Lessons from Shawshank

It’s one of the great storylines in one of the all-time great movies: the building of the Brooks Hatlen Memorial Library in Shawshank Prison.

Shawshank, of course, is the penitentiary featured in The Shawshank Redemption, director Frank Darabont’s Golden Globe-winning film that starred Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins as inmates who become best friends. Robbins plays Andy Dufresne, an accountant convicted—wrongly—of killing his wife and her lover.

After struggling to adapt to prison life, Dufresne finally finds a worthwhile project: revamping the run-down library. He writes one letter a week to the Maine State Legislature, asking for funds. The legislature responds by sending book donations, a check for $200, and a letter saying, “We now consider the matter closed. Please stop sending us letters.”

Dufresne does not stop, and in 1959, he secures an annual appropriation of $500, “just to shut him up.” Some time later, in “the year Kennedy was shot,” that money completes the transformation of “a broom closet smelling of turpentine into the best prison library in New England.”

The film implies that Andy Dufresne saw value in a neglected Shawshank library and that he increased this value simply by being a buttinsky and a gadfly. In reality, prison libraries during this time (1950s–60s) had become something of a cause célèbre.

America has had prison libraries since 1790. These were usually operated by the clergy, who used the collections for “strengthening of character, religious devotion, and what we today would call behavior modification.” This view continued into the twentieth century.

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Prison libraries expanded during the Great Depression, as they were seen as a way to occupy restless inmates. A greater professionalization also settled in. The American Library Association published its first manual for prison libraries in 1915. In 1930, the American Correctional Association followed suit.

Twenty years later, criminologist and prison reformer Austin MacCormick touted the importance of prison libraries:

"Properly organized, directed, and utilized, the institution library is an instrument of wholesome recreation, of direct and indirect education, and of mental health. Books are for many prisoners a bridge to the free world; over that bridge they can pass to a better world with a broader horizon than they ever knew before."

Such ideas eventually led to government action. In 1966, Congress passed the Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA), which funded library services for correctional and mental health facilities. A decade later, the Supreme Court ruled in Bounds v. Smith that “the fundamental constitutional right of access to the courts requires prison authorities to assist inmates in the preparation and filing of meaningful legal papers by providing prisoners with adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law.”

Support for prison libraries fluctuated in the 1990s and 2000s. The LSCA was replaced in 1997 with the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), which removed the designated funds for institutions. The year before, the Supreme Court, in its Lewis v. Casey decision, narrowed the Bounds v. Smith ruling, holding that, though prisoners have a constitutional right to access the courts, “this is not violated when a prison lacks legal research facilities or legal assistance unless prisoners have been substantially harmed by these deficiencies” (emphasis added). In response, many institutions reduced or eliminated their library collections.

Fortunately, there has been a return to progress in recent years.

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The Prison Library Project, housed in California’s Claremont Forum Bookshop, is “one of the nation’s largest books to prisoners programs.” It mails over twenty thousand books a year to prison librarians, educators, and chaplains, as well as inmates themselves.

Hope for Prisoners Family Libraries is a project of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District to “service the formerly incarcerated, and facilitate educational support for reentry into society.” This support includes donated laptops and books, as well as “a unique wall-sized vinyl wrap with QR codes to creatively guide participants towards free library resources, social services, and personalized advantageous opportunities.” (For this and other projects, LVCCLD won the 2024 ALA/Information Today, Inc., Library of the Future Award.)

Freedom Reads is a “first of its kind organization” that delivers handcrafted bookcases to prisons, turning cell blocks into “Freedom Libraries.”

And in echoes of Andy Dufresne, when a jail in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, lost its librarian during the pandemic, Brian Stokes, director of the Falmouth Public Library, volunteered to take over.

Community efforts like these can go only so far, however. Real progress needs legislative support. One such bill was introduced in Congress in 2023: the Prison Libraries Act. 

According to the American Library Association, which endorses the legislation, the act would provide grants to prisons to “update materials, hire qualified librarians and support digital literacy and career readiness training.” It would set aside $10 million per year through 2029 for the purpose of “creating libraries in prisons without libraries and in prisons that otherwise would not have the means to scale library services.”

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It’s clear why the bill is needed. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, incarcerated people are the most illiterate population in the United States. Moira Marquis elaborates:

"Our culture demands a high degree of literacy for everything from employment to obtaining housing. People need, on average, 40 hours of reading at each reading level in order to advance to the next one. This is why public schools are increasingly devoting school time to silent, sustained reading and why prisons offer ample opportunity for increasing literacy and learning how to read. Yet, it’s challenging if not impossible to improve reading skills without books."

Representative Emanuel Cleaver, the lead sponsor of the Prison Libraries Act, said of the bill:

"Reintegration into communities, coupled with the lack of education or job training opportunities, poses one of the biggest challenges faced by incarcerated citizens upon release. The Prison Libraries Act addresses this issue by providing funding opportunities to increase library access and resources within state prisons."

Representative Jackson Lee, a cosponsor, added:

"Every jail and prison should invest in having robust libraries and educational resources. It has long been proven that providing education in jails and prisons improves rehabilitative outcomes, reduces recidivism rates, and ultimately improves public safety and reduces incarceration costs. We must all acknowledge and accept that education is a fundamental human right to which we are all entitled to, and it is one that should be protected and uplifted in every community and in every environment."

EveryLibrary joins the ALA, NAACP, PEN America, and many other organizations in endorsing the Prison Libraries Act and urging Congress to pass this critical piece of legislation.

Visit www.everylibrary.org to learn more about our work on behalf of libraries. 

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