Reading behind Bars

by Jill Grunenwald

  Outside, in public libraries, service animals are allowed. Was that what this was? Was that even a thing? Are there service animals in prison?

  Silent, with no acknowledgment of the gigantic dog bumping him at the waist, the man signed his name to the sign-in sheet and, with his free hand, removed his identification badge and handed it to Spencer. Their exchange was so muted I couldn’t hear it, but Spencer took the badge and clipped it to the side of the magazine rack. He handed the latest edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer to the inmate. Dog and master moved into the crowd in search of a table.

  I picked up the phone that sat at my desk and dialed Kimberly’s extension. “McIntyre,” she said, introducing herself by her last name.

  “Hey,” I said. I kept my voice low. “Um, there’s a dog in here.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a dog in the library,” I repeated, emphasizing the middle word.

  “Oh! Yeah, that’s part of the puppy program. They have to take their dogs everywhere with them, even the library.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I hung up the phone. I added “puppy program” to my growing list of things to ask Kimberly about further during the evening break.

  When I looked up there was an inmate leaning over the desk. He peered at me inquisitively. I suddenly sympathized with animals at the zoo.

  “You the new librarian?”

  I nodded. “I am. I’m Miss Grunenwald. But you can just call me Ms. G.”

  “Yo!” He turned around and shouted to someone at the back of the line. “We got a new librarian!”

  The queue at the door grew exponentially. Inmates jockeyed for their place in line, while others crammed themselves into the tiny foyer. Because the dining hall didn’t have enough capacity for all seven-hundred inmates at once, meals worked in shifts, one dorm at a time going down to eat. After, inmates were supposed to return to their dorms and wait until the yard opened for the afternoon. But the inmates knew if they ate slowly, walked slowly, and loitered just long enough, they could sneak into the library just as it was opening. It was important to get there early, as like every other library I’ve worked in, the materials—including the newspapers—were first come, first served.

  The line cracked as an inmate forced his way to the front. His gaze gave me the once-over as he crossed the threshold and took his spot beside Spencer. I ran my finger down the porter schedule until I found Tuesday afternoon: Spencer and Childers.

  Childers was Caucasian and gangly with unwashed, disheveled hair. Like Spencer, he was tall, although Spencer still towered over him. I clocked both of them to be around my age, somewhere between late twenties and early thirties.

  The pair of library porters fell into the same rhythm: ID badge to porter, paper to patron. Badge to porter, paper to patron.

  Another crack opened in the long line of incoming inmates and an older African American man came to the desk. His arms were full of manila folders, papers shoved into them every which way. He quickly pulled his hat, dark blue like his coat, from his head, revealing black hair sprinkled with white and gray.

  “I’m Washington,” he said hurriedly. “I’m one of the law porters. I’m sorry I’m late, lunch and Cooper out there and—”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cowboy correctional officer walk past my window. I waved my hand. “It’s okay.”

  Washington nodded. “I’ll be in the back. If you need anything, let me know.”

  Already a crowd had formed back in the law library, waiting expectantly for Washington. He ignored them, carefully removing his jacket and hanging it on the back of a chair. His own stack of papers went onto a shelf beside the legal texts. Only after he had settled and situated himself did he turn to attend on the waiting inmates.

  The circulation desk pulsed with activity. Enough time had gone by that the men who had gotten in at opening were finished with their first newspaper. Now, the process worked in reverse: Paper to porter, badge to patron. Paper to porter, badge to patron. When an inmate wanted to read another newspaper, the badge simply got moved to the appropriate spot.

  I was impressed. This library was a well-oiled machine. Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief. Despite the location, it really wasn’t that different than every other library I’d worked in over the years.

  Lunch was over and the yard was open for afternoon recreation hours. Outside my window, I saw inmates and correctional officers moving up and down along the walkway. While the inmates moved in a lackadaisical motion, the correctional officers walked with purpose. They knew they had a job to do.

  After a flurry of ten minutes of heightened activity, the crowd at the door and my desk thinned. With a deep breath, I settled back in my seat.

  The library had opened in such a frenzy, I hadn’t had a chance to examine my desk with any real focus. I essentially had two desks: the big, main one at the front of the room, and behind that, a small computer desk that held the desktop computer. Ready to get to work, I powered it up.

  Tackling the donation pile, or piles as it were, seemed as good a place as any to start. At least to get a sense of what I was looking at. The donation pile was haphazard at best and a hot mess at worst. Books of every shape, size, and condition were piled on top of each other and shoved into every available nook and cranny of the metal bookcase. There was no organization, no sense of purpose. It was as if the boxes of books just showed up one day and the librarian, overwhelmed and short on both time and space, just did whatever it took to get the books out of the boxes and onto the shelf and out of the way.

  Come to think of it, that’s probably exactly what happened.

  Once my computer booted up, I logged in with the username and password that Hall had set me up with earlier. I had been told that the previous librarian’s files had all been transferred over, so I began poking around in different folders and documents. Eventually I came across an Excel spreadsheet marked “Catalog.”

  I clicked to open it. As I scrolled down the spreadsheet, my eyes widened in horror.

  Before I continue, I feel it necessary to take a moment to show you the “man behind the curtain.” Libraries cannot function without an accurate and up-to-date catalog. The catalog is basically what keeps track of the books owned by the library. How can a library know if a book has gone missing or has been checked out, or if they even own it, if they don’t keep an updated list? Updating it means adding new books to the catalog and deleting books from the catalog if they are weeded, that is, removed from the collection.

  Card catalogs were still around when I was a kid and I loved thumbing through the cards to discover a new book or author. When I was a page in high school, the library had transitioned to an online public access catalog (OPAC), which was a digital database of their books, but they still maintained a card catalog in the basement. When I assisted with weeding, I was tasked with finding the cards and removing them from the card catalog.

  When a patron logs into their library’s website and searches for a book, they are searching the catalog. They’ll find out if the library owns the title, how many copies there are, the available formats (audiobook, physical book, ebook), and, perhaps most importantly, where to find it in the library. Each book is giving an accession number, which is a unique identifier tied to each individual book. That way, if a library owns five copies of a title, they know which four exact copies are sitting on the shelf and which copy Jane has checked out. That’s what those barcodes represent on books.

  Most library catalogs are databases. I was looking at a list. Literally.

  Before me was a spreadsheet of all roughly eight thousand books that made up the prison library’s collection. I had the title, the author, the subject, and . . . that was it. There were no unique identifying numbers, which meant I had no way of knowing if duplicates were intentional or accidental.

  I couldn’t remember much from my cataloging class, but I remembered enough to know that this was cataloging chaos.

  This act of adding new books was goi
ng to be a much bigger project than I had originally anticipated, mostly because it was going to require dealing with the books currently in the library first. There was no way I was prepared enough to tackle this yet, it would have to be put on the back burner for now.

  Catty-corner to my computer desk was a high freestanding drawer. Inside I found routine office supplies: three-hole punch, whiteout, and a pair of safety scissors, just like the kind I used in kindergarten when the teachers were worried our clumsy five-year-old fingers would slip and we’d hurt ourselves. Ah. They weren’t afraid of the inmates hurting themselves, they were worried about the inmates hurting someone else. Specifically another inmate or, even worse, a staff member. Scissors—real scissors, with points and blades—could be used as a weapon. A deadly weapon, if a person was so inclined.

  Beneath the drawer was a wire cart. I rolled it out and found hanging files, each marked with a series of letters and numbers. I pulled one out at random. Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction logo was in the upper left corner. On the right-hand side of the page was a box.

  Subject: Institutional Religious Services

  Number: 72-REG-01

  Page: 1 of 7

  I continued reading. It is the policy of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) to ensure that inmates, who wish to do so, may subscribe to any religious belief they choose. Inmate religious practices, as opposed to belief, may be subject to reasonable time, place and manner restrictions. Inmate participation in religious activities . . .

  My eyes lit up. This was a file cabinet’s worth of prison policy. Here was everything I could possibly want to know, along with plenty of things I didn’t want to know, and other things I didn’t even know I wanted to know about how the prison was run. So much reading and research to be found in the dozens and dozens of hanging files.

  Christmas had come early.

  I’m naturally curious and as a librarian, my favorite tasks are those that make me feel like I’m Sherlock Holmes on my latest case. The game’s afoot! I love playing the detective, digging in deep, searching for clues, reading up on a subject, garnering information. In grad school, I once tracked down a single missing page from a patent. This may not sound like a big deal, but the patent was from the 1970s and the scientist associated with the research facility where I worked was desperate. But every patent database brought back the incomplete patent and the intellectual property law firm that had filed it was no longer in business. Even the United States Patent Office didn’t have the full patent, at least not unless I wanted to drive to Virginia to search their archives and hope it was there.

  After weeks of searching I finally found a law firm in England that had previously been associated with the original firm. The association was tenuous at best; it was basically the fourth cousin once removed of law firms, but it was enough of an association that they had all the old files.

  The day that single page showed up in my email as a PDF, I understood how triumphant Hercule Poirot felt at the end of every Agatha Christie novel.

  Here before me was a treasure trove of information to be read and understood. To some this might seem boring; they were just administrative rules after all. But for me, it was the information and understanding that could be gleaned from such rules that excited and fascinated me. It was like cracking open a clock and seeing the intricate dials, the way the pieces clicked and locked into place. I replaced the file on religious services and went to grab another at random when I noticed a flash of black hovering to my left.

  A female corrections officer leaned against the desk, her right arm propped on top. She smiled at me. “CO Scott,” she said. I rolled my office chair across the small gap of linoleum and shook her hand. She nodded out towards the crowded library. “How’s your first day going?”

  I shrugged. “Okay so far.”

  She turned her head of strawberry blonde hair back out over the crowd. “I’m the Education officer today. If you need anything just call next door.”

  On top of the counter, in the corner nearest the window, was a thick, spiral-bound horizontal notebook. Scott removed a pen from her breast pocket and clicked it open. Consulting the digital watch on her wrist, she wrote her name, the time, and date on the next open line in the notebook. As she leaned down, I noticed the constellation of dark freckles that stood out across her nose.

  “Actually,” I said slowly, thoughtfully. My brain ran down the state of my body, weighing going now or waiting later and having to call. “Would you mind waiting just a second while I popped into the restroom?”

  Scott nodded her affirmation and I stood up, pulling the keys from my pocket and finding the one that Kimberly had told me belonged to the bathroom. I walked across the small foyer between my desk and the bathroom and unlocked it. It was closet-sized, which seemed fitting as it clearly doubled as a closet: there were hooks on the wall, presumably for staff personal items. Beneath the hooks was a small two-shelf standing bookcase that held all manner of surplus office supplies like whiteout, sleeves of staples, and typewriter ribbon (typewriter ribbon?! Between the circulation cards for checkout and the typewriter ribbon, I was starting to think I’d entered some time travel portal). Alongside the office supplies were various cleaning supply spray bottles holding liquids of different colors.

  Emerging from the restroom, I thanked Scott and resumed my post behind my counter and the afternoon progressed. The cogs in the library wheel moved steadily along. Inmates checked out newspapers and magazines and books. Scott came by on her hourly rounds. After 2 p.m., Scott was replaced by the evening officer, Womack. Other officers popped in to say hello and introduce themselves and see how I was doing.

  As I sat at my desk and watched the inmates drift in and out, I realized Kimberly had been right: I saw the same inmates come in, stay for a while, leave, only to return again a short while later.

  One in particular was Andrews, a lanky, young twentysomething who moved with the ease of a gazelle. He looked like one, too: his light skin carrying a slight tawny overtone. Andrews introduced himself during a pocket of calm. He repaired the books, he explained, clearly on a volunteer basis. His job assignment was Education, he was in the GED classes, and that took priority over any other job assignment, so he didn’t have the option of working in the library. Miss Carol, however, the librarian before me, let him volunteer in the library by repairing the books. I’d already seen the state of some of the titles, so if he wanted to tape them back together, I was more than happy to allow him to continue.

  As the hands on the clock made their 360-degree laps, the library started to thin out. After the rush of reading the afternoon newspapers, inmates floated in and out, popping in as they bounced between classes in the Education department or games in the recreation center.

  At 3:30 p.m., I began ushering inmates out of the library, both so I could wrap up and they could all be back to their dorms in time for the 4 p.m. count. The porters were the last to leave, tidying up the law library and newspapers for the evening shift after dinner.

  Washington stopped by the desk on his way out. “You did okay today,” he said, nodding. He pulled the worn blue state-issued hat over his head. “You did okay today.”

  Behind him was Koch. Both of the law porters were on the older side, over sixty at least. Koch had tufts of wild gray hair that grew in all directions around his coke-bottle glasses. In a parallel life, he and Mr. Hooper, the GED teacher, could have been brothers.

  When everything was done, I locked up and headed next door to Education.

  “How was it?” Kimberly asked. She was filing papers in Dr. Harald’s office.

  “Okay,” I replied. I turned my head to read the labels on the files. TAB. ABLE. I recognized the combination of letters as tests that determined which of the Education classes an inmate would be put into. “Tell me about the dogs.”

  “Oh!” She temporarily stopped her filing and turned to look at me. “We get dogs from the Lorain County Humane Society. Inmates
in the Puppy Program are assigned a dog to train, the dog stays with them and then goes back to the humane society who can adopt them out, saying the dog already knows basic commands.”

  “Ah.” Dogs in prison. Welp. That explained that.

  “The dogs are supposed to be trained. That’s, like, the whole point, so if they get out of control you can ask them to leave.” Kimberly turned back to her filing.

  I wandered down the hall. Near the copy machine stood a woman. A brunette, she was about my height and, I guessed, close to my age. She turned at the sound of my footsteps and a smile bloomed against her pink skin. “Are you Jill? I’m Stephanie, one of the recovery counselors.” Stephanie cocked her thumb in a gesture pointing towards the office in the back.

  A gigantic man poked his dark, bald head out of the office. “Steph, you done with your notes?”

  Stephanie pointed to the stack of papers sitting on top of the copier. “Almost.”

  He started to retreat, then stopped when our eyes met. “Kwame,” he said, his mouth extending into a smile. Kwame pointed a finger at me. “You’re the new librarian.” Statement, not a question.

  Before I could ask Kwame what he did, classroom doors opened on the either side of us, and inmates flooded out, followed by their instructors. For Roberta, Nancy, and Mr. Hooper, school—and thus, work—was done for the day. But the library was open late on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, meaning I had to stay for a few more hours to run the late shift.

  On the correctional officer’s desk near the Education restroom was a log similar to the one I had next door. Everyone signed themselves out as they bundled up in their winter coats, ready to face the cold walk up to the entryway.

  CO Womack found me in the group. “I have to go help with count,” he said, “but I’ll be here this evening if you need me.”

  “One last thing,” Kimberly said, wrapping her scarf around her neck. “The yard closes early during Daylight Savings Time. As soon as it starts to get dark, inmate movement stops. That means they can’t leave the library until closing. Watch for the lights out there.” She gestured to the lamp posts, like stadium lights, that dotted the perimeter. “When the library closes for the night, you have to call it in up front so they know inmates are leaving. Count the number of inmates so they know.”