Earl Dungey – McNeil Island Corrections Center Library

And many have done a “little time”  They include Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, St. Paul, Christopher Columbus, and writers Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Miguel Cervantes.  How one gets inside a prison isn’t as important as what they do there and after they are released, or so this illustrious list of names would have you believe.

 

There are fifteen prisons, one of them for women in Washington, and another will be opening soon.  They house about 18,000 inmates, only ten of the fifteen have a contract for library services with the Washington State Library.  There are 28,000 offenders in community supervision with local library support. Budget cuts have brought the library staff in the branch libraries down to one FTE per branch.  This means that the library branch is only going to be open for twenty hours per week, in institutions where the population is from 800 to 2400 inmates, most inmates will not be able to get to the library for their needs.  The services provided are common to most public libraries:

·     Books (including large print, graphic novels, YA, children’s picture, audio)

·     Magazines (including popular, foreign language –Spanish, Vietnamese)

·     Music CDs and Cassettes (all genres)

·     Interlibrary loan

·     Reference (no legal research)

·     Employment (library clerks)

 

Before the major budget cuts under Governor Locke, there were two or three FTE per Corrections Center and the libraries were open five days a week with three evening hours to cover those inmates that were working, almost sixty hours for patron access.  The Department of Corrections staff was also served by the library and professional journals and books were available.  After the budget cuts the Corrections staff were no long a focal point of library operations in Corrections.  The library starts to be labeled as the Inmates’ Library, although there is still limited staff support.

 

One benefit of being the one full time employee at the library branch is that the training and responsibilities were increased, and the immediate supervision was reduced; the paraprofessional level and pay were increased to reflect the added responsibilities. The biggest disadvantage is lack of support and coverage for vacations and medical absence. So as soon as either happens the library is effectively closed except for some temporary assignment of a Librarian or Library Associate from another institution for a day or two. When the position becomes empty the hiring process begins immediately, but new hires will have to go through CORE training before being allowed to work their library branch.

 

And at the Department of Corrections… When the chance came to return to a prison library I jumped on it and have been fully employed ever since.  They just don’t describe the eight hour days and the mad rush of impatient patrons, all certain the universe revolves around them and only them first… and always. That might scare most gentle library types away…

I expect that if you haven’t worked inside a prison that you think there are too many terrible people around and it is dangerous, and that might be almost true. But I have about seven years in prison libraries and only one half-hearted fight the entire time I have been working, the real fights are held elsewhere so they can’t be interrupted by staff and the Emergency Response Team. The more dangerous problem is staff being influenced to break the rules for an inmate – name the rule and they will try to get a staff member to break it, there are almost as many illegal activities inside a prison as outside. When they put tobacco off limits inside the facility the inmates say it just changed the price of the tobacco – since a heavy smoker still smells like stale smoke, I would have to agree that someone is still smoking.

Still like the world outside the fence, most prisoners (inmates, felons and violators) inside the fence are going about behaving well and getting along. They do demand that staff obey the rules and regulations (although they are sure they are okay to break the ones they need to) and there is a long list of customs and polite manners that other inmates know and dare not break without paying the penalty for crossing the line. Everyone makes choices and stands on what they have chosen to do. I watch, work and talk about this and other things with the questioning patrons and penalized, every work day. One never needs count the minutes and the hours for the days fly full.

 

I need to expound on ILS, Institutional Library Services, to entice you to join in this happy fray.  You have a population of people separated from America’s culture and commerce, for healing and treatment or programming. This population needs access to the outside and a library can provide entertainment and education without subjecting the outside population, you, to the stress of contact with the separated persons. That could be what is going on, I am not sure, but some one has decided that a library can assist in the return of this special population to normal society. Is there empirical proof that a library can make an incorrigible into a better human being? I like to point to Red and Malcolm X, and expect that you know not everyone goes to nor uses the library for its maximum potential.

I work in the Institutional Library Services to help provide that help in finding one’s way out of the present and into a past and a better future. I know that I am called on daily to bring a change in knowledge, attitude and satisfy one’s question without an answer. Do I make a difference? only in that I open the door and allow some one in, they get to open the books and they have to have an open mind. That may be all the difference needed. More library keepers are needed far from the flag pole and all the glory in the Capital, the Washington State Library serves less than twenty institutions, serving over fifteen thousand or so patrons with no other library service.