About
“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
– Malcolm X
The Kansas City Books for Prisoners Project is a community organization that is seeking to donate books to prisons all over the country. To donate or volunteer, please e-mail us at kcbooksforprisoners@gmail.com.
To quote Frederick Douglass, “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” Education and mass-incarceration are inextricably linked. 68% of state prisoners have no high school diploma. Books are crucial to the spiritual, political, and educational development of all people. Access to decent reading material and literacy are human rights. Education is a powerful tool that greatly reduces the chances of inmates returning to the prison system after their release. Prison educational programs have been drastically cut and most prisoners cannot afford to buy their own books. Most prisons do not allow family and friends to send books into prisons. Access to books in prison varies from state to state, partly because nowhere is it legally mandated that prisoners have a right to educational or recreational reading material, including through general library services. Prisoners were denied access to federal Pell Grants in 1994. Most states eliminated prisoner eligibility for state tuition grants as well, and the number of college programs in prisons went from around 350 in the early 1980s to fewer than 12 by 2001. The Kansas City Books for Prisoners Project is an attempt to throw a small but impassioned wrench into a looming system of mass incarceration. Here are some “fun facts” about the prison population in the United States:
- There are more African Americans under correctional control today (in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole) than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
- As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (revoked of the right to suffrage/voting) due to felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
- Even though crime rates are currently at historical lows, incarceration rates have quintupled in less than 3 decades.
- The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population but currently has nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
- The War on Drugs is a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.
- There are 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population in the U.S. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
- The United States has 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
- The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, earlier this year sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.
Here is an image that shows the atrocious visual statistics of mass-incarceration:
A definition of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) developed by Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA):
“a massive multi-billion dollar industry that promotes the exponential expansion of prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers, and juvenile detention centers. The PIC is represented by corporations that profit from incarceration, politicians who target people of color so that they appear to be “tough on crime,” and the media that represents a slanted view of how crime looks in our communities. In order to survive, the PIC uses propaganda to convince the public how much we need prisons; uses public support to strengthen harmful law-and-order agendas such as the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terrorism”; uses these agendas to justify imprisoning disenfranchised people of color, poor people, and people with disabilities; leverages the resulting increasing rate of incarceration for prison-related corporate investments (construction, maintenance, goods and services); pockets the profit; and uses profit to create more propaganda.” [from Making Connections: the Anti-Violence Movement Actively Resisting the Prison Industrial Complex – CARA (Communities Against Rape and Abuse), www.cara-seattle.org, definition found on www.usprisonculture.com]
“The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
“We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the evildoers, to use a term recently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, criminals and evildoers are (in the collective imagination) fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.”
—Angela Davis, 2003, Are Prisons Obsolete?
KC Books for Prisoners 