Information Provision and the Carceral State: Race and Reference beyond the Idea of the “Underserved”

ABSTRACT

This article addresses an approach to library services for people who are incarcerated that meets the situated information needs and desires of people within jails and prisons. By creating a flow of information between LIS students and individuals who are incarcerated through a Reference by Mail program, resources available to incarcerated people are increased while students engage in a humanizing and self-reflexive project, with the understanding that the regulation of information within jails and prisons has lasting effects for the life chances of incarcerated people.

KEYWORDS:

• Incarceration
• information access
• LIS education
• racial capitalism
• reference by mail

Notes

¹ This number does not include information on forced detention of immigrant populations, which is notoriously underreported.

² The focus on American systems of policing in this article is intentional. It is undertaken with an awareness that American systems of policing and incarceration are based in international flows historically constructed through the slave trade and colonial extraction, that they have continuous international effects, that the American system of policing has been exported, and that the prison-industrial complex has implications that far exceed the country’s borders (Chavez-Garcia, 2012; Daulatzai, 2012; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015; Márquez & Rana, 2017; Wagner, 2009).

³ The most recent American Library Association (ALA) Diversity Counts survey in 2012 found that 85% of librarians in the United States are white, and overwhelmingly white women (American Library Association, 2012). The Sentencing Project notes that the lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for U.S. residents born in 2001 is 1 in 9 men, 1 in 17 white men, 1 in 3 Black Men, 1 in 6 Latino men (The Sentencing Project, 2017).

⁴ The authors of this paper are cautious of, but not immune to, reproducing the “White lady bountiful” archetype that Schlesselman-Tarango (2016) carefully outlines. The authors recognize that we cannot remove ourselves from embedded systems of race, but that being aware of the tension and moving through the friction is where a more egalitarian information studies practice will emerge.

⁵ Ferguson (2014) notes that there has been a longstanding forensic interest in handwriting, typed copy, and fingerprinting as forms of evidence in criminal cases. Thornton (1998) also discusses this theme in Handwriting in America). Contemporary forensic interests in handwriting are linked to the potential development of predictive policing models and seek to establish an identifiable link between types of criminality and forms of script (Gawda, 2008).