RSSLibrary services to incarcerated teens, Part Two
Nov 11
From Our Guest Bloggers, Programs of Interest Incarceration, Juvenile Detention Centers, Literacy No Comments
This is Lisa from the Brooklyn Public Library, writing some more about the work I’ve done with incarcerated teens.
The fall after I began doing regular outreach at Crossroads Juvenile Center, several librarians were hired to staff the Passages Academy libraries. Anne Lotito began working at Crossroads, dividing her time between three Passages sites every week. By the end of the school year, Anne had moved the library to a larger room, but at the beginning of the year the library at Crossroads was in a room so small that some staff seemed to mistake it for a closet, sometimes storing furniture or boxes in there. Besides Anne’s desk, there was only room for one table and a few chairs. Though the library was small, it was stocked with a quality collection that Jessica, the Passages Academy library coordinator, had begun, and that Anne continued to maintain and add to. Jessica and Anne work hard to keep up with what their population wants, as well as needs, to read, and this has resulted in a very strong library collection. While many of the kids at Crossroads are fluent readers, a great deal read below their grade level, and the library contains books for a variety of readers. The books are either extremely practical – providing career, school, and health advice – or high interest. There is nonfiction on music, graffitti, and art. There is a book with gorgeous photographs of New York in the 1970s and 80s, and another filled with photographs of sneakers. There is a ton of graphic novels, with lots of manga and superhero titles and, of course, a lot of fiction, most of it with gritty urban settings and action-filled plots.
Some of the kids at Crossroads are from the surrounding neighborhood of Brownsville, and most others have come from neighborhoods with similarly high crime and poverty rates. Many of them want to read books about characters with lives like theirs. When I go to the halls and ask for book requests, the residents most often request “hood” or “ghetto” or “urban” books. We are not allowed to bring in the really graphic ones written primarily for adults. Fortunately, there are a number of titles written for teens that are hugely popular among the kids at Crossroads, as well as their peers in the neighborhood branches. Among the most popular titles are Tyrell by Coe Booth, which is about a homeless boy in the Bronx, Allison Van Diepen’s Snitch, a story of a girl drawn into a gang in Flatbush, and Ellen Hopkins’ free verse books about teens struggling with drug problems: Crank, Glass, and more. Crossroads residents tend to request the books that many other teenagers in Brooklyn would want, except that these teens also want books about life in jail or prison. Many of them have read Jack Gantos’ Hole in My Life, a memoir of the author’s stint in a federal prison for drug smuggling, Walter Dean Myers’ Monster, about a teenage boy on trial for murder, and Kalisha Buckhanon’s Upstate, a book written in letters between a girl and her boyfriend, who is in prison in upstate New York for allegedly killing his father.
One boy asked me for books about “people in situations like ours that come out okay,” and I think that this, besides pure entertainment, is what most of the kids are looking for in these books: some hope, optimism, and guidance.
Another boy told me that, before coming to Crossroads, he hadn’t read a book since fifth grade, and now he reads “all the time.” You don’t want to incarcerate a teen just so he’ll start reading, but it is a fortunate side effect, and what I really hope is that the kids I see at Crossroads will become regulars at the public library when they are released. My colleagues and I always introduce ourselves specifically as Brooklyn Public librarians. We explain that we work nearby at a branch, and are bringing Brooklyn Public library books for them to check out. If we don’t have something they want, or if we are unable to bring in something because it may be considered contraband by the facility, we remind them that, once they are out, they can come and choose anything they want from our collection.
One afternoon Vani, a young adult librarian who has helped immensely with the outreach, and I were returning one day from Crossroads, walking through the projects back to the Brownsville branch. Across the courtyard, we heard a boy yelling excitedly to his friends and saw him pointing at us. “They came to Crossroads!,” he cried. “They brought me books when I was at Crossroads!” “Come to the library!” I called over, hoping that we had helped make the library a more accessible, relevant place to him, and to all of the detainees we have visited at Crossroads.
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