About
Us
The
Prison Book Project is a small, secular group based in
North Hadley in western Massachusetts. We opened our doors
in 1998 for the purpose of providing free reading materials
to the millions of individuals imprisoned in the United
States.
A
partnership with Food For Thought Books in Amherst, Massachusetts
enables us to send books into prisons. Our work space
is currently located at the North Hadley Congregational
Church, but we have shared space with The Performance
Project and First Churches in Northampton in past years.
We
receive approximately 200 letters each month from men
and women in New England and Texas prisons interested
in receiving reading materials. We meet every Sunday from
1pm to 4pm to answer these letters from our inventory
of donated books. Each week we succeed in mailing out
30 to 40 packages, each containing two to four books,
to individual prisoners. We usually run a three- to four-month
backlog of as-yet-to-be-answered letters. Participation
by greater numbers of drop-in individual volunteers and
larger groups interested in one-time volunteer experiences
enables us to reduce this backlog.
In
the past nine years, we have organized and hosted public
events about prison issues, published two newsletters
of prisoner art and writing, attended community service
fairs, been featured in newspaper articles and radio shows,
hosted exhibits of prisoner art, and taught a high school
curriculum on prison issues. Our intentions for all of
the activities in which we participate are to
