Welcome to each and every one of you. My name is Fran Roznowski, a volunteer for Prison Book Program and we are now ready to begin our program. Tonight is an evening to celebrate 30 years of Prison Book Program. We made it! We are a vibrant program and we are going strong and plan to be around as long as there is a soul in prison.

I want to share with you a brief history of Prison Book Program in the next few minutes. Raise your hand if you know of or frequented the Red Book Store when it was located on River St. in Cambridge.

Red Book Store , a radical bookstore opened its doors in 1969. The idea for the Prison Book Program was conceived by members of the Red Book Store in 1972. The collective recognized the critical need for political books inside prison through their own personal friends who were doing time, from prisoners who wrote directly to the bookstore and requested books and through customers who wanted to send books to their loved ones in prison. Back then as it is now there were families and friends of prisoners who made up the volunteer force of Prison Book Program. Back then as it is now prisoners were not allowed to receive packages of books directly from family or friends. Back then as it is now, many prisons had no libraries and prisoners in segregation were banned from libraries where they did exist.

Prison Book Program was founded to provide the resources of Red Book Store free to people warehoused in prisons with two basic ideas: to make reading material available to people who couldn’t otherwise obtain them and to provide a network of communication between people on the outside and inside prison.

Prison Book Program began in 1972 with a total of $300 in private contributions and from Red Book Store.

Initially, members of Prison Book Program worked with support and study groups in seven Massachusetts prisons – Framingham (for women) Concord, Norfolk, Walpole, Billerica, Charles Street Jail (now known as Nashua St. Jail) and Deer Island. Some members of Prison Book Program were teaching courses. Prison Book Program supplied them with books they were using in their study groups as well as with books of interest to individual prisoners with whom the support groups came in contact. Such activism continues at Prison Book Program with members of Prison Book Program having a history of participating in prisoner run programs in Mass. and in other states. Study groups throughout the country continue to receive reading material from Prison Book Program. This past year alone twenty prisoner lead study groups nationwide received Africana - an encyclopedia of Afrocentric knowledge from our program.

Without any publicity, word of Prison Book Program spread in the early seventies. Soon the program was getting requests throughout the country. One ad about Prison Book Program that appeared in the Midnight Special, a New York based prisoners’ newspaper, contributed to an increase from 14 to 40 requests a week. Times have changed. Today Prison Book Program averages 100 requests per week. In the mid seventies Haymarket Peoples’ Fund whose staff you will meet soon began funding the work of Prison Book Program. We were one of the first two grantees to receive money from Haymarket’s social change foundation which began in 1974.

The first of three moves for Prison Book Program came in the eighties. In 1982 Red Book Store and Prison Book Program were forced to move from their Cambridge storefront when we lost our lease. After a frenzied search Red Sun Press, whose staff you will soon meet, saved the day by renting a storefront to Red Book Store in a building they recently bought in Jamaica Plain. They graciously provided Prison Book Program with a rent free space, a home for the following 18 years.

I want to tell you about a victory for Prison Book Program from those days that occurred at Angola Prison because it indicates the power of a small group of determined people. In 1983 Prison Book Program received hundreds of books rejected and returned to us by Angola State Prison in Louisiana. Worth noting at that time Prison Book Program received more requests from Angola than any other single prison in the US and at that time Angola was and continues to be one of the largest prisons in the country. There were poorly stocked libraries in the prison complex with mostly westerns and romances according to the prisoners who wrote us and far too few books for the 7000 prisoners. Each package of books was rejected due to a new regulation of “new books only”. As a collective of 6 people we composed a letter and sent it to each prisoner who had requested books, encouraging them to mobilize, file complaints with the prison and the Louisiana Dept. of Corrections and to contact the National Prison Project in Washington DC because we only stocked used books. Prison Book Program also filed complaints with all of the above. It took 18 months but the rule was rescinded and once again the books went over the wall and into the hands of prisoners.

Another turning point for the project in the eighties was the arrival of the Gay Community News Prison Project and Mike Riegle also known as Mother Mike to countless prisoners everywhere. The compassion for the work elevated to new levels with Mike sleeping over at Prison Book just to catch up and the introduction of mailathons - Sunday afternoon work sessions followed by a potluck at a members’ house, in addition to our weekly sessions. In those years a backlog of 6 months for responding to requests for books was typical yet we actually caught up – meaning that we were answering letters received that week as opposed to being 5 or 6 months. The 2 or 3 times we caught up in a 4 year period, everyone stopped working, put down what they were doing what they were doing and just soaked up and savored the glorious moment. (Terry, the volunteer who used to bike to Holliston, 30 miles away after his weekly session at Prison Book Program).

The ambiance of our basement space during this time is best conveyed to you by the words of Ebony David Barkley, a volunteer from those days, “It was cramped but close, everyone was close together. It was musty, the smell of old books looking for new life.”

In 1988 we at Prison Book Program began publishing and distributing the National Prisoners Resource List in response to the large and ever growing number of prisoners requesting information regarding legal self help resources, prisoner support organizations, newspapers ands journals that maintain free or low-cost subscriptions for prisoners, penpal listings and information on AIDS and safer sex. Back then as it is now the resources list is sent out with each book package to prisoners and is updated up to 3 x times a year.

For Prison Book Program a major link was broken and yet another created with the closing of the Red Book Store due to bankruptcy in 1992 and the birth of the Lucy Parsons Center and Book Store at the same location. The survival of the bookstore under any name is paramount to Prison Book Program’s well being because it is our link to an established bookstore that permits us to send in books to prisoners everywhere. The Lucy Parsons Bookstore and Educational Center is now located at 549 Columbus Ave. in Boston and I encourage each of you to stop in and buy books. You will meet soon meet some of the members of the Lucy Parsons’ collective that operate the bookstore.

The nineties bought new volunteers and their own personal links. Cynthia Kline, whose son was imprisoned at Walpole came to Prison Book Program as a way to cope with the incarceration of her son. She brought Barbara Schram who continues on as a hardworking volunteer. Barbara brought her links from Northeastern University – students from her human services course. Barbara started a tradition and students from Northeastern continue to volunteer during the semester. During those years Prison Book Program began to link with other prison book projects around the U.S. often times sending prisoners’ letters to other projects so that they could be answered more regionally and more quickly.

Links from Boston’s Prison Book Program continued to be established and in new ways. In the mid and late nineties two new books to prisoners projects were started by former Prison Book Program volunteers. Around 1994 Juliana founded The Women’s Prison Book Project in Minneapolis “in the spirit of Mike Riegle” and in 1999 Sarah West started the Prison Book Program in Asheville, N. Carolina which responds to prisoners requests from 5 southern states as well as requests from those states by our Prison Book Program. Also in 1999 the Northampton Prison Book Program in western Massachusetts started with a backlog of Texas letters from our Prison Book Program. Members of Noho Prison Book Program are here tonight.

Now I’d like to share with you a vivid description of the atmosphere at Prison Book Program in those days from volunteer Valerie Linit:

To Fran

Some nights after work
in a printer’s basement smelling of skunk and sardine-bait--
the kind of place you wouldn’t want to bring your mother,
we read letters.

“Dear Prison Book Program, I am in 23 hour a day lock down...”
“ Dear Prison Book, at age 33, I’ve just discovered I’m Jewish. Can you send me literature on the Holocaust?”
“ Dear Prison Book, I like to work on cars and do nature-painting. There are no library facilities to speak of.”
“ Prison Book, I am a political prisoner. Please send a copy of Soledad Brother.

We eat cinnamon candy hearts and try not to feel
like four people alone reading letters in a musky basement.
I crunch candy hearts between my teeth,
angry at the growing list of restrictions:
the Texas prisons that only allow religious materials inside,
the ones that’ll only take paperbacks.

Shackled brothers and sisters line up in my head, waiting
for one goddamn novel to sustain them.
I ask myself,
Who can live in a cage without even a dictionary?

They want books, and I can understand their hunger
like we are kindred spirits
even though I am a white woman, never been arrested.

They want books.

Books to teach them English, about AIDS, Malcolm X,
and Shakespearean sonnets are what keeps them going.
They know the value of a word like only poets and prisoners can.
I get a package ready, hoping
to create one more poet and free one more prisoner.

© September 1999 Valerie Lint

In 1998 with the stench of skunk and other rodents, poor ventilation and lighting and spurred by several new volunteers (David Jaeger, Gavi Wolfe) we at Prison Book Program began to look for a new space with a new sense of enthusiasm. David Jaeger attended a meeting of religious leaders and activists in Boston known as the Ten Point Coalition and presented our need for space with many conditions attached (rent free, near public transportation, rent free, accessible evenings and weekends, rent free, warm and dry in winter, rent free). Rev. Elizabeth Ellis of the Unitarian Universalists, a longtime prisoner rights activist proposed to David that PBP move to this building, rent free and for eternity (which is my understanding).

As you have seen for yourselves on the tour we have moved to a space that is large enough to withstand 24 hour packathons with shifts of people working round the clock as a way to catch up on the backlog of requests. In addition, packathons are fundraisers with supporters pledging money for hours worked by members of Prison Book Program and others. We hold packathons 3 or 4 times a year. We will announce the upcoming packathon later this evening.

Over the past 30 years Prison Book Program has endured times of dire when volunteers pooled money together for postage or supplies knowing that there was no reimbursements in sight. We have survived with only a core of 4 volunteers but survive we did and PBP is now in an age of prosperity.

Prosperity for a prison book program looks like this:
- a room full of volunteers sending out packages of books
- letters from prisoners requesting books with a backlog of 2 months and not 9 months, [we’ve been there]
- reassurance that a prisoner on Death Row or in need of legal material will receive books within 3 weeks
- shelves overflowing with the most requested books
- a surplus carton of donated National Prisoners Resource Lists ready to be sent out
- boxes of donated packing envelopes waiting to be used
- money for packing materials, dictionaries, hard to obtain books and a little savings in the bank
- and willing volunteers who know how to write proposals for funding

If you look around this room and look around Prison Book Program’s work space and our storage space downstairs you will see the evidence of our prosperity.

Please stand if you are a former or current volunteer of PBP.

A very warm and generous thank you to you. Without you the Prison Book Program would have passed into history.
We are going to move onto to a historical moment for Prison Book Program. Tonight I want to present Prison Book Program’s very first logo. The logo was selected from close to 20 entries from prisoners that were entered into our logo contest held this summer. The winner is actually two people, Steve Hubble who drew the artwork and Ray Champagne who conceptualized the logo. Both are doing time at Souza Barinowski Prison in Shirley MA. Their prizes were books of their choice.

And so did everyone who submitted artwork.

I want to close with the words of Ray Champagne who sent these words to share in our birthday celebration.

Prison Book and I pretty much began our prison time together, although we would not formally meet for another few years - 1979 to be exact - but we’ve been together even since. I’ve turned a lot of pages through those years thanks to Prison Book; both book and life pages. There have been times when Prison Book was my only Free-World Friend and I guarantee there have been and are now many prisoner’s whose only Free-World Friend is Prison Book, which is both sad and wonderful - Sad, that someone is that alone -- Wonderful, that someone is there; and never doubt the impact Prison Book has on such people; there is nothing as comforting as receiving a book to a person who is sitting alone in a cage, especially if he or she happens to be in segregation day after day, week after week, and often year after year. People with “lives” can never completely and truly understand the impact and importance of Prison Book, its Volunteer’s and Supporter’s, who for the most part remain nameless, faceless benefactor’s -- But know you have, individually and collectively our heartfelt gratitude and respect. Thank You!
I would also like to take a moment to remember those who have passed through Prison Book and are no longer with us and able to enjoy this event: people such as Mike Regal, Cynthia Kline, prisoner’s such as Parkey Grace and Tom Swift, Kevin Meuse, Jorge Bird Comacho... All whose spirit still exists in Prison Book and its volunteer’s and those they reach out to. And finally, a very warm and generous thank you to Fran Roznowski without whom Prison Book would have passed into history. So thank you Prison Book, thank all of you!

In Strength & Struggle

Ray Champagne
9/13/2002