Nina Smirnov bustled through the small library, looking pleased. She was looking for “Into The Wild,” an adventure book similar to the James Bond book a prisoner had asked for in a letter.
Smirnov, member of the Leadership Board of the Skyline Honors Club, is volunteering at the Grassroots House in Berkeley, which houses the Prisoners’ Literature Project library.
The Honors Club volunteers one day every month with the Prisoners’ Literature Project, an undertaking by Bound Together Books that sends books to individual prisoners based on written requests.
Skyline Honors Club students Kajah Ram, Nina Smirnov, Diana Kozlova, Christian Etienne, and Gabriel Denham started volunteering in September. Most of the time they spend at the Grassroots House is used reading letters from prisoners and gathering books to fulfill their requests. Each prisoner receives a package weighing up to two pounds. The limit is imposed in order to keep postage, the project’s main expense, in check.
George Vassiliades, a volunteer with the Prisoners’ Literature Project who trained the Skyline students, says that the work they do is “not mechanical; it’s not like feeding the homeless.” Because the library they cull from is limited, volunteers are not always able to meet requests for specific books. Instead, volunteers will look for similar books that may be of interest to the person writing.
“Considering how small the library is, there’s actually a very good selection of books, and I managed to meet the needs of the prisoners” fairly well, says Skyline student Kajah Ram.
Ram is passionate about continuing to work with the Prisoners’ Literature Project because there’s a great need for the work they do. Ram says a lot of prison libraries are being “cut down, or basically reduced to nothing or just taken out completely.”
Ram enjoys corresponding with the literary-inclined prisoners and hearing their interesting and heartwarming stories. He believes that it’s a worthwhile project for many reasons and thinks that anyone would benefit from volunteering time, not least because it provides moral support to prisoners who often have no loved ones to correspond with.
Christian Etienne is volunteering for similar reasons. “The limited resources and the lack of educational programs in the prisons all over the United States inhibit the inmates to have the opportunity to acquire certain knowledge and skills while incarcerated,” Etienne said.
And he’s happy to be helping where help is needed: “This is one of the main things that we strive for in the honors club,” Etienne said. “It’s to give back and reach out to the community.”
The benefits of the Prisoners’ Literature Project’s work are evident in the myriad thank-you letters that prisoners send after receiving materials. Some of these letters are kept in a binder at the Grassroots House in Berkeley, and the omnipresent theme in them is heartening: The prisoners are grateful and wish to return the favor in any way they can.
Some of the prisoners write with the progress they’ve made, thanks to books sent by volunteers, in arguing their cases in courts of law. Others adorn their letters with artwork and calligraphy they’ve learned. Still more speak of the hope they’ve found in reading religious or philosophical works. But the resounding, common message is clear: The prisoners are grateful to be thought of as intelligent human beings with a simple desire to read.
