Prison Banned Books Week: Uninspired Reading by Ken Meyers

This year, the organizers and supporters of Prison Banned Books Week, in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library, which recently extended their catalog to local prisons and jails, are calling for public library catalogs to be made available on carceral tablets. Library content is for community use, and detained and incarcerated people are still part of our communities.

To learn more, visit the Prison Banned Books Week website or purchase a copy of Books through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement edited by Moira Marquis and Dave “Mac” Marquis.  

You can read the first essay in this series, Free Prison Tablets Aren’t Actually Free by Ezzial Williams, right here.

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Uninspired Reading by Ken Meyers

We’d been able to buy our GTL “Inspire” tablets for three years before the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections expanded the short list of functions to include e-books. Under normal circumstances, I would have been delighted. But this was no act of generosity by the DOC. The e-book functionality came in the wake of 2018’s DOC-engineered drug-exposure “crisis” that led to a contract with Smart Communications to scan our mail, thus eliminating that stream of paper, and which briefly banned all books before settling on a DOC-run Security Processing Center to inspect books and periodicals for contraband. The ultimate DOC policy might not have banned physical books outright, and it’s possible there isn’t an explict plan to try to reduce the number of books entering Pennsylvania prisons, but delays in delivery, damage to books, and the frequency with which books are lost certainly discourage ordering them. Still, whatever the DOC’s motivation, e-books had to be a win for us inmates as well.

I’d gone through innumerable cell searches over the years and almost all, from the most innocuous random to the most destructive days-long CERT shakedowns, elicited the same condemnation: I have too much property, and books were singled out for particular attention. They take up too much room. They’re a fire hazard. How could I ever read them all? So, when the e-book option became available, I saw a solution to my excess property problem. All of those space- consuming, CO-ire-inspiring volumes could be reduced to files on my tablet, all but invisible to the prying eyes of Security. (Not quite invisible because, of course, Security tracks, examines, and archives everything we do on our tablets.) I might avoid some of the snide comments about books with suggestive covers or gay references (John Rechy’s City of Night, Petronius’s Satyricon, Michael Bronski’s Culture Clash: The Making of a Gay Sensibility). Even if I didn’t pay to replace my core books (surely I’d keep some–who knew if the DOC would reverse course and these might be the last paper books I’d ever get) and pay more to ship the books home since our small prison library, whose collection is focused on “E-Z Reader” books, fantasy series, and graphic novels, has rarely been interested in my donations, I could at least get rid of the real space- eaters, the bricks like the six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature. No longer would I feel the burden of property, and there was an ancillary benefit–no more fights with cellies over reading too late into the night.

The trepidation I might have felt at giving up the heft and feel of paper pages laid open before me, the feeling I’d first fallen in love with by reading my siblings’ hand-me-down Little Golden Books and, later, the 1950s-era Colliers Encyclopedia my mother bought on installments a couple volumes at a time from a traveling salesman, was allayed by her embrace of her new Amazon Kindle, where, among other reads, she’d tell me about the latest out-of-print books she never thought she’d see again, downloaded for a few dollars each.

As soon as the icon appeared on my tablet, I started searching. At first glance, it looked good. There are over 200 preset subject search categories, covering topics from chemistry to the occult, from satire to science. There are also seventeen preset language searches from Chinese to Tagalog, including two of particular interest to me, Portuguese and Latin. On a budget? Search by prices ranging from $0 to $24.99. But since I knew what I wanted, I went straight for the open search boxes for Author and Title.

I expected to run into the same problem I’d had when I first could download music: too many choices, just way more great music than my budget could bear. I started searching judiciously, beginning with the canonical gay authors who’d long been my refuge. First up, perhaps in tribute to the impact he’d had on a closeted Navy ROTC midshipman in his first semester at university: Allen Ginsberg. “No books matched your search.” OK, how about Burroughs? Edgar Rice, sure, but I was looking for William S. Gay prison icon Jean Genet? Not in Pennsylvania’s prisons. By then, I knew I had no hope for others like C.P. Cavafy or Christopher Isherwood or Dennis Cooper but I searched anyway, if only to confirm their exclusion from what might become the limits of my intellectual universe if the DOC did eventually decide to ban physical books. None of the writers I’ve relied on for decades as an intellectual and emotional redoubt in a hostile, homophobic world would be there to support me as I tried to retreat to a corner of my bunk in the semi-darkness of midnight block-light.

If not what I searched for, then what did they have? There were still the
preset categories. There are three different queer search options: “Gay” (6 titles); “Lgbt” (4); and “Lesbian” (1). Eleven titles, most of which appear to be detective novels and only one I’d heard of, Party Monster by James St. James, something I might have requested through Inter-Library Loan (another victim of the new draconian mail and publications policy) but not something I’m curious enough about to spend $22.25 on. The Portuguese language search was even more disappointing: 10 titles, all translations of Ernest Hemingway. Not a single Portuguese author. Not even a Brazilian. So much for Fernando Pessoa or Eugenio de Andrade, for Mario de Andrade or Jorge Amado, either in Portuguese or in English translation. And not a single hit for books in Latin.

My hopes for an electronic Library of Alexandria were fading fast, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. There were still the free books (111 of them, to be precise). Most are old religious texts, and most appear to have been looted from Project Gutenberg. (This was a real missed opportunity, a way GTL could have vastly expanded their catalog while keeping it affordable, but alas GTL and the PADOC didn’t follow through.) As a Buddhist, I hoped at least some of the Pali canon would be available, but once again, nothing. The closest I can get are several Hindu texts, relics of the British Raj. What else do they have for free? Christian commentaries and a King James bible. Muslim texts with titles like Mohammedism and Mahomet Founder of Islam, as well as the Qur’an. Jewish commentaries including works by Josephus, but no Torah.

Disappointed, yes, but still undeterred, I was determined to make something of this opportunity. Even if I couldn’t substitute e-books for paper, I could supplement my in-cell library with books I might have otherwise hesitated having sent in. My first purchase, then, was Shakespeare’s The Sonnets, the sort of reference an aspiring poet should have at hand. I found a copy with an intriguing description

This prizewinning work provides a facsimile of the 1609 Quarto printed in parallel with a conservatively edited modernized text as well as commentary that ranges from brief glosses to substantial essays [sic] Stephen Boothes [sic] notes help a modern reader toward a kind of understanding that Renaissance readers brought to the works

I wasn’t thrilled with edits or modernization no matter how conservative, but I’d have the facsimile to compare the text to so that shouldn’t matter. And explanatory notes. And critical essays. All for $3.17. After eight years of dealing with prison profiteers, perhaps I should not have been surprised when the book finished downloading and I opened up what turned out to be a plain text file. No facsimile. Then, as I swiped through the text, I realized there were also no notes or essays. Nothing except the “conservatively edited” text.

I did what any dissatisfied customer would do. I logged into GTL’s kiosk- based Support Ticket feature and explained how the description misrepresented the product and asked for a refund. I waited three weeks for a response, which read in its entirety, “Shakespeares Sonnets Unable to refund after researching this book with our provider the book is correct. No further action is required.” Product description be damned, the title was right and that’s all that mattered. Caveat emptor indeed, especially when there’s only one stall in the market.

The second, and only other, book I bought (I also downloaded seven free books) was Kafka’s The Trial, a Dover Thrift Edition translated by David Wyllie, for $3.17. I can’t say there is anything wrong with it, not like there is with The Sonnets, but as I sat in my bunk reading the eye-searing screen, I realized something I hadn’t anticipated. Since my undergrad days, I’d annotated my texts as I read. Later, when I was a community college English instructor, I taught my students how annotating meaningfully leads to having a dialogue with the text. But there is no way to annotate an e-book (or at least not on GTL’s app), and trying to takes notes separately is pointless when they referenced a text that has neither page numbers nor a search function. Reading had become a passive activity little different from watching television. I could be educated and enriched and entertained by either screen it is true, but only by consuming, not by engaging. The thing that had always made reading special was gone.

Annotation is an important part of my reading, but without something to
read, it’s irrelevant. So what explains the large holes in GTL’s e-book offerings? I might be tempted to view the near-total absence of queer literature as a homophobic decision, or perhaps just as mere ignorance, but two facts dispute this and instead speak to something much larger. First, GTL’s music catalog is replete with LGBTQ bands from the predictable Pet Shop Boys to the utterly obscure Mukilteo Fairies. Second, the pattern repeats with Portuguese: essentially no books, but there is a wide range of bands, everything from the classic fado of Amalia Rodriques to Censurados and their driving punk. The problem is more fundamental. When the e-books were first added, the catalog offerings were scant, but the DOC’s then-secretary, John E. Wetzel, assured us that the DOC was committed to offering a broad range of titles and more would be added, including free books. But books aren’t a priority. Despite the fanfare with which e-books were launched, the project appears to have been quickly forgotten, with most of the 200-plus search categories still contentless.

I probably hadn’t searched for e-books in four years or more and wouldn’t have now except for PEN’s call to write this essay. When I synch my tablet, it still says “Updating Ebook Catalog,” and perhaps it does, but from what I can tell having now repeated many of the searches from those early days, nothing has changed since the day I eagerly opened it, prepared to be awed by all it offered, now resigned to the sore disappointment of what it delivered.

Prison censorship is a topic that has been covered in depth here at Book Riot for many years. Take some time this week to dive into those posts, including:

• Ending Censorship Applies to Prisons, Too
• Why and How Censorship Thrives in Prisons
• Censorship in Prisons Is Part of Slavery’s Legacy
• The Ever-Growing Challenge of Getting Books into Prisons
• Taking From The Vulnerable: JPay, States Charge Incarcerated for Free Ebooks