Claremont ‘library’ serves a captive audience

Penned inside a stark world of concrete and steel, the messages are often congenial, the words soft.

“Greetings from the other side. I hope this letter finds you in good health, achieveing all your heart’s desire.”

“Looking at things from a positive outlook helps you see the beauty in life.”

“You all will always be in my prayers knowing that thy are truly servants of our God.”

The authors are inmates writing to the Prison Library Project, a program run by a Claremont nonprofit that provides reading materials free of charge to hard-core criminals.

Each week, the project receives hundreds of letters -- some written in careful cursive or intricate calligraphy, others scrawled with confused grammar. Whether writing a couple of lonely lines on a scrap of paper or a discourse running several pages, someone is always asking for something good to read.

The project has been fulfilling that request since 1987, when Claremont resident Rick Moore took over a program begun by spiritual gurus Bo Lozoff and Ram Dass in Durham, N.C. Starting with used books stored in the closet of a friend’s yoga studio, Moore eventually established the Thoreau Bookshop, where he could house the project as well as operate a store to fund it. From that evolved the nonprofit Claremont Forum, of which the Prison Library Project is the nexus.

Publicized by word of mouth, the project receives inquiry letters from corrections facilities across the country, with a handful arriving from overseas.

Men tend to ask for westerns and anything by Louis L’Amour or Stephen King. Women lean toward romance novels.

Because inventory is limited, the volunteer staff often must root around for a comparable piece of literature. The program’s main purpose, however, is self-help. So the inmate who receives “Hondo” or “Misery” may also find that his package includes a philosophy text and parenting resource.

“We keep trying to bring people around to what’s going to serve them and the community at large,” said Moore, 58. “Nothing racy. Nothing political. Everything’s so polarized in the prison system. We don’t want to stir more controversy. We’re trying to get people to turn inward.”

Thus, requests for true crime or anything by British crime novelist John Wainwright are turned down. As is John Grisham’s “The Chamber,” set in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Other guidelines include no hardcovers (lest they be fashioned into weapons), removal of any handwriting left by a previous owner and wrapping packages in plain, brown paper. Inmates suspected of selling the books or using them to curry favor are put on a do-not-send list.

More than 250,000 books have been mailed out over the last two decades. For inventory, the store relies on community members dropping off used books or publishers clearing shelves for a new print edition.

The one book the Prison Library Project can’t seem to keep in stock is a dictionary. Requests are filed away until the organization has enough money to buy the references in bulk, although sometimes the cost of postage and rent leave little for much else.

The program relies on grant money and proceeds from its annual auction of submitted artwork, where the main attraction is the not-for-sale display of envelopes on which prisoners have inked fanciful images such as a dancing pig balancing a violin on a hoof or a bull busting through an outhouse.

One illustrator’s letter read: “Thank you very much for the books you sent. Greatly appreciated. I’ve already read 2 of them, maybe I could squeeze a couple more out of you. I was hopeing on some material on the occult of ancient necromancy and mysticism. But whatevers available will suffice. I can draw or proof read or do whatever to earn some of the postage.”

Although the project’s correspondence with convicts angers some, for the most part the community appears supportive.

“I had a close relative in prison and he didn’t have a lot to do,” said Claremont resident Tom Helliwell, whose church donates money to the project. “It’s important for them to have access to tools to use their brains in a constructive way.”

The workforce at the project, located downtown, consists of volunteers like Doug Wallace, who rings up customers, catalogs donations, pores over letters and mails books.

Wallace, 71, said he helps out at the store six days a week because he believes that just one book can greatly affect the life of someone who has ample time to think about its message and no access to the Internet or TV.

Although he said some of the letters he reads are disturbing, Wallace doesn’t waste time worrying about an inmate’s past. “Who can judge what another person has done or what we might do in their circumstance?” he asked.

Recently, the former librarian responded to a Turkish national imprisoned in Bangkok who had asked that the project publicize his incarceration. Instead, Wallace sent him the Koran and an autobiography by a doctor once imprisoned in China, two books he felt would offer a little encouragement.

corina.knoll@latimes.com