 All right, we are live. Welcome everyone we'll get started momentarily right at two o'clock. Welcome. Welcome to our YouTube viewers as well. Hi everyone, and thank you so much for joining us this Friday afternoon, the last Friday of Band Books Week 2021. This program is part of Band Books Week programming at San Francisco Public Library, and it's on censorship in prisons. Hi Austin, I'm a librarian with San Francisco Public Library's Jail and Reentry Services program, and we're very happy to host Dr. Tammy Arford, Curtis Tanaka, and Hari Gopal today as our speakers. Before we get into the program I'd like to start by reading San Francisco Public Library's land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unseeded ancestral homeland of the Ramatush alone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramatush community. Thank you so much for joining us, and Anisa has just put in the chat a map that I think there are probably people who are joining us from all over the place. So, if you go to that link you can see where on what is now known as the United States, what is now known as Canada, what the tribal lands have been and continue to be in your area. Before we get to our panelists with reading to you off a quote by Monica Cosby, who is a formerly incarcerated woman, and now heads moms United against violence and incarceration in Chicago. I think the slides might be coming up a little bit blurry so if it's better for me to share from mine I can. I should switch to yours G. Yeah, this is in a scene that was published called Down Struggles by Chicago books to women in prison and I'll throw a few links up to the scene if you'd like to purchase it and to their project in just a moment. This is just a short excerpt from Monica Cosby's essay on the importance of reading and access to books well incarcerated, and it reads, while I took much pleasure and reading in my younger years, being able to read while in prison with such a gift, a life saving and life giving Life saving and that getting lost in a great story in the lives of characters, knowing who they were and how they lived loved pride left getting lost in their story, and sometimes seeing myself somewhere in a character in their sorrows and their triumphs was both a means of escaping my own circumstances for a brief while, and inspiring me to be present with my own circumstances and to move beyond them to make use of my circumstances lending me the courage to refuse a reassure. A life giving those books that came to me while I was in prison help to feed my soul. They helped me to acquire the language to articulate thoughts, feelings and ideas that I'd always had, but for which I had no means of expression. Reading helped me reclaim my vision, my clarity of focus and clarity of purpose, my creativity. It helped me remember who I am and what I'm about. And again reading let me the courage and strength to refuse erasure. This erasure I speak of is of the self, which happens slowly but steadily in the prison. Society's refusal to see prisons and prisoners is no minor contribution. We are isolated in the prisons cut off from our communities and our families. The cost of phone calls and visits contributes to this isolation. Even the cost of purchasing a book to send to someone in prison is too much. And it would cost to buy a book or two is too much for many families. Oftentimes it is the choice to either get a book or be able to purchase personal hygiene products from the prison commissary, because the prisons do not provide these things for free. Sending letters and books into prison is a means of communicating to us in this in the prisons that we are seen that we are cared about. I'm going to open this panel today with the quote from Monica Cosby about the power of access to books and information and connection to people outside of prison. Because I think that it really emphasizes when we're talking about censorship in prisons what we're talking about is a total can be a total disconnect from any kind of access to books or information. Unless they're going to dig into that a little bit more today, but I just wanted to start with that kind of positioning and to ask you all to hold the power of that access in a circumstance where it can be so very difficult to get. And I will go ahead and put links in the chat with that. Dr. Tammy Arford, I invite you to introduce yourself and talk about some of your own research. Hi. Tammy Arford. I am at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She her and I did my dissertation which didn't realize how long ago was until I looked at this stuff. It was actually about 10 years ago about censorship in prison libraries and what I did is send surveys through the mail about over 150 different prison libraries that I got the addresses for, and then I had people mark the survey if they wanted to do an interview afterwards so I did follow up interviews and I talked to like 26 librarians in different states all over the country and sort of try to get an idea of a few things. You know what is being censored. What are the processes of the censorship that happens. What are the librarians roles and order attitudes and beliefs about this. Oh, if I, if I am at my time. Could someone let me know if I'm trying to go over time. Sorry. Thank you. Don't worry too much. I lose my track of myself sometimes. Okay, so I think probably the most surprising thing that I found and all of this is how completely arbitrary. These processes are in different places. So there are some prisons, for example, which are in the same state, and they have completely different rules and regulations. Some states have formal lists of restricted reading that each librarian gets a copy of some don't. Some librarians have total control over the libraries. Some have absolutely none, and people who are appointed by the warden have to approve or deny every single book that comes in there. So it was just absolutely as if each little institution is a little, almost like a phyton and the warden rules over it. Some of whom have pretty strict policies and you know like punitive conservative attitudes as you might expect, and others who just didn't care at all. And one of the things that the librarians talk to me about over and over again is in their position there. If they opposed the censorship that was happening, which many of them did in many cases, being able to find like elbow room to get around certain rules and regulations to circumvent people or policies. From being enacted in unfair ways and so on. So there's there's a couple of ways that overall like I sort of categorize in my mind as like formal and informal types of censorship. And so the formal censorship, I think, is what we think of when we think of censorship the ban books list the incoming publications regulations. The library development policies, and then some states and some prisons and some states have a publications review committee. And if anybody challenges a book, it has to go to that publications review committee to be approved or denied. The thing that was more surprising to me I guess was the level at which informal censorship occurred in various places. And this was also sort of like two different categories one is the library and self practicing a sort of self censorship. Whether that means not buying something that they think someone might object to, or imposing their own values and beliefs about what is right and what is wrong, and what is counter to rehabilitation and what is not, and so on. And sort of buying books based on their own individual outlook on these topics. And then the other and one was this process where CO's correctional officers or administrators like an award or an assistant warden simply go see a book they don't approve of for one reason or another and they just take it. And when they do that they would either just take it and throw it away, and the librarian might never even know about it, or they could take it and take it to the library and say get rid of this this shouldn't be here I don't like this. And then, in those instances, that's where the librarian has to make this choice about what to do, and whether or not to allow that sort of informal type of censorship to occur, or if they can find a way to react to that, where they can challenge that person, or they can go to someone who's in a higher position of authority because in the prison you know it's like a paramilitary organization, and there's a very strict hierarchical order and so if the CO, you know, tells them to do something all they have to do is go to the captain and report that, and then the captain makes the decision the CO doesn't have power over the captain. Anyway, the other thing that I sort of looked at, and I'll give you some examples of this later. The other thing that I sort of look what gets censored, most often, and what are the justifications. And there are two primary justifications, and one of those being based on the legal decision, anything that is deemed to be a threat to the safety and security of the institution. And then the other one, which many people used for like a whole different category of books is materials that are believed to contain or promote ideas that are considered counter to rehabilitation. So, within that first category, there's some sort of clearly defined materials that could promote violence. Well, also sexually explicit material, sorry, I'll get to that in a second materials that promote violence like race hatred and things like that that you would imagine. And then also information that could aid an escape. And so this was oftentimes books about like how to make tools, or anything about a lot of people talked about computer books about engineering and computers because they were afraid that the prisoners were also going to get these books and figure out how to dismantle the security system in the prison. And then the other one was references to things that are illegal or illicit in prison. And this would be anything that talks about, you know, distilling alcohol, or a lot of books about drug. We can talk about how they were doing drugs, even if it's an autobiography about recovery, if they talk at all about how to, or that they were using drugs. They'll often ban those books. And then in that other category, the counter to rehabilitation. This is where the interpretation of these rules got really kind of wild sometimes, because even in the institutions and the states that have these strict policies. It's always an individual who's reading and interpreting these definitions which are quite vague, you know, what is counter to someone's rehabilitation, you know what is a threat to the safety and security of the institution. And so there's a very wide range of items that are banned in specific places, and also that aren't in other places there's like a certain subset of material. That's pretty commonly banned around the country, but the variation is even greater than the similarity, I think. So this idea of the encounter to rehabilitation is what I saw really play out in really racialized and also homophobic ways that either the librarian, the people who work in the mailroom for the, where the books are sent in initially, or a random CO. If they see books like urban fiction books, I mean I suppose as librarians, you all probably know what urban fiction is. But there were a lot of people who told me about urban fiction books just in general are often censored at the same time that you have this sort of mystery books about the mafia and things like that. And so the James Patterson bestseller mystery novels, which contain just as much violence, etc. But the sort of racialized way that urban fiction novels are understood really contributed a lot to the censorship and then anything that had to do with, you know, anything but heterosexual types of love for activities. And also, in general, sexually explicit materials are defined in many places very broadly and can include things like, for example, in one case, a woman told me that there's a history book about Hitler's rise in Berlin and what was happening in society at the time and so on. It was like an award winning history book by Eric Lawson. And inside of that book was a black and white reproduction of a photograph of Hitler's or one of his cronies, like his bedroom, and above the bed was a painting, the sort of old world European painting in which the woman was topless. And she said it was about a quarter of an inch big that little picture and when someone saw that in there they literally made her get rid of the entire book. And so that kind of like sort of ridiculous to a degree that it's almost unbelievable sort of thing seems to happen pretty frequently due to the individual power that people have to interpret these rules. And so a few of the things I want to say a few of the things that librarians talked about that they were able to do in order to get a little bit more control over their library a little bit more power. And one is to try and keep trying and keep trying to get a position on any sort of publications review committee that exists, that they're primarily just made up of security staff and people who know nothing about books. And one librarian told me that she fought for a couple of years to get herself another librarian on to that review committee. And then once she was on that committee, everything that they tried to censor, she was right there when it was happening. And so she could push back. And sometimes they would listen to her and sometimes they wouldn't. But it wasn't easy for them, you know, for her to get them to say yes to her but eventually they did. Another thing that someone told me they did is they were trying to develop their when they first got the job, there was no library collection development policy. And so they thought, if I have this policy in place, I can use it to fall back on that some people told me about a lot that even if the rules and regulations seem overly restrictive, that oftentimes they actually give you more power, because you can refer back to that document and show how somebody isn't following the rules if they're trying to do this sort of informal censorship. So she did a survey of all the prisoners and asked them what kind of books they wanted to read and she compiled it and she brought it to the administration, along with her proposal for a development policy. And through doing that she was able to get them to support her in doing that and giving her a little bit of control over what happens, you know, what goes into the library. How much time do I have? Sorry. It's maybe just a couple more minutes and then we can return. I love the examples. Maybe we can return to some of those during the QA. Okay. So, yeah, so the sexual explicit material also is really defined very differently according to the institution, according to the state. In some cases there are, this is probably the one category that most the people that I talked to their state does have an official policy where they define what that means and it's often written out in like different kinds of sex acts and what it includes. And for some places it's more about images. And so any image of nude body, for example, is not allowed to be in but there are specific rules about what constitutes as nudity. You know, you could show a breast but not a nipple, you can show like part of a butt but not the whole thing. And there was a funny example one woman gave me where they, if there was a picture of a woman from the back and she was naked, what they would do is take a little sharpie and draw a little song underwear on it. And as long as that was there, they were allowed to bring it in. So that was one of the ways that she sort of took these rules, and by following rules was actually allowed to sort of circumvent them a little bit. In other places, anything written where in the story people are engaging in sex or sexual act also counts as sexually explicit materials. The other thing, so let me, one of the other things I talked to the librarians about was their understanding of censorship and their sort of attitude toward it. First, the majority of them have this sort of ambivalence where they could understand some degree of censorship, but they also in their hearts really don't believe in censorship. And the big difference here and I should have said this, the big difference there in where people's attitudes are about this is whether or not the person is actually a librarian with a degree or not. In many cases, the librarian position, the librarian position in the prison is not actually filled by a professional librarian. Some states have regulations that the person does have a master's degree, most do not. And so there are often times where somebody who maybe has a job as a teacher eventually becomes a librarian, and even COs who eventually they get a promotion and then the librarian position is open and they apply for it. And they become the librarian where they're sort of simultaneously for years have worked there as a prison guard. And I think as you can imagine that had a lot to do with how they viewed censorship. So, I think one of the important things that I also took out of this is just how important it is that there be an actual librarian with a degree in that position, rather than someone from the institution. So I have like a lot more than I could talk about, but I don't have time. And if there's anything that I didn't mention that anybody has any questions I'm happy to answer questions like, just, sorry, don't have much time but thank you. Sorry for rambling. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I think the examples are so important right years ago when I was a juvenile detention center librarian in communication with other juvenile detention center librarians. I told me a similar story, the rule of the facility was that only 25% of someone's breast or butt could be showing on the cover of a book. And so they literally spent hours, sometimes determining what 25% is, and then with a sharpie sharp being out the rest of it. I think I mean the reason right that you could go on about this is that it's so proliferate censorship and prisons is happening all across the United States and for anyone who's here who hasn't seen this yet. I think I've recently released a report calling censorship and prisons, the nation's largest book then. And I mentioned to that this really has a cooling effect on not only what information gets in but what information people produce or able to create while they're incarcerated, or to share across the prison walls. And I think Curtis you're going to touch on a little bit of that, right. Not specifically that I will be taking up a lot of a lot of the threads that Dr. Arford just laid down so who's dissertation parts of the dissertation I have, I have read. And we'll one day get to reading all of. So I'm going to share my screen. All right, can everyone see this. Great. So thank you, as I said thank you so much Dr. Arford for for setting up so so much of this discussion in a very helpful way. I'm going to in many ways talk about a very specific instance of censorship and how this works for colleges who are trying to provide a college education inside of prisons. However, I get into that I do want to introduce myself, my name is Curtis Tanaka. I'm a senior analyst at Ithaca SNR we're a not for profit research organization that works with the academic and cultural communities to better serve the public good. And I also want to call out my colleague Darnell apps who has been supporting me and leading leading a lot of this this work himself. What I want to cover today is really just the landscape of higher education in prison since I recognize not everyone in this audience is going to be very familiar with with what this looks like across the country. And then talk more specifically about how media review or censorship works for these programs specifically, and then some preliminary observations about how these programs navigate censorship and self censorship. So just as an overview. So many on this call probably know the incarcerated population in this country has dramatically increased since the 1970s. Of course, this is disproportionately affected people in communities of color. And even though the this population has dramatically expanded post secondary opportunities have not kept pace and you see that here, where the bottom line, the number of enrolled students who are incarcerated has mostly kept flat. And that hasn't declined and this is a specifically precipitous decline in 1994 after the on the bus crime bill, which eliminated access to Pell dollars for incarcerated students. And essentially in response to that, most of the college programs that were operating in prisons evaporated almost overnight. And so because of that prisons mostly focus on general education or adult basic education, or career and technical education. So the programs sort of withdrew from the prisons in the 90s because of the elimination of Pell. However, there has been a slow but steady growth in the number of programs across the country you see here, a map that was compiled from a survey by the Alliance for Higher Education in prisons that maps the number or the layout of the programs across the country. So this expansion has mostly been made possible through private philanthropies, and then beginning 2016 with a second chance Pell experiment which was started in the final years of the Obama administration and then expanded every year since. And the biggest development recently was in the end of last year with the budget bill where Pell was fully restored for incarcerated students and set to take place in 2023. And with that we do expect to see many, many more students, many more programs filling in this map. Now as you can imagine if you're trying to run a college program inside of a prison, you need to make sure that your students have access to to the materials that they need to do their education so this includes textbooks, academic articles and journals. So one of the primary sources that includes things like PowerPoints, you know, the whole gamut right students who are incarcerated have virtually nothing that an on campus student would have. And so programs themselves have to find a way to provide most of this. Because they are then bringing in the materials like textbooks and what at what what have you, they do have to engage with the media review or censorship process that Tammy Arford has has just laid out for us. And as Tammy Arford already said, these policies and the way they get implemented very widely between states and between facilities and so even if the policy is the same across the state. At the central level, the way they get enacted can can vary widely. So because of this, some facilities may require no review at all programs are free to bring in whatever materials they wish. And while in others programs may need to submit all of their syllabi reading lists and all their other course materials well in advance of the semester to have those reviewed and okayed. And if you know a professor is trying to bring in say an article or a reading you know for a week of the class that also has may also have to go under review. Arford has already noted that a lot of this could happen in the mailroom. But in the case of these college programs can also happen with the education personnel, or just other corrections officer can be no the officer at the gate that night who is who's looking through the papers. Now what this means and as Dr. Arford has already alluded to is that these censorship decisions are being made by staff with no real background in education and certainly not the background in higher education they're not subject matter or domain experts in the materials that are viewing in and potentially censoring. And because of this and because no one has the time to review you know an entire semesters or read through an entire semesters reading list. Most censorship decisions are being made just based on the title so if there is an objectionable word in the title of that can mean that that book or article is not allowed in rather and so it's not being based on an actual understanding of the content of the article or book, or its argument. Dr. Arford is also sort of already pointed to this but departments of corrections are particularly sensitive to materials that may address race, because of a concern of inciting violence or racial violence. That might be critical of the criminal justice system that might impede the good working order of the facility in other words or as Dr. Arford has already said it may be deemed antithetical to rehabilitation and so a specific example in this is we talked to a professor who was proposing to teach a class on poverty in America. And this was deemed antithetical to rehabilitation because it would lead people to not take responsibility for the decisions that led them to being incarcerated and so that class had to change its title and some of the readings had to be altered. So it could proceed inside of the prison. The media review process can also be very honoris and Byzantine it can take weeks or months for materials to get through media review, as I said, oftentimes materials have to be submitted well in advance to the Department of Corrections and if you're trying to bring in something on a week to week basis, you know it may still take time. And so you can end up with a very complex process that looks something like this and this is is not to for everyone to begin to impart but just to show how many steps how many people can take and how many considerations can go in just to getting a single, you know a single article to a single student so we asked some practitioners and professors to map out all the different steps it could take and who could could weigh in at which point to get you know one student one academic article. So you can see this is a very difficult process or can be a very difficult process. Sorry. So we wanted to understand this whole should bang a little bit better on how do these programs actually navigate all of these constraints to offer a college education equality at college education to incarcerated people. And so with support from the ascending education group. So we have begun to map the policy landscape of media review so just to collect all these policies in one place and compare them. How do they differ. And then also the real meat would be, or we are interviewing educators to learn about how these policies impact their course design, the kinds of assignments that they make for their students how they do instruction in the in the actual example, a corrections officer might you know walk into the classroom. And what how does this impact their relationship with the Department of Corrections. And then ultimately we were hoping to develop some at least model policies and practices to increase access and reduce censorship and the need for self censorship. So just to offer some preliminary observations and I'm calling them preliminary because the research is still very much ongoing. We have spoken to the directors and faculty of about 12 programs right now. And we are looking to interview many more so if you have anyone or can yourself a test or are willing to be interviewed please do let us know. And also, we would also, we're also hoping to recruit either currently reformally incarcerated students to talk about their experiences with censorship and their academic careers. And we are offering a small area for those students. So this is all to say we have not progressed to actual analysis proper but some some things that have left out to me as we've been doing this research. I'm going to give here, and mostly really comes down to the asymmetry and power between the programs and the Department of Corrections. These programs exist at the will of the Department of Corrections typically, unlike general education or adult basic education. The Department of Corrections typically does not have a mandate to support higher education or post secondary education. And so what this means is that programs have to basically do everything possible to preserve their good relationship and a good working relationship with the department. So talking about censorship what this typically means is that even though appeals processes do exist, most media review policies do have ways of appealing a censorship decision. These are typically never used by these programs, mostly because appealing a decision could be seen as causing trouble, and which could itself in jeopardize the existence of the program and so programs are always having to consider this existential question when when thinking about censorship. And in fact what this actually means is that even though one no one book or article being censored is deemed worth the fight is worth jeopardizing the existence of the program and aggregate means of course that a lot of censorship is taking place. It's also the case that to preserve this good working relationship with their departments of corrections programs may themselves self censor through reviewing syllabi and readings before giving them to the Department of Corrections, just to make sure that they you know they don't get yelled at or cause cause cause waves with with staff in the in the facilities. And they do this even though they will also tell you that they have no way of predicting they cannot predict the decisions do sees will make. They're often many of the interviews we spoke to you were surprised at what they were allowed to bring in things that they never thought thought the do see what okay. By self censoring in this way, they're actually very much limiting the kinds of materials and resources that they're that they're able to bring into their students. There's also a modified version of this where departments of corrections can actually put the onus of censorship on the programs themselves. And making it clear that if something does come in that they don't like the program will be on the hook for that. So the kind of need to self censor can can be can be more or less formal. At an individual level, we also asked interviewees if they were, you know, because most people who are engaged in this work are very interested in criminal justice reform and social issues of social justice and so we asked them if they ever engaged on social media about these issues or engaged in activism otherwise. And all of them said no, they were afraid that if the Department of Corrections were to see any of this activism or engagement on social media, this could also impact the program have a negative impact on the program and so most of them felt like they could not engage and had to self censor even if they wanted to engage in that kind of activism or to speak out. Another sort of the third rail of higher education in prisons is the issue of technology, which I should say is in itself neither good or bad. There are, but there are problems and technology can provide more opportunities to censor. So when I was talking about the media review policies previously submitting syllabi and textbooks and readings, most of that is done in an analog way so they're submitting the physical books and stacks of you know printouts of articles. And when that's the case, you know, unless you're going to read through everything very you know with a fine tooth comb, you're going to be making decisions about you know what's in the title, most of the time. Now, when with the increase in technology and the ability of instructors to bring in digital files they like PDFs this does provide more opportunity for for DOC to find things they don't like. They can you know do a control search, you know control F and look for just start searching for words that they don't want to see. And so this does provide an increased opportunity or increased range of materials that they can find objectionable. The programs have also been using prison tablets you see an example here on the left to support their programs and this again is not in it in of itself bad although the programs are very problematic is as many of you may know and we can talk more about that later. But the tablets have at least increased access of these programs to their students to increase in communication and supporting the program itself through a learning management system. So for the tablets again into the program or into the prison because they make it clear that they will be monitoring and surveilling all communications that that happened on them and so it's not just, you know email exchanges between instructors and students it can even be a site student assignments it can be in, you know, professors comments on students student assignments that are now visible to the Department of Corrections. What we have heard from from the interviews is that this of course has a chilling effect on the on discussion and engagement when you know everything is being monitored. So some interviewees express that they would not teach certain classes or give certain assignments if a new communication had to be done through these channels that made it made everything visible to the Department of Corrections. There's a lot more that we could say and again we're very early in or we're sort of in the middle of the research. But there are a few things that are clear call outs for how programs themselves are navigating all of these challenges and the first and foremost, anyone who's engaged in higher education in prison will tell you you have to build trust over time. So programs that do not undergo media review, who are able to just bring in what they want, typically are long standing programs that have been developing a relationship with the department over over years and some cases decades and because of that, they have sort of proved that they can be trusted to bring materials in. The second strategy is what I'm calling performative transparency performative because you know these programs had nothing to hide like they're not trying to cause riots or in the prison they're certainly not trying to bring in smuggling drugs or contraband they're trying to provide an education so they have nothing to hide. The Department of Corrections also has the authority to inspect everything anyways and so the programs and the less may try to be extra transparent. An example of this is we talked to a program director who is trying to send letters into students during the pandemic just to give them an update on the program and ask how they were, and the department was very suspicious of this. However, the answer was the, the director just said well I just won't seal any of the envelopes so you can just know go in and open them and see what I'm right when I'm sending in and that was enough for the Department of Corrections to sign off on it. Even though it's the Department of Corrections they open all mail anyways, right so but it was just the act of not sealing the envelope that that made it okay so this performative transparency and the performance generally and in this space is something I find very fascinating. And then finally, training faculty about working with the Department of Corrections so some programs do provide specific training that addresses, you know, faculty do not try to anticipate decisions that the Department of Corrections might make because you can't. And similarly to what Dr. Arford has already said, and in a related way don't try to anticipate the interests of incarcerated students so just because they're incarcerated just because they might be a person of color doesn't mean that they want to learn about systemic racism. They may want to, but they may also want to learn about medieval history or my in archaeology or what have you. And so also making sure that they are not themselves denying access to a broad range of materials to their students is a part of that training, and it's something that I think can be replicated more widely. I'm probably already over time but I didn't want to to finish up on just some some paths forward. And one thing is, is stronger policies in place and I mean, one can critique the efficacy of a policy in the way that they actually get and put into practice all one once. But there are at least a place to start and as Dr. Arford said, ways to hold people accountable. So Colorado's Colorado's directive, for example, actually centralizes and tracks approval or is supposed to centralize and track approval to create consistency so it's not, you know, these little fiefdoms, making their own individual decisions it's supposed to be standardized across the state in theory. And importantly, I think it also cards out exceptions for materials that serve an educational purpose. So materials that perhaps my have nudity in them. If they are provide being provided in the context of education are supposed to be allowed in. And so I think this gives us a window or at least a wedge to use education to build evidence to show like hey these are not you know causing rights or what have you whatever dark imaginings exist within the Department of Corrections. They're used to expand access more broadly beyond incarcerated students or students or incarcerated people who are enrolled in programming. And then I think perhaps most importantly is that some programs don't undergo review their materials at all and this I think you know is the most important example to point to which is that, you know programs are able to operate they're able to provide, you know, an education and all the materials needed without oversight and they're doing just fine the prisons that have not you know erupted into violence. They're not smuggling in drugs. And you know and it's fine. And so I think pointing to this evidence and buildings, this evidence that at least in this context, we can and should be the bringing access to materials because this is not about security this is about access to reading and access to education. And so this is these are avenues that we're hoping to pursue as we as we engage further in this work. And with that, I will end and happy to entertain questions at the end. Thank you so much Curtis, very informative, and also just listening with that feeling of how easy it is for people who are outside of jails and prisons to access all kinds of information, even the exchange in the chat in the chat with people asking to get Dr. Arford's dissertation, you know, this is this like very quick way of getting the information that we would like to have. And I hope for everyone who is in the room right now that you're having a little feeling of, well, how can I be involved in helping people to get access to information given all of the difficulties that exists. One of those ways is by volunteering with or donating to books to prisoners groups, or other free book programs for people who are incarcerated. And these exist across the country they have a really long history. Many of them were formed in the 70s around supporting political prisoners and now have expanded to support anyone in the area that they provide people books to. And so if you're interested in these I won't say too much about them because Harry is going to talk about Xbox in Georgia. But if you're interested in trying to locate a books to prisoners group in your area. I invite you to look at this list that was created by the Prison Activist Resource Center, which is based in Oakland to see if there are programs that are operating near you. And with that, Harry, would you like to tell us more about your work and Xbox. I would love to. I'll try and keep it short to make sure we have time for the Q&A for for the after portion before we head out but my name's Harry Gopal I'm a board member at Xbox here in Atlanta, Georgia. We're a very new prison brick books program. We're also the first in the state of Georgia incorporated here as a 501 C3 so traditionally a lot of the book programs that had been supporting Georgia prisons had been from North Carolina from Alabama from Mississippi. But we're the first here in Atlanta and we sort of thought about the beers and books program in a couple different ways and we'll talk through a little bit but very similar to what Dr. Martin was saying in the state of Georgia about half of prisons have no books about Dr. Martin Luther King about two thirds have no books about Malcolm X. And one of our and a lot of that comes from a lot of this informal censorship, a lot of the asymmetry and power that we're seeing in the space. The focus was not only a thinking about prison, you know, getting books into prison as a pipeline which I think there are a bunch of incredible organizations doing this work. But secondly, trying to think about how can we get relevant current and important materials to these prisoners and how can we get that kind of work to incarcerated populations. So, a lot of the things we've run into are a lot of the band book lists, a lot of the censorship that's happening a lot of the review boards, but we've tried to think about how we can solve that problem in this space. I mentioned we're very new. We're founded in December and in that time period we've been able to donate. We've actually just closed our books for September over 12,000 books. We're averaging about 75 cents for every book that we're we're sending into prisons and we've gained relationships with about seven different facilities. And I say that one just, you know, we're very proud of the work that we do with with X books but more importantly, we think there's a sort of a model that really requires collaboration and work and partnership and advocacy with the OC librarians in order to make this work. And so when we think about this space, traditionally we think, you know, when we look at prison book programs they've they've been really sort of done in a very specific way and it's not to say that this model is wrong but we think there's there's a way that we can sort of use this to help us think about censorship and books and so traditionally a lot of these book programs will donate books into a prison program, they'll hold inventory for a long time. And then they'll get a request whether those are from higher ed programs like Curtis mentioning, or those are for individual prisoners, and then they'll, you know, take that request package those books and send them directly to these prisoners. It actually creates a lot of issues in terms of, as they mentioned a lot of mail is opened up by the DOC, they'll self censor books they'll make sure that they, those books don't end up at the right recipients and so we looked at this problem a little bit and tried to think about how can we start to think about some of these censorship boards and some of these review, review boards. And in, in our work we're trying to think about how we can filter sort of further up the, the value chain, right to use an MBA term but the idea is how can we be better about selected donations so we work to a pre sort our books, make sure that we have them by genre and by type. So we spent a lot of time cataloging and making sure that this happens in the in the sort of the donation phase of our work. We then hand deliver those to DOC librarians and library so we've worked very hard to build personal, you know relationships with these DOC librarians and libraries. One of the things we've seen, especially with the ones that we work with and as I mentioned we work with a very narrow group here in Georgia is traditionally overworked traditionally under resourced traditionally not enough funds to actually do the work. And so it's really important to them that they have a funnel and an advocate on the outside that says, you know, these are the books we're bringing able to bring in and here's how we start to think about how we do some of the advocacy policy around that. And as Curtis mentioned, we work very heavily with education programs and incarcerate population to help fulfill their request by buying them books. We did that by recently we did higher education programs through Bruton Parker College here in Georgia as well as the common good Atlanta, which are both higher education programs here that you know we're working off older textbooks for working off older books and went and purchased them new books for for a number of things and while, you know, those are very small numbers of books. And as Curtis mentioned, very high impact right because these are, you know, we're finding these are heavy in use are being used for these programs and are being used to help drive, you know, greater education greater access within prisons and so we think there's, you know, in building these partnerships we think there's a real opportunity to drive to them and then as we start to think about donations and selected donations how do we start to engage local bookstores, local libraries here in the Georgia area to help us drive not only use books but also new books into this space we think, you know, there's, there's a lot to think about in in sort of how we think about used books which I think there's there's a ton out there and when we make a call for donations where, you know, generosity is not an issue on our side and getting books. I think the question is how do we start to drive some of that through the operations of how we actually start to deliver books and presents. So, when we talk about DOC librarian collaboration we think about it sort of in in sort of two pieces. One is, how do we not only get to know these people and work with them and become advocates for them. But be how can they help us do exactly what what Curtis has done in his work which is how can we start to map some of the process and start to understand some of those gating factors. And so this has been a big focus of us, you know, I think we've been very successful in getting the books to our librarians I think our next focus is, how do we make sure that these books sort of get into the right hands of those incarcerated populations so we really think about one how do we hone our book donations how do we create filters in sort of the higher, you know, sort of on the outside, so that we're bringing the right books into into prison librarians hands and make sure that things are easier for them to pass through things like the media review how do we work with those DOC librarians to identify banned books and again this is on a facility by facility basis so we spend a lot of time with our DOC librarians to understand what is being banned. Why is it being banned and how much of that is, you know, as Dr. Arford mentioned how much of that is self censorship by the librarian and how much of that is, you know, there's a true band books list and how can we start to work through that. And then the last piece we're trying to think through and you know one I Dr. Arford and Curtis are much smarter than I am in this space but how do we start to interact and help them be advisors and some of this review can we start to do some of those things like building trust you know some of that transparency some of that training for the groups that are there, and help them while interacting with them those review boards so we joined with other organizations we joined, you know, Curtis and I are on a monthly call but those are the spaces we want to get into in order to help better understand what those librarians are able to do. And finally how do we think about this as a next step in our space so first is we are very passionate in our right in the midst of creating a book catalog for distribution in prison so. In order to help us filter through that process we're working with librarians to develop book catalog so it's more order form where you're able to say out of these 10 or 12 books here's what I'd like to order. And then here are three or four books outside of your order form that I would really like to have in this prison. And so how can we start to develop some of these capabilities without sort of narrowing the list on our end in order to say hey we're going to develop these only books that you know are okay and aren't, you know, how can we continue to do our new and important relevant books in that space. As well as secondly how do we start to grow our library and networks and how do we start to become advocates for them and so, as we mentioned before very new in this process where we're, you know, we're building as we are learning. One thing we're very proud about is is a couple months ago we were able to get 120 copies of the autobiography of Malcolm X into Metro Atlanta juvenile facilities here in Atlanta and so we're already starting to make headway on some of the problems we've identified earlier and, and we think there's a real opportunity to bring sort of, I wouldn't want to say it's sort of provocative but but material that is relevant and new and important that some of these incarcerated populations. Stop there for questions. Thank you so much Harry I really, really enjoyed learning about the model that X books is employing, and especially to hear about partnerships with prison librarians who so often in research are quoted as discussing that they're incredibly isolated in the work that they're As we enter Q&A I'd like to invite everyone who is in this Zoom with us today to join San Francisco Public Library and celebrating two important themes this month. The first is Filipino American History. And the second is our Viva programming, which celebrates Latinx history. We've given a few questions in the Q&A. Thank you everyone who has asked questions so far. And if you'd like to ask a question, please continue to use the Q&A function. Dr. Arford, the first question is for you. I'm wondering about what it would be like for an anti censorship minded library prison librarian, who was able to make it onto a publication review committee. Would they need to play ball and approve the censorship of some materials in order to be heard when it feels very important. How far would they get in the committee if they raised concerns for every case. Have you heard from any librarians on these committees about this. Thank you for your question. I can, this was a long time ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy on this but I do remember the one conversation I had with the woman who told me that she had to like fight for years to get on this. And the impression that I got is yeah it's a little bit of playing ball. It's a little bit of like, I'll give you this if you give me that you kind of got to play along and smile and, you know, be nice and to get something, but I feel like anytime you're dealing with prison administration that's kind of what you have to do. Yeah, that's, she's really the only one I talked about that I really imagine it would just be absolutely dependent upon the people who are on the review committee and that particular institution. Thank you for everyone there's a question. And I'm sorry, in my home and it's a noisy neighborhood. How do the kinds of considerations that you all are raising apply in situations where prisons are not allowing real materials at all anymore. So books aren't getting in, there's blanket bands. There are starting to just scan incoming mail and publications from incarcerated people. So in high surveillance circumstances are the concerns that you all are raising other projects that you're working on, even relevant to the level of censorship that is. So I can say about the institutional levels when I was doing this research. There was absolutely no correlation whatsoever. And this was also before people really had a lot of these tablets any readers I was actually wondering the same thing if either Curtis or Hari knew anything what's going on with those tablets now. It seems like it'll be harder to get stuff in now, like they have even more control. I was I was going to say from from a book donation standpoint in Georgia specifically. We are keeping our eye on tablets. I think that we see, you know, I think there's huge technological advantages for, I think you get a wider access I think those things are able to, to to grow your knowledge but obviously on the other hand as we've mentioned huge abilities. I think from our end, we're trying our best to steer away from it right and we think that books are the right way in but you know if, if for some reason they built tablets I think you know the work that we've we've done in sort of a cross prison book programs, we have at least a point of view that we can sort of take off the shelf and be able to pass along on how we think that should be done. Right, so the concern that that is trying to address in this way right is that books as a vehicle for contraband. And so the concern with the tablets right is that they will privilege ebooks over physical books. And that means another opportunity to charge incarcerated people or their families. Here we get into the exploitation, the exploitative model of many of these tablet providers, specifically JPA and GTL are perhaps the most famous and to your question Dr. Arford. They are sort of still the hot new thing in corrections, increasingly more and more states are signing free free tablet contracts where every person incarcerated in the state gets gets a free tablet. And that's the expectation that the companies will recoup that cost through you know exploitative charges for for x, y or z. And so far as access to educational materials this this looks a little bit different. Or the concern the current concern is very similar but but express a little bit differently because in most cases even if you have, if you're in prison working where there's a tablet. And as far as I've heard I've not not heard of any program being limited to only providing things through the tablet if they are in an in person program. The bigger concern is that the existence of the tablets and the communications opportunities that they present will encourage the Department of Corrections to prefer distance education. So providers who do not you know have no you may be completely out of state there's no in person element to the education. We know very very well that you know one of the great advantages and one of the most impactful things about these programs is sort of the in person interaction. So there's there's there's a great deal of concern and this is this is really why the threat to in person programming is really why technology is as I said kind of the third rail of this this area. There is however some some movement on this topic in a couple of states have adopted laws or they haven't adopted laws there before the local or the state legislation. That would require the Department of Corrections to prefer an in person program if we're an in state program and that is willing to offer in person programming if one is willing to do it in the state so they can only prefer. They can only go to a fully distance education model if no no college in the state is willing to do in person. So that has has some potential to perhaps cut back on that fear. But in so far as you know the replacing physical books or denying access to books or only limiting people to specific vendors is still very much an ongoing issue with no clear solution sort of out there. Yeah smart communications is the one in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And we're just seeing a proliferation of companies that do similar services and engage in similar forms of surveillance. I know we're at the hour now we have a few more questions. So maybe we can spend 10 or 15 more minutes together. A couple of questions are for you. Could you share more about how X books is funded and staffed and then there's a second question which I'll just read now and you can bounce around as you want to. Do you limit any material beyond what facilities have been are there materials that you would deny sending. So for the first question we're we're funded by individual donors for X books we're staffed primarily by the board 500 books in this room I need to get to a to a facility soon that's that's already sorted and ready to go. But my wife said she won't take it upstairs so I got to work on it at some point. I think question. I mean the short answer is is no I mean our goal is to expand the funnel as much as we can on the doc side in order to get as many books in as we can. We we face some some physical restrictions and the fact that some of our present partners won't take hardback books won't take books that have writing in them. So we have to we have to funnel out on our side but from a, you know, when we first started it was us taking sort of provocative material and sending it into prisons and just hoping that things are going to work out when we started to build some of the organization around this. Our viewpoint now is, you know, we should still keep some of the, the, you know, some of the, you know, break the wall down type of spirit behind this organization, but try to do it in through through the doc. And so, like I said short answer is no, our belief is that, you know, we should be able to send any material into prisons, and, you know, if we should be able to be fighting for access for all that material. So, obviously there are bureaucratic and, you know, sort of, you know, self policing type hurdles that are exist but our goal is to, you know, hopefully be advocates for those doc librarians to help drive around that. Thank you. And now a final question for all. Have you noticed that censorship policies you've seen tend to correlate with security levels of the facilities that you're in communication with, or is it widely divergent even among prisons in the same security level. I'll just, I'll do a really quick thing. It's, for our, we've had a lot more success at juvenile facilities than we have at adult facilities. I say that to say, it is wildly divergent but that is one definite piece that we've had is is our juvenile facilities we have a lot more leeway in those facilities than we do. I would and for my, for my perspective I would say it varies widely. I would say yes juvenile facilities are typically easier to get things into easier to pilot things in so things like you know computers and technology and things like that. In some cases it can, you know, depend on the security level of the facility. Typically not as far as I've seen not in the, you know, the kinds of censorship that that gets gets done. It's more about access to other kinds of materials so you know if you're trying to teach you know a biology course can you bring in some of the benefits or you know models of organs or things things like that. And so that might be allowed in the lower security facility but not in the higher facility security facility but I haven't really seen, you know, censorship policies differ at that level, per se. I would also say the other thing to think about is is the difference between men and women's facility. And in some cases, it seems like women's facility is treated a little bit more like like juvenile facilities like they're more willing to to allow things in and in other cases in other states it's like the women get get nothing like no one no one's even thinking about them. So it, you know it. So I think set set at the beginning you know it varies so much across the country in between states and within states. I'll say one thing that I don't actually remember which state this was in but somebody told me that they have a sex offender unit within the prison, and that the rules for who's allowed to access books in that unit are different. They have a much narrower, they probably just aren't allowed anything really, like a Bible or something. They have a really small number of things available to them, because they have a sex charge. A question came in about, you know, where what are the limits of choosing to work against self censorship or censorship or selection, which is, would you send in the Turner Diaries and, and I think I know what book this is, which is a white supremacist science fiction fantasy. Would you all like to talk about your own selection practices or information practices party this might fall more to. It's a good question. I think. Yeah, I, I think it's not in, you know, I don't find that to be important or relevant literature to send into prisons. If it's a, we haven't faced this situation. I mean, I think we'd have to have a very serious meeting about I can't imagine that I would be okay sending that in but you know I think in the spirit of access. It's hard. It's hard to say no to some books and yes to others but you know, personally, I think it's difficult to send. And I will say part of the piece and that that might not be coming up as an issue for you all is that. And if people have been following Emily driven skis tweets this week you've seen some of this Emily driven skis been tweeting about books that are censored in prisons, but some of the materials like that would be similar to Turner Diaries like David Dukes biographies are permitted but in prison library collections, for instance, the David Duke books are in prison collections in Texas. So that is I mean that's a pressing concern if you are in a library that is skewing particularly why in its collection development right which is Dr offered some of what you were talking about is what is the tacit endorsement that happens with those kinds of inclusion. We're still getting some questions there's one, but I think we're getting close to closing out so I will leave you all with a choice and then to any words of wisdom you'd like to share as we end. The two questions that remain are for everyone can you speak to the difficulties with working with local detention facilities like jails versus state and federal prisons. And then the other question which aligns well with this is, do we know of instances of DOC actually suspending our outright eliminating higher education programs or prison libraries because of disagreement over censorship and follow up any guidance for new and developing prison library programs. So I can tackle what I was the middle one. I have not heard of of an HPP program, outrightly sort of closing down because of censorship. I would say there, you know the, the priority typically is you know we want to provide an opportunity and education to our students. And we should privilege and prioritize what they want to happen. So this is the same thing about debates with technology you know it's very easy for us on the outside to philosophize and being about these things. When the person inside you know there's the students inside me just like I don't I don't care I just like want something. And so in those cases I think most of the programs listen to those to those voices to the incarcerated voices and say, you know we are we want to serve you in the way that that you want to be served. And if that means you know we may need to compromise and I mean, the prison working in a prison environment is it is inherently compromising space. Right, if you're going to have to make you know moral and ethical choices, because that's just what it is. And so I think most of these programs that are that are engaged in this work are trying their best to to serve their students and continue to serve their students, even if that involves some some difficult compromises. So I can say like I teach. You meet it yourself. Sorry. I teach in a county facility. And I really think it's all about the relationship that you have with that institution. I literally walk in there with a bag on my shoulder. Nobody looks in it, and I teach class, a class called transformative justice and give them readings about prison abolition. Because we, my university has been working with them for so long, but they just know, and every once in a while if there's a new co who doesn't know about the program when we first get there we have to go through the metal you know he's won't like this people bring in notebooks and then I guess somebody tells him oh those that's just the teacher just let her go she knows where she's going and you just let me go and I walk in. So, I don't think that's quote unquote normal, but I think it's all about that relationship that you build over time. Thank you all so much for your time and for sharing your expertise with all of us, and thank everyone who's attended for how much you've engaged with this program. The recording of the program will be available through the San Francisco public libraries YouTube page I believe, likely later today but I could be wrong on that, but soon. And as we close out is there anything else that you all would like to share. I think there was a question about sharing the slides, which I'm happy to do. If there's a way to do that. Yeah, same here. I'm happy to do it. Yeah, I'm also happy to. If you email me I'll send you a copy of my dissertation for those people who are asking, if you can't get it off progress, progress like if you don't have access I can help me know it to you. And sorry, sorry, my very last plug is, please support local prison book programs in your area. They are there are incredible people doing work in local area and that's not an Xbox plug that's a everyone across the nation plug, you know, support them with, you know, we need volunteers to help us sort books we need, you know, we need funding in order to help us go and go and, you know, purchase new books for people. And we need sort of amplification of a lot of our messaging in order to get some of this word out so, you know, ban books week is a great week. We wish every week was banned books week so we talked about this. Excellent. Thank you all so much and everyone has a very, very good week. Thank you. Thank you. We miss together. Thank you.