Fontana Library folks visit to Macon County Detention Center

Posted on by
Reply

From Melanie’s report…

Ben Woody and Melanie Waldroop met with Lt. Steve Stewart of the Macon County Detention Center on May 27 at 2:30 pm. They discussed the jail book project and what his expectations were from the library for the project. Below is the list of things that he wants in the Macon County jail.

  • Melanie asked how many books they wanted at one time and he replied only 24. They took it to include magazines.
  • Melanie asked about magazines and he replied they would accept them, as long as the staples had been removed.
  • Melanie asked him abut the condition of books and he replied, as long as they are readable. Not new or like new as per the list we had.
  • He wants them to come once a quarter or every 3 months. Melanie made the suggestion that we could leave the 24 books for now, but to also have 24 more books that they could replace themselves. She suggested a plastic tote, clear, with our name on it, that he could keep permanently. She could place 24 more books in it and they could replace as they need to. She would go back in 3 month increments and replace all with new stuff. Lt. Stewart seemed fine with that.
  • Melanie asked him about content of the books and he replied “no fifty shades of grey”. He wants only PG-13 type content. He said mystery, western, and clean romance. She had pulled some discarded large print that she will send first and see how it goes. Ben is sending me a box of books from the closet at Jackson. She will work some of those in if she can.

Melanie told Lt. Stewart that she would bring him new things in the next week to 10 days, just as soon as she can get them ready. He seemed very happy that we were there and wants this project to fly. He stated the same thing that Jill had told them in her meeting with them, “Happy inmates make better inmates”.

They brought back two boxes of books, that literally had the covers read off them. Melanie told Lt. Stewart that when the books got that bad, to just trash them. They don’t have to wait for them to come pick them up.

The library staff felt more optimistic that they are doing the jail a service, that what they are doing is good for all people concerned.

Posted on by
Reply

Below are links to the scanned documents for the application for the WCU Faculty Research and Creative Activities Award, including letters of support and resumes of participants

WNC jail Project – Project Narrative

WNC Jail Project – Award Application

Other support – Fontana RL – NCPDL Award

Other support – Fontana RL – Letter of support

Other support – Letter of support of department head

CV of Assoc Prof Jill Ellern

Other support – Fontana RL – CV Jail Project coordinator Liz Gregg

WCU faculty Research and Creative Activities Award applied for and failed this year

Posted on by
Reply

For the Jan 15, 2015 deadline, I applied for and didn’t receive this award.  But I wanted to put the info out there for the blog world to see…

WNC JAIL PROJECT – PROJECT NARRATIVE
The Western North Carolina (WNC) jail project was inspired by the collaborative research between two Western Carolina University faculty members. (Ellern, Gillian (Jill) D, & Mason, Karen, “Library Services to Inmates in the Rural County Jails in Western North Carolina” North Carolina Libraries v 71, no 1, 2013). http://www.ncl.ecu.edu/index.php/NCL/article/view/365/478.) The subject of this study was better suited to Prof. Jill Ellern’s personal research agenda (outreach and community engagement scholarship in librarianship). After the article’s publication, she has been focused on working more in-depth with the public librarians in the WNC area to recognize the needs in the region’s jails. Her effort has helped motivate some innovative programming in the WNC public libraries that has improved the library services to inmates by focusing on adequate reading materials in the region’s detention centers.
The WNC jail project received a great deal of press by the local media in the past year including newspapers, radio, and posts on the NC State Library’s blog. A list of links to these press releases are available from Prof. Ellern’s blog “Books in Jails in Western North Carolina” at https://jailswnc.wordpress.com/. The blog contains a record of the partnerships progress and outcomes. The project’s work with Fontana Regional Library (Fontana RL) has just received the NC Public Library Directors Association (NCPLDA) Service Innovation Award which included a display of the program at their annual awards meeting.
The publicity gained by the project has helped create a bounty of local and state support to improve the materials in the region’s jails. A large amount of private book donations (550+) were received at Fontana RL in Sylva and more continues to come in. Fontana RL staff have committed many hours into cataloging the current collections in Macon and Jackson jails into an online web-based catalog at http://LibraryThing.com. This unlimited catalog account was donated to the project by the web company after learning about the use of the account.
Western’s students and faculty have also gotten involved with the WNC jail project. A criminal justice class did a service learning assignment and a film class did a class video for the 125th anniversary celebration on the project. A criminal justice faculty joined the group of librarians and reporters when they visited the jail in Haywood County making it possible to begun to form alliances and connections there that might benefit her students and teaching in the future.
Jail administrators and sheriffs have welcomed Prof. Ellern as she introduced them to their county’s public library staff as they toured the jails, often for the first time. Prof. Ellern has been most successful in helping to form partnerships between Macon and Jackson County Detention Centers and the Fontana Regional Library (Fontana RL) and between Haywood County Detention Center and the Haywood Public Library (HCPL). The detention centers have welcomed librarians and have given them full access to help them with their book collections.
So far, the publicity for WNC jail project has been able to get private donations of fiction and popular current non-fiction for Jackson and Macon jails. As predicted by the research, targeted non-fiction on subjects that might be a catalyst for inmate life improvements were not among the titles donated. Books on such topics such as education, life enrichment, literacy and resources for job seeking, as well as re-entry into society after being jailed, mental and physical health, and self-education were absent from the donations. Funding for addressing these needs have yet to be identified. However, progress has begun by creating a bibliography of those items in a “wish list” in LibraryThing.com and an awareness by the public librarians in Fontana RL that we need to do more.
Plan of activities, objectives, and outcomes:
Prof. Ellern’s current objective in her research has been focused on working with Fontana RL in looking at grant possibilities; furthering the creation of a targeted bibliography of titles that might be of interest to outside funding groups for placement in the jail libraries; and to continue publicizing the successes of the project to the public, civil organizations and the library community. Grant funding has always been a part of her research goals, but it has been difficult to identify monies for this specialized underserved group (i.e. inmates or detention centers).
Prof. Ellern is requesting the assistance of graduate student to support the WNC jail project and money for a small targeted non-fiction collection to continue this work. The research assistant will help to publicize the work of the WNC jail project presentations and communications to potential granting groups and to begin studying how these targeted books are used by the inmates and the libraries.

The duties of a Graduate student would include:

  • Helping to identify potential granting agencies

o Local and state businesses’ grants (for example, there might be some community grant possibilities from the nations chain stores, civic service groups, etc.)
o More in-depth searching into grant databases and resources
o Talk with NC State Library about other funding ideas
o Communicating with potential donors

    Assisting the librarians on writing the grants for sustained funding

o Collecting statistics and demographics on the project for those grant proposals and presentations

  • Expanding the current wish list of titles covering the targeted non-fiction needs
  • Purchasing books on the wish list
  • Set up the parameters for studying the use of targeted books in the jails
  • Working with Fontana RL librarians and the Hunter Library librarians to get the purchased and donated books in the online catalog in LibraryThing.
  • Assisting on the presentations for future library conferences

The WNC jail project is a good example of how scholarship by a university faculty member can engage the community into actions that have direct benefit to the citizens of their region. That is the goal of an engaged university. In conclusion, it is appropriate to quote the original research that started this project that was published in the North Carolina Libraries article cited above, “These collections could do so much more to provide much needed opportunities to enhance the lives of these citizens and help them to use their time in jail more productively. If we value reading and literacy and recognize the importance of reading for a healthy community, we owe it to ourselves to provide these citizens with more substantial reading materials than these jails currently provide.”

  • Thank you for considering this proposal for this award.

NCPLDA award and Showcase (Dec 2014)

Posted on by
Reply

The WNC Jail project (under the title of Developing collections in Rural Jails) received a 2014 North Carolina Public Library Directors Association (NCPLDA) Service Innovation Project Award.   The award winners (Fontana Regional Library director andinterested staff) were given the opportunity to provide a a table top display of their program during the awards showcase.  Karen Wallace, FRL director, went (Dec 4th) and reported the display generated lots of great questions and lots of interest about the program from the other attendees during the meeting.

Books added to Macon County Detention Center June 2014

Posted on by
Reply

On June 27th, Liz Gregg, Jackson County Public Library delivered about 90 titles to the Macon County Detention Center from the books collected and donated from the community.  She also photographed them so she would added them to the LibraryThing account.  A staff person from Macon Public Library will be taking over for her to support Macon County and we should be knowing more about it soon.

Pics of titles added 1

Pics of titles added 2

Pics of titles added 3

Pics of titles added 4

Pics of titles added 5

 

Donations

Posted on by
Reply

From: Nan Watkins (former WCU library employee)
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 12:57 PM
To: Jill Ellern
Subject: Prison Lit

Hi Jill,

I’m cleaning out stacks of stuff and have a small bag of a dozen books of prison literature that I bought years ago when I was working on a project and exhibits on the subject at Hunter. I just saw the article in the Clarion about you and your Jail Book Collections, and wonder if you would like the books. Mostly paperbacks, one old library anthology of prison lit, but all classics in their own way. I’m looking for a good home for them.

  • The Great Prisoners: The First Anthology of Literature Written in Prison
  • This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers
  • Prison Writing in 20th Century America
  • Solzehenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  • Toer: The Fugitive
  • Sa’adawi: Memoirs from the Women’s Prison
  • Ngugi: Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary
  • Kim Chi Ha: Cry of the People and Other Poems
  • Sahgal: Prison and Chocolate Cake
  • 3 Collections of Poetry from US Prisons
  • 1 CD of Prison Songs: Historical Recordings from Parchman Farm 1947-48

If some of your prison libraries could use these, I’d be happy to drop them by Hunter in a day or two.

What say?

Nan

————————–

From Jill to Nan

Subject: RE: Prison Lit
Date: Mon, 12 May 2014 17:56:08 +0000

Yes, we would be very interested.  Liz at Sylva Public is the one collecting them.  Could you bring them to her?  Or I can take them if you want…thanks for thinking about us.

Jill

——————

From: Nan Watkins
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 4:21 PM
To: Jill Ellern
Subject: RE: Prison Lit

Hi Jill,

I volunteer every Wednesday at the Sylva Library so I’ll take the books to Liz then. So glad I ran across the Clarion article just when I wanted to give the books away! Thanks for doing all the good work to get those jail libraries worthwhile books.

Nan