There are over forty organizations in the United States that distribute donated books to prisons and incarcerated individuals. One of these nonprofit organizations is Books to Prisoners, located in Seattle, Washington. They have been responding to individual requests for books for close to five decades. We sat down with Andy Chan, who has volunteered there since 1994, to discuss how the organization works and some of the challenges and rewards of operating the book donation program.
Tell us a bit about Books to Prisoners.
It’s an organization that has been around since the 1970s. Initially it started out in support of political prisoners. Subsequently it has broadened out quite a lot to be an organization with the mission to support the self-empowerment and education of incarcerated individuals across the United States. .
How does the donation process work?
We respond to individual requests that people send us for specific books. As a secondary thing we will send to libraries or prisons that request, but usually in those circumstances we ask that they pay the postage for it. For individual requests from individual people, we send everything for free.
People request the whole spectrum of stuff, and we do our best to respond to those requests as we can. There was a pandemic dip in the number of requests we got, but typically we get something in the region of 900-1200 requests a month. We can respond to most of those but there are some states or individual prisons we cannot get into. We have a limited supply and limited space so we can’t stock everything. We get most of our books through individual donations of used books. Occasionally we will get publishers or bookstores that will donate overstock of new books and occasionally individual donations of new books. We do not typically have a budget to buy new books. Just recently we managed to do a couple of good fundraisers which will allow us to do that.
What are some of the challenges the organization faces trying to donate these books? For example, are there books you cannot send?
You can imagine that not every prison or every state DOC is interested in our services. We cannot get into certain states, and the states that we can get into are liberal in their interpretation of which books can get in. Some will only allow new books, some will only allow paperback books, some will have a limit on the number of books each prisoner can get at any one time or have in their cell at a time. There are content restrictions that we have to be aware of, and there are things that we know we can’t send: anything with a spiral binder, pictorial nudity, or maps of the states for example. We don’t bother to send those in. We realized it’s better to self-censor than waste the postage on those things.
Is there a particular book or genre of books that is often requested?
Dictionaries are consistently the most requested item. The requests change over time a little bit, but the very typical ones, the evergreen requests, are items like Black history, radical Black history, horror, Sci-Fi, and trades books – like carpentry books, HVAC systems, auto mechanics. Reentry books, business books, how-to books, like how to start businesses, how to rebuild your life after prison, how to draw. But honestly the subject matters are so incredibly broad that everything has been requested at one point in time.
As a nonprofit organization, how do you raise funds to keep sending out books for free?
In terms of fundraising, individual donations have always been the primary funding source. In earlier years we got chunks of money through benefit shows – I’m talking three digits – punk shows, things like that. The proportion of individual donations has gone up a lot. We get occasional donations from foundations, but that is fairly rare.
We’ve had very little luck in getting solicited donations from foundations. Because as a smallish organization with branches in two states, Washington and Oregon, we are pretty local but our reach is national. For local founding organizations we are not local enough, and for a national founding organizations typically we are too small to be of consideration. There are some family foundations that will help every now and then, but they provide unsolicited donations. We don’t ask them for it. They find us and offer it up.
We are almost entirely volunteer. Everybody was a volunteer until 2013 [when] there was a lawsuit, that we were not a party to but that we benefited from. That netted us enough money to pay a part-time program coordinator, who currently has fifteen hours with our organization. But other than that, the board is all volunteer, always has been, and almost all the work is done by volunteers.