Reading behind Bars Read online

  Williams was white and older. I pegged Brown and Jordan as being in their thirties but Williams was probably closer to her mid-forties. Her brassy, blonde hair was held back in a ponytail with a scrunchie.

  Kimberly turned and nodded to the tall, lanky man standing off to the side who was sorting newspapers. Up until that moment I had never fully understood the physical descriptor of beanpole before. “That’s Sullivan.”

  Smiling, Sullivan used his elbow to gesture to a stack of newspapers and magazines that sat alone on a chair. “Those are yours.”

  In the center of the room, Jordan pulled some photographs out of an envelope. It was then that I first noticed they were all wearing latex gloves. “Ooh,” she said, shaking her head. “I wonder if her mama knows she’s sending pictures of all her bits and pieces.”

  Kimberly’s cackle ricocheted around the room. “All incoming mail gets read.” She was peering over Jordan’s shoulder for a closer look at the photos but addressing me. “Certain pictures will get confiscated. Inmate never sees ’em.”

  “They get a note,” Williams piped up. She had her gaze trained on a letter. Her bright blue eyes flickered quickly back and forth across the page. “So they can tell their girlfriend to, uh, tone it down.”

  “Do the women know their letters and pictures are getting looked at?” I asked.

  Williams shrugged. She folded the letter and slid it back into the envelope. “They do and they don’t care,” she answered, reaching for another envelope from the pile.

  Kimberly grabbed half the stack of newspapers reserved for us. I picked up the other half. Arms full, we walked to the door. Sullivan’s long legs got him there first and he held it open for us.

  “See you tomorrow, Miss Librarian,” Williams said warmly, her bright blue eyes shining. She pronounced it lie-berry-an, her voice affecting a slight twang.

  The control booth saw us exiting the mail room and, when we got closer, buzzed the interior sally port door open for us. Kimberly leaned into it with her back to push it open.

  “Newspapers get delivered daily,” she said. We were back on the main path, following it back down towards Education. “Monday through Friday. You can pick them up after lunch.”

  Meals moved quickly here and already men were exiting the dining room from lunch. A small cluster congregated outside the library doors, trying to hide from the correctional officers patrolling the sidewalk. “Keep it moving,” one male officer kept repeating. In between commands, his mouth chomped loudly on a piece of gum. He walked with a slight swagger, like a cowboy off the cover of a Louis L’Amour western. All that was missing was a Stetson hat and a highly polished belt buckle the size of a fist.

  Kimberly shifted the newspapers onto her hip, holding them like a small child, and unclipped her keys from her belt. She opened the library doors and ushered me in, then allowed one inmate to follow. Another inmate with a shock of red hair tried to join the line but she blocked his entrance. “Not until 12:30, Monroe. You know that.”

  “But—”

  “Nope. Move it along back to your house.” She shut the door and locked it before he could respond.

  Darkness greeted us. The library’s only window shared a wall with the main door but between the exterior awning and the mass of dark blue moving in front of it, all outside light was blocked out. Arms still full of newspapers, Kimberly used her elbow to switch on the overhead lights.

  The room stretched back maybe twenty yards, forming a long narrow rectangle. At the very front, right near the entrance, was the librarian’s desk. My desk. It was made of heavy wood with a high top. When I sat, only my head would peek out above, just visible to the inmates entering. On the floor, near the gap between circulation desk and my desk was another red line, this time made with duct tape. Its message was clear: No inmates beyond this point. More specifically, no inmates behind my desk.

  Parallel to my desk was the circulation desk. This was where my inmate workers, known as porters, were stationed. Part of my job was to serve as a manager with a team of a dozen inmates. Like any library, the circulation desk is where the patrons would come to check out their books, magazines, and newspapers. Because of the strict no-computer policy, the library was still operating on a card system, just as it had been when I was in grade school. Every book had a pocket in the back with a card that the inmates used to check out the books. These days, card catalogs and the matching checkout cards are a nostalgic novelty. A relic from a forgotten time before the internet. Nostalgic librarians and readers stalk library sales and spend thousands of dollars to purchase one for their homes. But in 2009, fresh out of graduate school, where all focus was on the future of the field, I saw the checkout cards as antiquated and old-fashioned. There wasn’t even a big wooden card catalog to go with them; it really was just the cards and pocket in the back of the books.

  Kim pointed out a door across from the circulation desk, telling me it was my bathroom. Inmates were not allowed to use it. She pulled out her keyring to show me which key would open it. “You can’t leave the library unattended,” she continued. “If you need to use it, call the officer next door.”

  Beyond the desks was the library proper. The left half of the room was comprised of tables and chairs, all facing the front like a classroom. The right half of the room contained the stacks, filled to the brim with eight-thousand books.

  Eight-thousand books sounds like a lot. Eight-thousand anything sounds like a lot. The reality, though, is that eight-thousand books makes for a very, very small library indeed. For comparison, at the other end of the spectrum, the main branch of New York Public Library houses several million books. The eight-thousand-tome collection I was now in charge of maintaining was indeed tiny for the library world.

  Still, it was my library, and small or not, I was kind of in love with it. There were a grand total of four shelves crammed full of books. The library really needed more shelves, with books stacked sideways and on top of each other just to make room, but budget and space limited any kind of expansion. Two of the shelves were outward facing only, drilled into opposite walls. On the far left side of the room, over by the tables, was the library’s reference section comprised of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other general reference materials that were only to be used in the library. Everything was outdated. The copies of World Book were from the late nineties. The last time I had seen them was in high school, back when they were the latest edition. Along the bottom of the spines, the alphabetical letters indicated the collection of encyclopedias were out of order. I’d have to fix that as soon as I could but, if nothing else, it seemed to suggest the inmates were at least using the encyclopedias, which is more than I can say for my classmates and myself back in high school.

  The shelf on the far right wall was our fiction section, housing authors A through K. Next to that was a freestanding structure with shelves on both sides. The left side held nonfiction, while the right side had fiction authors L through Z.

  At the very far back of the rectangular room was the area designated as the law library.

  Ohio Revised Code. Ohio Administrative Code. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Decisions from the United States Supreme Court, Federal Courts of Appeals, Ohio Supreme Court, and others. Aside from housing all these important tomes, the law library was also the only place in the prison where inmates had access to a computer. Two desktop computers stood on the desk. One was perpetually broken but they both had an open source word processing program and a limited access version to LexisNexis, a program for legal research. Computer usage was strictly verboten by the inmates, except for Open Office for typing and LexisNexis for research. The latter was a locked down version that didn’t allow the inmates to visit any other sites and was designed for those inmates who didn’t want to bother with the heavy law books.

  When I had initially interviewed for the position, Dr. Harald had brought me to the library on my tour. We sat at one of the tables in the middle of the ro
om and he talked about the importance of the library within the context of the prison. The library served several purposes; its main function was to serve the informational needs of the service population, like every other library in the world. In this case, that “service population” was the seven hundred or so inmates incarcerated at the prison. Like every other librarian in the world, my job was to develop and maintain a collection that met the specific needs of my patrons. Every library is unique because every library’s user base is unique and this library was no different. However, different communities meant different needs meant different collections. For example, at graduate school, there wasn’t a single fiction book in the entire collection of the library where I worked. All of it was nonfiction and research-based. Here, in the prison, the fiction titles outnumbered nonfiction two-to-one.

  The other purpose of the library was just to provide a space for the inmates to go. “If they aren’t busy,” Dr. Harald expanded, “they get into trouble. The library is just one place they can go so they aren’t sitting in the dorms bored.”

  Along with the library, when it came to spaces to keep the men entertained and out of trouble, the prison also offered the recreation center and—weather permitting—the baseball field right outside the library. What set the library apart from every other available space at the prison was that I had no guard with me. Oh, there was always a correctional officer next door in Education so they were always a phone call—or push on the panic button—away, but along with that, it meant they were at least a phone call or a push on the panic button away. If shit happened, there was going to be a delay in response time—both mine and the officer coming over. And that’s assuming I can even get to my phone or panic button in time to alert the officer.

  Suddenly I was wishing I had paid more attention to the unarmed self-defense class.

  But while the library itself had no correctional officer and while the Education correctional officer did rounds every hour or so, the majority of the time it would be just me and because I didn’t have a correctional officer in here, that also meant that the inmates didn’t have a correctional officer in here.

  This made the library a unique pocket of freedom within the confines of a prison. It was just an illusion of freedom to be sure: the men knew they were in prison, and I knew they were in prison, and we all knew the reality of the situation even if there were no bars; but for a few hours a day, they could come to the library and temporarily forget where they really were. With multiple newspaper subscriptions, including national and Ohio state news, they could sit quietly and pretend they were catching up on their local paper from the comfort of their own home.

  There was one other benefit to this space: for those who worked there, known as “porters,” the library was also one of the better-paid positions within the prison and there was a long wait list that was constantly being added to. There were two types of porters: regular library porters, those who handled the newspapers and circulation desk, and law library porters. Both had educational requirements for the job, with the law library porters requiring a higher level of education, for which they were compensated slightly above the regular library porter. It wasn’t much, but in a place that paid six dollars a month on average, any extra money was good money. The man who had followed us into the library was one of these porters.

  “This is Spencer,” Kimberly said, introducing me. He was a tall African American with a full dark beard. “Spencer, this is Miss Grunenwald, the new librarian.”

  Spencer gave a short nod of acknowledgment. He shrugged off his heavy, dark blue coat and hung it on the single chair behind the circulation desk, then immediately went to work on the newspapers and magazines. A third-party service delivered all of the prison’s newspapers, both for the library and personal subscriptions inmates had. Since we did not receive them directly from the newspaper itself, the papers were always a few days out of date. The inmates never seemed to mind, however, as any news from the outside was appreciated, and there were televisions and radios in the dorm rooms if they wanted to get their news in real time.

  Behind the circulation desk was an expansive metal bookshelf that came up to my waist. Back issues of the newspapers were kept there while the latest editions hung on a free-standing wire rack right next to it. Above the metal bookshelf, on the wall, was a wooden magazine holder. The newest editions of each magazine went in front, with the last couple back issues stuffed behind it.

  Spencer worked quickly and quietly, first sorting the newspapers and magazines alphabetically, then placing them into their appropriate slots.

  Kimberly continued: “Inmates are supposed to go back to their dorms immediately following lunch and then wait to be released for the afternoon, but your porters will try to be waiting at the door around noon to help get the newspapers ready before you open for the afternoon.” She pointed to a clipboard in the right-hand corner of my desk with a list of names and hours. “This is the porter schedule. They are all usually pretty good about showing up on time.”

  The desk was elevated like a single step of a staircase and on top of it was another clipboard. The page was full of scribbled names and yesterday’s date. She removed the signed pages, exposing a fresh blank one. “Sign in and sign out pages,” she explained. “Every inmate, no matter what, needs to sign in and sign out every single time they come in and then when they leave. Even if they keep leaving and coming back. Which they will. Multiple times.”

  “What do I do with them at the end of the day?”

  She handed me the signed sheets she had pulled and pointed to a small filing cabinet I hadn’t even noticed. “Save them. You have to submit a monthly report to the state librarian each month. Dr. Harald told you about the dress code?”

  I nodded and recited: “Shirts tucked in, no hats indoors, ID badge visible.”

  Behind my desk was a pile of books, covers tattered and torn. A six-foot-tall metal bookcase tucked into the corner was also weighed down with even more books. I stepped behind the desk and started to pull them from the shelves to see the books tucked underneath and behind the ones on top. The titles were familiar, if a few years old. John Grisham’s bestseller from a few years prior. The entire Little House series. Older selections from James Patterson, Janet Evanovich’s respective number series, and Sue Grafton’s letter series. The copies were worn and well-read.

  “Those are donations,” Kimberly said, catching my gaze. “Books that need to be input into the system. The former librarian didn’t have a chance to finish.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, attempting to sound casual. Inside, my stomach was doing flip-flops. It was like looking at the personal library of a hoarder, not the expected nice, neat organized personal library of a librarian. I had to catalog all of these books? I had taken a cataloging class over the previous summer, but could barely remember most of the finer details and nuances. Plus, where the hell was I going to fit all of them? The shelves were full beyond capacity as it was.

  Kimberly bounced a little in place, anxious to leave. Training incoming employees apparently fell under “other duties as assigned” on her job description. “Any questions?”

  I shook my head.

  “If anything comes up, I’ll be next door, but you should be fine.” She beamed. “Good luck!”

  She left before I had a chance to respond.

  Suddenly, I was alone in the library with Spencer. The room was quiet except for the rustle of newspapers as he moved them around. “Don’t be nervous,” he said from his corner.

  “What?”

  Spencer turned to look at me. In his eyes, I read a mixture of kindness and, I think, pity. Pity for the new librarian who was clearly feeling way out of her depth. “Don’t be nervous,” he repeated. “Everyone loves the library, you’ll see. Nobody wants to do anything stupid to fuck up their ability come here.” Spencer glanced up at the clock that hung above the solitary window by my desk. “Time to open.”

  I went over to the door to unlock it, and saw a
crowd of dark blue coats waiting to get in. Forcing a smile to hide my building anxiety, I settled myself behind my desk and waited for my first patron to enter the library.

  The door creaked open. I looked up and was greeted by a dog.

  Chapter 3

  In the Doghouse

  Institution library staff shall be responsible for ensuring that all non-security DRC policies are maintained and available to the inmate population in the institution library and/or law library.

  —ODRC Policy 58-LIB-01

  Not just any dog, but a St. Bernard.

  And not just any St. Bernard, but a full-grown, 250-pound, slobbering, drooling mess of a St. Bernard. Only thing Cujo here was missing was a barrel collar.

  The St. Bernard sat obediently at the side of an inmate. His slobbery mouth turned up into a grin as he stood there, slavering and drooling all over the tile floor of the library.

  My library.

  Now, dogs have never been my favorite animal. The clichéd stereotype of a crazy cat lady librarian? That’s me. I had a cat at home, Chloe, who I adopted while in graduate school and I had plans to adopt more. I don’t really do dogs. Cats, see, are self-sufficient. And independent and sassy; but, most importantly, they are small and manageable. Smaller dogs I can tolerate—like lap dogs, which are basically just needy cats. But this shaggy beast with paws the size of my cat? Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

  The inmate attached to him—because, make no mistake, the dog was leading the man and not the other way around—was a slightly older gentleman in his late forties or early fifties. His olive skin, paired with a full head of dark hair and matching beard, marked him as Middle Eastern, making him, so far, the only non-Caucasian and non-black inmate I had seen in my, admittedly, short time at work. He gripped a leash and while the dog appeared to be under control, the dog also outweighed his human companion by at least a hundred pounds. But even if it were a different, smaller breed, that doesn’t change the fact that there was still a dog in my library.