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In a small room in the northeast corner of the Rhizome Collective, a renovated warehouse surrounded by dense foliage and inhabited by people who consider the term “radical” the highest form of praise, a cramped library stands apart from the rest of the building. Handwritten notes and instructions speckle the walls and tables. The air circulation is scarce; the insulation nonexistent. Books overflow from one section of the genre-sorted library as an adjacent shelf collects dust. This is home base to the Inside Books Project, a volunteer operation that runs at a level of efficiency approaching superhuman standards, especially when taking into account the working conditions.
Founded to send free books in response to Texas inmates’ requests, IBP is one of roughly 25 prison book organizations in America, and the sole group of its kind in Texas. Susannah Cummins, who represented IBP at a meeting of prison book projects in Illinois last November, says of the nationwide congregation of activists, “We talked about how to cover the whole country and see where the gaps were.”
They concluded that “more organizations are in dire need in Texas and California because of the volume of prisoners in those states” — more than 170,000 inmates in Texas alone, longtime volunteer and coordinator John Nathan points out.
The glossy pamphlets, the clusters of social buzz words and all the PR of prototypical Austin activist groups are conspicuously absent from the Inside Books Project — their places being served by the do-it-yourself aesthetics of Xeroxed flyers and word-of-mouth promotion from a league of volunteers who work with varying degrees of regularity. Considering the tightly-run project’s outwardly ramshackle appearance and lack of vocal publicity, it is not surprising that Nathan, one of the project’s volunteer coordinators, cannot remember where he first heard of the project seven years ago as an undergraduate at UT.
Nathan, who just completed his master’s degree in nursing, started volunteering with a few other friends and soon became one of the project’s most consistent volunteers. “The number of students involved fluctuates, but the group of students we have coming regularly now is the largest in a while,” he says. The groups of people involved range from “sororities and law students to leftist groups and families of inmates, even a few junior high schools.”
While the demographic of volunteers on any given day varies, students tend to show up mostly on Thursday nights, instead of the project’s two weekend workdays. Last Thursday night, the volunteer population mostly consisted of UT law students. Cathy Seagraves, a second-year law student, says the student group Public Interest Law Association set up the mass volunteer date. On these nights peopled by large student groups and during the project’s biannual work parties, volunteers spill out of the warehouse’s library and into the main room because of lack of space, and the dull, orange packages of books pile up at a staggering rate.
While the occasional workers — the student groups, radicals and those fulfilling community service requirements — do the bulk of the project’s packaging and letter writing, it is left to regular volunteers like Cummins and Nathan to keep an up-to-date database of who was sent what and when, track which prisons reject the books IBP sends and haul packages to the post office each week. When prisoners add personal flair to their letters, whether out of pure gratitude for the service, to describe their living conditions or to let the project know they have spread the word to fellow inmates, the coordinators set these letters aside from the other read-and-replied requests that fill an industrial sized inbox.
The work extends far beyond what volunteers see at the warehouse for a few hours a week, but Nathan has stuck with the project this long because of his belief in the need for prison reform and “alternatives to incarceration, such as substance abuse treatment and community service.”
Of the role students play in the Inside Books Project (and the role it in turn plays in their lives), Nathan explains that “it’s a chance to see how others live, to see the real implications of public policy.” And if the hundreds of pounds of packaged books, magazines and newsletters piled in the plastic tins that pepper the warehouse floor are any indication — the implications are heavy, indeed.
