By Marc Larocque
For Northeastern alumnus Pam Boiros, books help make life tolerable.
“I love to read,” said the 1992 graduate, while sorting through stacks of mystery, business and cultural titles. “I couldn’t imagine a three-hour train ride without a book. To be without access to books would be horrible.”
For prisoners, limited access to books is inevitable. So Boiros and dozens of volunteers gather at the Prison Book Program (PBP) headquarters in Quincy Tuesday and Thursday evenings, in the basement of the historic United First Parish Church, to help prisoners who long for reading materials. The volunteers open letters from inmates requesting specific titles or genres of books, and match them as best they can with titles donated by local philanthropists, professors or publishing companies.
Last semester at Northeastern, one professor offered extra credit to students that worked with PBP and wrote a short essay about their experience. In Professor Arian Ferrer’s “Intro to Criminal Justice” and “Intro to Corrections” classes, 30 students opted to volunteer for the program in late-November and early-December.
“In my corrections classes we were talking about how a lot of the prisons don’t have library resources,” Ferrer said. “There are mixed feelings about the program.”
The PBP receives about 200 letters a week, or about 10,000 letters a year, and runs on donations alone, Boiros said. Volunteers meet twice a week to organize titles in the program’s small library, pack requested books and mail them to correctional facilities nationwide.
The group delivers approximately 6,000 packages per year to prisoners, each containing on average two books. But because of limited resources and an unexpected five-year hiatus in Massachusetts imposed by the state, at least a 12-week backlog of requests has formed – specifically, requests from in-state prisoners that waited in a filing cabinet, unfulfilled, until last month.
In 2002, after 20 years at work, the program lost its right to ship books to facilities in the Bay State. The program was an unapproved vendor, the state’s Department of Corrections declared, and its products couldn’t be distributed to the state’s inmates. It was permitted to continue serving other states.
The program has faced other troubles since its 1972 inception in a small book store in Cambridge.
The cause has been treated as pointless by some who said they think that criminals don’t deserve books or an education.
“It’s easy to vilify a person in prison,” Boiros said. “But they have feelings and families and there are all sorts of reasons people are in prison,” she said. “It’s a person with a brain and a body.”
Boiros added that the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country, and that prisons are focused on punishment, not rehabilitation.
“Seventy-five percent of prisoners today reoffend, and are readmitted [to prison],” Boiros said. “It’s called recidivism. The only thing proven to reduce the recidivism rates is when people get educated.”
PBP is one of about 20 programs across the country supplying prisoners with books. It serves prisons in every state except Michigan, because the state Department of Corrections there has restricted free books; California and Texas, because the states are considered too large; and Oregon, because a steadfast books-to-prison group already exists there.
Boiros said the only way to truly understand the program is to read a letter and send a prisoner some books. On Thursday, she picked a letter from a pile in a box that once held bottles of raspberry flavored vodka.
William Y. from the Federal Correction Institute in Estill, S.C., wrote, “To whom it may concern: I’m currently serving a lengthy sentence
