0:03
Charissa Brammer – CO: Okay, welcome everyone. I’m really excited to see some familiar faces and some new folks here. We are going to be recording this presentation, as it just told you, and the link will be shared out afterwards for people to view it.
0:20
Charissa Brammer – CO: The question that’s on your screen is kind of our icebreaker question. That is something that we asked, in our focus groups, and got a lot of really good and interesting results from folks for that, so we like to ask it to our people as we’re kind of coming into the meeting.
0:38
Charissa Brammer – CO: We are here to present the findings from the focus group portion of the PRISM project, funded by IMLS. PRISM stands for Our Prison Libraries Motivators of Pro-Social Behavior and Successful Reentry.
0:50
Charissa Brammer – CO: Each speaker on our panel will now introduce themselves in the order that our names appear, and my name is first, so I’m Carissa Brammer, I’m the Director of the Library Research Service.
1:01
Charissa Brammer – CO: Here at the Colorado State Library, and worked really closely with other members of the State Library staff and everyone else, on this project.
1:11
Charissa Brammer – CO: Then we’ll pass that on to Erin. Erin B: I’m Erin Boynton. I work for the State Library as well, with institutional library development. Basically, I’m a prison librarian, and I’ve been a prison librarian for about 11 years now.
1:29
Sara Wicen: And I am Sarah Weissen, I’m the research assistant for the Library Research Service, which is also part of the Colorado State Library. So I was a part of the data collection, analysis, and, writing of our findings for this study.
1:44
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): I’m Amy Ballenhorst. I’m a research analyst at Library Research Service, and similar to Sarah, I helped conduct some of the research and do some of the data analysis and report writing and presentations on, our research.
2:01
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Hi everybody, I’m Chelsea Jordan Makeley. I’m, was a consultant on this project. I’m currently a doctoral student at Simmons University and a researcher at Knowledgey. I’m based in western Massachusetts.
2:15
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: While this project was in the works, I was the director at the Griswold Memorial Library, a rural library that provides services to the local county jail, and I was also a co-chair for library services to the justice involved.
2:28
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Over to you, Carol. Carol Peeples: Hi everyone, my name is Carol Peoples. I’m the founder and executive director of a nonprofit, called Remerge. And, I’ll tell you more about Remerge later on in the, in the presentation.
2:46
Charissa Brammer – CO: Okay. Charissa Brammer – CO: And that’s our group. Next slide, please. There we go, you already got it.
2:51
Charissa Brammer – CO: So for today’s webinar, we’re gonna be kind of digging deep into the findings that we got from our focus groups.
2:58
Charissa Brammer – CO: We’ll talk about the background of the project, that started Several years ago. …
3:06
Charissa Brammer – CO: Talk about how we conducted the focus groups, interviews, and surveys in carceral settings. Introduce you to a toolkit that we created for libraries.
3:14
Charissa Brammer – CO: or people that are related to prison libraries to do in their facilities, and then go through the findings from our experience in Colorado.
3:26
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Starting off with the positionality and reflexivity statement. Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We as a panel represent a range of experiences and perspectives. We acknowledge that our identities and backgrounds and worldviews have informed how we engaged with participants, interpreted data, and shaped the narrative of this study.
3:46
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We want to recognize that our outsider status relative to the incarcerated community positions us with both limitations and responsibilities.
3:57
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We don’t claim to speak for those who are system impacted, but we want to center and amplify their voices, experiences, and expertise within this research.
4:09
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We’ve consulted with subject matter experts and individuals with lived experiences of incarceration throughout this project, and even in putting this presentation together. And today, you’ll hear a number of direct quotes from system-impacted people who participated in our research.
4:32
Charissa Brammer – CO: Cheese Charissa Brammer – CO: Now we’re looking at what is the PRISM project. The PRISM project was first imagined in a planning grant that was completed, by the Institutional Library Development Office at the Colorado State Library and the Colorado Library Consortium, CLIC.
4:48
Charissa Brammer – CO: The grant was designed around developing an outcomes-based assessment of library services in prisons.
4:54
Charissa Brammer – CO: Trying to better understand how these institutions within institutions impact people who are incarcerated. The State Library in Colorado has a unique relationship with our state-funded institutions, where ILD has supervisory and consulting responsibilities, ILD is Institutional library development.
5:11
Charissa Brammer – CO: But they have supervisory and consulting responsibilities for all of the libraries in our institutional system, so it makes us an ideal place to pilot a program like this.
5:24
Charissa Brammer – CO: We are funded by an IMLS National Leadership Grant, and this says the 2023 to 2024. That turned out to be wishful thinking, it’s the 2023 to 2025.
5:35
Charissa Brammer – CO: … Charissa Brammer – CO: PRISM study by the Colorado State Library, and that builds on a planning grant, the planning grant in 2018 to 2020.
5:43
Charissa Brammer – CO: We basically are here to better understand how libraries inside prisons impact the lives of people who are incarcerated, and to evaluate library services in prisons, like we evaluate library services in public libraries, or academic libraries, or places where this sort of
5:59
Charissa Brammer – CO: this sort of study is ubiquitous. This is a first Charissa Brammer – CO: of its kind study that inside prisons in the United States. There’s been a couple that are similar or use slightly different methodologies in other countries, but this is the first one that we’re aware of in the United States, and we hope that it will lead to more, studies like this.
6:27
Erin B: Throughout our session, we will have some quotes from our participants for our focus groups. I’ll be reading those, just so you know when there’s a slide like this, it’s not my voice, it’s the people that we spoke to, so…
6:42
Erin B: Yes, like I said, I learned how to read while going to a library while I was in the hole. So, I mean, they helped me pick a James Patterson book, and they taught me how to read. Being 40 years old and not being able to read, it’s hard for you to get a job anywhere, because you’ve got to read.
7:01
Erin B: A little bit of background on this project, as Carissa mentioned, there was a planning project, that got started with my
7:11
Erin B: former boss, Diane Walden, who’s now retired, and…
7:16
Erin B: Basically, we at ILD have become experts at getting to yes in a world of no, and a lot of our
7:27
Erin B: method for doing this is to keep asking, or to ask different people. There’s always a lot of turnover, and there’s always a lot of change.
7:37
Erin B: At every level in a correctional environment. Erin B: So, first we asked, they said yes, and then they kind of took it back and said, no, no, I don’t think we can do that, and then we asked again, and not only did they say yes, but they said, well, you should do focus groups, or do you want to do focus groups? So it was not only yes, but heck yes.
7:59
Erin B: after a lot of no’s, which can be very discouraging, and then all of a sudden, you’re going full speed ahead. So, the project did evolve over those years. Even the name, I think, may not totally reflect the way it looks today, or the way we think about what we
8:17
Erin B: were doing, with this research. So the focus changed, the scope change, even the language we used changed based on feedback, as it evolved.
8:28
Erin B: basically, ILD having a long-established partnership, decades long.
8:34
Erin B: with the Colorado Department of Corrections really paved the way. There’s a lot of trust. We’ve worked closely with them. I’ve been a direct employee of DOC, and so have all of my colleagues at ILD.
8:50
Erin B: So, when we were trying to set it up, we were very sensitive to the needs of security, and the way that
8:56
Erin B: DOC works, and even their scheduling, and that kind of thing.
9:06
Erin B: That should be like, oh, you get your bar of soap, your hygiene, your blankets. Okay, and a book, too. You should be able to have it, you know what I mean? Because that keeps you going, keeps you alive.
9:22
Charissa Brammer – CO: And these are our goals, and kind of where we focused both the research that we did and the writing of the report that’s coming out very soon.
9:30
Charissa Brammer – CO: We wanted to focus first on outcomes, figure out what are the outcomes of public library use, and in particular, those related to prosocial behaviors, information literacy and learning skills, and preparing people for a successful reentry to the community.
9:44
Charissa Brammer – CO: We wanted to focus on programs and services, which are what types of collections, programs, and services are associated with positive outcomes of prison library use in the view of the service users.
9:55
Charissa Brammer – CO: And then finally, in what ways can prison libraries be improved, either by increasing the variety of positive outcomes to which they contribute, or by improving their effectiveness in contributing to current known outcomes?
10:08
Erin B: The library has given me a sense of independence. It has taught me to advocate for myself. It’s given me a foundation to build a balance that I can stand on when I need to get things done, when I’m trying to reach out, when I’m trying to use my imagination, broaden my horizons, cope, be positive.
10:31
Charissa Brammer – CO: And this is, … Charissa Brammer – CO: It’s a mixed-method study, technically, with surveys and focus groups, but it has been primarily qualitative in the analysis that we’ve done, especially of this focus group data.
10:42
Charissa Brammer – CO: We conducted focus groups with people who are currently incarcerated and those who were formerly incarcerated in Colorado, and we were able to collect a lot of surveys from both groups that did not feature in this analysis, but we’re currently analyzing them.
10:57
Charissa Brammer – CO: Qualitative research is really a great way to get at outcomes, where we can listen to people’s own words to tell us about what the library’s doing for them, and then analyze that using codes and themes that help us make sense of it.
11:12
Charissa Brammer – CO: It’s… Charissa Brammer – CO: it’s always tempting to get super technical in this, so I’m gonna try not to. Outputs are what libraries generally measure, so…
11:23
Charissa Brammer – CO: Outputs are the things that we tell our boss or funders about, right? It’s how many people came in. When we opened… started opening earlier, how did that impact the number of people? Things like that. How many programs we’ve done this month, or how many people attended each one?
11:37
Charissa Brammer – CO: We do a lot of that analysis in libraries, and I think that’s super valuable, but I also think that’s, like, the easy way to do it, right?
11:45
Charissa Brammer – CO: … Charissa Brammer – CO: They’re about use of the libraries, and they’re really focused on the librarians, and what we’re doing, and what we’re concerned about.
11:55
Charissa Brammer – CO: Outcomes, on the other hand, are about the people that the library serves, like how having access to a book helped them
12:02
Charissa Brammer – CO: Learn more about construction work, or, …
12:08
Charissa Brammer – CO: there was a person who had an outcome, I hope I’m not stealing this from the rest of the thing, where he was having conversations with his daughter, and she wanted to adopt a pig into her Denver apartment.
12:18
Charissa Brammer – CO: And he was trying to figure out ways that he could connect with that daughter and convince her that this was a bad idea, and he actually went to the library, got a book, read about it, and was able to come back and convince her. That’s an outcome of library use, right? As far as we know, she never got the pig, so he came out.
12:34
Charissa Brammer – CO: Well, on that, and it really… he really talked about how it built that relationship between them as well.
12:40
Charissa Brammer – CO: So knowing that, you know, we had 137 people come into the library this morning is great, and it is important, but learning from someone about how
12:50
Charissa Brammer – CO: They used the library and it helped their lives, is about what we really do for people and what we’re trying to get to.
12:58
Charissa Brammer – CO: … Think? Charissa Brammer – CO: This was a highly collaborative study, just as Erin just talked about, we’re really obsessed with how collaborative this was, because it was a great… I think we had a great representation and really awesome people working on it.
13:13
Charissa Brammer – CO: So I think we’re gonna hand this to Carol to talk about what that collaboration looked like on her end, since you’ve kind of heard about ours.
13:22
Carol Peeples: Thank you so much. And I’ll tell you, I was in those meetings, those early meetings, like, I think in 2018, 2019,
13:29
Carol Peeples: Shout out to Keith, I think you’re in the audience out there. And so I wanted to be here. I, I founded Remerge as a nonprofit to reduce recidivism. We provide a statewide resource, database, it’s a public service.
13:45
Carol Peeples: We’re connectors to a lot, like, we’ve got 1,400 resources on remerch.com, so we’re connectors. We… we are always trying to, reach out to people and to the… our community of people who have been incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, and so, …
14:00
Carol Peeples: And I’ve gone into almost every prison, and I have always found the libraries to be the place inside a prison. And, like, prison libraries are the oasis of the institution, of the… and I was so excited to be part of this.
14:16
Carol Peeples: And I just have to give you a little anecdote. I’m currently working on a podcast with someone who was formerly incarcerated, and I will never forget what he said. He likened when he went to the prison library, to the smell of fresh-cut grass. And I can never get that out of my head, and so I think it’s part of, like.
14:33
Carol Peeples: You can make the title of this that. So, anyway, that’s what it was about. It was just collaborating with everybody, and our in was, like, how can we be the connector to all the places that we went to to do the focus groups and to submit… and to get, surveys out to the community?
14:54
Charissa Brammer – CO: And we also, were really fortunate to be able to bring in Chelsea, who’s with us today as a contract researcher to do the… or help with the analysis portion of the project.
15:04
Charissa Brammer – CO: It’s been essential to our progress. It’s been great to have other, you know, non-Colorado State Library voices in the room all the time, and our funding was what had made it possible for us to achieve this rich collaboration.
15:18
Charissa Brammer – CO: we were funded through, both the planning and implementation phases through national leadership grants. So, you know, this… this sort of thing is… it takes a lot of time, and we learned a lot, and it also takes a lot of money, and so we’re thankful for the, grant that we were… that we received.
15:37
Charissa Brammer – CO: … Charissa Brammer – CO: Yes. It’s been a really big few years working on this project. When y’all were conceiving this project initially with the planning grant.
15:47
Charissa Brammer – CO: there was almost no literature available about prison library services that was current. There were not that many people that were publishing in this area. I know people were working in prison libraries and doing that work, but you didn’t see the… a lot of publications. Now.
16:04
Charissa Brammer – CO: There’s so many cool projects, so, … Charissa Brammer – CO: And so many things being published. Like, Erin worked on the ALA standards for the incarcerated and detained, which was the first update that that had had since 1996. There are groups at Ithaca, at San Francisco Public Library, who are working on grants and projects to study prison libraries.
16:26
Charissa Brammer – CO: And you’re seeing a lot of, like, relatively a lot of publications at the moment, so it’s a really great time.
16:32
Charissa Brammer – CO: To be a part of this kind of growing group of people and this growing body of knowledge, really studying and evaluating prison library services.
16:40
Charissa Brammer – CO: … So yeah, and… Like I said, it’s also a long time coming. We’ve been doing outcomes
16:46
Charissa Brammer – CO: Analysis in libraries for a very long time. Charissa Brammer – CO: We know this stuff for public libraries and special libraries and academics. We know this stuff, and so it’s really cool to be able to move us to where now, at least a little bit, at least in the Colorado context, for adults.
17:05
Charissa Brammer – CO: we know how… what the outcomes are for prison libraries. It’s a really cool thing to get to do.
17:10
Charissa Brammer – CO: In working in prisons… well, with working with people at all, you want to use an IRB, an Institutional Review Board.
17:20
Charissa Brammer – CO: We, in context, chose to use a commercial IRB. Normally, for, like, research faculty or people working in research libraries, you use your…
17:30
Charissa Brammer – CO: institution’s IRB, but we didn’t have access to that, so we used a commercial IRB. The nice thing when you’re forced to use a commercial IRB is that
17:40
Charissa Brammer – CO: they move a lot more quickly than, institutional libraries, which can sometimes take months to come back to you with a decision. That may have been the only thing on this whole project that moved quickly, so maybe that’s why I remember it so carefully.
17:54
Charissa Brammer – CO: Because people are… who are incarcerated are inherently at more risk than other populations because of the, inherent power dynamics.
18:04
Charissa Brammer – CO: within a prison, and also the aggregated consent that people have, the aggregated ability to consent that people have when they’re incarcerated. You have to get a special review done on all of this work that is required to have a member
18:20
Charissa Brammer – CO: of the panel reviewing the project that was formerly incarcerated, or connected in some way. So it was… it’s sort of a deeper, review, especially of consent.
18:33
Charissa Brammer – CO: Once we got that, approval, we then went through right into a similar process with the research team at DOC, and they also had to approve our research before we got started.
18:49
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Alright, I’m gonna chat a little bit just about, what we did with all of the information once we got it. This is gonna be a really high-level, overview of basically qualitative research.
19:03
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So once we had all of the focus group transcripts, we sent… or, all the focus group audio recordings, we sent those to a transcription service.
19:12
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): And then they returned to us, transcripts, which we uploaded into a software called Deduce.
19:19
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): And this software basically allows you to analyze qualitative data, by coding the data. Coding, for folks who are maybe not quite familiar, is just basically
19:32
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Applying short phrases or words to larger bodies of text or images in order to categorize them and make sense of them.
19:40
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): You can also kind of think of it as tagging something, or maybe, like, defining what the topic of a sentence or two is. So, for example, every time we heard someone talk about how important listening to music in the library was, we would then code or tag the sentence with the word music.
19:58
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So we then began analyzing the data and synthesizing it in order to make meaning of our codes and pull out themes. And so we looked for relationships between different codes, how frequently those codes occurred, and when they occurred together.
20:13
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): What we’re going to be covering in the rest of the presentation is essentially a culmination of all of that synthesis.
20:23
Erin B: when you don’t think there’s any hope, you know what I’m saying? When you find something that catches your interest, it gives you a whole other outlook on, maybe there is hope.
20:35
Charissa Brammer – CO: Okay, now I’m going to tell you about focus groups. … Charissa Brammer – CO: We created focus groups based on the planning grant work, and then conducted them in the various facilities.
20:47
Charissa Brammer – CO: I’m gonna first talk about the groups that we conducted inside the prisons, and then hand it to Carol to talk about the focus groups that she and her team conducted with people that were formerly incarcerated across Colorado.
20:59
Charissa Brammer – CO: I also have a paragraph here that’s repeating what, Aaron said.
21:04
Charissa Brammer – CO: And it’s… I really want to make the point that when we went into asking for this, I never thought to ask, could we do focus groups inside prison? Because I thought for sure that’s a no.
21:15
Charissa Brammer – CO: And so, … Charissa Brammer – CO: when the member of management from DOC who asked if we’d like to, it was just such a moment for me, where I learned from our friends at ILD that you just really have to ask for everything, right? Because you don’t know what they’re gonna say.
21:30
Charissa Brammer – CO: And just what a cool opportunity we got when that was approved through, management, and then each of the wardens allowed us to do as well.
21:40
Charissa Brammer – CO: So a typical focus group, you write your questions, right? And that was true for this project as well. And then you go through a selection process. So, in a typical focus group, you would say.
21:52
Charissa Brammer – CO: this is a population of 400 people, I’d like to talk to 15 of them in 3 different groups over a period of 3 days, and then you’re good, right? You can go straight into analysis. …
22:03
Charissa Brammer – CO: When you’re doing focus groups inside prisons, the selection process is a lot more complicated than a traditional focus group.
22:11
Charissa Brammer – CO: They’re… Charissa Brammer – CO: You can’t just walk into a prison and say, I want to see 10 people, and then they just come. That’s not how it works. We had to control this by custody level.
22:22
Charissa Brammer – CO: Some of our focus groups were one person that we were interviewing alone, because they were not allowed to be in a group of pers- people, or only one person chose to come.
22:32
Charissa Brammer – CO: We had some that were 7, so it really varied. …
22:39
Charissa Brammer – CO: In some cases, the one-on-one interviews took place in, like, non-contact booths, so we did that. There was a lot of…
22:48
Charissa Brammer – CO: Different places that we were working, although most of them took place in the libraries.
22:55
Charissa Brammer – CO: … The way that… Charissa Brammer – CO: So ILD really made this work because of their partnerships with, DOC, because we were able to… well, they were able to, but, pull… basically pull a roster of the entire facility, divide that into custody levels, and decide how many people from each custody level we wanted to send it to.
23:17
Charissa Brammer – CO: Then, once we got that list. Charissa Brammer – CO: The invites were mailed to the library staff, who printed them out and delivered them to the invitees using whatever method made sense to that family facility.
23:28
Charissa Brammer – CO: In one of our focus groups, I found out that Charissa Brammer – CO: The letter had just been, like, slid under their door in the middle of the night, the night before, and so they just woke up and they were like, okay, I will do this.
23:42
Charissa Brammer – CO: … Charissa Brammer – CO: This also created a point where we had to really think about how do we guarantee anonymity of these voices, right?
23:52
Charissa Brammer – CO: And so, because… Charissa Brammer – CO: When you have the list of people, and you send it to the library, and someone takes it out into the prison, there’s a lot of places that people could find out who’s on that list, right? So, we worked with library staff to ensure that they destroyed the invites, and deleted any email correspondence once the focus groups were over.
24:12
Charissa Brammer – CO: If we saw the list of focus groups on a desk while we were interviewing, that just came with us. We made really carefully and very sure that these were as anonymous as they could possibly be.
24:24
Charissa Brammer – CO: There was another time that in one of the prisons. Charissa Brammer – CO: we were having a discussion, and it looked like a friendly group, and someone from another department came by and wanted photos of this happening. And so then we had to chase that person down and be like, you can’t take those photos and, like, get them back. It was… yeah.
24:41
Charissa Brammer – CO: So focusing on anonymity in a place where there’s not a lot of anonymity was a little bit difficult. …
24:49
Charissa Brammer – CO: Prisons are, as a rule, usually in a pretty remote area, or there are a lot of them congregated in one area. Those are sort of what happens.
24:58
Charissa Brammer – CO: So, our trips required us to do sometimes 5 to 6 groups per day, and to stay overnight in various places across the state. This is a…
25:09
Charissa Brammer – CO: an incredibly draining process to do 5 or 6 focus groups per day. So it’s something that we really had to prepare for, and we gained a lot of trust with each other as we kind of drove back and forth, after these things, when we could just talk about what we’d done and things like that. So that was really important.
25:28
Charissa Brammer – CO: … It was also the… Charissa Brammer – CO: the planning for security was also a logistical issue that was primarily handled by ILD. We got to just kind of show up and have our bags searched, and then we were taken where we need to go, but I know they did a ton of work to make that happen. We also had…
25:50
Charissa Brammer – CO: instead of having a library staff member from the facility or a CEO in the room with us when we were doing interviews, we were able to, have institutional library staff
26:02
Charissa Brammer – CO: ILD staff. Charissa Brammer – CO: be in the room with us, so that they could be the security portion, and we could keep this from being something where it’s a lot harder to be honest about a library when the person running it is, like, standing there staring at you. So we were able to create a really good, positive environment for these, because they were able to be our security.
26:22
Charissa Brammer – CO: And we never had any issues. Charissa Brammer – CO: We didn’t… we didn’t need security ever, but we appreciated having it.
26:31
Charissa Brammer – CO: The incentives also differ, so a lot of times for focus groups.
26:36
Charissa Brammer – CO: you will give them some money, or an item, or something like that to thank them for participation. …
26:43
Charissa Brammer – CO: We brought in fresh fruit and vegetables, because in the planning process, one of our colleagues at Remerge, who was formerly incarcerated, said that fresh food is something that’s not available in prisons, and that ended up being totally true. People were so excited to see, you know, a bag of fresh carrots, or something like that.
27:01
Charissa Brammer – CO: We had one man tell us that he hadn’t had a cantaloupe in 30 years, and so we were able to provide that.
27:08
Charissa Brammer – CO: … Charissa Brammer – CO: Only one group, we weren’t able to bring fresh fruit, and that was for the folks at CSP and maximum custody level.
27:17
Charissa Brammer – CO: We had to bring them, like, packaged stacks from Costco. I did find out that the most popular flavor of chips in the assortment, which surprised me, was chili cheese fritos. So, you know, we got to at least give them that moment of choice, choosing what they would like to eat.
27:34
Charissa Brammer – CO: We really appreciate the effort that people took to join our groups. Like I said, the invites came
27:40
Charissa Brammer – CO: how they came. … Charissa Brammer – CO: They also were really… they took pains to be honest with us about their libraries, which is a trust that I’ll never take for granted. This is not…
27:51
Charissa Brammer – CO: In a prison, there’s not a lot of reasons to trust people, so I really appreciate that they trusted us to take this information and do something good with it.
27:58
Charissa Brammer – CO: And we got to talk to well over 100 people over 7 months in 19 of the 20 state-funded prisons in Colorado. So that was sort of the…
28:08
Charissa Brammer – CO: very intense research process, that gave us all of the data that we have here. I also want to mention, from the focus groups.
28:18
Charissa Brammer – CO: We did record audio, and we took some notes. So when we had them transcribed, We sent the audio.
28:27
Charissa Brammer – CO: then we… Charissa Brammer – CO: I was the only one that had the audio, so we didn’t give that to anyone else. Sent the audio, had it transcribed by a service, it came back, and then we pulled all of the identifying information out of it.
28:40
Charissa Brammer – CO: prior to doing any analysis. So we were very careful about making sure that… because people, you know, when you’re talking, you just say names, or places, or things that would identify someone, and so we would go through and take those out.
28:54
Charissa Brammer – CO: So a lot of them, you know, they’ll be saying a really nice thing about librarians, and they’ll be calling them out by name, and we had to put in just librarian.
29:01
Charissa Brammer – CO: And then after they were transcribed and anonymized. Charissa Brammer – CO: a truly bummer day for me, but a completely necessary one, was when I had to delete all of the audio.
29:12
Charissa Brammer – CO: So, as part of this process, we absolutely had to delete the audio, because you can identify people by voice, things like that. So, that was a day that really hurt my heart, but was really important for keeping our research as safe as possible for everyone.
29:29
Charissa Brammer – CO: Okay, and then I’ll hand it to Carol, because Carol did all of the outside focus groups.
29:35
Carol Peeples: I bet that did hurt to delete all of that audio. Oh my goodness.
29:41
Carol Peeples: So it was considerably easier to do focus groups on the outside. …
29:49
Carol Peeples: We ended up, you know, I have, … I’ve never been incarcerated myself, but I have almost always hired people who had been incarcerated at one point.
29:58
Carol Peeples: So I had staff who were working on this with me, and we did this together, so I think that always helps with the communication and interaction between people and trust.
30:11
Carol Peeples: We divided the state up into, different regions, you know, Northern, Denver Metro, Southern, Western, and then just kind of started thinking, okay, now, what’s… where can we go to to find formerly incarcerated people?
30:29
Carol Peeples: And so, and as I mentioned, we’ve got merch.com, so we have, we have got the list, and so we were looking at, parole offices, community corrections facilities, community partners, including sober living homes, which, have been
30:45
Carol Peeples: coming up around the state, and they would turn out to be a really good place as well to find people. And then we started creating some flyers, and then we started doing our outreach, and planning on, …
31:00
Carol Peeples: you know, can… trying to do the… I’m so sorry… trying to do this outreach, this statewide outreach, to… and planning. So, once we started putting some dates and, on the… the calendar, we were able to, start the tour.
31:17
Carol Peeples: And so we did that. We did 9 focus groups, 8 of them were in person, and … then we also were distributing surveys as well, so it was kind of a combination. We did almost 300 surveys.
31:32
Carol Peeples: And, we were in, Aurora, Sterling, Greeley, Colorado Springs, Larmer, out in Rifle,
31:42
Carol Peeples: We hit all over the state, and… Our incentives weren’t…
31:48
Carol Peeples: that great, but they were… they were appreciated. We end up… ended up,
31:54
Carol Peeples: buying little warm blankets, and … or we had some nice, thermoses, coffee thermoses, and I, gave people a choice, and…
32:06
Carol Peeples: You know, that was… people were really appreciative just to have that. We capped our focus groups at 10. We always had… almost always had everybody full.
32:16
Carol Peeples: So the experience itself …
32:21
Carol Peeples: It was quite remarkable to hear about people talking about how they, used their library while they were incarcerated.
32:38
Erin B: I did a lot of self-help reading, too, and it actually opened a door to me examining a lot of the issues in my life. If I hadn’t have done these things, read those books, I may not even be in an incentive unit today.
33:03
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: So as we mentioned earlier, one of the goals of this project was to produce a toolkit so that everybody would be able to,
33:12
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: you know, pick up where we had left off and benefit from some of the tools that we’d already developed. So there’s a link right here in the slide. It’s at ls.org forward slash prism dash toolkit, and you can check that out. It provides an overview.
33:31
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: A highlight of this is the videos that are in there. …
33:37
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: There are also transcripts that you can access to, to just,
33:43
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: to read those videos if you don’t want to watch a whole video. …
33:48
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: And implementing this would probably look very different in your communities, but take what you want and leave the rest, as they say. One of the highlights, I think, is that you can benefit from our codebook that we used, so the keywords that we found, the themes that we found.
34:06
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: All of the questions that were asked in the focus group are there, and we encourage you to take those and to make them your own. As I mentioned already, I am in western Massachusetts, and I did the same thing. I copied this survey and then adapted it to the program that we were running in our local county jail.
34:25
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: And so you’re welcome to do the same from that toolkit there. Another high-value item is some more information on IRB that Carissa has told you about. So please dive into the toolkit, and that’s a takeaway that you can bookmark on your
34:44
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: bookmark and come back to later if you’re interested in trying to do some of this research on your own. Collecting these outcome stories is so important for being able to advocate for library services.
34:56
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: For people who are impacted by incarceration.
35:03
Erin B: participant. Erin B: Because it creates a pro-social environment, you know what I mean? You start a book, and everybody’s in here doing it.
35:11
Erin B: Interviewer, what do you mean by pro-social? Participant. Like everyone’s sitting here interacting with each other, even people you don’t normally talk to.
35:24
Sara Wicen: All right, so now we’re gonna jump into our findings, and I’m gonna speak to, Goal 1. There were 3 overall goals.
35:33
Sara Wicen: And Goal 1 was to identify outcomes related to developing pro-social behaviors, information literacy, and learning skills, and preparing for successful reentry into the community.
35:44
Sara Wicen: And before I jump into the rest of this slide and the next ones here, I just wanted to, give a little bit of background information in this word that was just used in the previous quote, prosocial.
35:57
Sara Wicen: Pro-social behaviors are used as a measure of impact in corrections, but one of the things that we needed to consider while conducting our analysis was how we were defining prosocial behaviors. And this actually turned out to be a little trickier than you might expect, or that we expected.
36:14
Sara Wicen: And so we had a lot of conversations about the history of the word, nuances of the term, and, like, the weight that it carries.
36:23
Sara Wicen: And so we considered existing definitions, and then we also created our own working definition, which ended up… so we ended up defining it as when a person expresses or does something that indicates an awareness of how they interact with and affect others.
36:38
Sara Wicen: And that’s all I’m really gonna say on this, right now, but we do have a soon-to-be-published white paper that will also go into more detail about the etymology of the word, and
36:50
Sara Wicen: Our interpretation of pro-social as well. Sara Wicen: All right, so back to this slide, and this and the next slide are gonna show just a really broad level overview of some of the outcomes that we found, and then we’re going to dive into a few of these points more specifically.
37:08
Sara Wicen: And I’ve started with a list of pro-social behaviors, that we identified in connection to prison library use.
37:15
Sara Wicen: Connection with others, respect for others, and property, expressing appreciation and helping others.
37:22
Sara Wicen: And as you might guess, like, there’s a lot of overlap between these pro-social behaviors. So, like, helping others and connecting with others could occur, and often did occur in certain scenarios at the same time.
37:34
Sara Wicen: And connection with others was huge. I’m gonna talk about it more in detail in a minute, but I also wanted to call out this point of expressing appreciation, because
37:45
Sara Wicen: We heard so much appreciation from focus group participants, both for the library, as well as for the opportunity the focus groups provided for their perspectives to be heard.
37:57
Sara Wicen: All right, next slide. Perfect. This slide contains, two other groups of outcomes that, we’ve identified.
38:07
Sara Wicen: In addition to pro-social behaviors, we also heard many… about many different instances of behavioral changes because of library use.
38:15
Sara Wicen: These varied from people staying out of trouble, specifically so, they could then go to the library.
38:22
Sara Wicen: but also to people showing a real interest, desire to use library services, and materials to grow, for example, by accessing self-help materials, which I think a previous quote also, spoke of as well.
38:37
Sara Wicen: And so, a few topics that were related to behavior modification, that we noticed included the library being an incentive.
38:46
Sara Wicen: Atmosphere and the library as a place of peace, mental health, self-regulation, which we will, dive into a little bit more later as well, escapism, and bettering, the idea that the library can be a place for personal growth and bettering oneself.
39:03
Sara Wicen: And then last, but definitely not least, was the incredible value and impact that the library had, as a place of learning. And we chose to differentiate between two types of learning, while conducting our analysis.
39:18
Sara Wicen: Information access was the code or tag that we used when we, saw instances of people just that wanting a question answered, going to the library to get that information that they needed. And then self-led learning, we used for the longer process of educating oneself, broader knowledge seeking, and discovering something new, about oneself.
39:41
Sara Wicen: And it’s also important to note that people came to the library with a huge range of previous education levels, and we also heard stories about people learning to read in the library.
39:58
Erin B: makes me a little more sociable. From the beginning, I was a real sociable person, and then as I got older, I kind of closed off. But whenever you come here, there’s people just sitting around reading or listening to music.
40:10
Erin B: I haven’t really had a bad experience with it. There’s always the librarians that are walking around, can I help you with anything? It helps me be a little more sociable.
40:23
Sara Wicen: Alright, so to look at prosocial behaviors a bit more closely, connection with others, was by far the most frequently identified prosocial behavior throughout our focus groups, and I chose that previous quote,
40:37
Sara Wicen: for this presentation, because I saw a person was identifying a shift in themselves, because of the library space, to becoming more sociable when, they used… they were in the library.
40:51
Sara Wicen: But it was really hard to choose just one quote, because there were so many quotes about connecting with others. Ranged from things like someone explaining how they used the library to help connect with their daughter by learning about an instrument that she played, to, so many instances of people seeing someone reading a similar type of material to what they liked, and, connecting
41:15
Sara Wicen: Through the materials that they enjoyed at the library. Sara Wicen: We saw instances of connection between fellow incarcerated people, as well as incarcerated people and library clerks, librarians, and also with family and friends on the outside.
41:32
Sara Wicen: And, oftentimes, these stories, within these stories, people also shared that the people that they found a connection or understanding with while using the library may not have been, the people they expected to. So sometimes these were, connections that surprised people as well.
41:51
Sara Wicen: All in all, connection with others was identified in around 85% of focus groups conducted with people who are currently incarcerated, and about 7… around 7 of the 8 outside focus groups.
42:04
Sara Wicen: In some, but not all, of the focus groups, we did specifically ask the question, have you ever connected with someone because of the library, or because of something you’ve learned in the library? This was a follow-up question, but it was a pretty common one that we asked within focus groups. But we did some analysis, and I also found that in a little over a third of the transcripts where we did identify a connection with others and code connection.
42:29
Sara Wicen: with others within those transcripts. In a little over a third of them, it was brought up without even being prompted by this question.
42:45
Erin B: It’s crazy that even though it is super wild in units, even in the wildest unit, if they come in here, everyone knows that it’s the library. So it’s time to be quiet. So it’s just really beautiful, because everyone knows that you be quiet in the library, and it’s like a sacred space, almost.
43:01
Erin B: So it’s just really nice to see that even though we are in prison, everyone has that shared respect and acknowledgement that this is everyone’s quiet space.
43:15
Sara Wicen: Throughout our focus groups, respect was shown for the library space, and the materials within the library, and also people in the library, including staff.
43:26
Sara Wicen: The quote, that we just shared is a really great example of what we heard over and over again about the library and the respect that people had for the library space.
43:37
Sara Wicen: Calling it like a sacred space, really is just a great example of how people seem to perceive the library and talked about the library within our focus groups, and use of the word sacred, when describing the library actually occurred in another focus group as well, so this was not a singular occurrence.
43:56
Sara Wicen: Talk of, or signs of respect for others, or property were identified in 28 of the 54 inside focus groups, so focus groups conducted with people currently incarcerated, and 7 of the 8 outside focus groups, or focus groups conducted with people who are formerly incarcerated.
44:15
Sara Wicen: And so the vast majority of, these outside focus groups and over half of the inside focus groups, talked of respect for the library.
44:29
Erin B: I think it does make a difference with us, because, say, coming to the library, being able to look at books, being able to read or listen to music does affect people’s behaviors, because I’ve noticed after the library, everybody’s in a good mood and relaxed.
44:44
Erin B: And they come back to the pod, and they’re behaving. So it plays a big impact on people when they get a chance to step out of the pod and come down here. So the libraries do help.
44:59
Sara Wicen: In approximately 3 out of every 4 focus groups, people, acknowledged that their behavior changed because of the opportunity to visit the library, or use of the library.
45:09
Sara Wicen: we did ask the question specifically, has the opportunity to visit the library changed the way you behave in prison? So these, when we people talked of behavior modification or behavior change, it was often in response to this question. People might say yes, or no, and then give an explanation why. Though, as you can see, yes was,
45:30
Sara Wicen: More… the more common response. Sara Wicen: Different reasons, were reported for behavior change.
45:37
Sara Wicen: as we already touched on a little bit, sometimes the library acted as an incentive to stay out of trouble, but sometimes it was also described as having a positive effect on people’s perspectives, moods, or thinking, so then they, behaved differently.
45:52
Sara Wicen: behavior modification was tied to a whole lot of different topics that I’m gonna then jump into in the next few slides, and it was most often discussed alongside mental health, which I think is a really, really huge finding.
46:12
Erin B: who didn’t have a library, I’d just lay in my bed and watch TV, the mindless tube. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be in the frame of mind that I am now.
46:25
Sara Wicen: Alright, so comments related to mental health were identified in 40 of the 54 inside focus groups, 5 of the 8 outside focus groups, and the vast majority of comments referred to the library having a positive impact on mental health.
46:40
Sara Wicen: Mental health was spoken of in a variety of capacities, and Amy is going to talk a little more in depth about specific parts of collection and services in the library that had an impact on mental health, because that was huge and played an important role.
46:58
Sara Wicen: But sometimes, often, just the atmosphere of the library and it being a place of peace was attributed to improving people’s mental health as well.
47:07
Sara Wicen: In the quote just shared, is a great example of how the library use can just help people, pass time and just be an activity to do, while someone is doing their time, and that can, play a really important role in mental health.
47:25
Sara Wicen: And then also escapism, so people being able to imagine themselves elsewhere, while in prison was also, reported to have positive impacts on mental health, and, yeah, people used the library materials to kind of disassociate from their current, situation.
47:44
Sara Wicen: And, that was… A… something that came up over and over again throughout focus groups as well.
47:55
Erin B: You can find a world that is created in these books and just go there instead of participating in the negativity that is here in these units. You can come here and find a positive place to be in, even if it’s just by yourself and minding your own business. But it’s nice to read a book. I really like it.
48:16
Sara Wicen: Alright, so now I’m going to talk a little bit more about this finding of self-regulation.
48:22
Sara Wicen: We used the term self-regulation to refer to instances when a person chose to remove themselves from a tough situation or negative interaction by opting to use library materials instead of engaging in something that may be potentially harmful.
48:38
Sara Wicen: And we really wanted to call out these instances of self-regulation that we identified as an important finding.
48:44
Sara Wicen: Because it stood out as a helpful way that the library, could influence people’s behavior. And also, I wouldn’t say it contradicted, but it definitely expanded,
48:56
Sara Wicen: Our view of how libraries could have a positive impact, because we had started with this term of pro-social behaviors and framing things in the context of pro-social behaviors, which we were thinking of as direct interpersonal interactions between people, mostly.
49:13
Sara Wicen: But then we started to notice that sometimes, such as in the quote that was just shared, people, identified themselves that minding, their own business or avoiding certain types of interactions, helped them stay out of trouble and also feel more in control and use library materials to do this.
49:33
Sara Wicen: We learned through these instances of self-regulation that, while encouraging pro-social behaviors has major benefits, also there were participants that saw the benefit of keeping to themselves in the prison environment.
49:51
Erin B: Overall, it’s just expanded my knowledge, really. I feel like you get out of a library, whatever you’re willing to put into it. So I come in here with an open mind, and I try to read different types of things, just so I’m not selective on what I’m reading. There’s just so much knowledge out there.
50:12
Sara Wicen: Alright, in our first focus group question, we asked participants, why do you use your prison library? As that was the first question, right at the beginning, and accessing information and self-led learning were top responses, in both focus groups with.
50:29
Sara Wicen: Currently… people who are currently incarcerated, and people who are formerly incarcerated.
50:34
Sara Wicen: in focus groups conducted with people currently incarcerated, information access was actually the top response for why do you use your prison library, and self-led learning was, sixth, so it was… it was up there.
50:49
Sara Wicen: not quite as frequently mentioned, but for focus groups conducted with people who were formerly incarcerated, self-led learning was, the most frequent… er, the second most frequently coded library service in response to that question, with only music occurring more. So.
51:07
Sara Wicen: Out of all the library services that we were identifying throughout our analysis, self-led learning came up as, …
51:14
Sara Wicen: One of the second major findings, in response to that question for people who are formerly incarcerated and the focus groups conducted with them.
51:25
Sara Wicen: Information access definitely stood out as one of the,
51:30
Sara Wicen: most frequently brought up topics, just overall, by people.
51:36
Sara Wicen: And… Sara Wicen: it just… I don’t think I can stress enough how, like, really meaningful it was to see how important the library was to people’s information access. When people had a question, then the library was often where they went to get that answered.
51:54
Sara Wicen: And then, literacy, I already touched on that earlier as well, but we heard lots of stories of people learning to read in prison, as well as stories from people who had helped others learn how to read, or helped them find materials, that helped them learn how to read as well.
52:11
Sara Wicen: And although it wasn’t one of the most common topics brought up in focus groups, I just think it’s important to note that low literacy within prison was recognized in multiple focus groups, and the library was seen as a place where people could grow
52:26
Sara Wicen: their literacy skills. We heard a quote at the very beginning of this webinar about it, but we also heard from one participant who shared that they were able to check out a book before being sent to solitary, and then was able to teach themselves how to read during that time.
52:49
Erin B: Education reduces the crime rate. This person over here is learning to read. He could really utilize that in finding a job and becoming a better member of society and not coming back to prison.
53:03
Sara Wicen: This was the final quote that I wanted to share to address our goal, one, of identifying outcomes of prison library use, because it really shows how not only were, we as researchers finding these connections.
53:17
Sara Wicen: within the transcripts as we were doing our analysis, but also, these connections were brought up by participants within focus groups. Clear connections were talked about between prison library use and education, pro-social behaviors, and successful reentry into the community.
53:36
Sara Wicen: And then lastly, to wrap up this first section of the findings, I wanted to just talk a little bit about how positively the library was spoken of overall, and how closely it was tied to positive feelings among folks group participants.
53:52
Sara Wicen: For our final question, we asked whether there were any other stories or experiences that people wanted to share about their prison library.
54:00
Sara Wicen: And the code, or top, or the, like, perception that was most frequently identified, in response to these questions was positive feelings. So, people use this time often to wrap up the focus group discussion with,
54:15
Sara Wicen: positive comments about the library, and so I just put a quick graphic up here, within the inside focus groups, the focus groups conducted with people currently incarcerated, positive feelings was
54:30
Sara Wicen: mentioned, around 75% of all the perceptions of the library that we noted, about 75% of them were positive, 14 negative, and the rest, more neutral, so…
54:42
Sara Wicen: The positive feelings really stood out, within these focus groups.
54:49
Erin B: I think books help quite a few people change their opinions on how they view everyone else.
55:00
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Alright, so the second goal of this study was to find out what types of collections, programs, and services are associated with positive outcomes of prison library use in the view of the service user.
55:13
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So, just the… the bird’s eye view here, the most prevalent answers to the… to this question, we found were information access.
55:22
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Collection, interlibrary loan, staff, read to the children, soft seats, group activities, and re-entry information. I’m going to go into depth about most of these in just a moment.
55:39
Erin B: If I did come to the library, it would be to help my counterpart. He’s Spanish-speaking, and this particular library has more Spanish things than our previous facility we were at. So he’s really interested in coming, but he’s so shy he won’t come by himself.
55:52
Erin B: So we’ll help him out and bring him here, and so soon I’ll be learning Spanish, because it’s the only way to help him out, is to learn his language. So hopefully soon, I’ll be coming here to get some books for Spanish.
56:07
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So the first thing we wanted to examine was what about the collection, or what parts of the collection were leading to all of these wonderful, positive outcomes that Sarah just talked about? I first want to note that even as a bunch of librarians, we found that collection is actually weirdly hard to define.
56:23
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So just for our purposes here, it was anything in the library, including books, music, movies, and technology that was all grouped together.
56:32
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): We found that collection was used for leisure reading, studying, and learning new skills, and that it was also important to everyone, so it didn’t matter what custody level you were in, it didn’t matter what, gender, as defined by DOC, you identified as, it didn’t matter. Collection was equally important to everybody.
56:53
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): We also found that the collection, was used as a way for people to help others. So, for example, the Spanish language collection, was used so that people could connect with each other or help each other in learning new languages and getting new experiences.
57:09
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): We also found a lot of mentions of self-help books, which is a piece of the collection, and it was really, really important for people to have access to this. They loved this piece of the collection and also frequently asked for more of it, and we’ll go into a little bit about that later.
57:27
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): In response to the question, is there a book, magazine, or other resource that has changed your mind about something?
57:34
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): People told us about a wide variety of specific titles and experiences, but the biggest tie-in was how those experiences had really helped people, grow and create empathy in their lives.
57:51
Erin B: You get a lot of opinions about information, and when you want that solid, definitive answer, the library’s where you gotta go.
58:02
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Sarah mentioned this earlier, but I just want to reiterate that when we asked people, why do you use your PRISM library, the most frequently coded response was information access. It was mentioned in 49 of our 54 inside groups, and 5 out of 8 of the outside groups.
58:19
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): In response to that question, specifically. People in protective custody, which is a fairly strict custody level, it’s a special management group, talked about it the most out of everyone.
58:32
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): And when we asked people about information access, we found that they were often seeking legitimate information, and also really highly specific or niche information or topics.
58:48
Erin B: when I’d go to the library, I’d go there heated, and I could just listen to music. So yeah, there were a couple of times I thought about, I’m gonna go do something stupid after I get out of the library.
58:58
Erin B: But every time I left the library, I was a lot calmer. I was like, man, I’m not even sweating that anymore. I’m in a better mood, just chilling. It’s not worth it. Not going to the hole, because… yeah, so the library is more like my calm-down, peaceful place.
59:13
Erin B: It was like, every time I entered the library, I was pretty heated a lot of times. So every time I left, I was like.
59:19
Erin B: I’m cool. I’m cool. Everything’s cool.
59:26
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So, music was a piece of the collection that was a really amazing, finding in our research. It was the sixth most commonly applied code in both the outside and inside focus group transcripts, and I think we had, I don’t know, 30 codes or something, and so this really, really popped up often.
59:46
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): It also had a really strong co-occurrence with mental health. So, by co-occurrence, I mean that in statements that people made, both the code mental health and music came up together, which tells us that there’s a relationship between those two things.
1:00:00
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): In 25% of transcripts, these two codes occurred together, so 1 out of every 4.
1:00:06
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): In the inclusive therapeutic community and restrictive housing groups, those are a couple of special management groups, those folks mentioned music the most of, all of the different special management groups.
1:00:19
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): And it could be presumed that these groups have a really high emotional burden, and their responses tell us how music can really help play a positive role in coping with emotions and mental health.
1:00:32
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): In the outside focus groups, music was the most commonly applied code and answer to, why do you use your prison library? So it really stuck with people as a meaningful way that they, were able to have those positive outcomes based on their library use.
1:00:51
Erin B: Everybody that did read to the children loved it. But with that being said, it impacted the kids they were reading to as well, in such a way that one of my friends from over there started that process of reading to his son. And because of that, his son started coming in and visiting him.
1:01:06
Erin B: It was a relationship-building thing that corrected a relationship between them, because he left years ago.
1:01:12
Erin B: And then they started that program, and it ended up building their relationship. Now he’s out of prison very successful. The relationship was built because of that.
1:01:24
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So part of Goal 2 was to look at some programs that led to positive outcomes, and one of the programs that we heard really frequently about was Read to the Children, which I personally think is an absolutely amazing program, and so do a lot of people in these focus groups.
1:01:40
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): It’s a program that began in 1999 as a partnership between the Colorado State Library and the Colorado Department of Corrections.
1:01:48
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): In it, individual libraries coordinate, having incarcerated people recording themselves reading a book, and then they send the recording along with a copy of the book, to a child in their lives. It’s really, really cool.
1:02:03
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): About a fourth of the inside focus groups had mention of this program, and half of the outside groups too, and I think that that really speaks to the long-lasting impact of this program.
1:02:15
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): As you can imagine, read to the children that code also co-occurred with a lot of pro-social behavior codes. Some of those codes included connection with others, role modeling, expressing appreciation, social norms or normalization, and agreement.
1:02:34
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So, Read to the Children, as just one program of many in prison libraries, was leading to a lot of wonderful pro-social behaviors for people.
1:02:43
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Group activities, we also heard about. As Carissa mentioned, we were in this kind of Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): weird post-COVID area, and so lots of programs had gotten pushed back to the wayside a little bit, but were starting to pop up more and more. And when we did hear people talk about them, they were linked with a lot of pro-social behaviors.
1:03:05
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): In particular, they were linked with helping others, empathy, and social norms and normalization.
1:03:14
Erin B: Y’all librarians are different. You do what you do, and it helps people, no matter what, whether they realize it or not.
1:03:24
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So, we’re moving on to services here, trying to identify what were some of the services that led to positive outcomes based on library use.
1:03:33
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): And one of them that was really important, for people was staff.
1:03:38
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): When participants talked about their interaction with staff, they mentioned how library staff had contributed to their experiences and well-being while in prison.
1:03:48
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Many of their statements included the pro-social behavior of expressing appreciation, so I’m so thankful that a staff person did this, or I really appreciate the time I’m able to spend here. I think we mentioned earlier that there was also appreciation for being in the focus groups themselves.
1:04:07
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): … So yeah, we heard a lot about expressing appreciation and libraries.
1:04:13
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Staff assistance range from everything, that you would kind of see in a public library or any other library setting, so it could be finding books and music.
1:04:22
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): learning technology skills, fulfilling interlibrary loan requests, and, something that’s particular to prison libraries was doing delivery service. So that’s when books are delivered directly to a person’s cell or pod for a variety of different reasons.
1:04:39
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Staff were also a common way that people felt like their prison library had served them well. When we asked people in what ways does your prison library serve you well, about a third of inside group responses included mentions of staff assistance, as did half of the outside group responses.
1:05:00
Erin B: What’s your most memorable experience? Participant. Erin B: Oh, I mean, it’s as simple as when they changed the chairs, and they brought these comfortable chairs in here, just to come here and sit in these kind of chairs. It sounds simplistic to probably the people from the streets, but for us, everything’s hard and cold in prison. The concrete and metal. So just to come here and read a book in comfort.
1:05:27
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): So, to me, this finding of soft seats as a library service was really, really impactful, and I think it’s a really interesting finding from our research. About 20% of inside focus groups mention soft seats in a positive light.
1:05:45
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): And protective custody accounted for about 79, so 80% of those mentions, and that’s people who are in a pretty strict custody level.
1:05:55
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Soft seats also co-occurred frequently with the code library as a place of peace, which really shows how just having a soft, comfortable place to sit down really contributed to the overall atmosphere in the prison library, and then that domino effect of what that atmosphere does to people, how their behavior changes, how it improves their mental health.
1:06:15
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Interlibrary loan, was also a really, really important service to people. They talked about it in inside focus groups a lot. It was the fourth most commonly talked about service for the inside groups.
1:06:29
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Lots of these libraries are tiny, and despite, best efforts, you can’t have everything in a tiny space. So being able to receive books from, libraries all over the place.
1:06:44
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): was very, very important to people with limited resources. It also impacted people’s ability to connect with others, and had positive effects on their mental health.
1:06:59
Erin B: interviewer. Overall, how do you feel about your prison library participant? I mean, to put it in one word, I think it’s a blessing.
1:07:07
Erin B: Because without it, imagine.
1:07:14
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: All right, hi again, everybody. I’m now going to talk about the third goal of the PRISM project, which was to identify methods for improvement. In other words, what can libraries do more of or do differently, which was one of the questions that we asked along these lines.
1:07:32
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Some of the other questions that got to these points have suggested improvements were, in what ways did your library not serve you as well as you wished, and what should be the top priority for improving prison libraries? There were other more nuanced questions as well, but many of them did cut straight to the chase.
1:07:50
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: What you see up on the screen here is an unscientific visual map of how I have come to think about these data. Barriers to access booms large and overlaps with so many of the impediments to the library use that leads to the outcomes you’ve been hearing about.
1:08:11
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Another reason that I was thinking of the relationships between these codes in this way is because, as everyone who works in these environments will tell you, there’s so little that we can control.
1:08:23
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: But what are we able to do as library workers? Chelsea Jordan-Makely: The reality is that even in Colorado, which, as I’ve come to understand it, has some of the best library services for incarcerated people in the nation, there are still gaps. There’s still a ways to go before we can meet the ALA standards for library services to the incarcerated and detained.
1:08:45
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: So, Goal 3 takes that negative and turns it into opportunities, methods for improvement, straight from the mouths of our focus group participants.
1:09:02
Erin B: Having access library is like the Hunger Games. It’s like, if you feel like arguing, it’s a sport to come here, then great. But if not, I’d just rather not. Yeah, but it’s rather sad.
1:09:15
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: All right, so we’re going to look more closely at the data in just a moment, but here’s an overview of what it boils down to. Ways that we can improve prison libraries in Colorado. And I’ve grouped these into four categories. Removing or getting around barriers to use.
1:09:33
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Improving collections, meeting staffing standards, and offering more programs and services.
1:09:41
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Something I want to highlight at this point is the first bullet point, and also the last.
1:09:46
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Make it easier to find out about library services and offering library orientation.
1:09:54
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We did ask people how they found the library, and many of them said that they found it on their own, or eventually through someone else telling them about it.
1:10:04
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Rarely was this information, rarely is this information coming straight from an administrator or a library worker. Even when people knew about the library, they weren’t sure what was available there.
1:10:16
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: So within the realm of our control, library orientation looms large. Maybe it’s not a class or a personal welcome, but a bookmark or posters. This is a huge opportunity for us to invite people in and to promote library services.
1:10:39
Erin B: If we had more to do, a lot more people would come to the library.
1:10:48
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Oh, I’m sorry, Erin, I tricked you by… now we have two quotes back-to-back.
1:10:54
Erin B: You can’t really focus on reading books when there’s a possibility of violence every day. So when you go in your cell, you’re not really worried about reading a book. You’re worried about the next time you go out. It’s not like that for everyone here, but there’s some people, like I said, that are gang-affiliated, that the library is the last thing on your mind, you know what I mean?
1:11:15
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Okay, so now I want to zoom in on barriers to access and what is keeping people from using their prison library. These included time allowance.
1:11:26
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Open hours, capacity, meaning the number of people who are allowed to visit at a time.
1:11:32
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Financial reasons, such as fear of fines or fees. Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Quantity limits, and borrowing time limits.
1:11:41
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Oftentimes, several policies converged. Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Support of the library occurred as a barrier to use in 31 inside focus group excerpts, and 12 times across focus groups with previously incarcerated people.
1:11:57
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: This came up in answer to our questions about whether anyone had discouraged people from using the library, as in the responses where people told us that time was a factor, or that guards would prevent them from using the library for one reason or another.
1:12:14
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Access to library services could also be undermined unintentionally, as by schedules or counts and lockdowns that kept people from being able to go into the library during the hours when it was open and available to them.
1:12:35
Erin B: Since many books were not available, it often discouraged me from even wanting to go back into the library.
1:12:45
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: All right, so sticking with barriers to access, but looking more about collection, we heard a lot about collection, and that’s pretty good when it comes to methods of improvement, because it’s something that we do have some control over as library workers.
1:13:01
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: In a nutshell, people spoke about being so frustrated with old books.
1:13:07
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Incomplete series was a really big thing, small collections, books that were irrelevant, that people thought they’d rather not bother even trying to use the library. There was just this assumption, there’s nothing for me there.
1:13:23
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Another thing was lacking catalog access, the ability to look for books, or information, or to place requests.
1:13:32
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: That was a pervasive issue. Chelsea Jordan-Makely: There was one participant who described having access to a catalog in one of the facilities that he’d been at, but that’s really rare. Some facilities had print catalogs, but we heard from focus group participants that those could be out of date and didn’t reflect what was actually available.
1:13:53
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Then we heard a lot that when people did place requests, they didn’t ever turn up.
1:13:58
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Or we heard that ILL was catch as catch-can. It wasn’t available in all facilities, not everybody knew about it, and it was prone to service interruptions.
1:14:12
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Also, in regards to the collection, we heard a lot of mentions about ebooks.
1:14:17
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: And it wasn’t all positive. People were really wary of ebooks as, a ploy that would limit and downsize physical collections. And there was a lack of familiarity or understanding about how… about ebooks and how they work, and what was available.
1:14:35
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: In facilities that make e-books available on tablets, this is another opportunity. We could be offering programs, or again, bookmarks, people love bookmarks, to advertise and take the fear out of these resources.
1:14:51
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: One thing I wanted to mention also, people wanted more music, more re-entry information, and more newspaper access.
1:15:00
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Current events at the local and global levels, and from a variety of perspectives.
1:15:07
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: And now let’s look at the list that we compiled of titles and resources that are in demand.
1:15:15
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: So this is a resource you can come back to, if… if you have some say in a library collection in a jail or prison. So religion and spirituality, including non-Christian titles.
1:15:28
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Crafts, beadwork and crochet, African history and Swahili dictionaries, Spanish language materials.
1:15:36
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Automobiles and planes, picture books, GED prep, Manga.
1:15:43
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Urban fiction, no surprise to those of you who work in jail and prison libraries. Memoirs, Native American culture and history.
1:15:54
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: business, how to start a business, parenting, and then self-help is really huge for folks. So that’s our… that’s our rough list of some of the things we heard that people wanted to see more of in prison libraries.
1:16:11
Erin B: I think if they were adequate size with better selections, that it would go a ways towards keeping people occupied. People get frustrated when they get in and they can’t get what they want. Everybody gets frustrated when they can’t get what they want in some way or another. Well, nothing’s different in prison. You can’t find a book you want, you get pissed off. Things escalate. You’re crawling all over other people to get a book. It gets frustrating.
1:16:37
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Okay, we also heard a lot about the lack of staff, not just in the library, but across facilities, and the ways that that kept people from being able to use the library. Because programs can’t run, and the library can’t be open if the facility isn’t sufficiently staffed to begin with.
1:16:57
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: And in some cases, library workers will get pulled into other duties, so that they’re not able to actually staff the library.
1:17:06
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: There’s also a lot of turnover, and we were hearing that mentioned from our focus group participants.
1:17:13
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: And disruptions to services because of that fact. Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We also heard about low morale and stuff.
1:17:20
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: All of this links to a devaluing of library services.
1:17:26
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: My hope is that impact and outcomes data such as these stories from the PRISM project may help to show that library services are more than a perk or a privilege, and maybe then they will be inclined to invest more in library services.
1:17:41
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: As in any organization, it’s the people who are usually the most valuable resource.
1:17:48
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: The yellow bubble that you see here speaks to a peaceful environment, and so that links to morale and having the staff to help ensure that the library is a safe and peaceful environment, or as safe and peaceful of an environment as possible.
1:18:04
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: And help communicate expectations and talk with people, and build relationships that are conducive to a welcoming experience.
1:18:13
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: And I also am gonna lump in here the calls that we heard for more programs. We heard that people wanted and appreciated reading contests, trivia, movies, Dungeons & Dragons, Gamers Unplugged.
1:18:29
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Poetry, writing contests, chess, And more read to the children.
1:18:40
Erin B: Lack of staff thing is a real, real big thing. Not only for the inmates, but if you come to work and your other employees don’t respect you, or you don’t want to stay there, you have to do something that you don’t want to do, then yeah, you’re gonna go get a different job, but we’re the ones who pay for it.
1:19:00
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: All right, so we’re almost to the end here, coming back to this big picture of ways to improve prison libraries. One more thing before I summarize.
1:19:11
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We heard a lot about inconsistencies from one library and one facility to another, so not knowing what to expect contributes to this sense of being unfamiliar with systems.
1:19:24
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: The only consistency from one place to another seems to be the barriers to access, which is pretty prevalent in people’s experiences.
1:19:33
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Again, there’s only so much that we can control as library workers, but what can we do? One thing we heard is that people want us to listen to them, they want to share what it is that they want, just like in any customer service experience, and they don’t want us to make assumptions for them.
1:19:51
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Hopefully, by sharing these stories about the connection between library services and prosocial behaviors, we’ll be able to provide more and better services, and to continue collecting data like these that show libraries are essential.
1:20:12
Erin B: My friends are, in every sense, they’re just an essential part of humanity. You come to read, you come to learn, you escape this environment. Everything.
1:20:30
Charissa Brammer – CO: That’s a hard one to transition out of, but … here’s our little housekeeping thing. If you would fill out our survey, our funders appreciate that. And then we have a few minutes for questions, if anybody has any questions that they would like to ask.
1:20:51
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Nice comment in the chat from Hannah, thank you.
1:21:04
Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Thanks to everyone who stuck with us all this time.
1:21:12
Amy Bahlenhorst (CSL, she/her): Alright, I will go ahead and stop the recording.