Member-only story
THE WAY WE WORK NOW
I Don’t Want Incarcerated People to Feel Cut Off From the World
The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.
Mia Bruner is a 29-year-old librarian and founder of the Prison Library Support Network (PLSN). She spoke with Mai Tran about the difficulties of providing resources to incarcerated people during a pandemic.
Prison Library Support Network was founded in 2016, after Donald Trump was elected. I was a student and library clerk at the Pratt Institute, and I quickly found others who were interested in using our skills and institutional assets to support prison abolition movements and share resources with incarcerated people.
The heart of library services in prisons and jails is pushing a cart around and handing people books. In March, the library services were shut out, and they haven’t been let back in. Some librarians are mailing out books to people who requested them, but those might get sent back. I’ve heard there are all sorts of weird restrictions going on right now. Across the board, facilities aren’t doing anything systematically, like enforcing consistent rules about mail. There is a lot of haphazard regulation, so people are being cut off from their loved ones.
Their biggest obstacle is having nothing people want to read on the book cart.
People don’t always know that public library collections and the collections in jails are totally different. The collections in jails are very, very underfunded. Some library systems have zero to no money for new books. One thing you hear over and over from people who work in jails is that their biggest obstacle is having nothing people want to read on the book cart. They become another service that doesn’t have the resources to respond to people in an immediate way.
In January of 2020, PLSN launched a new reference project to help librarians in jails answer questions, compile packets, and print out materials about whatever people…
