Books to read and consider regarding library services and the PIC

Thinking about library services and incarceration? Here are some of the books that have helped me to parse out this bureaucratic tangle, in no particular order. Please note that the new ALA Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated and Detained are almost here! But just as the PIC is vast, there are many angles to consider. This list is not at all comprehensive, but I hope it is a good point of reference for library and information workers who are wondering what is up on these fronts. For other information and resources relating to libraries and incarceration, please visit Library Services to the Justice Involved, where we've linked lots of good stuff like the Expanding Information Access GIS map and training videos.

Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Davis, 2003, Seven Stories Press

Concise, cutting insights into the prison industrial complex, or PIC. The following passage is especially apt to the place of public libraries in a world with fewer jails and prisons:

“The prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards, unions, and legislative and court agendas.

. . . Imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. . . . Try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment–demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.”

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, by Mariame Kaba, 2021, Haymarket Books

What is abolition? In brief, "PIC abolition is a positive project that focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that increase it." Kaba follows in the tradition of Davis to talk about the role of life-affirming institutions. These arguments also apply to our responsibility to "reduce contact between the public and the police." This will necessitate a dramatic shift from the "carceral logic," which dominates "nearly every government function, including those seemingly removed from prisons."

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, by David Graeber, 2015, Melville House

Do we protect things or people? Librarianship is bureaucratic by nature, meaning that we focus our energies on allocating resources. Even the most "benevolent bureaucracies," will spawn absurdities, and at the end of the day, are backed by the "threat of force." Graeber continues the logic and tradition of Max Weber to show us our true nature. This book is not specific to libraries or the PIC, though Graeber actually calls on the example of academic libraries to illustrate a key point about society and "lopsided systems of imagination."

Library Services and Incarceration: Recognizing Barriers, Strengthening Access, by Jeanie Austin, 2021, American Library Association

This book shows the lay of the land, including the history of library services for people impacted by incarceration, and all of the challenges that relate.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, 2012, The New Press

The PIC has been built out on racism and the socioeconomic problems we inherited from past generations, and as such, has disproportionately impacted people of color, especially black men. Rhetoric and laws that present as "tough on crime" reproduce and exacerbate harm, and have catalyzed the growth of the PIC.

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City, by Andrea Elliott, 2022, Random House

I include this book on this list because it really goes to show the interlocking network of public services and the lack of a safety net for poor families which too often results in experiences with law enforcement and the PIC. Also, this narrative should be front of mind for children's and teen librarians, who could create welcoming and safe environments for families at the crossroads of the legal system and other social services.

Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, by C. Montross, 2020, Penguin Press

This book also is not specific to libraries, but offers compelling arguments to show how "privilege and poverty and race are determining factors that suffuse and define our encounters with the criminal legal system."

Milo Imagines the World, by Matt de la Pena, illustrated by Christian Robison, 2021, G.P. Putnam,'s Sons Books for Young Readers

A picture book for all ages that goes to show we're not alone, and thereby may help to break down walls and barriers to imagination.

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, by Jeff Hobbs, 2015, Scribner

I hate to burst our bubble, but libraries, or education, are no silver bullet. Like Invisible Child, this book offers a very personal account to the impacts of societal shortcomings and politics. I will never not think about Robert Peace's mother, returning to work the day after hearing that he had been killed.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson, 2018, One World

May I suggest listening to this one as an audiobook? But especially, the chapter about women on Death Row stands alone.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond, 2017, Crown

Important narrative journalism, especially as cities move to criminalize homelessness, and insofar as the housing crisis and poverty connect to the PIC.

The Women's House of Detention: A queer History of a Forgotten Prison, by Hugh Ryan, 2022, Bold Type Books

Kind of a difficult read, but like Poverty or Invisible Child, really great journalism, which positions an infamous jail alongside the women who were incarcerated there and the surrounding community. See especially the chapter about the Stonewall Riot and the House of D.

Outside and In: Services for people impacted by incarceration

This past summer I got to work with Dr. Jeanie Austin to share our research findings about library services to people impacted by incarceration in Library Journal. Read, “Outside and In: Services for people impacted by incarceration,” here! The crux of our argument is that public and academic libraries are not doing enough to support people who are incarcerated or recently released, and their loved ones, as we found fewer than 50 libraries offering programs and services of this type. Our hope is that in showcasing the work that is being done, more libraries will be inspired to reach out to jails, prisons, and nonprofits in their communities that support people impacted by incarceration.

Besides reading the article in LJ, please take the new survey we’ve launched in partnership with the Library Research Service (LRS.org), to collect more information about library services to people impacted by incarceration. The survey closes December 6, 2021, so hop to it!

Connections, from the New York Public Library, is a free guide for people who have been incarcerated.

public library leaders and the status quo: vocabulary and ideas for better bureaucracy

Last month, I published a paper called, “Public libraries as bureaucracies: Toward a more critical perspective,” in Public Libraries Quarterly. This paper was the result of several years spent grappling with critical theory and my own experience as a public librarian, manager, and director, yet is by no means an end of the difficult work that remains to be done in regards to the ways that public libraries enact bureaucracy, and themselves operate within larger and more complex social constructs of bureaucracy and capitalism. Some of the ideas that I came across in my research relate particularly to the challenges public libraries are facing at present, especially vis a vis responding meaningfully to calls for racial justice in our communities and workplaces. That this vocabulary seems to be missing from public librarianship is no accident, it is evidence of the ways bureaucracy reinforces the status quo.

The concepts I most wish to highlight at this juncture include:

• “bureaucratic balance of power principle,”

• “soft touch hegemony,”

• “interpretive labor,”

• libraries as “undertheorized spaces,”

• “threat of force,” and, last but not least . . .

• praxis.

Let me begin, though, by defining bureaucracy. The most succinct definition of a bureaucracy is “any location where any numberof people gather to discuss the allocation of resources of any kind at all” (Graeber, 2015, p. 21). Of course, this is a very simplistic understanding of a difficult and nebulous phenomenon. The way I would explain bureaucracy, in a nutshell, would be any system that aims to enable efficiency, predictability, and calculability, but which likely also produces inefficiencies, absurdities, and inequalities. Bureaucracies are underpinned by control through non-human technologies, and ultimately, “threat of force,” an ugly truth that deserves the attention it has just begun receiving from public library practitioners in recent months, and which I will explore in greater detail in what follows.

First, the “bureaucratic balance of power principle,” is quite straightforward; it states:

When a conflict over alternatives arises in an organization, they are evaluated on the basis of their impact on the balance of power among the decision makers. The alternative that maintains the status quo, or alters it in the least, is favored whether or not it is the best choice under the circumstances.

It is interesting to look for this principle at play now, as libraries reckon with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. Indeed, it is easier to release a statement, put up a sign, or strike a task force, than to enact substantive, radical, systemic change to upend racism in public libraries. In fact, these responses I’ve named represent more bureaucracy, and to that end a concept that I did not intend to introduce in this post: the iron law of liberalism, which holds that any initiative taken to reduce bureaucracy will actually have the opposite effect. David Graeber, who as best as I can tell coined this term, was speaking to market reforms and government policies, but I don’t think it is a stretch to see how it applies also to governance and committees and so many of the ways that we try to move change forward in public libraries.

Task forces and committees serve as a good segue to the notion of “soft touch hegemony,” a phrase that Karen Nicholson applies in, “The McDonaldization of academic libraries and the values of transformational change,” to describe the ways that libraries leverage empowerment to their strategic advantage. Examples of soft-touch hegemony in public libraries include coaching employees towards resilience and self-care, mindfulness trainings, team agreements, and scrum and self-organizing teams in Agile, each of which can serve as an effective and powerful tool for fostering healthy and positive environments, or can inadvertently produce the opposite. Here it is interesting to think of the theory that a bureaucracy will follow “the direction which the powers using the apparatus give to it” (Weber, as translated in Gerth and Mills, 1946, p. 230).

Let’s return to the example of a public library striking a committee or task force to make recommendations as to building diversity and equity into their organization, and creating a safe and welcoming environment for all visitors, especially BIPOC, people who identify as LGBTQ2S+, and people with disabilities. This could be a good idea, but does it place an imbalance of interpretive labor on the shoulders on people in your organization who are already oppressed? Interpretive labor, as I understand it, describes how the work of understanding power dynamics falls to the people who are disempowered. Not only do the people who are disenfranchised need to understand what makes their oppressors tick, they must also do the work of calling out injustices, for example, calling out racism. Ironically, the people in positions of power have greater access to information (I note, ironically, that the paper of my own that I reference within this post is beyond a paywall), education, and opportunities to understand their privilege, but outsource this labor to others instead of taking it upon themselves.

In fact, public libraries—and the greater forces of financialization and capitalism—enact bureaucracy to the effect of maintaining environments where the work of understanding is purposefully precluded. For this reason, libraries can be described as “undertheorized spaces,” in which emphasis is placed upon the practical, tangible, measurable aspects of library work. To quote from my own paper:

Nicholson and Seale have called this the “politics of practicality,” a phenomenon that “acts to reproduce patriarchy, neoliberal ideology, neutrality, and white supremacy” (2017, p. 5). Popowich, also in the spirit of critical librarianship, observed that in libraries, rationality, and practicality, have resulted in “an untheorized practice,” that in turn, “reproduces the inequalities and oppressions of the system even while it allows the system to keep functioning” (Popowich, 2017, p. 62).

Hence, public libraries have not been in the habit of creating space and time for staff to read, reflect, and discuss Black Lives Matter, or Truth and Reconciliation, or disability studies, or feminism, et cetera, on work time. I have often thought it is ironic that library work is not typically considered “knowledge work,” as we are not known for producing new ideas and systems, so much as we are at reproducing existing information and systems. To the ends that they represent practical, and undertheorized environments, David Graeber describes bureaucracies as “dead zones of the imagination.” How ironic is it that libraries so often self-describe as valuing imagination, access to information, and innovation, while not investing in their employees’ development by paying for this work? Another way that these practical, undertheorized dead zones persist is by keeping people in need. People who are preoccupied with food, rent, and money worries are not as free to engage in politics, theory, and creative pursuits.

A recent article in School Library Journal, “What if paying library staff and teachers to read IS part of the anti-racist work we could, and should, be doing?” made two excellent points about the usual practice of not paying library staff for time spent reading (and I would add, researching):

One, you have library staff that don’t read because they would have to do so on their own time, which means that all of the book knowledge they have comes from whatever they read in school or casually on their own time. Spoiler alert, whatever they read in school was most likely predominantly written by a white male author and is part of the traditional cannon, whichever age group they were reading and studying. And two, if you do have well read library staff, that means that they are reading on their own time and the library or school is benefiting from the unpaid labor of their staff. Librarianship and education are two of the professions which benefit a lot from both the unpaid labor of their staff and staff spending their own money on materials to help enhance the program. 

Library leaders seeking ways to practice anti-racism can also foster the right circumstances for growth and ingenuity by creating space and time for reading, research, reflection, and discourse, within paid work time.

When I was writing “Public libraries as bureaucracies,” I struggled with what seemed like it would be a radical and unpopular notion that threatened any vestiges of vocational awe: public libraries, as bureaucracies, rest upon “threat of force.” As I shared in my paper, though, the very example that David Graeber drew upon, in The Utopia of Rules, was that of someone being removed from a library. From a SWOT perspective, in which opportunities and threats are examined as factors external to an organization, threat of force underpins a society that rests upon property ownership and the division of wealth, there is no getting around it. But within public libraries, we have some control over when and how often we summon the “armed men,” i.e., the police, to our libraries. We also have control over our codes of conduct, and the ways that staff are trained to apply these expectations. This represents one of the most significant areas in which library leaders have any real power to reform bureaucracy in public libraries.

Critical librarianship still is not too well known, I have found in my personal experience, working primarily in public libraries, and as follows the above thoughts on libraries as practical, undertheorized spaces, i.e. “dead zones of the imagination,” but it is a movement which brings critical theory into librarianship. Within critical librarianship, “praxis” is used to describe “the dialectical unity of theory and practical activity” (Popowich, 2017, p. 62). This would entail “both a critique of institutions and practices, and a practice of solidarity with all those who . . . find it difficult or impossible to speak or act for themselves” (Popowich, 2017, p. 62). Praxis, to me, represents owning the personal and the political within librarianship, and taking practical action. Within public libraries, hierarchical structures grant more power to managers and directors, who in turn have more control and influence over bureaucracy, and thus, ability to exert change. Recalling the above quote to the effect that a bureaucracy follows the direction of the powers that be, it is incumbent on public library leaders, especially, to develop their own praxes, taking the necessary steps to learn and understand their own privilege and status, and subsequently examining and dismantling the systems that uphold the outdated, unequal status quo, in the public libraries in which they work, and in their communities and own homes.

Gerth, H.H. and Mills, W. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Graeber, D. 2015. The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY and London: Melville House.

Nicholson, K.P. 2015. The McDonaldization of academic libraries and the values of transformational change. College & Research Libraries, 76 (3): 328-338.

Popowich, S. 2017. ‘Ruthless criticism of all that exists’: Marxism, technology, and library work, in The politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship, ed. K. P. Nicholson and M. Seale, 39-66. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press.