Books Behind Bars

Before police arrested her, 18-year-old Amanda didn’t have to look very far for drama. There was plenty on the streets of San Diego, where she worked as a prostitute and scored drugs.

Now that she’s in the San Diego County Girls Rehabilitation Facility, a juvenile lockup, her excitement comes in another form: paperback novels. She’s one of the 30 members of a special book club organized by a local juvenile judge.

“Reading makes me feel better,” Amanda said recently. “If I get upset, it helps calm me down.”

But can reading save Amanda?

Some experts think so. Although other factors--such as addiction, peer pressure and lack of job skills--weigh heavily, making sure Amanda and other inmates are able to read could help steer them from a life of crime, they say.

“I believe that it is one of the critical points of rehabilitating prisoners,” said Dorothy Place, a Cal State Sacramento sociology professor who has run a prison literacy project. “It’s not the only point, but it’s a pivotal one.

“Without literacy . . . there’s no way that they’re going to get jobs or enter the mainstream work world,” she said.

Lawmakers have recognized the link as well, and in the late 1980s passed the Prisoner Literacy Act. Citing a correlation between reading, writing and inmate rehabilitation, the Legislature required that literacy programs be made available to a majority of adult prisoners reading below the ninth-grade level. Overall, two-thirds of the of the 160,000 inmates held by the Department of Corrections read below that level.

The California Youth Authority also places an emphasis on reading skills among young offenders.

The agency honorably discharges an inmate who has a high school diploma or equivalent. Those who fall short of that academic standard are given a dishonorable discharge, meaning that their juvenile criminal records are permanently available to potential employers who conduct background searches.

Despite these initiatives, educators lament that teaching inmates to read is easier said than done.

The political climate favors punishment over education, they say, and the sheer logistics of getting reading materials into the hands of an often resistant and dangerous prison population are another obstacle.

In the Secure Housing Unit of Corcoran State Prison for men, 1,800 of the state’s most hardened prisoners cannot be given magazines unless the staples are removed. All leisure books must be paperback; hardcover books, officials say, might be used as weapons.

The quality of literacy instruction is uneven and varies among prisons, experts and educators say. At minimum security facilities, for instance, the sentences are so short and inmates discharged so soon that there’s little time for reading lessons to sink in.

More intensive reading programs, meanwhile, have fallen victim to cuts in manpower and budgets.

At the California Youth Authority’s Heman G. Stark facility in Chino, a literacy tutoring program fizzled when its volunteer coordinator died last year. At the state prison in Lancaster, a one-on-one tutoring program staffed by criminal justice students from nearby Antelope Valley College ended when funding dried up.

The biggest barrier, however, is pride, particularly among male inmates. Gary Goddard, who runs reading and other education programs at Corcoran, said that most prisoners there read at the fourth-grade level--but would be too humiliated to admit it.

At the Lancaster prison, inmates accustomed to making thousands of dollars dealing dope sometimes brag that they don’t need to read--they’ll just hire someone to do it for them, said Joseph Huma, who runs literacy programs there.

“No one wants to admit that he cannot read or write,” Huma said. Still, when inmates hunker down and crack the books, there can be epiphanies and progress.

“The most rewarding moment is when a prisoner who was illiterate announces in class that, for the first time, he can read a letter from his child,” said Huma, whose programs receive $235 per inmate a year to teach reading.

“No matter how personal, he will read the letter in the classroom. And he will insist that the child will go to school. And yes, that child will have a chance to live a different life.”

Place, the sociology professor, said she saw significant improvement among thousands of prisoners who used a pilot literacy program that Cal State Sacramento ran in correctional facilities between 1991 and 1998.

Prison Literacy Labs

The program established “literacy labs” in 28 California prisons, where inmates worked with teachers and self-directed computer programs featuring intensive phonics instruction. Place said that inmates, who started out reading on par with fourth- and fifth-graders, gained as much as two grade levels after just six months of the training.

Even without the literacy programs, all inmates are guaranteed some access to state-mandated prison libraries. Officials say the most popular titles are law books, which prisoners use to prepare civil cases or fashion legal arguments aimed at overturning their convictions.

But there are other kinds of topical titles. In the harsher environment of men’s prison, favorites include ghetto tales and adventure books, said Don Chesterman, who runs education programs at Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad.

“Let’s just say we don’t stock a lot of romances,” Chesterman said, adding that a single inmate may read up to 200 books a year.

Among the popular volumes: Louis L’Amour’s Western sagas, as well as Holloway House’s Black America series, which features cult classics “Pimp,” by Iceberg Slim, and “Lost Angeles,” by Odie Hawkins. The latter is a tale of racial tension between the city’s Koreans and African Americans.

Although adult prisons have no explicit policy banning certain books, officials say security reasons have prompted them to avoid skinhead and other racist tracts, as well as manuals on how to build bombs or weapons.

At San Diego County Girls Rehabilitation Center, part of the juvenile system, there were other concerns three years ago. The library’s leisure collection consisted of old religious tracts and an outdated encyclopedia set.

The dismal conditions caught the eye of Maria Arroyo-Prokop, a local juvenile judge, who decided to launch the Juvenile Court Book Club. At Arroyo-Prokop’s invitation, donors soon started stocking the shelves with more substantial offerings, and groups of about 15 inmates began monthly meetings to discuss books with lawyers, judges and other volunteers.

This month, the topic has been “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the classic first-person account of a Jewish girl’s life hiding from the Nazis. And to underscore the gravity of the text, 10 book club members were permitted a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance for a lesson on the Holocaust.

The theme for the Jan. 18 field trip: “The Power of Words,” a force many of the juvenile inmates have been slow to master. Most read at the fourth- or fifth-grade level. Few have ever read a book for fun.

“Outside of prison, they wouldn’t be in a class that would be teaching such lovely books,” said John Kelly, the girls’ English teacher. “These are girls who didn’t go to school, who were afraid to go to school.”

Not so Amanda, who was on the museum field trip and said she always liked reading, even before she started hanging with the wrong crowd. Now that she’s in custody, the inmate book club is helping her express what she feels, she said.

“You can read books, and they inspire you to talk,” Amanda said. “They inspire kids who are afraid.”

With her was Rosie, an assertive 14-year-old, who said participation in the book club has helped reconnect her with dreams of becoming a writer. Rosie said she talks about books with fellow inmates “all the time,” and is still pumped by a December meeting that book club members had with an author.

“It gave me inspiration,” she said of the lockup reading club. “It drives me to want to write more.”

Next week, a look at a special prison reading program.