A group of volunteers meets at their workspace in Carrboro every Sunday to package soft-covered books to be sent to parts of North Carolina and to Alabama. Overflowing boxes of letters requesting books are read and tended to as fast as volunteers’ hands and money can take them. Requests come as letters for one specific reason: the book recipients are prisoners. 

The Prison Books project is a group that believes in humanity, justice and rights for all people, and thinks sending books to the incarcerated is a good start to achieving that goal. 

The Prison Books project started in 2006.  Nikita Sheppard, a UNC graduate who had been a volunteer at the non-profit radical book store, Internationalist Books, was one of the group’s founders. According to Sheppard, there seemed to be an increasing public interest around issues related to prisoners at the time. 

In addition, a few people who were volunteering at Internationalist Books with Sheppard had come from Asheville, where they had been working on a similar project and really enjoyed their experience. However, they said they could not get books to all the prisoners they would have liked to. 

Sheppard said that once they finalized their idea, they were required by the prisons to have some type of sponsoring bookstore or publisher. Internationalists Books fit that requirement, so they decided to give the project a try. 

The group then contacted the National Prisoners Resource List to get the organization added, and the orders started coming in. From there, word of mouth caused a chain reaction and the letters started to flood their workspace.

According to Sheppard, when he was younger, he had been interested in learning about the death penalty, which led to discovering more about the prison system. 

“I started to realize that there are much more profound problems with the prison system as a whole in the U.S. and that the death penalty is only the tip of the iceberg,” Sheppard said. 

Sheppard went on to explain why the group chose to focus on prisoners and, specifically, to send books to them. 

“Prisoners are one of the most exploited and marginalized demographics right now,” Sheppard said. “Prisoners are disproportionately people of color, and almost all prisoners have some kind of economic reason to why they are incarcerated.” 

Katya Roytburd has been involved in the Prison Books project for five years. She got involved after visiting a law and social justice conference where the Prison Books project had a table.

“Most of the people in our prisons are mostly not murderers, most people are non-violent drug offenders so let’s be straight up with that,” Roytburd said. “It is an unjust system that locks people up for doing something that in some states is legal.”

 According to Sheppard, the struggle to support prison justice connects to so many different social struggles such the anti-racist, economic justice, capitalist and GLBT struggles. 

“I personally think it has the possibility to be the civil rights movement of the 21st century,” Sheppard said, “A way to tie together so many different social struggles and combat oppression and marginalization.” 

With that being said, Sheppard believes that books are a good way to start fixing this issue. 

“We want to be able to accommodate people no matter where they are coming from,” Sheppard said. “Books are a great way to support basic humanitarian needs for education and recreation, but also much deeper political purposes of building consciousness.”

According to Sheppard, some prisoners just want novels to pass the time. Others want them because they are studying for their GED, trying to further their formal education or trying to understand the judiciary system.

“One of our goals is to support people’s curiosity,” Sheppard said. “But we hope that books will help people gain confidence to organize and stand up for themselves or to challenge the conditions of their incarceration or to challenge the modern society that requires them to be incarcerated.”

Roytburd said that the amount of orders is out of control, but in the heart-warming kind of way. She said that it makes her happy to know that people are asking them for books.

“I love books and I love the idea of people reading them,” Roytburd said. “It warms my heart that people ask for a dictionary. That means that they are not just reading to read whatever; they are reading to learn and understand.”

Roytburd said that the group usually sends three books to each prisoner. If they ask for escapist books, they send such a book, and one thought-provoking book as well. 

According to Roytburd, one of Prison Books’ biggest barriers is raising money for postage. 

“We are on a shoestring budget, really, really shoestring, this is just a labor of love from everybody, we are actually a negative profit,” Roytburd said.

According to Sheppard, in addition to being psychologically helpful, sending books can also protect prisoners. When a prisoner receives mail, the rest of the prisoners and guards know that somebody on the outside is looking out for them. Prisoners who receive mail are less likely to be targeted for violence.

“We just want people who are incarcerated to be treated like human beings that are worthy of respect, which does not happen in NC prisons,” Sheppard said. “We want to let prisoners know that we don’t think they are monsters or animals. We think that they are human beings who deserve basic respect and dignity just like the rest of us.”

According to Roytburd, it is not humane to abuse another human being no matter what they have done. 

“We don’t even like to lock up animals and put them in pounds or shelters,” Roytburd said, “so locking up our brothers and sisters in cages is not honoring their humanity and that’s something that as a group we believe in.”

Roytburd said that though she would not like to see a violent murderer wandering around, she doesn’t think our prison system is the best way to treat them or cure them.

 “Prison systems do not rehabilitate people; it really either breaks people or makes them worse off than they were when they came in,” Roytburd said.

As for long term goals, the Prison Books project hopes to see our country figure out alternatives to incarceration that actually rehabilitate criminals, work better for accountability, don’t leave communities ruptured and aren’t based on an adversarial system of winner takes all.

“We hope that we don’t live in a world where we have to rely on force and violence and putting people in cages for our sense of safety,” Sheppard said. “And that our sense of safety can come from justice.”