Book Review: This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project by C. Banta,K. DeVault-Juelfs,D. Harper,K. Ryan,& E. Skirvin

When the door's locked; the guards have fed you, and all your freedom and dignity has been stripped the only thing left is your mind, the only thing they can never take from you …. When all is lost you find salvation in a book. Horace Nunley (p. 60)

The right to read and to choose one's own reading materials in prison, indeed access to books at all, has been contested perhaps as long as there have been prisons. In the wake of the rebellions at Fulsom State Prison in California and Attica State Prison in New York in the early 1970s, activists, students, librarians, and others began to organize efforts to send books to people behind prison walls. Prison book projects quickly sprang up in Boston, in Seattle, and in Durham, North Carolina.

Over the next four decades, the U.S. prison population grew almost 700% to over 1.5 million people (The Sentencing Project, n.d.). By 2024, some 59 prison book projects were operating in the United States.

This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP) is the story of one of those projects. The APBP grew out of a 2004 graduate class at West Virginia University. Working out of donated space in a branch of the Morgantown Public Library, the project receives approximately 200 requests for books a week and has sent over 70,000 books since its inception to people imprisoned in six states: West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.

Many of those requests appear in chapter one, in excerpts from letters the project receives. As the editors point out, the categories of books that incarcerated people request defy popular stereotypes: dictionaries, self-help, reference books, almanacs, religious books, legal primers, street novels, how-to-manuals, mysteries, history, herbal/plant medicinal uses, fantasy, politics, Appalachian history, books in Spanish, poetry, composition books, sports, biographies, philosophy, GED prep, mechanics. The list is endless.

The editors note that prison libraries are either meager or nonexistent in most facilities and that the carceral system has placed all sorts of restrictions on the types of books they allow, where they can come from, what kinds of illustrations can appear in them, and who can receive them. Many prisons won’t allow books to be sent in unless they come from a publisher or distributor. Hardcovers are generally not allowed, and books are often rejected for “security reasons.”

Over the past 20 years, the APBP has expanded its work to organizing book clubs, writing groups, and college classes in prison—all of it helping to overcome isolation and feed the intellectual and political life on the inside.

This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep presents a clear and powerful critique of the system built up to sustain mass incarceration, and is worth reading for that alone. But for this reader the core of the book is found in the letters and other writings by people on the inside which show up embedded in the text, in the side margins and, in the latter half of the book, as the primary text.

It is those writings that have stayed with me—aching, wistful, vulnerable, full of insight, wisdom, and hope—provoking me to think more deeply about the nature of the inside/outside dynamic, what contribution prison book projects might make to a larger movement, and who is teaching whom. As Katy Ryan says in her introduction:

… Rachel Boccio writes that a limitation of even the best prison pedagogy ‘may be the faith it puts in the liberal bourgeois class (the activist scholar or the prison educator) to teach the captive class into freedom.’ A narrow focus on educators going into prisons overlooks the leadership of incarcerated people who are there, already doing the work, and who show up, over and over and in so many ways. (p. 12)

Over the past 3 decades, critical leadership in the movement for criminal justice reform has come from formerly incarcerated people, men and women who—largely shut off from family, friends, and comrades in the community—have rethought their place in the world and emerged from the prison experience with newfound knowledge, skills, and determination to make a difference in the world.

As the poet Ya’iyr (writing from the inside) says in his poem “Bioluminescence” (reproduced in full on p. 134):

… some organisms that grow in darkness make their own light which is called bioluminescence

recently scientists

have discovered this phenomenon in humans

Ya’iyr