by: Ayla McDonald
The Independent Media Center (IMC) located at 202 South Broadway Avenue in downtown Urbana will host a semi-annual book sale for the local volunteer-run project Urbana Champaign Books To Prisoners. To be held on Saturday March 30 from 10 a.m.– 5 p.m., the book sale will feature a range of hardback and paperback books for sale at prices of $0.50 and $2. Proceeds of the book sale will go to support the operation of the Urbana Champaign Books To Prisoners project.
According to the website books2prisoners.org, “UC Books to Prisoners is an Urbana, Illinois based project providing books to Illinois inmates at no cost by mail as well as through two county jail libraries which we operate. We are a community-powered volunteer organization…Our volunteers interact with inmates by reading their letters, selecting books from our collection of donated materials and sending books to inmates in response to their requests.”
Rachel Rasmussen, the Books To Prisoners Volunteer Coordinator, told the Prospectus that the Project was started in 2004 by a University of Illinois student. “The story is he got a shoebox of letters from incarcerated people asking for books and that he began to answer them,” Rasmussen said. “And then very shortly [after] there was a fuller more robust, more organized non-profit organization at the IMC…We are the largest supplier of books inside prisons in the state of Illinois, and partly that’s because the State has had no funding to buy books.”
With the exception of Rasmussen as the only paid staff member, Books To Prisoners is completely volunteer run and offers three weekly volunteer sessions at the IMC building on Tuesdays from 7-8:30 p.m., and on Thursdays and Saturdays from 2– 4 p.m. The program is dependent upon donations from the community. Books To Prisoners has many donation drop-off boxes around town, including a box located outside of the Parkland Library on the first floor of the X-wing. While volunteers handle direct book requests from incarcerated people, a list of generally needed and non-acceptable items in the form of books, electronics and monetary donations, as well as a list of local book drop-off locations can be found at books2prisoners.org. “This community, we’re the flagship campus of University of Illinois, and then Parkland, it’s just a very literate, high-reading community. It’s a community very interested in education, so it’s an easy sell to get people to want to help incarcerated people get their hands on books.” Rasmussen said. “The donations flood in. We’re a town uniquely set up to be able to do that.”
Rasmussen spoke to the power of Books To Prisoners as an educational force for incarcerated people, representing a link to their futures in the outside world. “Education is the most cost effective and the most successful intervention in recidivism,” Rasmussen said. “So, education, morale and hope and courage, the fact that somebody remembered them, that there are people who come and do this for them amazes them. They write to us, but they don’t know who we are…we get prayed for, we get cards and letters, they’ll send us Christmas and holiday cards with no requests. The fact that someone outside hasn’t given up on them and still thinks that they have something to contribute to society, it’s a sense of, how would you like to be identified forever by the worst thing that you did as opposed to what good you still might have to do. So, we represent that for them. We don’t advertise in the prisons, and we get about 180 letters a month from incarcerated people throughout the state of Illinois.”
Rasmussen shared a letter from an incarcerated person who received books from the Books To Prisoners Project. “This man tells so amazingly the difference that it makes to get books,” Rasmussen said. “He basically is telling us he started out illiterate, a high school drop-out, and since got an associate’s degree. He sent us his transcript even. He’s so proud of himself, his GPA is 3.4, and when he gets out he wants to get a college Master’s degree in substance abuse. That’s a total turn-around story. He credits us, but it’s also his own initiative.”
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For more information about Champaign Urbana Books To Prisoners, to be added to the project’s newsletter, or to get involved, visit books2prisoners.org.
