The Prison Library Primer: A Program for the 21st Century

In this century the central and quintessential correctional facility program ought to be the library. While the U.S. prison industry has embraced a massive reentry movement emphasizing literacy and job readiness for former felons, prison libraries have been ignored as potential sources for reintegration. In The Prison Library Primer: A Program for the Twenty-First Century, Brenda Vogel addresses the unique challenges facing the prison librarian.

This practical guide to operating and promoting a correctional library focuses on the basic priorities: collection development; location, space planning, and furnishing suggestions; information on court decisions and legislation affecting prisoners' rights. This volume also includes an information-skills training curriculum, sample administration policies, essential digital and print sources, and community support resources.

Equipped with practical library science tools and creative solutions, The Prison Library Primer is an invaluable resource that will help the librarian and library advocate develop, grow, and maintain an effective, user-centered library program.

This book is a practical guide to understanding how to operate a prison library in contemporary society. It equips the librarian and library advocate with the necessary background, practical library science tools, and the proper solutions to develop, grow, and maintain an effective, user-centered library program.

Library Journal

This serves as a revised edition of the author's Down for the Count: A Prison Library Handbook (1995), in which she wrote about prison libraries as fundamental parts of the correctional system. Now, referring to her own former experiences as Coordinator of Maryland Correctional Education Libraries, Vogel instructs fellow prison librarians on how to function in this environment. How does a librarian put together a viable book collection considering the censorship imposed by the prison authorities? How does he/she adjust to the watching, the listening, as well as the being watched that is a part of the culture? How can one keep one's sanity when the logic of the prison environment would be considered outrageous in the outside world? Most of all, how can the librarian best make a difference in the lives of the inmates for whom the library is the only acceptable escape from their grim surroundings? Vogel gives her answers to these and other questions in 15 succinct chapters. Although her book is directed at prison librarians, she also gives the general reader a poignant glance at what it is like to work in a prison. Highly recommended for correctional, public, and academic libraries.—Frances Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Fac. Lib., Stormville, NY

Brenda Vogel spent 26 years as the Coordinator of Maryland Correctional Education Libraries. An outspoken advocate for prison library services, Vogel was named Library Journal's Librarian of the Year in 1989. She is the author of Down for the Count: A Prison Library Handbook (Scarecrow, 1995).