How to Donate Textbooks to Correctional Facility Libraries

There are over 2 million people serving time in correctional facilities in the United States. For many of these men and women, access to prison libraries is one of the only opportunities to feed their minds and prepare for a return to freedom. These libraries seldom have much access to funding. They depend on people and organizations on the outside to donate textbooks and other useful materials.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Pick-up and drop-off points
• Packing materials
• Volunteers
• Money for flyers and shipping materials

1. Maximize your efforts to donate textbooks to correctional facility libraries by getting others involved on your college or high school campus. A textbook donation drive is a great service project for any student organization.
2. Match your desire to donate textbooks with the likely interest areas of potential recipients based on the kinds of materials you and others at your educational institution are likely to donate. Secondary school textbooks, materials that may be helpful in GED preparation and dictionaries or other reference books are especially useful in correctional facility libraries.
3. Visit the Books Through Bars website to view an interactive map showing the location of prison book programs throughout North America (see Resources below). Click on the map to get contact information on a prison book program near you.
4. Contact a prison book program in your area to get information about the kinds of books it accepts and its logistical requirements. Describe your efforts, your book categories and your timetable and likely quantities. It is worthwhile to make this contact before you invest much effort in your book drive, so that you can make sure your efforts will be useful to a prison book program.
5. Recruit volunteers and arrange for logistics, including the timetable for your book drive, a place where books will be collected and pick-up and drop-off options.
6. Prepare an informational flyer encouraging other students and student organizations to participate in your book drive by donating textbooks. You can find useful flyer templates and information on the Books Through Bars website.
7. Secure, pack and ship or deliver the textbooks that you will donate to correctional facility libraries through a prison book program. Consider the Prison Book Program as an alternative to Books Through Bars (see Resources below).

Tips & Warnings

• If you have difficulty finding a prison book program in your area, you may want to make direct contact with a nearby correctional facility library, your state's Department of Corrections or a local county jail.
• It can be expensive to ship textbooks because of their weight and bulk, even at USPS Media Mail rate (formerly known as Book Rate). By getting an organization involved in a drive to donate textbooks, you can build in an objective of raising cash donations to defray the cost of shipping or delivering textbooks.

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