"Every day, for the almost two years I worked as a staff librarian at the Suffolk County House of Correction at South Bay, the pattern was the same: Seconds after they were released from their units, inmates would not walk, they would run — as though catapulted — towards the prison’s library.
Many inmates, especially those in a hurry, arrived with some specific order of business. They would grab a book of case law, or they’d check out a newspaper or magazine and take a seat at the library’s long table. They might disappear into the labyrinth of bookshelves. Many would line up to speak with me. They’d pose legal questions, talk about their families and health concerns, describe their spiritual and educational quests. Time and resources were short, and the needs were urgent. The library was a site of activity, of perpetual motion."
A thoughtful meditation on a prison library in Boston. The author argues for it's untested power as a social institution, transforming inmates (or at least having the potential to transform) less through the books themselves (what I expected) and more through the instantiation of civic mores. Hm, and it turns out the author has written a larger memoir on his time spent at this prison library, so I assume this is an excerpt. Or at least a condensation.
MORE here.
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