In the past 30 years, access to knowledge has undergone a massive transformation. Libraries have, by and large, kept pace with those shifts—but not in every sector. Despite a growing focus on prison librarianship and outreach in libraries and MLIS programs, there has been a national decline in investments in community health, education, and opportunity, and that has included libraries, notes Tracie D. Hall—distinguished practitioner in residence at the University of Washington Information School, former American Library Association (ALA) executive director, and longtime supporter of library service to incarcerated individuals.

While ALA has provided support to its members who work with prison libraries, particularly through its Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services (ODLOS), the last revision of its Library Standards for Adult Correctional Institutions was issued in 1992, and a standard for detained youth in 1999. Over the past three decades, access to information across much of the world has shifted to digital formats—yet support for services to incarcerated people has not kept pace with those changes.

ALA has recently issued a revised document, Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated or Detained. It will help support libraries and library staff to meet the literacy, learning, and recreational needs of people held in jails, prisons, detention facilities, juvenile facilities, immigration facilities, prison work camps, and segregated units within any facility, whether public or private, military or civilian, in the United States and its territories. The guidelines also include a history of prison library standards, a definition of the document’s intended audience, the “Prisoners’ Right to Read,” and legal policy contexts.

The new standards were released in September to coincide with Prison Banned Books Week, a time when librarians, educators, journalists, and others raise awareness about the profound destructiveness of censorship in carceral contexts, and advocate for better information access. The updated document reflects the current needs of people who are incarcerated or detained, 95 percent of whom will be released and require information seeking skills to thrive and reestablish a life on the outside. It also takes into consideration concerns that have come to the forefront over the last 32 years: rises in mass incarceration, inequitable incarceration rates for BIPOC individuals, and increases in the numbers of incarcerated women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, undocumented people, and youth. The expanded standards now explicitly speak to the information needs of women, LGBTQIA+ people, the aged, people with dementia, people with disabilities, and foreign nationals.

STARTING POINTS

For years, many in the library and prison services communities have advocated for new standards for both incarcerated adults and youth without success. Everyone working on the standards realized that the new document had to address dramatic technology changes, as well as changing populations and mass incarceration. As Jeanie Austin, San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) Jail and Reentry Services librarian and PI of the Mellon grant that supported the rewrite, told LJ, “Since that cycle of tech boom that happened in the late ’90s, people who were incarcerated have been largely left behind because more information is born online and not put into print, but people inside don't have access to the internet.” Some, they added, have been incarcerated for that entire time, if not longer. “We're talking about a moment in which there was a massive change in how people accessed information.”

Despite these changes, Austin also noted that the 1992 standards have continued to be used despite being out of date. The original document contained much information that has continued to be of use over the decades, and that served as valuable starting points. As Austin writes in their preface to the new standards, “this publication illustrates that robust library services and programs that respond to the information needs and desires of incarcerated patrons are not just possible—they already exist.”

Austin started out as a juvenile detention center librarian pushing for a revision of the standards for young adult library services. In their search for other models to support SFPL’s work, Austin saw that people need not only information for programming and services but professional advocacy resources. “They need tools that LIS instructors can use in a classroom, and they need tools that they can use within the bureaucracy of their institutions,” Austin said.

At the same time that Austin was looking to grow advocacy options, and Eldon Ray James, a now-retired librarian and researcher, ALA member, and a formerly incarcerated person, was continuing to push for revised standards, Hall was focusing on prisoners’ rights to read as an important tenet of ALA’s advocacy. “When I think about services to people, I naturally think about people who are incarcerated, because in the community that I've lived in and come from, being incarcerated is sometimes seen as inevitable,” she told LJ. “For many of the folks who worked on the standards, I think we are examples of people for whom being incarcerated and knowing someone who was incarcerated is everyday—it is a part of what we think about.”

As director of the Joyce Foundation Culture Program, Hall had been thinking about re-entry resources, and how formerly incarcerated people could skill up to find work in the cultural sector. She looked for the original standards on ALA’s website and was shocked to find that they weren’t online. When she stepped into the Executive Director role at ALA in 2020, she knew she wanted to prioritize carceral library services. Hall knew this would take a group effort.

The United States is the most carceral industrialized nation in the world. Approximately three percent of the U.S. population has some exposure to incarceration, with rising rates of incarceration among women, BIPOC individuals, people in the South, and those who live in high-poverty areas. As Hall wrote in an Afterword to the revised standards, "Of the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. at the end of 2022, it was estimated that 32 percent of sentenced federal and state prisoners were Black; 31 percent were White; 23 percent were Latino; two percent were American Indian or Alaska Native; and 1 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander." She told LJ, “I felt like we couldn't even really talk about outreach at ALA, and have a valid voice in that conversation, unless we updated the standards.”

But to her dismay, ALA’s Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA) was being disbanded. “So with the feeling that the stewardship group that would normally be there was kind of disintegrating, I started to look for, and to ask, who can we bring together to have a conversation about redoing these standards and updating them?” Hall told LJ. The two names that came up repeatedly, and the first people she spoke with about the project, were Austin and James. Hall also spoke with author-activists Reginald Dwayne Betts and Randall Horton about the value of access to books and libraries while they were incarcerated, and eventually brought everyone to the table to help prioritize and advance the project.

BUILDING NEW STANDARDS

In December 2021, SFPL Jail and Reentry Services program and ALA secured a two-year, $2 million grant for Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Among other components, the grant funded project managers for a comprehensive survey of existing models and the revision of the 1992 standards.

A task force coalesced in fall 2021, coordinated by Austin and Hall, in collaboration with ODLOS and the SFPL Jail and Reentry Services Program. The call for interested parties to begin work on researching and writing a new set of standards went out in 2022. Austin and Hall pulled from their professional networks, making sure that the voices of people who are or had been incarcerated were centered throughout the process. The first large working group conversation took place in November 2021 over Zoom. Participants included librarians and library workers, educators, formerly incarcerated individuals, public librarians, policy makers, and others with working relationships to carceral facilities.

Task force members self-selected into working groups covering research, drafting, editing, convening, and dissemination. The drafting group began meeting in March 2022, and wrote the bulk of the standards. Drafting was led by Sharaya Olmeda, a standards project manager, along with James, Horton, Van Hyning, and Erin Boyington, a longtime advocate for new standards. Other drafting group members included Adam Bush, Tess Wheelwright, Katy Schorling, and Rebecca (Molly) Bassford.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) had its own Guidelines for Library Services to Prisoners, the most recent edition of which was issued in March 2023. James was a member of both the IFLA and ALA task forces and was able to share drafts from the IFLA guidelines with the ALA drafting group. As James pointed out, the IFLA guidelines often address a complete absence of carceral libraries in countries around the world. The United States has a long-established, if unfortunate and patchy, history of librarianship in carceral facilities, so U.S. standards had to focus on enhancing rather than establishing practice.

In gathering information and input, the drafters and researchers saw clearly that baseline requirements for school or public libraries were very different from what was available in American carceral facilities. Expectations in public libraries such as air conditioning or freely accessible restrooms were not standard in prisons. At the same time, while the drafters wanted to be realistic about what the standards could recommend, they also wanted to “raise the bar,” as Olmeda put it, for what should be. Prison librarians involved in the drafting process offered on-the-ground information about features and practices they did and didn’t have access to; “where it worked” stories add color and depth to the recommendations.

MANY MINDS, MANY VOICES

The drafting group periodically solicited feedback on work in progress from stakeholders in the corrections, education, and library fields. In summer 2022, Hall, Austin, ODLOS colleagues, and other members of the convening group held a half-day information seeking and listening session at the ALA Annual conference in Washington, DC. A draft outline of the standards was made available to attendees, and a call for Where It Worked stories—a case study format suggested by Van Hyning to help bolster the seemingly out-of-reach or aspirational aspects of the new standards—was shared widely. Sixteen Where It Worked stories are included in the standards.

A fleshed out draft was shared with the editing group in fall 2022, and ALA’s Library Services to the Justice Involved (LSJI) listserv. They gathered feedback through sessions and discussions at ALA’s 2023 Annual conference in Chicago, and Hall convened an additional group of educators, policy makers, activists, librarians, and other advocates that fall. These feedback streams were incorporated by the drafting and project management teams and ALA editor Rachel Chance, who stewarded much of the writing and Where It Worked process. Due to the dissolution of ASCLA and the adoption of the new standards in progress by ODLOS, the standards went to a vote at ALA Council in summer 2023 as well, and passed nearly unanimously.

In response to feedback, the project managers and drafting team incorporated stronger language and guidance about censorship, explaining that decisions about materials are often not only made by the prison librarian—parties from facility administrators to mail scanning services also control the flow of information. The drafting team provided detailed guidance for how to report censored materials, aligning metadata with those needed by the Marshall Project Banned Books database "reporting recipe," to align information about censorship in the United States. (See also “Prison Tablets and Borges’s ‘Infinite Library.’”)

The new standards also address several issues that were given less consideration in the former version, including advocating for the rights of marginalized communities within prisons, such as speakers of languages other than English, and individuals with disabilities. Because the 2013 adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled gives librarians the ability to require appropriate accommodations for users with print disabilities, accessibility issues are explicitly noted in this edition’s facilities, materials, and programming sections. Van Hyning is continuing collaboration with colleagues at the National Library Services for the Blind and Print Disabled to bring their new standards, also supported by ODLOS, together with carceral library standards to close gaps in service to people who are incarcerated or detained and have print disabilities—some of the most radically underserved patrons in the country.

COMPREHENSIVE, NOT PRESCRIPTIVE

As James notes in his Foreword to the standards, “The authors designed these guidelines to be comprehensive without becoming prescriptive.” To help address that goal, the drafters of the new standards developed a new format. In addition to sections about Access, Administration, Staffing, Budget, Facilities, Programs and Services, Library Materials, and Performance Assessment, each is followed by a “Where It Works” section. An additional concise version offers a short overview of the main points in the full document for carceral administrators, wardens, and others up the chain of command who might not be involved in daily library service provision. The concise version is designed to enable a prison librarian to approach a warden and suggest, for example, that the library space be provided with modular furniture that can be reconfigured, rather than units bolted to the floor, and point to the relevant section of the standards without having to wade through other details. These at-a-glance points are followed by aspirational suggestions “which we hope will become a baseline best practice by the next time these Standards are revised,” the document states.

The document includes appendices with a glossary, reflection prompts for users of the document, professional resources, the Library Bill of Rights, “Prisoners’ Right to Read,” “Policy on Confidentiality of Library Records,” and “Resolution in Support of Broadband as a Human Right.” Austin provided a Preface, James a Foreword and introduction, and Hall an Afterword.

The new standards are available in both print and digital formats. A vibrant cover design by Alejandra Diaz, consisting of an orange sun with yellow rays outlined in teal above a deeper orange ground, completes the piece. The soft binding is appropriate for inclusion in a carceral or detention setting, where hardback books are often banned. For a free copy of the printed version, which will be most valuable to people working in facilities with limited internet, email ALAStandards@gmail.com with the following information:

• Name
• Organization
• Address 1
• Address 2
• City

A digital version will be available at alaeditions.org/standards.

Having an authoritative set of standards driven by both ALA and wide range of voices in the field ultimately gives advocacy power not only to a national-level association, noted Austin, but to individual library workers who aren’t part of a carceral system but want to see change happen. “I have heard from prison librarians that they're really excited about having this advocacy tool, just to say there are standards and that things should be better,” they said.

All involved hope to see revisions occur every five to 10 years, to ensure that it remains a living document, and in keeping with the updating of many other ALA standards. This could mean providing mechanisms for currently incarcerated library clerks and users to give feedback on the document. "My hope and my goal as all of us continue in this work is that we share those models with one another,” Austin said. “I think a new version of the standards provides the opportunity not just for new services to be developed, but also for us to find out what models we didn't know about before.”