Pages to Prisoners receives $1,000 grant

The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, a volunteer organization that disseminates free books to incarcerated people, received a $1,000 grant from the Indiana Literacy Association to fund its efforts to encourage self-education for inmates.

The group will use the grant to purchase self-educational tools such as dictionaries, thesauruses and GED test preparation materials, which are expensive and in high demand among inmates, said General Coordinator Geoff Hing. He said the program usually relies primarily on community donations, which rarely include these items.

The funds came from Verizon’s “Check Into Literacy” program, which collected $19,000 in donations from Hoosier phone customers last summer and gave it to the Indiana Literacy Association to administer grants to literacy initiatives across the state, said Judith Stabelli, treasurer of the Indiana Literacy Association.

Stabelli said encouraging literacy among incarcerated people will make it easier for them to get jobs and build wealth when they are released.

“Any effort to improve literacy levels, we think it’s important,” she said.

Although many prisons have libraries, Hing said limitations on access and content have driven inmates to repeatedly look to the outside for additional reading materials.

“We find that in facilities where there are libraries, people don’t feel like it meets their needs,” Hing said.

He said many people use their time behind bars to reconnect with their spiritual and cultural roots, and prison libraries might not offer diverse reading materials. He also said many prisoners turn to reading materials to gain life skills such as parenting or to learn about vocational skills such as carpentry or welding.

Hing said Pages to Prisoners works to help inmates make the most of their prison sentences by pursuing education, which will broaden their perspectives and help them think critically about life.

But the inmates aren’t the only ones whose perspectives are broadening.
Pages to Prisoners’ volunteers also get a different perspective on who is behind bars in America. Instead of seeing inmates as simply a statistic or imagining them in a sensationalized context, Pages participants get to know their real stories, backgrounds and personal interests, Hing said.

“I think that education is important for anybody, whether you’re a child in the public education system or just somebody who wants to understand their world better,” Hing said. “And I think that includes incarcerated people, who are very often the most neglected when it comes to educational resources.”

Hing said with the help of the grant, Pages will continue to “expand educational opportunities for people who didn’t have a lot of those opportunities to begin with.”