Olympia Books to Prisoners breaks into maximum security

If you wanted to change the policies of the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC), it would help to be Andrea Robbins. No, she isn’t a high-power ceo with a politician in her pocket, nor does she hold an official government position. She graduated from Evergreen last year and now works at the school’s Center for Community Based Learning and Action (CCBLA) through AmeriCorps vista. She is also one of the “key holders” (volunteer coordinators) for Olympia Books to Prisoners, an organization that fills requests for books from incarcerated people all over the country.

Is it starting to sound like she might have some clout with the DOC? Yeah, not really. But recently Olympia Books to Prisoners celebrated the success of an effort to change the doc’s rule that bans used books from maximum security prisons, an effort in which Andrea played a big role.

Before 2007, used books were not allowed into Washington State prisons—minimum or maximum security alike. Our state was one of few in the country that only permitted new books, and for that reason was underserved by the roughly fifty-four grassroots organizations nationwide that supply reading materials to incarcerated people.

These groups understandably focus most of their energies on serving prisons that accept used books because those are much easier to accumulate (usually by donation) and therefore distribute. However, Washington institutions were being served by Books to Oregon Prisoners, a branch of Portland Books to Prisoners created to serve Oregon prisons, which also were limited by a new-book-only policy. In 2007 Oregon Department of Corrections changed their policy as a result of strenuous efforts on the part of Books to Oregon Prisoners organizers.

Andrea learned of the policy change at the Books to Prisoners regional meeting. These meetings bring together Books to Prisoners groups from Seattle, Bellingham, Olympia, and Portland—a network which Andrea calls a “buddyship,” meaning that they are technically unaffiliated organizations, but they communicate for logistical purposes. At the meeting, Portland Books to Prisoners agreed to continue to serve Washington with their limited stock of new books.

Inspired by Portland, Andrea decided to work on finding a way to change the policy in Washington. A friend, Rana Shmait, mentioned to her that one of their classmates was related to Eldon Vail, a former Greener and coincidentally the Secretary of the Washington DOC. Andrea asked the classmate to ask Vail about the policy, and soon they were in touch via e-mail. According to Andrea, “He was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that was a policy,’” and he was open to the idea of changing it.

Vail was willing to go forward with changing the policy in minimum-security prisons and asked Hisami Yoshida, an employee of the doc, to make it happen. The process entailed Yoshida visiting each of the minimum security prisons in Washington and showing the guards that the new books that prisoners received came from a place that also housed used books. In our interview, Andrea re-enacted a hypothetical version of Hisami’s speech, “They have a shelf. They have a new book next to a used book. The [books are] not wrapped up, and there’s not like a razor blade they throw in the used ones and then they just leave the new ones alone.” After six months, the policy was changed. Used books were allowed in all six of Washington’s minimum-security prisons.

Andrea didn’t expect it to be so easy. “I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They seem to think that I’m like totally legit to have a relationship with.” Whatever the reason, the old rule was out, and the Books to Prisoners folks were pretty psyched, but the victory was a glass half full, because of the ten maximum security prisons that remained “new book only” zones.

In spring 2009, the third regional meeting of the northwest prison book projects was held at a private residence off of Cooper Point Rd. Seven representatives attended from the four projects, and as they ate donated pastries and pizza, the folks from Portland announced that they could no longer fill the thousands of requests from the ten prisons in Washington that required new books. Andrea realized what the options were: “Either nobody serves Washington...or somebody takes it on. And I was like, well, fucky…and I said I’d do it. We’d take it on.”
Olympia Books to Prisoners received over fifty boxes of new books from Portland’s remaining stock, but they knew they didn’t have the capacity to acquire enough new books to fill all of the requests coming from people in Washington prisons.

While they knew they wanted the “new books only” rule changed in maximums, there was always a stack of letters keeping the Books to Prisoners people busy. Then, last fall, Books to Prisoners got an influx of new volunteers who were adamant about getting the policy changed across the board. They wanted to organize a letter-writing campaign to pressure the DOC into allowing used books in maximums. Andrea had second thoughts: “Now, having a relationship with the secretary of the Department of Corrections, and having asked in the past and gotten exactly what I wanted, there’s no strategic reason why I would follow through with anything that would make them defensive, like a letter writing campaign.”

So Andrea decided to e-mail Vail again and see what he would say about allowing used books in maximums. Vail responded that he was too busy working on the Sustainable Prisons Project, but that he would have someone else contact her. By the next week, Dan Pacholke, deputy director of prisons, emailed Andrea and said he was excited that she was working on this issue.

“I was like, really? Because, again, you must be really confused. Like, I’m not on your side. I don’t know whether it was the fact that the governor had just declared it Prison Literacy Month, or what...”

Andrea and a group of Books to Prisoners volunteers prepared for the meeting. They went through all the letters in the place and picked out fifty of the most compelling ones that spoke to the interests of the prison officials—books about transitioning back into society, learning English, and other educational and anti-recidivism texts. They took pictures of the space to show that new books and used books came from the same shelf. They put these materials in lots of nice-looking folders.

Andrea didn’t want to go alone, so she asked if she could bring her “intern” (“Because they love hierarchy”). Her intern was Max, who has been working with Books to Prisoners for over fifteen years. The two friends donned business casual clothes and rei backpacks and ventured to the doc to meet with Dan and the superintendent of Stafford Creek, the biggest maximum security prison in Washington.
“They loved it. They were like, ‘Normal kids are doing this, and they won’t turn over any cop cars!’” It turned out the prison officials had some vested interest in working with Books to Prisoners. As part of the Sustainable Prisons Project—a new agriculture program at Stafford Creek—the prisons needed books about growing stuff. Andrea and Max agreed to supply books for the program, and then dove into the logistics of supplying used books to the folks behind bars.

“They sat with us for about forty-five minutes and talked with us, and they asked us weird questions, because honestly, they are involved in a pretty weird world. Like, people shoot up with Visine bottles and sewing needles, and sneak anything in to turn into a weapon. They’re dealing with max—people are there for a long time. People get really desperate.

“When the superintendent of Stafford Creek was talking to us, he was definitely worried about that two percent of the prison population that will take advantage of this in some way. And he was trying to think of every way they could do it. He was like, ‘Family members will find out where you’re located and come volunteer with you and they’ll put heroin in crossword puzzles,’ which people do—cut squares of black tar heroin and put it in a crossword puzzle, cuz like shit gets hella creative. And they were worried that people were going to come find us, because they had had an incident with their laundry. They were outsourcing their laundry and somebody went to the place where the laundry is, put something in somebody’s bag, and they got it—like a bag of blow or something. So they had what seemed like illegitimate concerns, which I will defend as legitimate concerns.”

Max and Andrea explained that Seattle Books to Prisoners receives the letters and then distributes them to the other Books to Prisoners groups—so the people in prison don’t actually have Olympia Books to Prisoners’ address.

The conversation took a lot of turns: “We had some ethical conversations and some logistical conversations and some philosophical conversations. I was scared. I didn’t want to talk about stuff like that with them, because I knew that we would get into a disagreement, and they would not want us to work with them.” But at the end of the forty-five minutes, Dan turned to the Stafford Creek Superintendent and asked when he could get his staff together to talk about the new policy. “It ended up sounding like they had these questions, but it didn’t matter what their questions were; they were gonna do this—because Eldon told them to.”

Now the policy is in the process of changing. Stafford Creek is the pilot site—used books will be sent there first, and Books to Prisoners will be in contact with the prison to work on any concerns that arise. Once things are in full swing with Stafford Creek, other maximums will adopt the new policy.

Incarcerated people in Washington will soon be receiving more books than ever—because they legally can, and because Olympia Books to Prisoners now has an unusually high number of committed volunteers. Andrea attributes this to their new ability to serve people incarcerated in Washington. “It really digs in deep when [volunteers] read ‘Aberdeen’ on the address, and they’re like, oh shit, that’s two hours away. Somebody’s needing this and I can do that for them.” The letters can be very personal, making those who read them feel that they are really making a difference to someone. “Every once in a while, we get radical requests, and that’s why most of us do it. But we also do it because we realize that not everybody wants to be radicalized in a highly politicized situation. A lot of people just want their minds to be somewhere else.”

Books to Prisoners enjoys support from the community, as well. Their space is in a kind person’s basement, where they are charged only $50 a month. They sell used books for a dollar outside the Evergreen Library and can make $40 to $90 in an afternoon.
When the Evergreen Bookstore caused Last Word’s bookstand to be expelled from their spot outside of the library (see Nov 2009 CxPJ), the Books to Prisoners folks worried that they might be next. The bookstore manager at first tried to talk them into setting up only once a month instead of every week. After some communication, however, the manager realized how important the Books to Prisoners mission is, and how integral the book stand is to that mission.

It’s easy to contribute to the work that Books to Prisoners does. Volunteering with them doesn’t take much time and it makes an immediate, incredibly important impact on someone’s life. Andrea calls it “real solidarity work. It’s like, what do you want? I can do that. I got it. That’s what Books to Prisoners is all about.”

For information on volunteering, e-mail btpoly@resist.ca