New Quick Reads — Jail and Prison Library Service

In the fourth installment from PLA’s “Quick Reads for Busy Librarians” series, Nicholas Higgins, director of outreach services at the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Public Library, shares wisdom gleaned from years of experience providing library service to incarcerated persons. But Higgins doesn’t just provide nuts and bolts information, he also considers the shortcomings of the American Criminal Justice system including embedded racism and harsh sentencing laws that have led to statistics like one in fifteen black men over the age of eighteen is incarcerated in this country. Higgins provides all this background as a framework in the hopes that readers will become more conscious of how they think and talk about prisons and prisoners.