are established that we can connect the kids to our county district after they're out. Yet it feels kind of like we're only in here while they're in. And then after they're gone, you know, there's not like an easy way for us to be like, hey, you can come see us on the outside, too, if you need. And so as far as collection, development and censorship goes, I think so a lot of those concerns are just that while we don't have formal MOU spelled out, what is and isn't appropriate often falls to the personal biases of the officer in charge that day. And it's equally as frustrating for the youth as it is for us because we'll get told that something is OK and then someone else will come on shift like six hours later. And it's absolutely not OK. And then the youth will get in trouble for it. And we sort of don't have say. And so it would be really nice just to have it spelled out as to who should do what. And it would really really be nice for all the different entities to agree on what the needs of the youth are, what the purpose of having a library here is, whether or not it should be treated as like a reward or a right, you know, and then. And I think just what can and can't be allowed like really needs to be spelled out in a way that's easy to determine. Aside from that, I think recognition and understanding, meaning we've been doing this at this point, it's April 2023. Our presence has physically been at these sites for like a year, but people still come to me and Chris and Anthony were there all the time and say, we had no idea that there was a library here. And I don't, you know, from our end, we're doing everything we can to advertise and we don't I don't know what else can be done for the staff, other staff there to communicate and like see clearly like how we are there and what we're there for. Oh, and I've included some pictures of what our facilities look like. So Osborne, this is the room that they gave us. Which was really just like a storage room. These books are not library books. This is what they gave us in like March of last year. It had just like a bunch of extra crap in it. I think those are old, like extra textbooks. I don't even know where we moved them. Like so much stuff is gone. I don't even know where we put them at this point. But we we had to get rid of all this stuff and then like put them all like put in shelving desks, all that stuff. And then I'll show you this is what it looks like now. There's Chris. There's me. We have since expanded our shelving even more and also added a monitor inside and are still working on developing more in our collection because all the books here on the shelves are just from the initial ordering that happened last summer from when Amatha asked the teen librarians to generally request and recommend books. And now we're developing collection based on interactions with youth, recommendations from staff and youth based on what gets circulated a lot after actual like checkouts. Yeah, this is not a great photo of before Blue Ridge, but I couldn't find it. But this is pretty much all that there was in the room that they gave us. It was just like a carpet of room with a ton of more old classroom books. And this is what it looks like now. And both both of them are growing up both places. We're ordering a lot more Spanish books. They're not sufficient at all for what we need. But that's why the collection is growing. So things that we are looking forward to the first one, we held the National Library Week perception on April 13th. That went well. It was like sort of an attempt to within the county promote like what we've been doing in the hopes of just like becoming more established presence and hoping that the administrative stakeholders invested in all these different organizations will see that like work has been done and see and recognize that and also affirm the need for more funding and staffing. We are really looking forward to getting a formalized and signed MOU and collection development policy if and when that happens. It's been drafted. I don't know what it takes to get it all signed, but it's been drafted. At our National Library of Reception, we actually finally met with a manager of the reentry services because that had been a big sort of nebulous entity in in the mix of all this, where we reentry is really well spelled out for the adult services, adult population in our country, in our county. But feels rather non-existent for the youth. And I think what we identified was that the Department of Probation is supposed to be responsible for that. And they have just been very hands off as a department. Like it is very difficult for us to talk to anybody there. So that is something that we're actively still working towards is maybe going through these other channels that probation has to have their fingers in and trying to find somebody that is higher up than a CEO or a PO who can like do something. And the management at the adult reentry services has talked about if probation allows and response to both of us, because the person that we spoke to also mentioned a lot of challenges from the reentry department with connecting with probation and getting permissions from them to do programs with the the adult population. But reentry services has expressed interest in bringing community presenters and starting a book club for the youth since the office is literally like around the corner from the downtown San Jose main juvenile hall. We would really like to see streamlined book ordering right now. It takes like anywhere from three weeks to two months for a book to arrive after we have ordered it. And that is just too long for the turnaround of what we get for the youth here. So eventually I'd like to see us be able to order off Amazon I still don't fully understand. I think it has to do with like money and funding and not super understanding where what comes from that we have to order from Ingram and Barnes and Nobles, but it really limits what we're able to bring to the youth. At this point, this feels kind of like we're just waiting until like the budgeting turns around for a year and year after year and they create new positions, which is cannot happen magically. I've learned in the government, but we would really like to expand our library service times like youth at both sites frequently express disappointment that we are not there more despite us working like what we feel is like the most humanly possible with what we can do. And yeah, it's just like there's such a huge saturation of need at these facilities that I think we could easily have two full time people per site and still have more demand than what is met. So we're just waiting now on budgets to be re-evaluated, which takes forever with the county. And yeah, our last thing that Chris has been starting is bringing a sort of like she doesn't like calling a podcast project, but it's through StoryCorps, where if the permissions for the privacy around the youth get approved, there is a group of youth at the ranch, which generally between the two sites, if the youth are at the ranch, that means that they are guaranteed to be getting out kind of soon. So between our two sites, the ranch is the one that has more. I don't want to say freedom, but like. It's less like getting yourself jail and more like boys camp. I hate all these euphemisms for incarceration. But what I'm saying is people with the youth at the ranch are allowed more technology and more fun things than people in downtown are. So the StoryCorps is limited to ranch population, but they would really like to develop a youth version of I think they're saying like what's they're modeling it after is the San Quentin State Prison's adult inside podcast, where yeah, there's sort of tell what they want to. But the public library is involvement in this is that we want to complete the StoryCorps assignment with them. And I don't fully understand what that is, but I think it's like a program that is national where you can record your perspectives and just share it publicly. I probably did a terrible job explaining that. Yeah. OK, so some advice. For people who want to start this work. A lot of it feels like advocacy feels like trying to get other entities to understand like why it's needed and why we even want to be there and why like it would even be beneficial to the youth because. Truth be told, like librarianship and a lot of different fields still treat like incarcerated people's is less than. And I think a lot of what we do as librarians. Outside of just providing library services, honestly, is just being a staff on site that youth can talk to that don't tell them the same things about themselves that all other entities there are telling them, you know, like, I think honestly, like Chris and I are advocating for the kids a lot. Expression and ability to just like read what they want to read and learn about the things that they want to learn within reason, you know. Second big thing is patience. I'm terrible at that because I just got out of library school and I have no like practical lived experience of actually working through government bureaucracy and like accepting that it takes years for things to happen. Feels frustrating, but that's what it is. Teamwork. I don't know who it was in our district that believed it would be possible for services to be provided with one person, but it is not possible. We need like so much flexibility and reliance on each other as a team. Honestly, if the four of us, Chris, Amita, me and Claire didn't have the dynamic that we did, I think. It would be a lot more difficult to be as consistently there as we have been with the funding and support currently available to us. Um, leading to the next point, whoever starting this, if you are able to secure. A guaranteed funding and staffing in the beginning somehow, like that is top priority because I especially after learning the previous presenter, you know, the biggest question mark for us is just how do you like counties who want to start this like convince their counties to put money to this? We're trying to figure that out. And then the fifth point communication and I put in quotation marks because honestly, at some point from our perspective, it feels like we've done all the possible communicating that there could have been done from our perspective and like whoever was supposed to read an email and send it to somebody else on our team just like didn't do it or something. And so a lot of times it's just like you're going to be broken record and you have to be patient and I don't know, like if you're coming in as like a new organization, basically, you know, we were told we're always going to be guests of probation. We're in their house until they trust us, which is not yet, even though it's been like a year. It doesn't really matter what happens. Like they sort of get the final call on a lot of things. If it's their rules. So even if you've communicated the best that you can and other people didn't communicate what they need to sometimes like that is what it is. And you just have to work with it prioritizing, meaning, you know, I just assume that this work is really underfunded and like most people will be starting in a situation similar to what we started with, which means that in the beginning, you know, like people really had to make decisions in the collection development being like, do we want to catalog this right now for the amount of work that it is and what it will take and the stuff that we have, you know, like we made that call in the beginning to just not catalog it, even though later down on the road, now we're like, that might be something we need to do. But really just like sort of defining for yourself in that situation, what like library services successfully would ideally look like to you guys and then trying to reach that if that's possible. And yeah, my biggest thing, the biggest thing that feels like for us that has been an issue is that we don't we don't have an MOU. Roles are not clearly defined or established. And that makes things really difficult. And on the right, I thought I just include like cute little artwork. We've I've been taking as a lot of like the youth's artwork and just trying to show them how they can turn it into things that they can sell so that a lot of these youth in San Jose, they'll come from previously gang affiliated or currently gang affiliated backgrounds. And sometimes the technological stuff that we show them in here is just like, you know, look at this thing that you can do that can make you money. That's not just selling drugs. Like this, this was a drawing that one of the youth showed me. And then I turned them into stickers for him. And then I'm working on now developing prints for him so that he can take them to his sister, who can sell them on the outs for them for him so that he feels like he has a voice and can like start trying to professionally establish himself as an artist so that he can transition his life towards that direction when he leaves. So I just want to include because I thought it was really cute. Thank you for listening. I don't know how long I went. It probably went over. Please feel free to contact any of us. If you had questions, because there's probably a lot and yeah, thanks for tuning in. Hi, everybody. My name is Chelsea Jordan Makley. I am super grateful to be with you today to be a part of this important series and to share about my experiences or some of them in providing information access for incarcerated people and in this instance and getting those services going. So I've put in a little subtitle here. A few perspectives acknowledging that I'm just one person, but thanks to the gig economy, I wear a couple of different hats and where those roles intersect is in the work that I do around providing services for people who are incarcerated and in learning about those. So I am a library director at the Griswold Memorial Library in Colrain, Massachusetts. It is a very small rural library. We are open to the public just 33 hours a week, four days a week. My role there is only 28 hours a week. And our entire library budget at the time when we started services to our local jail was less than eighty seven thousand dollars a year. The whole library budget, eighty seven thousand dollars a year. So my other part time role is as a research consultant, and that is with a company that I started called Renewed Libraries. So what do we do? A note about my presentation, you'll see it's divided here into two columns, acknowledging those two different roles that I occupy. And so sometimes there's some overlap, but otherwise that's going to be the the format that I try to follow here as I'm talking about these things. So what do I do in each of these roles? First, in my role as director at Griswold Memorial Library. My library together with another rural library that's about the same size. We provide outreach to the local jail, which is the Franklin County jail. And as such, we provide book lending at this time in two units. And as part of that, we create and help manage our patrons library accounts. So our book lending is by a book cart, just like if you watch the presentation from San Francisco Public Library, except on a much smaller scale. We also offer a book club in the women's unit. So that is once a month. Read to the Children is a program that many of you are probably familiar with already. I believe it started out of the Colorado State Library. And in that program, the incarcerated caregiver receives training on early childhood literacy and reading to children. That helps to build their confidence because the next step is to record themselves reading a picture book. And then their loved ones receive the copy of the recording and a copy of the book. The fourth thing that we do is just book donations to the jail library. So that was actually the first thing that we got going was providing discards from our libraries to their jail library. And then we want to promote local public libraries and a lifelong love of reading. That lasting relationship is very important to us. In my other role. I conduct research about library services and incarceration. So many of you have probably heard of the library services to the Justice Involved listserv. It's also known sometimes as Prison L. And so I'm a co-lead of that group is an ALA interest group. If you've ever responded to the library services and incarceration survey, I helped to get that going. And that data is now contributing to the information access for incarcerated people project through the San Francisco Public Library and funded by the Mellon Foundation. And lately, I've also been beginning work on the Prism Study through the Colorado Department of Corrections and Colorado State Library funded by the IMLS. So little spread out. But let's talk about who is our patron base. So my library, the Griswold Memorial Library in Colrain, is located in Franklin County, Massachusetts. And I've put in a little map here. You can see there we are in the top left corner of Massachusetts on the Vermont border. As I mentioned, it's a really rural area. My town where my library is located has a population of just 1600 people. But the jail is for the entire county. And I wanted to include this quote from the Vera Institute of Justice, the statistic. Since 2013, the jail population has grown 27 percent in rural counties and 7 percent in smaller cities. So I think there's often a disconnect where people think of the prison industrial complex as an urban problem when it's a problem that impacts all of us everywhere and actually disproportionately in rural communities. In terms of our patron base for LSJI and the other work that I do, this is the definition from that webpage, from that listserv. And it's very broad library professional students. I can actually see all of this because how my screen is library professional students, correctional staff volunteers or anyone who serves the underserved and correctional settings or justice involved individuals. In other words, anyone is welcome. OK, how did this get going? So I have a little bit of a personal story to share about how I got involved in this. And the year was 2018 and I was on a board at a women's organization. It was it had begun to serve and help women who were fleeing abusive relationships. And there was a fundraiser for the organization and Angela Davis was speaking. And I called one of my best friends to go to this talk with me. It was in Vancouver. And Dr. Davis talked about how the work that we were doing in our organizations was all fine and good. But if people were ending up incarcerated, that we weren't creating any lasting solutions and that we were just reinforcing these cycles of violence. And that was a message that I'd never heard before and had never thought about before. And so, one, that was really impactful for me. But second, the good friend who I went to that talk with ended up incarcerated shortly thereafter. So then this big systemic issue became a lot more personal to me when one of my best friends was incarcerated. I moved shortly after that. And so I made a decision that when I moved, this was going to be a part of my new life that I was going to find organizations on the ground in my area who were doing work to get books to people who were incarcerated. And so I did that when I landed here in Massachusetts. I found Great Falls Books Through Bars. You're probably familiar with other books through Bars organizations. They mail books to people who are incarcerated all over the country to try and meet their information and entertainment requests to the best of their ability. Books Through Bars did not serve Massachusetts correctional facilities. So that was an interesting loophole, but working with them, I did connect with other librarians and library workers in the area. And so we then reached out to the Education Coordinator at the Sheriff's Office. So how did this get going? We reached out to them and we asked, what do you need? How can we help? We want to help. And like folks everywhere, they were short staff. They were in over their heads and and they really needed our help. And so it was it was pretty simple and establishing that there was a need. And then from there, we just had to figure out how it might work. So we went out and we got an ALA grant first off. It was for $3,000. It was an open ended grant, I believe. And then after that, we got an LSTA grant for $9,700. And in in writing these grants, we were looking to the Read to the Children program from the Colorado State Library, which I've already mentioned, that helped to set the precedent. They also had already sourced some resources that we were able to quote in our grant. How did work going for me and the LSTA group? Well, I didn't start that group. It already existed. It was known as LSID Library Services to the incarcerated and detained. The leaders before me, Aaron Boyington, was one of them and had sort of recruited me to the position. And I imagine that's how it's going to go with that group moving forward. So if anybody out there is interested in volunteering with that group, please get in touch. Then my research got going really because I wanted to find examples of other small public libraries who were doing this work. And when I looked out there in the world, I really couldn't find many examples at all. So in trying to make connections, I joined the ABLA listserv, which is the Abolitionist Library Association listserv. I then met Jeannie. We reached out and got in contact with Library Journal, LJ, and they were super supportive in giving us a platform where we could talk about this and, you know, keep pushing that snowball and growing the community a little bit more. And same goes for Library Research Service, LRS, when we reached out to them about creating a survey tool. They were right there for us. What else did we consider writing grants? All grants come with a lot of guidelines, red tape, the Jacks was just talking a lot about bureaucracy. This work environment is layers upon layers of bureaucracy. So grants come with some of that. One of the grant guidelines, for example, that we had to work with was that they wanted for us to include this early childhood literacy training for incarcerated caregivers, right? So we had to figure out how to make that work. The jail itself, of course, has their own restrictions and many of them, only lending paperback books is the biggest one that we have to deal with. Anybody who comes into the facility has to go through the jails sanctioned training, which takes weeks to set up. And so, for example, when we had the early childhood literacy experts from the Eric Carl Museum come in, they all have to go through that same training, even though they're only there with us for one afternoon. Something else to consider. I have grounded, I make sure that everything that we do is grounded in our library's strategic plan, in our bureaucracy, including our social justice statement. I want to make sure that it all lines up, and I'll talk about that more a little bit moving forward. Sustainability is a consideration. We want to make sure that we're starting something that we can grow, and that these services won't be tied just to us as individuals, that they are institutionalized. In regards to the LSJI listserv and growing the community out there, one big consideration is that, though it's not just a community, one big consideration is that, though it's an ALA special interest group, not everybody is a member of the ALA. So, how do we make it as inclusive as possible? How do we make it a space that's accessible and safe? And I think at first, what we were focusing on was really about sharing information and resources. And then what I have come to understand is that people really want to make connections and bonds, and sometimes we just want a safe space where we can talk with other people about our pain points. So, that's been a big consideration, is how do we want to use this space? How do we want to use our time together? And again, how do we make it safe and accessible for everybody? And in regards to our survey and the research, as I said, it really started with trying to establish other precedents and finding examples of others who were doing this work, and so collecting and sharing information about what was out there, but soon it grew to also trying to understand the different obstacles that folks were facing, different restrictions, and also sharing about our achievements. Any issues? Yes, there have been issues. Surprise, surprise. Learning on the fly is always one of them. I mentioned they have you go through a training at the jail, but darn if they cover everything you need to know, right? Like an example, there are these buttons in the hallway, and I never know when I'm allowed or supposed to press the buttons, and I get in trouble for it sometimes, and I just, I don't understand. I'm trying to learn the buttons. This last week when we were going into the jail, so we go in with these rolly carts, I call it my geek cart, and each of us has a cart full of books that we bring in. We are filling hold requests and we're bringing in some new materials to refresh our lending book cart. And the head of security saw us and said that's too many books, and it was the same amount of books that we've been bringing in every week for about a year. So sometimes there are just these like moving metrics, and it seems really arbitrary. I just wanted to share the communication that I, we've worked through that and the communication that I heard back this quote was, I appreciate your willingness to make this adjustment to your routine, because the solution was for our team to show up 20 minutes earlier now. I will say that these kinds of considerations and inconveniences likely contribute to there being so few collaborations between jails and libraries, and it's a testament to the goodwill and commitment of all involved here that we can make this work at FCSO. So there's always this dynamic at play. Law on law and order or tough on crime values and rhetoric. I don't know if it's specific to being in a small rural community, but that is definitely a pervasive attitude in the town where my library is. And pushing back against that and spreading the message that everybody has a right to read. Always an ongoing issue. Gatekeeping and fines and policies is what I want. One thing I want to talk about library to library, because I expect a lot of these issues to be coming from the carceral facilities and the CEOs. But one thing that we're doing when we meet a patron who's incarcerated, we ask, do you already have a library card? Often those cards have a lot of fines on them that are old. And then we call those libraries and we try to clear up those fines. And sometimes you just get a staff person who doesn't want to let it go because they've made that their reason for existing. Okay. That was maybe a little terse. But I think that attitudes among library staff can be a significant issue and impediment. And I hope to see more libraries do away with their fines and their policies that hurt folks. And that'll go a long way in improving these services. One quote that I want to share. Minimizing or suspending late fees altogether as well as stopping the practice of asking for proof of residence or a photo ID to get a library card are two simple ways that libraries can make their services more accessible. So whether your library is providing these services or not, just if you can implement those simple changes in your library, it will help to improve services for people who are impacted by incarceration. And for libraries who are doing that work budget as everybody else has mentioned is an issue. And I just mentioned our budget is less than $87,000. I love hearing about other libraries who have made Opax available or ebooks available in their libraries. Due to the predatory contracts that are in place in the jail that we are serving, we have not been able to make that headway. And so that is an ongoing issue. How can I be an advocate? And how can I be an activist without jeopardizing my very tenuous access to the jail? And how do I live both of these two lives without feeling like I'm an imposter in either setting all the time? And so I hope that makes sense, but there often seems like we're dealing with a super secure environment versus an environment where we want everybody to have access. And this is just a values clash. And I don't think it's going to go away. So it's a lasting issue. But then it also has the compounding effect of being demoralizing. And so I've spoken to a lot of people who have done this work, who deal with the real issue of burnout. And I've seen some people already have to change careers. And so I think that that is something to be aware of is to, I don't know, how can we make it a marathon? How can we bolster ourselves in each other up to continue working? In talking about issues around funding, one issue that I want to bring up is encapsulated in this quote from Angela Davis. The problem of creating more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system persists. So I often think like, well, why are we spending library funds? Maybe we should maybe the jail should be funding this with their giant budget, right? But then I don't want them to be growing their budget, right? So I don't know. I don't have an answer to that. Let's talk about what's good. One of the patrons who I serve, who we serve just said a couple weeks ago that they'd never really read before. And that this was their first experience with that, right? It just makes my heart gush so much to know that there's at least a silver lining. And of course, for me personally, reading has been, I say, I wouldn't want to be on this earth without books, right? So when I can help turn somebody else onto that, that is a huge impact for me. Hopefully that speaks to us making their life better. The Read to the Children program is ongoing. We're about to do another iteration of that in time for Father's Day and we're expanding it to another unit in the jail. We did write a MOU. I'm very proud of that. One thing I want to share about that is that we used whereas language in our MOU, where we would quote the mission or vision of the institution. And we quoted things like the prisoner's right to read, right in our MOU before going into the language about what it was that we were spelling out to do. So the sheriff has signed that our boards of trustees have yet to get on it but it is signed by the sheriff and that is a huge amazing victory I'm really proud of. Increased circulation. Here is a reason to get with these services if your library has not already, is that our circulation has definitely increased because here we've gotten this whole other population that was right under our noses now borrowing books. We are getting more libraries to wave fines for people who are incarcerated and through making these phone calls, through doing this work, we are growing awareness in Massachusetts as well. And we just last month spoke to Simmons University, a class of library students there. So I really hope that more folks coming up in the library world will see this as the standard that we should all be striving to reach all of our patrons who are incarcerated and impacted by incarceration. Finding community has been incredible when I started out as I mentioned I was trying to find examples of other people doing this work and it felt so strange like how are there not more of us? How are there not more of us? At least now more of us are connecting. As evidence of that I'm quoting that the LSJI listserv now has more than 417 members. I'm sure it's more than 425 now at this point actually. But just two years ago that was in the 200s. So that is really good news. What else is good? We have great leadership at ALA who is shedding a light on the need for these services and being great as advocating for library services for the justice involved, writing standards. This is so great. On that note I hope that we will maybe connect with more people at the ALA annual in Chicago and at future library conferences where there's more space now dedicated to these conversations. And what else is good? This is kind of meta but I'm pointing to this training series and to these resources from San Francisco Public Library because I'm so excited just to see that these are becoming more available to more people. What advice do we have for other libraries in the future? Dan from Hennepin said in his presentation every library has a role but I really want to say every library worker has a role too in this work and in changing attitudes out there. So building relationships and trust is something that you'll just hear constantly and how that work is on you to build those relationships. And I'm going to go back to the administrators etc. In this slide on the left hand side you see a screenshot of my associates calendar where she has these regularly scheduled programs that we do. Maintaining that consistent schedule is really important for building that trust. And that's really important. I know that we have a long way to go in all getting on the same page with common language that is people first. My main point is that we use respectful language of everybody everywhere and that's really easy to do. It's a simple change to make and so that's really important. Yeah. As I said every individual can contribute. Finding community is so important when you have those bad days when you need to gripe with other people about what's absurd and what's upsetting. Self-care is why I have a picture of chicken noodle soup there though that also has to do with community because somebody else brought me it. As you can see this slide it's a cartoon from the New Yorker and it is a waiter serving red wine to a bull and the caption says I think you'll find this wine to be quite infuriating. I think you will find this work to be quite infuriating a lot of the time and that's why you're going to need a sense of humor. It's something that really serves me in getting through especially when I see those absurd situations and circumstances. I hope that you're able to go back and check out this reference slide in perpetuity or else you can contact me and I would be happy to share these references otherwise. Again it has been an honor to share with everybody and I wish everybody out there the best of luck in getting going with your services. Thank you so much.