Thread by @rachelofsorts

Today I had a customer order books by Malcolm X and Mumia Abu-Jamal, to be shipped to an incarcerated person. I regularly ship books to prisons, but I also know that some states consider possession of Black Panther lit to be equivalent to gang membership.

I contacted the customer to let him know, in case he didn't. If the recipient had specifically requested these books, that would have been different, but they hadn't; they'd just asked for something to read.

The customer agreed that he didn't want to do anything to provoke retaliation, and I offered to call the prison mail room from my work phone to get a sense of their screening processes.

I called and had a conversation with an employee that made my soul leave my body. She audibly grimaced at the titles. She said they'd have to go through the package room and then to "media review."

She asked the recipient's name. I did not give it.

She said if the recipient had a discipline ticket, he'd be on "loss of package." What was that? "They take things away from them, you know."

Me: "If the recipient received these books without asking for them, he wouldn't be in trouble or anything, would he?"
her: "Oh, no, no, no."

I called the customer back and told him the gist of the conversation.
"What was that about a disciplinary ticket?" he asked, "because he was attacked, and right now, he's in the hole. He really just needs something to read."

So now I am asking my colleagues for book recs for general fiction and books by less well-known black activists so I can send a list to this customer. For a package this person might not even get.

There's so much to unpack, I don't know where to start. I spent ages practicing rephrasing in my head what I was gonna say on the phone to the customer so I didn't sound like I was advocating the censorship of Malcolm X.

If other privileged white people want to understand what it means to feel powerless, to feel utterly beholden to the whims of a system that doesn't care, try calling a prison on behalf of an inmate.

As a bookseller, I am very familiar with the idea of putting books in peoples' hands. Not just recommending them, not just posting about them, but literally handing them to people, who then read them.

It is profoundly awful to be speculating on the books this person in solitary confinement would want to read, and to then be prevented from providing them.

This kind of blew up. I'll post updates, and the eventual book list, when I have them (I'm off this weekend). In the meantime, here's the bail fund link for my home state. massbailfund.org

To minimize confusion: I work at a regular independent bookstore. The vast majority of my customers are not incarcerated, and while I've shipped books to prisons before, I've never been worried that a book would get someone in trouble.

Looking back, most books that my customers have sent to incarcerated folks have been self-help type stuff. I had one prisoner manage to order some philosophy books from us by snail mail.