During the COVID-19 pandemic, a county jail outside of Amarillo sent a letter soliciting help. As a result of the new pandemic regulations, the entire prison library had been shut down, and the inmates no longer had access to books—one of their few solaces.
So the Amarillo County jail contacted a nonprofit organization started by Austin activists, the Inside Books Project, to possibly donate books to their facility.
“We sent them a couple of boxes of books,” said Scot Odierno, a staff member at Inside Books Project who has been with the nonprofit since its inception. “And then we sent them a couple more a month or two ago,” Odierno recalled. “And the guy who runs the library reached out and told us that they now have a full library of almost 1,000 books that we sent to them. That’s really cool. It’s really cool to see your work actually making an impact.”
This is not an isolated event. The Inside Books Project has an impressive record of bringing books to incarcerated individuals in Texas and across the country. The nonprofit’s work has impacted millions.
“Our primary mission is to send pretty books to people in prisons in Texas,” Odierno said. “But it goes beyond that because we can see the impact of books on people-—seeing them use books to educate themselves, inspire them, and get a job. It’s empowering them in the right way.”
But getting to that rewarding outcome is a lengthy and detailed process. However, Odierno says the Inside Books Project has developed a consistent method to be successful.
“We get all sorts of books donated to our library collection from individuals and different groups so we use those to send,” Odierno said. “But a lot of the time, certain books and types of books are banned in prisons as per laws and regulations. Certain books make sense if they are promoting something, but sometimes it’s pretty ridiculous, to be honest. Computer manuals and computer training books have started getting banned because they think people would use them to hack into things. Some books are even thrown out once we send them if they think there is an unknown substance on the pages.”
On top of that, Inside Books receives at least 300 letters a week from inmates around the country requesting certain types of books. The nonprofit then curates a selection of books that best match the requests in the letters and ships them off with handwritten letters from the volunteers who selected the books.
“We get many different requests, but our most popular requests are books on religion, starting a business or certain skills, and … pulp fiction and other fiction novels,” Odierno said.
During the pandemic, Inside Books lost many of its volunteers, resulting in backlogs. When COVID restrictions started loosening, the nonprofit soon got back on track.
“During COVID, when we didn’t have any volunteers, we were up to eight months behind on responding to letters,” Odierno said. “Now we’re at six weeks, so that means people will get their books within six weeks after writing us.”
Outside of their main mission, Inside Books seeks to take on bigger initiatives as well.
“Right now, we’re working on getting books into detention centers down at the border where there are about 10,000 people that are detained,” Odierno said. “And that’s one of the hardest places to get into. A lot of people there need resources, especially legal resources, but they are also in need of ESL resources or books that could help them translate into their native language.”
For years, Inside Books has provided a valuable service in the rehabilitation of the incarcerated.
Even in this digital age, physical books remain an important resource for knowledge and self-improvement.
To get involved with the Inside Books Project and support the cause, visit https://insidebooksproject.org/ and sign up to volunteer.