Mac Marquis on Books Through Bars
This week, you’ll hear our chat with David “Mac” Marquis, one of the editors and contributors to the recently published new book Books Through Bars: Stories From The Prison Books Movement out from University of Georgia Press. We talk about prison books projects, what they say about conditions inside, some of the value of this inside-outside organizing and what you can expect to find in the book.
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Transcription
TFSR: We’re joined by David “Mac” Marquis, one of the editors and contributors to the new book Books through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement. Mac is a longtime activist, a labor historian, author, and has helped found and run multiple prison books projects. Is there anything else you wanted to say by way of introduction, preferred pronouns, that sort of stuff?
Mac Marquis: My preferred pronouns are he/him, and I am fine with that introduction. It works for me.
TFSR: Could you talk a bit about what is a books through bars or prison books program? What needs do they fill? What do people need to know about the availability of reading materials in US jails and prisons?
Mac Marquis: That’s a great question. I want to take a second to thank you for having me on and allowing me to discuss Books through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement with you. I also want to say that this book wouldn’t have been possible without my co-editor Moira and all of the people who contributed chapters, but also all the people who volunteered for prison books over the years. So, I want to give those folks a shout out, and of course to all of the people who have fought for the rights of incarcerated people, including those incarcerated people themselves.
So, in terms of the work that a prison books program does individually, I’d explain the work of a typical prison books program, as most programs are volunteer-run and -staffed, we get books donated to us or we fundraise to purchase what we need. Typically, we find space that’s free or cheap where we can house our books and package them up. We get letters from incarcerated people asking for books. Hands down, the most commonly requested book is a dictionary. Many folks are a little bit surprised by that. I think that their surprise comes from a lack of understanding that many people on the inside are indeed looking for ways to better their lives and that’s no easy task while incarcerated. For the record, it’s worth noting that rates of functional illiteracy are high within the prison system. So, people need these dictionaries to teach themselves how to read. This, of course, relates back to issues of who is incarcerated and highlights how much our educational system has been defunded and the neglect that that defunding and the failure of that educational system breeds.
But the reading desires of incarcerated people go well beyond dictionaries and other forms of self-help. There are commonly requested genres of books such as urban fiction, African American history, thrillers… it really runs the gamut. Word games such as Sudoku, crossword puzzles are also commonly requested. We do our best to fill those requests, but we don’t always have the exact books someone wants. That’s kind of the baseline for most programs. Most of these programs will have libraries where we can. Sometimes we operate out of basements of an individual, sometimes they’re out of the backs of bookstores. It really kind of depends upon what the organization has access to. Some have their own offices, or they’re associated with universities and so on. So, we’ll have a large stack of books.
If you can envision if someone were to walk into one of these programs looking to volunteer after hearing about what it was that we did, they would generally see probably a couple of tables, which we would use for packing, and there will be packing materials on the table. Primarily, the space is dominated by books. There will usually be some sort of filing system for the letters and some of the other paperwork that we have that’s associated with the program. But in essence, it looks a lot like a library because in many ways that’s what it is.
There are other materials in addition to books that many of us try to stock and send inside. Things such as the National Prisoners Resource List, or NPRL. The NPRL provides incarcerated people with useful contacts and addresses so that incarcerated people who get the NPRL might have access to writing programs, information about college classes while incarcerated, art programs, health programs, such as information about AIDS and HIV support, or access to pen pal organizations, legal aid organizations. In short, it has many useful contacts for incarcerated people. Many organizations also stock and send in reentry guides. These are critical for people who are approaching the end of their mandated incarceration. These guides work to make returning citizens are aware of the resources that they might have access to. And the lack of resources for these folks is pretty much appalling and definitely plays a role in high recidivism rates in the United States, but that’s another topic altogether.
Another function that these programs serve is that they allow for people who have friends and family who are incarcerated to send them books without having to purchase them. And that’s critical. These folks also volunteer too, and they may gain a sense of community through working with other people who understand the issues their loved ones may be facing. That’s a type of support that is pretty much generally lacking in our society. I kind of feel like that’s an undervalued aspect of these programs, the community that they can foster.
Another intervention these programs make is that many folks who package out books also tend to write a brief note to the incarcerated person. This may seem like a small thing to folks who do not have an understanding of the prison system. However, for some folks who are incarcerated, this is the only outside personal contact they may have had in years. So, a handwritten letter from someone letting you know that you’re not forgotten might mean the world.
The books themselves really play a similar role. I mean, the books are a tangible piece of evidence that folks on the outside care enough to send you something that they think you might need and in some cases something you might have specifically asked for if we can get the exact book you want. This is just the type of thing that may help someone make it through another day. That can’t be undervalued. Prisons are by design very harsh places, and that type of support that we provide too. Essentially, in some ways you might even look at it as a mental health intervention in some cases.
Finally, prison books programs are important for the volunteers as well. For many of us, it’s a way to make a positive intervention and attempt to bring some small relief to incarcerated people. At the programs I’ve been involved with, we did our best to make these projects as enjoyable as possible. I know that sounds odd in juxtaposition to the carceral state, but the point is that you’re doing something, that you’re attempting to bring hope and light into a desperate situation. It’s a way to maintain your humanity in the face of an inhumane system. All too often activists can fall into a martyr complex. It’s kind of like the story of the blues in a way, being able to laugh in the face of a system designed to make you cry.
So yes, we did our best to bring a little levity, as we were able to do at times, and frankly more people volunteer and more books get inside if you can also spread some joy in the process. So that’s, that’s kind of what we do as a prison books program. It’s really as simple as that.
In some ways, the simplicity of it is part of the beauty of it. We get letters from incarcerated people, we answer these letters, we send them the books that we have, we meet their needs as best as possible, we also give them access to lots of other information. There’s lots of things that go on behind the scenes that these programs, from the acquisition of books, the curating of books, because you may ask for book donations, but then you can’t send in every book, you have to go through books, and there’s certain books you don’t want to send, perhaps. So, you know, you kind of have to think about that process and curate those books. You have to be able to communicate with the other prison books programs to ascertain what’s happening with other programs, what restrictions are in place in other in other places, and so on and so forth. But we can get to some of that in a little bit.
TFSR: You said the prison system is about disconnecting people, it’s about isolating people, it’s about breaking down community. I know it’s across the gamut, different states, different counties, different federal institutions have their own setup, as well as different wings within that have access to different resources. But could you generalize or give some specific examples besides books to prisoners projects, like the ones that we’re talking about, what access to these sorts of resources do folks on the inside have, either from the institution or from other outside organizations that might be sending in information?
Mac Marquis: Sure, and that’s a great question. To start with, and it can’t be reiterated enough, the system is designed to limit that access and to control that access. And there are 1000s of different institutions in the United States. The short version is the federal system has its own determinants on what is allowed and not allowed. But even within that federal system, there’s different tiers and levels of security and so forth, and there’s different restrictions based on that. Then you break it down at the state level, the county level, and then the individual prisons. Each Warden may add additional controls and oversight into these things, Then finally, you get down to the mailroom where the interpretation of all of these things is left up to a very arbitrary decision made by someone who isn’t necessarily trained to ascertain how this may or may not fit into the restrictions. And they can be very capricious in the way that they decide that and generally is. So, I do want to make sure that that’s crystal clear.
In terms of other access that folks have, I think the chapter in the book that Daniel McGowan wrote really kind of gets at some of that and talks about how it really runs the gamut, that you may be in an institution that has a reasonable library or what accounts or amounts to a reasonable library inside a prison. But that’s the exception, not the rule. That’s, that’s fairly rare as far as it goes. More likely, you have a library that is in significant need of attention, or you have no library at all. Not every institution has a library, and that’s important to note.
Some institutions are connected with public libraries, and people are able to access books through those sometimes. Not all the time. That also depends. Also, the chapter by Rebecca Ginsburg highlights that even within that prison system, those libraries in the prisons, there may be significant issues of censorship within those libraries in the prisons. Even if you are in one of those institutions, that does have a library, and even if it’s a good library, you may be in a part of the prison that doesn’t have access to that library. So, there will be a pushcart that’ll get rolled through, and someone will have already curated the books on the cart, or perhaps not so much curated, but just pulled books randomly off the shelf and rolled them through. It really kind of just depends upon the institution that you’re at and how invested folks are.
So even as Daniel McGowan said in his chapter that there were times he would just have to reach his arm through what you call the bean hole, where the food comes through. He would just reach his arm through, and you didn’t necessarily even see what you were grabbing, perhaps. It was as if a book, any book, will do, thank you very much, be on your way.
Folks from the outside do have the ability to send books inside. However, you can’t do that as an individual. You have to do that through, generally speaking, what they refer to as an authorized dealer. And traditionally, what that has meant is through a bookstore or a bookseller. But those definitions now are being challenged in some places and some places are just arbitrarily deciding who is an authorized book dealer and who isn’t. There are currently lawsuits. I think there’s one by Avid Books in Georgia, where they’re challenging this because they’ve been barred. They’ve been declared not an authorized bookseller, and so they’re challenging that lawsuit, I believe that’s the bookstore. So, it gets a little tricky.
And what it means is that people’s access to books, individual families—and let’s face it, the reality is that most people who are incarcerated come from families who have a lot of experience with poverty and are impoverished and may not have the resources to purchase a brand new book through a authorized book dealer and then pay for the shipping of said book or may not even know how to navigate that system. So, that’s another barrier that exists. Unfortunately, what it means is that many people go through the big corporate conglomerates to purchase those books, because they want to be on the safe side and ensure that those books will get through.
Then there are religious organizations that will send books inside, but generally speaking, those books will be religious books. So as far as secular non-governmental organizations that send books inside, to the best of my knowledge, the prison books programs compromised the largest, hands down, association of groups that send books inside to incarcerated people. It’s not even close. I’m unaware of any other method that sends as many books as these various prison books programs do.
TFSR: Another direction that I think is really interesting that prison books helps to approach is that not only are books and libraries difficult to access and literacy rates are low among a lot of people that are incarcerated, also people’s access to legal resources, whether to affect their outside case and challenge their conviction, a lot of people who are in prison are poor and don’t have lawyers that are willing to put in the time and the effort. They’re often like public defenders who have too big of a caseload or don’t really care. But if they’re on the inside with all this time and they want to challenge their initial incarceration, they don’t have easy access to legal resources besides jailhouse lawyers, what is provided by comrades inside, or the law books and dictionaries and whatever that they can access from the outside. People are not prepared to fight on a legal level in a lot of cases against the fact that they’re in prison, let alone the charges that they get from within prison.
Our reading group just read the essay on Surviving Solitary Confinement by Khalfani Malik Khaldun, who’s still in the Indiana system. He was talking about how reading groups and also building and asserting one’s understanding of the legal system around them and building up resources is, in that case, an important way not only to mentally survive solitary confinement as an individual but to build solidarity among folks on the inside. I wonder if you would like to say any more about what you’ve experienced with people requesting law books, requesting dictionaries, requesting NPRLs or access to other gateways to legal resources.
Mac Marquis: Indeed. Great question. So, there is a long history of jailhouse lawyers and people organizing on the inside to create access to this, as the interview with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin in the book makes clear that incarcerated people were the people who pushed to allow for books beyond the Bible to be allowed in prison in the first place. It was the lawsuits of Martin Sostre that really broke that down. Lorenzo Ervin talks about how he meets Martin Sostre while incarcerated and, as he puts it, Martin Sostre kind of gives him the playbook and he takes that with him and furthers those lawsuits and continues that expansion on how to fight on the inside.
But even those folks on the inside need access to resources, right? Even the best jailhouse lawyer would benefit from access to resources, and we get lots of requests from people on the inside, frankly, more requests than we can fill in the manner that the requests are written in, insofar as people want very specific legal books, and unfortunately those are also fairly expensive, oftentimes. So many of these programs are run, not all, but many are run on relativity… at least everyone that I’ve been involved in [laughs] has been run sort of on a shoestring budget. We would hold fucking bake sales to get books for prisoners. Anything that we could think of to raise money we probably did in the early years of Asheville Prison Books. We weren’t particularly adept fundraisers. We didn’t know how to access that type of wealth. But we tried our best, and we came up with very creative methods. Sometimes we’d make $50 and sometimes we’d make several hundred.
Raising that money for these programs is important, because those legal books, just even ordering one of the common ones, a legal dictionary for instance… they understand that you’re not necessarily going to be able to get them all this case law, but maybe you can get them a legal dictionary, but even those who are expensive. We do our best to fill those needs whatever we got and unfortunately we can’t always do it. So oftentimes, we end up sending in a printout of the PDF of the most recent Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook and the NPRL. Sometimes the best that we can do.
Hopefully, that will give folks access to further information, and maybe those folks will keep trying back with us and they’ll hit us at the right time when we do have some of those legal works to send in. I wish that that was one thing that we were able to do more of and perhaps a book like this will raise awareness that that is necessary, and there will be people coming out of law school and think, “Yeah. I don’t need that old battered out legal handbook that I have but maybe somebody who’s incarcerated does.”
TFSR: But not too battered otherwise it won’t get in. [laughs]
Mac Marquis: Indeed. Well, you know, again, that runs the gamut, and that’s left to the arbitrary nature of each individual prison guard. But generally speaking, yes, it is usually only new books or books in very good condition that are allowed inside.
TFSR: Could you talk a bit about what people that pick up this book are going to see when they crack it open, some of the contents, contributions, some of the artwork?
Mac Marquis: I guess the easiest way to do that is to give a general framing of the book. In short, it’s a book about a social movement that in many ways has flown under the radar for well over 50 years. The prison books movement is comprised of a disparate group of people. We sent free books to incarcerated people. Over the last several decades, we’ve sent tens of thousands of free books inside and answered tens of thousands of letters from people inside asking for books. Collectively, these programs comprise the single largest secular not-for-profit endeavor to get reading material into the hands of incarcerated people. To the best of my knowledge, there’s been no work that has attempted to document this movement writ large and introduce this movement as a whole to the general public. So, this book really kind of strives to tell the story of this movement and to share that story with the general public and academics.
One of the reasons this movement has flown under the radar is because the population that we serve is designed to remain invisible and forgotten by the public. Of course, I’m talking about incarcerated people. So, the people in this movement refuse to not see and refuse to forget our fellow citizens. This is particularly important, and I’m sure that many of your listeners are aware of the statistics, but they do bear a little bit of repeating, and perhaps there will be some first-time listeners, and these statistics matter.
This is important because the United States has the largest the highest rate of incarceration rate per capita in the world, hands down. In other words, we imprison our citizens at a higher rate than any other country. According to the Prison Policy Institute there’s currently over 1.9 million incarcerated people in the United States, and Black and brown people are disproportionally incarcerated. Again, I’m sure your listeners are familiar with the ills of the carceral state, but just in case, there are some new folks out there, I would mention that. And frankly, even for those who are familiar I think it’s important to have this type of thing in your back pocket when discussing incarceration with others. It’s also worth noting that roughly three quarters of a million of incarcerated people have not yet been convicted of any crime and are incarcerated simply because they cannot afford bail. So, in essence, poverty is their crime.
In the first part of our book our authors talk about some of the needs of prison books programs, clarifying the needs, clarifying that these programs are indeed necessary and serve the needs of people whose needs are not currently being met by the state or through private enterprise. In other parts of the book, we discuss censorship and some of the obstacles to teaching and learning inside. There are sections written by Vicki Law giving a general overview or Michelle Dillon and Rebecca Ginsburg and others on censorship and experiences teaching inside as well as the perspective of formerly incarcerated people speaking about obstacles to learning and the relationship between student and teacher on the inside. We also talked about the history of some of some of these prison book organizations and of course, as I mentioned, the interview with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin clarifies that the movement was begun by incarcerated people.
We highlight the origin stories of a couple programs such as Asheville Prison Books and Appalachian Prison Books Project. We also talk about the efforts of the movement as a whole, how we attempt to cooperate with one another and communicate and learn from other prison books programs. We talk about that process, and indeed, many of these programs have anarchist origins. For anyone who has tried to organize a large disparate group of anarchist organizations, even ones that have a specific methodology and specific goal in mind, it can be an effort [laughs] to create that type of organization and communication. Of course, we have interviews with formerly incarcerated people expressing the need for and importance of books on the inside. We give insights to ways in which people can start their own prison books programs, including a really good comic that gives step-by-step instructions.
Finally, we end with discussions of issues these programs are currently facing and what they might need, what that might mean for the future. In short, what I want to say is that what we’re trying to do is provide usable lessons all through this book, right? Yes, we are trying to introduce the general public to these organizations and create an awareness of these organizations so that people might become involved. But also, this is for activists in general that goes just beyond prison books. There are many useful lessons in here that activists can take away and put into use in their own projects, regardless of whether they’re projects that have to deal with incarcerated people or not.
TFSR: Thank you for that rundown. Just to note, it’s a really beautiful book. It’s got really good information in essays, but it’s also got lots of artifacts from prison books or books through bars projects. It’s got lots of sidebars that have words from folks that have been incarcerated about the importance of getting access to resources like books. Yeah, and the comic strip throughout it, that one section that Nic Cassette drew and that Moira the co-editor contributed the words for. It’s a really beautiful book. Honestly, I would describe it as a coffee table book.
Mac Marquis: Yeah. Some people are like, “This is kind of like a coffee table book?” My response is that it is a coffee table book. That was the intent. That’s what we were trying to do. It is that by design. I think that a lot of folks will be struck by the visual aspects of the book. That’s going to hit them right away. Or that’s the hope anyway.
We made art a point of emphasis in regard to the layout of the book, and there are reasons for that decision. Art and artists are a big part of the prison book social movement and we wanted that to come through. If I was wearing my professor hat, I would talk about how the project very much represents the humanities in general. But I’m going to leave that hat on the shelf for now. [laughs]
We didn’t want the art to go into a separate and distinct section because that’s not the reality of the work. We wanted it to be interspersed throughout. And you mentioned there’s various sidebars. We try to include a little bit of information about books that people have written while inside. That could be a book in and of itself, all of the important works that have been written by incarcerating people. That’s a book. But we’re just trying to highlight and show that there are these important contributions to society being made from the inside, in the last place that you’re supposed to look for these contributions. The last pace place that many people would expect them to be coming out of. Yet they are there. There’s something really beautiful and telling about that.
We tried to intersperse some humor stories about funny things that may have occurred while people were organizing for prison books just to, again, introduce some levity and to show that you don’t have to be a martyr, another day off to the salt mines of prison books. You can try to do your best to make it rewarding and enjoyable. It is always rewarding for me, anyway. I think if it’s ceases to become rewarding for someone, they might take some time off. Rejuvenate and come back to the program.
But I think that the art, again, is a critical part of this. The fliers and whatnot really demonstrate that and get at that they because there is not just information on those fliers. They’re designed to be visually appealing. It really kind of produces that history of the movement and shows that connection in a very tangible way. There are connections between the incarcerated people as letter writers to us. So many of them adorn—not many, but it definitively happens enough that people adorn their letters with art or send drawings in addition to their letter kind of as a means of a thank you. They’re like, “I don’t have any money. I can’t pay for this book. I know that y’all are doing really great work. I appreciate it. Here’s this drawing.” By the way, that type of thing has always meant the world. I don’t expect a thank you. The thank you for me is knowing that I’m doing something good, I’m participating, I’m trying to change the system. But getting those drawings from incarcerated people is always really amazing and always means a lot. So, yeah, the art is a critical part of this book, and I hope that comes through with people.
Lastly, on the coffee table design, it’s a tough topic to talk about incarcerated people. It can be fucking depressing to talk about not just incarcerated people but to talk about the whole system of incarceration and the history of incarceration within the United States. It can be a difficult topic to talk about. Oftentimes people don’t want to talk about it at length for any given point in time, because it ends up, they become depressed by that topic. So, we’re trying to kind of fight that by interspersing this art and interspersing moments of levity, but also that you can pick this book up and put it down. You’re not going to lose your place. You’re going to be okay. You can pick it up when you’ve got 15 minutes. You can get through an entire little section of one person’s interview or just look at the art in that time. Whatever it is, you can get something out of this book in 15 minutes. You can also sit down and read it from cover to cover, but it’s designed so you don’t have to, and I think that that’s an important aspect to this book.
TFSR: Yeah, that definitely makes the content easier to go back and revisit. You’re looking for something where someone’s thinking about what they’re experiencing with mail digitalization, you could just say, “Oh, I have this book that covers this topic.”
There are obviously lots of reasons that people would, on the outside, work with a books through bars program. For some, it’s going to be about the joy of engaging with ideas and getting folks introduced to topics or further giving the tools to help them enmesh themselves further in reading or helping folks build skills that the jailers aren’t providing paths towards. For others, that may be a way of giving back as they themselves or their loved ones have been or are incarcerated.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about if prison books is mutual aid, a little bit more about what people who are participating in it on the outside get out of experiencing it. Is it the common organizing space and the camaraderie that comes around that? Just go wild.
Mac Marquis: Sure. I think that it is definitively the common organizing space and the community that that provides. There’s more to it than that, and I’ll get into that in a second, but I don’t want to undervalue that. Many people operate in isolation and that’s not an accident. Even on the outside, this is becoming an increasingly isolated society as people spend more time in their houses less time at social events, more time glued to their screens, more time glued to their phones. Those interactions are kind of meted by some sort of digital format. It’s nice that we can move beyond the limitations of geographical location and have that type of interaction, but often it’s coming at the expense of the interaction of the people outside your door, of the people in your town. So, prison books programs really kind of provide a space for that.
For many folks who have been involved in organizing for a long time, one of the things that can be difficult to deal with is the sense that the problems are too big and there’s nothing we can do about it. It can become overwhelming for people and debilitating at times, even if you are involved in environmental organizing, a long environmental campaign. For instance, I’ve been involved in campaigns to protect a particular wild area and you ended up having to run that same campaign 10 years after you may have had that success because it’s being threatened again. It oftentimes doesn’t lead to long-term solutions. And those campaigns can take months at a time where you’re attempting to do just a singular thing. But with prison books, every book package is an intervention. So, you get this tangible result out of it, every single package that you send in. You tape it up, you address it, and you can immediately feel good. And that’s not to be devalued. For me, that’s a huge part of it.
I think that it’s also important to note that for many folks in these programs, not all, but many folks involved in these programs are indeed abolitionists. So, this is one aspect of an overall abolitionist outlook that they’re engaging with. This provides a very tangible means of doing something productive. That old saying, “Action is the antidote to despair.” That, for me is just such a huge part of it. Knowing that some of these things, some of these books that you send in, they can change somebody’s life. They can help somebody make it through another day. It’s not often you get to make that type of intervention in someone’s life.
TFSR: I’d like to dig a little bit more into that abolitionist horizon of prison books projects, because there’s a way of looking at it and there’s a way that some people I know engage with it as, “I’m providing a service for this individual,” or “I am checking a box by responding to this letter and sending this package of books” and decontextualizing… almost like, “Well, the state is failing doing this right now. The state should be providing these resources to the people that it’s putting into boxes. So, I’m going to do this right now and get all these resources and do this thing and feel good about that,” without necessarily critiquing the fact that those boxes shouldn’t exist, as well as prison libraries should exist if there were to be prisons. I wonder what kind of conversations you hear from folks that are involved in this project or around dialogue of the charity versus abolitionist praxis approach towards prison books projects. I imagine that besides the politics of individuals, for groups that are 501(c)(3)s it becomes difficult to promote a political perspective. And also, you don’t want to be reproducing the same crap that a lot of those religious book distribution projects are doing.
Mac Marquis: Again, that’s a good question. The answer is a little complicated. The reality is that there’s space for different outlooks within the prison books movement. I personally embrace that space for those differences because I want people to be able to walk into a prison books program and feel comfortable. I don’t want them to walk in and feel like, “Oh, my gosh. I’m surrounded by these wild anarchists!” and whatever image that may conjure in their head. I want people to know that they can walk in and they can bring their kids and it’s going to be okay. We’re going to send in packages and there’s nothing scary about what’s happening at a prison books program.
I think that part of that is, for me, I’m always about thinking about how to expose people to this information and to other methods of looking at the world. So, in other words, I don’t always want to preach to the choir. I mean, the choir does need some reinvigoration from time to time and I’m all for it. But I think that the ability to change someone’s outlook, that’s where much of the interventions need to happen. If we’re going to make larger changes in the world, then we need to be able to allow for people to change and also to give them the means to change. So, prison books can kind of really fill that niche in some ways for some folks, because I think that the experience… many people just they don’t have that experience communicating with incarcerated people at all and just through that experience.
I’ve seen people change through that experience. I’ve witnessed it. They just have no idea. Even people’s face when I tell them that the most commonly requested book is a dictionary. Their face says everything when you say that. They’re shocked. Not everybody, but generally speaking, that is a very common reaction I get when I say that. And that’s a moment of intervention right there. That’s a moment to educate someone and show them and kind of hope that that education leads them to a different conclusion or leads them to question what it is that they think they know. So, that’s a big thing for me.
These programs, yes, I do want them to feel comfortable. I want families of incarcerated people to come in and feel comfortable. Even if they are religious in their own way, even devout religious in their own way, they can still come in and package books from our secular library. I have no issues about that whatsoever. Part of it is, for me, we’re providing an example of a change that can be made and way of how to do things. We can demystify this process for some folks. There are many ways in which participation in these programs does facilitate abolition through the curation of the books, through exposing the general public to people that the system is designed to keep them from having an interaction with.
But also, because there are so many folks who are indeed abolitionists involved in the program, even just somebody coming in who’s not an abolitionist or would consider themselves as they might say in their own words “not political”—and will leave that alone for now. [laughs] But folks who may describe themselves in that way, and they’re just there to send books to incarcerated people, because for whatever reason that’s their thing. This week, that’s what they want to do. Getting those books inside may create an intervention. Even if the person on the outside isn’t that abolitionist, it may create an intervention for the person on the inside, and that’s not to be underestimated. Then I think even just the process of our organization existing and other people on the inside, spreading the word like, “Hey, if you want books, I did write these people, and they did send me books.” Again, that’s facilitating their interaction with us. And through that process with that information will get there. That information will get there. I’m not particularly concerned about that. I think that that comes through pretty much by the nature of the project.
TFSR: Yeah, and I’m not asking you to speak on behalf of all prison books projects, obviously. As you said before, there’s different flavors to different projects and those projects change according to who’s participating and according to who they’re interacting with on the inside as well.
But having been involved in activist projects in the past, things that have claimed to be mutual aid and the intention was there to be mutual aid, a lot of times, besides the fact that there is value in helping folks get a hold of things that they need or that they desire to survive that the state, for instance, is not providing or is actively denying, there is value in that. The easy example for me to think of that stood outside of the way is the Breakfast Program of the Black Panther Party, which included a political education element. Obviously, the majority of prison books projects are not Maoist projects that have a specific political line that they’re pushing. But what we saw with that alongside the active destruction of the people and organizations that were involved in coordinating those Breakfast Programs was the state stepping in and saying, “There’s a need here. We’re going to fill this” and then filling it and then defunding it afterwards. After it had pushed aside the activist grassroots intention, fill the space, and then neoliberalism deflates that, and then the needs still exist without the people that were involved in the project anymore being involved and taking that space. It’s hard to retake that. People were killed, people are in prison.
I kind of wonder in that way are there any specific interventions that you’ve seen with prison books projects to step beyond the service role. I know that some prison books projects will then start engaging… they’ll increase the direct engagement with people involved collectively. Asheville Prison Project has done inside/outside readings of books, then collected those expressed perspectives through letters of people on the inside that were participating in it, compiled a zine with some writings of people that were on the outside, put that together, and then sent those into prisons as a possible aid to reading whatever book, George Jackson, Angela Davis, or Toni Morrison, or whatever… “Here’s what we thought! Here is inside and outside perspectives.” That, in of itself does not tear down prison walls physically, but metaphorically it kind of does.
I wonder if there’s any other examples of how prison books projects have sparked interventions above distribution of literature.
Mac Marquis: One, I do want to point out that we do have a tendency to… all of us, or I shouldn’t say all of us, but there is a tendency in a lot of activist organizations to want to do everything all at once. I’ve certainly been guilty of that many times myself in terms of keeping on pushing the boundaries, trying to do everything and perform all the functions. One thing that some prison books programs are wary of is their ability to send books inside. That’s one thing that we always try to protect as best we can, our ability to continue to send books inside. So, people may come up with different names… Programs are generally spawned off of the prison books programs. Some programs like Asheville Prison Books may engage in reading clubs and things like that on the inside. I’ve certainly seen that at prison books programs. The reality is that at the end of the day we often can’t fill all the needs just even performing our basic function.
When I was originally involved with Asheville Prison Books, we were generally six months behind in our letters. We got through them, but at that time, in addition to the books, we had a whole zine library that we had comrades at a big corporate printing entity where we would go and be able to print off 1000s of copies of whatever we wanted to for free. So, we had no shortage of radical zines. All it took was the time to go and use the machines from midnight to 4:30am when we were able to do that. So, we had no shortage of radical zines to send inside.
I think that, in terms of this conversation, what’s also instructive is Lorenzo’s interview there. He talks about the need for, in his experience, what they had on the outside, what his experience and organizing on the inside, when they were organizing on the inside, during his time of incarceration was at the height of the Black Power Movement. He talks about how that was critical, that support was critical to the development of this movement on the inside. In terms of his outlook, he doesn’t see that type of support currently in existence from outside organizations. He indicates that he thinks that’s necessary for folks on the inside to be able to succeed to the extent that… maybe not necessary, but certainly would help further it along a lot faster.
So, at the end of the day, I have seen interventions in this matter from prison books programs, but many programs struggle to perform their basic function, and I don’t want to really critique folks for that. I have seen people involved in these programs chunk off other projects with different names, so if certain prison says, “Hey, wait a minute. You’re not a bookseller. You’re something else, and here’s our evidence for that.” They can say, “Well, actually, that’s an entirely separate program.” And it is. They use the prison books program to access that. Some prison books programs are very careful about how they engage in those things.
There are other sister organizations. We talked about how there’s this connection that does need to be fostered, all of these people working with people on the inside. There are people who do run book clubs on the inside, who do run radical book clubs that are connected between the inside and the outside that are associated with prison books programs but aren’t necessarily a prison books program. There are other people who are teaching inside that support all the work. The connections and conversations between all of these people are often difficult to coordinate and to have, because everyone is so maxed out in the system designed to keep you barely surviving.
TFSR: So, because you brought up Lorenzo, it’s a perfect segue into what I was going to ask next. Censorship can look a lot of different ways obviously, and Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin spoke in his interview with you for Books through Bars about leftists and Black liberation books being declined, and how that changed with lawsuits from Martin Sostre and the pressures that were applied by movement inside and outside during his time inside, as you said at the height of the Black liberation movement.
He also talked about the importance of study groups where prisoners swapped ideas collectively read texts and shared them around. My impression is that many of these tenuous successes were whittled away defunded or stolen wholesale during the days of the War on Drugs and the rise of mass incarceration from the ‘80s up until today. I’m aware that Mr. Ervin’s new printing of his essay in book form Anarchism and the Black Revolution and the compilation of political prisoners’ writings Rattling the Cages have both been blocked by many facilities. Maybe not with these examples, but with others, if you could talk a bit about the role of Books Through Bars, in challenging this sort of censorship, if you’re aware of any campaigns that BTB or BTB-inspired organizers have been involved with to sort of challenge these censorships of specific titles.
Mac Marquis: Sure. So, censorship is something that we deal with in prison books programs on a regular basis. That censorship isn’t always overtly political. That Censorship can be in terms of the myriad of rules designed to make it more difficult to simply access any material, from federal prison systems demanding white packaging for their books and things like this. So, I do want to start out and say that. Even just the idea that used books can’t be sent and all of these other various restrictions that are placed on access to material in general just kind of add to that bar for entry. But when it gets to specific books, some states have censorship lists that people like PEN America have been successful in getting access to some of those lists. Some states can’t get access to those lists. Even again, at the individual institutions, those lists may vary, and there may be additional restrictions at an individual institution.
In the book there’s a piece on a case that was presented called Big House Books v. Hall. It’s about fighting some of that censorship and the ability to send books inside. I know, in North Carolina years ago we had an issue with all prison books programs being barred from some prisons, because, again, that idea of, “You’re not really a bookseller.” All that took was a letter from a lawyer to basically ask for clarification on that and to ask how they’re assessing these things. Of course, oftentimes you find out that they have no real legal standing. They’re just kind of making it up and hoping that you don’t question them. And even the very act of questioning them is an act of resistance because it makes them think twice perhaps, hopefully, before the next time that they try to enforce some arbitrary restriction.
But it gets real crazy. I think in the book, I think Kwaneta Harris talks about a magazine being banned because it had an ad for adult diapers. It can get wild. Now, I’ve successfully sent in lots of material. The history of the Black Power movement and organizing and radical organizing, anarchist organizing, so on and so forth to many institutions with no trouble whatsoever. Then sometimes you get all those same books back. Sometimes I suspect that the people in the mailroom, when the titles are not crystal clear, may not know who George Jackson is. But they do know who Malcolm X is. There was a time when Malcolm X Speaks or The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a little more difficult to send inside.
So, it really kind of runs the gamut, and these lawsuits and letters from lawyers oftentimes work. Not always, but there’s usually some sort of lawsuit, like that one at Avid books right now. Avid Books isn’t a prison books program, but the lawsuit is a challenge to the rule that bars prison books programs from sending material in some states. All of a sudden saying, “You’re not an authorized dealer.” And then you ask, “Well, who is an authorized dealer? What is an authorized dealer in the prisons?” And the prison’s like, “Yeah, we just kind of made that category up, but we’re sure you’re not in it.” So, again, it runs the gamut. There are definitively books on the list in some places, and some people have been successful in challenging institutions.
But the first thing is you have to know that a book is technically banned. A lot of times you won’t even know. You’ll just get a return package with no explanation. One of the things I want to point out, and that I didn’t mention earlier, is that many of these programs, as I said, are all volunteer run, and we’re for the most part, staffed by poor and working-class people. It’s a lot of times, all we can do to run the program as is. The additional barrier of, now I have to contact a prison, figure out why this book got returned, what the process is, go through these phone calls, and you have to do that every time and you may get a direct answer and you may not.
But sometimes I’ve had success in calling the mailroom and talking to individual COs. Sometimes, it was legitimately a case of, “Well, we looked you up on the internet, and we didn’t see a brick-and-mortar store. So, you’re not a bookshop.” And we say, “Well, we run our operation through this bookstore, as you can see. Would you like a letter from this bookstore? Here’s the Google Street View of this bookstore.” Quite literally, I’ve had those conversations with people in the mailroom, and they’ve generally had a reasonable rate of success, again, through that simple questioning. But it doesn’t always work.
TFSR: Yeah, it’s not like the prisons are really good communicators about what books are banned. If any of the listeners have checked out the mail policies or package policies for prisons that are on their websites or on the DOC websites, they’re so confusing, general, vague. I would imagine that now that there is a national organization for coordinating a bunch of prison books projects that it’s a good venue or avenue for people to be able to communicate back and forth, like, “Hey, have you had this experience with this specific state or this facility?” Building institutional knowledge among the activists that doesn’t exist if there are a constellation of independent projects that aren’t talking to each other.
Mac Marquis: Andy Chan’s chapter in the book really kind of gets at that. That listserv is reasonably active, especially when it comes to restrictions with people kind of trying to figure out, “Hey, we’re having trouble in Texas” or “We’re having trouble with this one particular institution. Has anybody else had this similar problem?” And then it turns out, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, we have as well.” You can kind of begin to figure out what the problem is and if one prison books program figures out a way around it, now everybody has that answer. So that listserv has been kind of invaluable in that way for sure.
TFSR: So, we just spoke about the active censorship directed against specific titles. But the prison mailing system has gone through constant revision, privatization, and digitalization in recent years with the creation of approved book lists, tablets with specific available titles or publishers in digital form that can be purchased, that can’t be shared, and that can be deleted. I wonder if you could talk a bit about what these technological changes, the further introduction of privatized industries like JPay and GTL, and the assault on subject matter that you see through this, what this has brought to the work that you all do, or to just correspondence between people on the inside and families loved ones and supporters on the outside?
Mac Marquis: So, there’s a lot going on there. I’ll quickly address the privatization aspect and then we’ll move on to the other aspects. To the privatization aspect: Yes, prisons are business, and that’s a dirty little secret that folks don’t really address a lot and talk a lot about. But every way that the state and private institutions can squeeze money out of prisons, they do so. And it’s not out of the prison. It’s out of the incarcerated person. So that is definitively an aspect. In terms of the federal system, there’s other ways.
I do want to point out that more so than a business, thinking about it as a political social institution. Where are the majority of incarcerated people? Where did they live before they were incarcerated? Where did they get moved to? When they get moved out of the locations where they were incarcerated generally or where they lived… Generally, largely speaking, the trend is to come from a more urban area and to end up in a more rural area. And this matters. It matters in terms of political representation. Those folks are counted in the census. This is, in essence, a modern day Three-fifths Compromise, except they’re five-fifths, but they also have limited rights. So they’re used to disproportionately prop up the politicians in these rural locations. So that’s another aspect of it.
But leaving that all aside because that’s a much larger conversation. Leaving all that aside, I would say that, at the end of the day, the simple answer is it’s more forms of dehumanization and more separating incarcerated people from their loved ones, their family, and the general public. So, the taking digital images of everything—one thing that’s happening now is that you have to send everything to a specific location, everything that’s going to go inside to another location, not actual institution itself. There it gets digitized. It gets digitized and sent to the incarcerated person. That removes that type of intimate connection.
For folks who are old enough to remember getting a physical letter from someone they appreciate—I know it’s a dying art. There’s something tactilely about holding that letter in your hand, seeing that person’s handwriting, feeling the impression of that person’s handwriting, feeling where their pen touched that paper. There’s something visceral about that that gets lost. Yes, you have the image of it, but it’s not the same thing. There’s something very touching and very loving, the connection, the human spirit, that gets lost in that communication. I think that shouldn’t be discounted.
Then when you get to the tablets themselves, at the end of the day, you hit the nail on the head right. There is definitively a profit margin associated with these tablets. It’s also control, right? People say, “Oh, well they have tablets. They have access to all these different books. Isn’t it better?” Well let’s draw that back a little bit. What books do they have access to? Is their access limited? Can it be taken away? Who controls it? And most people, when you begin to ask those specific questions, people as they’re hearing about this, they don’t have the answers to that in part because that also would change at institution to institution to institution.
People also don’t even understand that incarcerated people’s access to the internet and their connections to the internet to access these things is also all limited. So, it’s not as if they could access and download new material at any time. Some of its already loaded on the tablets. There is definitively, in my understanding, quite a bit of religious material on these tablets that is accessible, overwhelmingly so perhaps in some cases. And what can be taken away, right?
Then also, the community with inside the institution. There’s a long tradition and spirit of incarcerated people kind of supporting one another, and one of those ways in which they do that, which gets talked about by some of the incarcerated people in our book, is that the sharing of books is a part of that. And the loaning out of books is a part of that. And people are going to be reticent to loan out their tablet. So, then that takes away, again, one more way that people are communicating and interacting with one another. So, it’s about control, profit, and censorship, in short.
TFSR: And the fact that institutions are also adopting these approved lists of books, even if it’s not the digital format or approved publishers, strictly limits the type of literature, the type of ideas that people can access on the inside, like “these are the approved safe publishers” creates a monopoly situation.
So parallel to this, and its already kind of been brought up, has been mail digitalization, the scanning and storing of correspondence, As you mentioned, you’re losing that tactile side. I know, in the Pennsylvania system, they were making the argument that a bunch of guards were getting dosed with drug-laced letters. Medical documentation of that… no one’s been able to actually find medical proof that this has happened. It sounds like either a moment of… I don’t like the word but mass hysteria or mass hallucination or whatever out of it. But it sounds more likely that it was a way to bring about this business by creating a panic about drugs getting into prison when in fact it’s mostly guards that are getting it in the prisons. They have the means, and they have the motive.
But private third parties, like TextBehind, Global Tel Link, others, which advertise to the prisons and prison systems that they are going to be selling these technologies to that the video, the messaging, and the phone services are going to be an awesome method for the collection of biometric information on the participants, on the people on both ends of the phone call, or the people that send the letters, the people that participate in the video. Who knows what that will be used for? My understanding is that GTL is currently in the final phases of some sort of settlement with the Federal Trade Commission concerning the leaking of 600,000 users’ personal information that was in their database, because they were storing everything in plain text. Someone was able to access their databases, hack it from the outside, and it wasn’t even salted. It wasn’t even encrypted on their servers. So now all that information is public. Who knows what would happen with all this biometric data that’s being compiled by these companies?
But anyway, around 2020, many of these companies seized the opportunity that they saw on video calls to sell their services for court dates, people appearing in court, as well as prisoner visits in many jurisdictions forcing interactions into these depersonalized technologies for easy recording, with less interaction from COs and more options for monetization. That’s kind of an interesting solution for when you move someone from a working-class population, possibly in the city, out to the countryside, where land is cheap, and where the politicians want to build a prison. But it also makes it less accessible for people to do in-person visits in the first place with their loved ones. So, this is like kind of a crappy alternative and expensive.
But could you talk a bit about these trends further about digitalization and how people are trying to challenge this approach if you’re aware?
Mac Marquis: This does move a little bit outside my area of expertise and personal knowledge, but I would say that at the end of the day, there are useful aspects to this, as you mentioned. The idea that you may be able to stay in touch with an incarcerated loved one who you can’t visit in person, because of the financial obstacles of doing so or time obstacles of doing so. But again, the profit motive always at the end of it and the cost always at the end of it. There have been successful moves in states recently to reduce and or eliminate the cost of calls by incarcerated people and to incarcerated people. So, that’s huge, right? That’s something that has definitively been a reasonably successful movement. But as you mentioned earlier, that’s something that’s kind of been decided for now. There’s no guarantee that in five years those fees aren’t coming back, or in three years those fees are coming back. And that’s part of the problem with mass incarceration in general and part of the problem that we face in general and why many of us are abolitionists. The problem doesn’t end until everyone’s free, right? That’s the reality of that.
Insofar as people are challenging the elimination of access to books inside… because that’s the catch. The tablets may have useful aspects to them, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of access to traditional access to other forms of reading material. Those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. That’s the thing. If you want to have these tablets, and we can fight those tablets, but I think that at the same time, what we really have to remember is that, even if those tablets become something that the institutions get behind, it shouldn’t come at the expense of access to books from the outside in general.
But the courts will hash that one out, unfortunately. I don’t have a particularly large amount of faith in the legal system to all of a sudden begin to do the right thing when it is shown time and time again that it’s reticent to do so.
TFSR: Well, thankfully, there’s groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, Center for Constitutional Rights, etc. that will in some cases work with groups like PEN America or other institutions to try to challenge these things.
Well, I’ve kept you on for a long time Mac, and it’s a pleasure, but I wonder if you could, in closing, maybe tell listeners a bit about what you’re working on now. I think I read in the book that you’re working on a graphic novel around unionized lumberjacks.
Mac Marquis: Indeed, yeah. I have a graphic history of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers. That was an interracial union primarily in Louisiana and East Texas from 1910 to 1916, affiliated with the most radical labor organization of the time, the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. So, they kind of defy many of the stereotypes that you might think of: An interracial union in Louisiana and Texas during Jim Crow, and not just that, they affiliate with the most radical labor organization in the country. So, it kind of brings a lot of things into question. This is a graphic history of that union. Super excited about it. It’s coming out with a historic New Orleans collection. It should be out in the spring of 2025. Rob Guillory who does Farmhand will be illustrating it.
TFSR: You were mentioning before we started recording another book that you’re working on as well?
Mac Marquis: Yeah, we don’t have a working title on that one, but that one will be looking at some of the anarchist organizing in the ‘90s and aughts, looking at infrastructure created by those. I don’t want to say too much about it until we have it a little more under wraps. But yeah, that’s coming along too.
TFSR: Well, do you have any places where we can people can follow you, any collections of essays or social media handles you want to promote, or are you just going to keep it underground for now?
Mac Marquis: No, I was on Twitter once upon a time, but like most folks ethically I couldn’t continue to support that. There’s not a real social media outlet that does the things that I need it to do and that doesn’t come with a significant cost. So, the only places that I’m on are mostly there for personal reasons as it were, and the politics is part of it, but I wouldn’t say that I’m an account that’s worth following in that regard. Other than that, keep an eye out for the books. There’s podcasts and book talks and all sorts of things coming to a place near you.
TFSR: Well, thanks a lot for having the chat. And thanks for this awesome book.
Mac Marquis: Thank you so much, Bursts. Thanks for the opportunity.