The Virginia Department of Corrections recently decided to cancel a local bookstore's link to a program that provided reading materials to Virginia's inmates because of a concern that contraband items may be hidden in the pages.
The 20-year-old Books Behind Bars program allowed Charlottesville's Quest Bookshop to donate books to inmates at the commonwealth's penal institutes in an effort to improve prison literacy rates.
"Every item coming in to a facility has to be checked by officers," said Michael Leninger, director of communications for the Virginia Department of Connections. "That process takes time."
When banned items were found in several books sent by Quest Bookshop, Leininger said the Department realized that friends and family of inmates could easily volunteer at the store to hide and send ilicit items, prompting the decision to stop receiving books from Quest. Although Leininger declined to comment about what the confiscated items were, Kay Allison, Quest Bookshops owner and founder of the Books Behind Bars program, said the Department told her that the contraband items included paper clips and a CD containing licentious material, which had not come from Quest.
Allison expressed disappointment about the Department's decision. Since it's inception, she said, Books Behind Bars has sent more than one million books to Virginia inmates.
"Most of these people have never owned a book before," she said, adding that Quest has sent about 8,000 dictionaries and thesauruses to prisoners in the past few years alone.
The donations were not just limited to dictionaries and thesauruses, however.
"The Complete Works of Plato was perfect," one inmate wrote in a letter to the bookstore. "It's exactly what I need to study and challenge my mind."
Allison said Quest Bookshop has received many letters of support like that inmate's since the program's inception.
University English Prof. Deborah McDowell also defended the program. She said inmates should have unquestioned access to any reading, and the Department's decision to stop Quest Bookshop from sending books to prisoners represents a larger problem in the national justice system.
"If there was ever an interest in rehabilitation, that objective has long since passed." she said, "The correctional system in this country is now purely punitive."
McDowell added that if the system were willing to allow its inmates freer access to education, fewer inmates would become recidivists.
Still, Leininger said the Department's decision was the right one to make, noting that Quest was not the only organization available to provide books to inmates.
"They're painting us as though we've crushed a reading program," he said. "But all we've done is remove [Quest] from our vendors list"
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