The Prison Library

California has quite a few interesting libraries, mainly because they tend to reflect the communities they serve. Nowhere is this more true than in the state’s prison libraries. This week I found myself visiting one of them down south in Chino. If the name doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t feel dumb; most people in southern California can’t find Chino on a map, much less the two prisons located there.

The California Institution for Women sits in the middle of the last dairy reserve in that part of the world. On any day you realize that a mile from the parking lot; on a hot August afternoon you know it before you get off the freeway. Prisons are never put where the rich folk live, unless you happen to have a condo overlooking San Quentin. If you can see the women’s prison at Chino you are either a cow or a horsefly, both of which are in abundance just beyond the wire fence surrounding the facility.

California has quite a few interesting libraries, mainly because they tend to reflect the communities they serve. Nowhere is this more true than in the state’s prison libraries. This week I found myself visiting one of them down south in Chino. If the name doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t feel dumb; most people in southern California can’t find Chino on a map, much less the two prisons located there.

The California Institution for Women sits in the middle of the last dairy reserve in that part of the world. On any day you realize that a mile from the parking lot; on a hot August afternoon you know it before you get off the freeway. Prisons are never put where the rich folk live, unless you happen to have a condo overlooking San Quentin. If you can see the women’s prison at Chino you are either a cow or a horsefly, both of which are in abundance just beyond the wire fence surrounding the facility.The grounds of this institution resemble nothing so much as a high school campus wrapped in razor wire. These discordant elements represent the historical shift of correctional philosophy from reclamation to retribution. As built this place was intended as a sort of correctional training campus, but that was then. Now is all about Three Strikes and throwing away the key. An auto trip up Highway 5 is a tour of state prisons, strung out like the Missions along El Camino Real, beacons of our current faith and desire.

At fifty, CIW is an old facility, creaky and inefficient, but it still bears a certain charm for the visitor. Women’s prisons are different in the same ways that women are different from men. The women seem to have more freedom of movement; the air seems less tense. Not to say that this is any paradise: far from it.

It is a commonplace saying in corrections that people are sent to prison as punishment, not to be punished. That statement dies in the throat here, and nowhere so quickly as in the prison library. Prison libraries have their origin in the old-fashioned concept of redemption through positive influence. In this state and most others they owe their survival to the fact that the courts require that prisoners have access to legal books and materials. I wonder how anybody working on an appeal could concentrate on his case in a room filled with the odor of cow urine, simmering in temperatures that are certainly above ninety on this hot August afternoon. Without air conditioning, the air here is closer and warmer than any other library I have visited outside Manila. Nevertheless the work gets done; the librarian here is as conscientious as any on the planet, insistent on service and order, even in this Sahara-by-the-feedlots.

Juming Tong Davis came here after a stint in an Ohio prison library. When she talks about this library, her face takes on the glow of evangelism. Juming works in a prison because she has a very deep commitment to the inmates-to the sort of library and service they should have, and which she thinks they deserve. This is probably true of most prison librarians. Like any other phase of the business, you don’t go into this end of the work unless you are prepared to deal with the worst the patrons can offer. Here, the customers are doing time for things you don’t want to know about: still, and despite what you might think, they are human beings with ordinary desires. Quite a lot of them like books. Books are good for passing time, and they have a lot of time to pass here.

Today Juming looks a bit wilted, but offers a glass of water and a pleasant smile to this visitor. She remembers me from last time; we have a brief chat and then I take a tour. This library is about the size of the one in my junior high school, but excepting the law collection, not quite as good. You will not be surprised to find that this is because there isn’t a lot of money for such things– that and there isn’t space for expansion. There is only Juming, her inmate clerks and whatever she can put together in the way of shoestring programs for her patrons. This is rather painfully reminiscent of your average public library.

It isn’t easy getting people to work in prison libraries. Prison is after all prison, and the library plays a subordinate role to security and whatever conception of role the warden and the state have of what the place should be about. It is not just a public library for a confined population, but for a separate world whose denizens waken every morning in the aftermath of a nightmare. It is a place of lost hope, but with many of the same possibilities as any other library, and similar challenges, even if the odds are longer. It takes a special person to run a prison library, and the libraries either get them or the jobs stay unfilled, as many are now across the state and were even before the budget noose got tightened.

I would not mind working at CIW, and I am sure others might feel the same. What makes me hesitate to apply is not the stifling air of the place or the ancient facilities, but the sense that things will not get better any time soon; the real stink in the air comes not from the dairy cattle but from the rot of neglect and disdain for the human beings here, staff and inmate alike. The state (by which I mean all of us) simply doesn’t care; caring was yesterday, redemption long ago. Today we enforce misery. Against this philosophy stand a few people like Juming, she of the indomitable will and heart. Perhaps I will be that good a librarian someday.