In 2015, a little over 1.5 million people were incarcerated at state and federal prisons in the United States (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2017). In 1980, this number was only about 330,000 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2017). With such a large prison population that consistently increases almost every year, I think it is critical for people who run prisons in the United States to continually be re-evaluating the rehabilitative opportunities offered within prisons and ensuring that prisoners have adequate access to those opportunities. Since many prisoners will eventually be released from prison and rejoin free society, I personally believe it is critical that prisoners have access to educational opportunities and library materials while they are incarcerated, because I believe having access to these resources can help improve their chances for successful re-entry into society upon their release. Consequently, the questions I was interested in answering through my research were:
1. Do incarcerated people in U.S. prisons have the right to access library materials? 2. What were some of the earliest prison libraries in the United States and what were their purposes? 3. How have philosophies regarding the purpose of prison libraries changed (or not) over time? 4. What is the future of prison libraries and what can we in the library profession do to influence it?
In order to research these topics, I primarily found resources using academic databases like JSTOR and EBSCO. The primary sources I was able to find and use for this research were Supreme Court rulings in cases related to prison libraries. I read the articles that I found and was able to trace the history of prison libraries in the U.S. by combining what I learned from each one, as well as develop my own opinions toward how prison libraries have been run in the past and are run now. I was also able to read Supreme Court opinions in two important cases involving prison libraries and develop my own opinions on these rulings. However, I do believe a weakness of my approach is that I was not able to find more relevant primary sources. I would have liked to have found something like a historical letter or journal written by an inmate about their experience with a prison library, but the only similar sources I could find were surveys that were done quite recently about prisoners' opinions about prison libraries (which did not have the historical angle I was interested in). Instead, I did end up primarily relying on secondary sources, but I believe the sources I used were excellent and offered great insight into the history of prison libraries in the United States. Reading multiple authors' opinions on prison libraries helped me to refine my own, and this is a topic I definitely plan to continue educating myself about in the future.