Rose City Book Pub hosted Books Through Bars January 27th for their awareness- raising event, where members of the organization read several dozen letters from adults in custody.
We’re glad to have had the opportunity to interview Deanna Cintas, President of Portland Books Through Bars.
Prose City (PC): Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got involved with Books Through Bars? What inspired you to start volunteering with this organization?
Cintas: I’ve lived in Oregon off and on since 1997, and it’s now the state I’ve lived in the longest. I moved back in 2006 and have lived in Portland consistently since then. I became vegan in 2007 and started meeting fellow vegans during that time, including a friend, Maren, who was very involved in prison reform and education. This has always been an interest of mine, and it might sound kind of silly, but ever since watching Shawshank Redemption—the older man who was released and had no community or support and ended up just kind of giving up as a result…it made me realize that even though this is a film, this has to happen all the time. It’s really sad that someone who is finally released doesn’t have community or support to start a new life. So when I met Maren, she was involved in all these things, held film screenings, and conversational gatherings. I went to several of those and thought, “Okay, cool, it’s nice to know there are other folks who are into this.” I have been pretty active in volunteering my entire life and had volunteered a handful of times through Hands on Portland/United Way. I think I must have gone on their website at some point and found out about Portland Books to Prisoners, now Portland Books Through Bars. My mom was actually in town the first time I volunteered, when we were in the old In Other Words [feminist bookstore] space on Killingsworth. That was probably 8 or 9 years ago, so it’s been a while, and I just kept volunteering. And then, being the person I am, I just got more and more involved and am now the president of the organization.
PC: Portland Books Through Bars was formerly operating under the name “Books to Prisoners.” Can you share a bit about how the name change came about? What is the reason the organization uses the phrasing “adults in custody” as opposed to prisoners or inmates?
Cintas: Our core committee decided to become a 501(c)(3), and when you do, you have to give your name, your mission, and all that. And so, even though there are other Books to Prisoners chapters across the country, including Seattle, where we receive the majority of our [book request] letters, there are also various Books Through Bars chapters. We decided to remove the word “prisoners” from the name because of the negative connotation associated with it. We changed our language on how we refer to folks behind bars and use phrases like “adults in custody” or “incarcerated people” because “prisoner” is just dehumanizing in a lot of ways. So when we decided to become a 501(c)(3), we talked about it, let Seattle know that we still want to partner with them, but that we were planning to change our name. We have a national email listserv, as well, so we updated everybody else that way once it became official. But yeah, it was an internal decision based on deciding to pursue the 501(c)(3) status, so we just took the time to reevaluate all those things.
PC: What has been your most rewarding experience volunteering with Books Through Bars? Or can you share what motivates you, what inspires you about doing this work?
Cintas: There are a few things I can touch on. One in particular is just our demand among people that want to volunteer with us. It’s not hard for us to find at least a handful of volunteers every week, and very often we have a waitlist each week. We activate our work sessions [online] three months in advance, and they fill up quickly. We often have first-time volunteers who say things like, “I’ve been trying for two months to get a spot.”
With other volunteer work I do, it’s not always easy to find volunteers, or volunteers that will come back over and over again, and that we as a board can entrust to oversee a session if we need to have a quick meeting or to delegate to help with certain projects within the organization. So that’s been really awesome with Books Through Bars because that’s a huge part of keeping us sustainable and moving.
And then the people we serve—I mean, the letters we get are varied because we serve all types of people serving all different lengths of time, but we often get lots of letters full of gratitude or saying, “I heard about this through a cellmate. I was hoping that maybe I could get a book, too.” Something that’s very heartwarming, especially if you have any understanding of the prison industrial complex, is that it is a business in a lot of ways. Everything is commodified and costs money, and a lot of it is getting digitized now too and coming at a cost to those incarcerated. But when they’re working jobs inside, they get paid very little, and we often get letters where people have given us three stamps or a check for like two dollars. So the fact that they’re taking their commissary money and giving it to us, even if we don’t really use those things—like we don’t use physical stamps—it’s so heartwarming and motivating to know that what we’re doing is having a lasting impact and that the very little they’re making while behind bars, they’re giving to us to continue our work. So it’s a lot of little things that just… we’re serving individuals, we hear their stories, we see the impacts. And we’ve had formerly incarcerated people volunteer with us. Or people that are collecting hours, maybe instead of serving time, like community service hours. It was actually Alex, a long-time volunteer and I think one of the original Portland chapter founders, who worked with Hands On Portland to get the volunteer application part removed where it asks, “Do you have a criminal history?” or something like that, because we didn’t want to be discriminating against the people we’re serving. We’re hoping for the day where someone we’ve provided books to will come and volunteer at our chapter, and it really comes full circle.
PC: Could you talk us through the process of how books are selected and sent to adults in custody and how you ensure that the books that you do send are relevant and meaningful to those who are receiving them?
Cintas: The way our program works, which is different from some of the other chapters in the country, is that people who are incarcerated are writing to us directly—either to our PO box or to the Seattle chapter, which sends us about 100-200 letters per month. So we’re reading each individual letter to see what they’re asking for. We have a cowbell in our volunteer space and if someone finds a perfect match, we ring the cowbell. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, and we have it in our library, it’s very exciting. We try to keep things fun as well, and some of the letters are pretty general and broad or “Hey, I just heard about this program, can you tell me what you have in your inventory?” Our inventory is always changing, so we will not be able to ever really document that. But in those cases, we’ll just pick two books from our library shelf, send them to that person with a little note that says “Just let us know what you’d like to read, here’s a couple to start with,” so we are trying to match as close as possible to what they’re asking for. This stack right here (shown on video via zoom)—these are the 2023 letters that we consider special requests. I just went to Powell’s yesterday and bought four special request books using a couple of Powell’s gift cards that people had given us. I’ll just give you an example of these special requests. This person wants books or magazines on Harley motorcycles. This person wants books on tiny houses and electric bass guitar. This one wants a Swahili-English Dictionary. We have a small library and limited space, and it’s all just what people are donating to us. So we’ll do our best to find a match, but in the cases where it’s very specific and maybe that’s all they ask for, we’ll use money that we raise by selling books back to Powell’s or through gift cards to buy them what they want. So it’s kind of a mix of exact matches of what we might have, or a book that is close, or another book by the author they asked for. And if it’s really specific with no other options, then that goes into this pile. Unfortunately, those have to wait longer because we’re limited with our funds and we need to prioritize the 2023 requests before we start on the 2024 requests.
We try to get them what they want – within reason. But there are some things that people ask for that are very expensive, like legal books or trade books. We try to partner with lawyers to get law dictionaries, which are very common requests. And then some people ask for things we just know are not going to be allowed, because they contain nudity or it’s a little too risqué. We are paying $100 – $200 per week for postage, and the Seattle Chapter pays for anything that is rejected, so we want to ensure books are not going to get rejected.
PC: What are the biggest challenges you face in this work?
Cintas: I would probably say the relatively constant changing of rules and regulations at [prison] facilities. There’s no national standard of what’s okay and what’s not okay. Some places don’t accept hardcovers. We have had rejections because magazines were too old, like a National Geographic was too old. We’ve had a rejection because there was a dead spider in a book. And so with a lot of facilities and with every warden change, there might be a change in what’s allowed, and we’re trying to keep up with that. And of course, there’s been a few book bans in recent history too. Usually, as a coalition, of the 40 chapters across the country, we’ll do an activism and outreach campaign to try and overturn some of those blanket state laws that might be really harmful policy. So that’s really challenging because it is always changing, so it’s hard to figure out “Oh, why is this rejected all of a sudden, was there a change in the Department of Justice or something?” And it is hard to, if you follow groups like the Innocence Project, read the letters we get from people who are defending themselves. They’re trying to prove their innocence and they’re incarcerated, and you just hope that they’ll get the support and advocacy they need, especially if they are innocent because so many people never make it out who were later proved innocent of crimes they were accused of and killed for. It is hard that there are people that we serve that are on death row, serving life sentences.
And we’ll share their websites or if they wrote a book or have a link to the art they do, we want to share that with the world, on our social media. But yeah, that can be really challenging too because a lot of people really open up about what’s going on and what they’re dealing with and, you know, it’s a very messed up, broken, harmful system.
Right now we are in a pretty good place financially. But when I first started volunteering, we would often not only run out of letters, but we would run out of money too. And so that was challenging the first year or so I was volunteering, and I think the changes that we made to become more known in the city and doing a stronger partnership with Hands on Portland helped. A friend of mine, Emilly Prado, who wrote articles for Portland Mercury, did a couple of features on us under her “From Slacktivism to Activism” feature. Those really helped get the word out. We have a couple supporters who give us $5 – $10 dollars each month and have for the last few years and that covers the cost of sending a package, you know. Every little bit helps, and it’s nice to not have that be a stressor like it was earlier on.
PC: Can you share a story of a triumph or a particularly successful moment in your time with the organization?
Cintas: I think the biggest thing for us as an organization is just having this core board/committee with specific roles who are also good at communicating, are reliable, etc. We’ve applied for many grants in the past, but there aren’t many available for what we do. The occasional $5,000 grant that we do get from a local organization or even a donation, it’s pretty significant because that’s basically a year of our overhead costs. We sometimes spend $800 a month on postage. There have been some weeks where we spend $200 a week. On average it’s probably $100 dollars a week, but it’s nice to have a cushion. As a board we’ve decided what our threshold is for when we need to focus on fundraising and get the balance back up. So we have a strategy and a plan, although we always want to have fundraisers and had one towards the end of April at Tiny Moreso that brought in $266 for us. We especially want that cushion, so we’re not running out of money in the middle of a weekly session. So yeah, there’s not any one particular triumph, but I just feel like we’re in a good place right now both at a leadership level and financial level.
PC: Can you share some of the impacts Books Through Bars has on the folks you serve? And How does Books Through Bars contribute to awareness or changes in attitude about issues within the prison system?
Cintas: For some of the people we serve, English may not be their first language or they have beginner reading skills , so we keep some kind of chapter and lower elementary books on hand. Our dictionaries tend to be the one thing that we always need, they get asked for a lot, believe it or not. The literacy levels of folks are different and we’ve had several people wanting to learn sign language as well. You can see varied interests – intellectual collegiate interest, different hobby interests, but also developing literacy and reading language skills. Being able to give these things for free at no cost to that person requesting them is huge. Especially when everything usually behind bars costs money that they have to work for, and like I said earlier, they don’t make a lot of money doing the work they do.
In terms of contributing to awareness, I kind of touched on that already, but that’s mainly when something’s happening statewide then as a coalition of chapters we’ll post things on our social media accounts like sharing links to articles or calls to action. We typically post that kind of stuff off on our Facebook page to bring awareness to what’s going on both here in the Pacific Northwest, but also across the country.
The changes and attitudes—it’s interesting because we’ve had prison librarians reach out to us directly—or like, a sheriff who runs a jail, to ask if we can send a box of books. There are definitely people that are staff who see the value and want help in providing reading material to people and that’s awesome. We are more than happy to do that. Especially if writing letters to us directly might not be possible for people, if we can do something that’s more sustainable and create a sort of library in a facility, that’s huge. I don’t know if that’s a change or if that’s always been that way but it is nice to see that there are people working within the system that see the value and want to be able to provide that.
PC: What future hopes do you have for Books through Bars?
Cintas: We’re in a good place right now with our core committee. I think if we can just keep organized and communicate and have money in the bank—that’s where we want to be. The Seattle chapter, I think, meets twice a week and has a part-time paid staff person and I don’t know if we’d ever want to get that big. If we did, we would probably need a larger committee. But I think just maintaining where we’re at right now would be awesome and I think everybody else on the board would agree with that too.
PC: For someone interested in supporting Books through Bars, what would be your advice on how to get involved or how to support?
Cintas: To volunteer, go to the Hands On Portland website, create an account and then search for opportunities. I think you can search by the keyword, “books” to find our opportunities and sign up for sessions. If you work at a company or are part of a school group and you want to have your own group volunteer session on a Tuesday night just give us a few months notice – you can email us or message us on Facebook or Instagram. Our email is info@pdxbooks.org. We are always willing to accept monetary donations and most people do that via Venmo or PayPal. For book donations, reach out to us because we are limited on storage and space so we like to coordinate with people based on how many books they have, and what kind they have, and we can give a tax donation receipt if the person wants.
PC: Do you want to share anything from your personal insights about how your involvement in this organization has influenced your perspective on the prison system or incarceration?
Cintas: It hasn’t really changed my perspective—I still think it’s a broken system that does more harm than good. Anything to reduce recidivism is good and that’s partially why we exist. There are some facilities that are providing education and personal development to people which is super important. There are a lot more therapy programs with animals for instance like partnering with animal shelters that I think are good. And to see the numbers and individual names and stories is pretty interesting because when you watch a film or something and you see the numbers of people that are incarcerated it is easy to be a bit more detached from the human element. But when you’re reading a letter from one of those people, who is maybe 20 years in or something, it’s pretty eye opening. One of my cousins was just released a couple years ago after serving a ten year sentence for drugs and weapons. Being in touch with him and talking to him directly about his experience – being transferred, being in the hole, and at one facility he was at he was able to work on his college degree, was interesting. Since he’s been released he seems to have gotten a good job, and he lives near his sister so he has support. That was a really eye opening experience because before that I didn’t know anybody that had been incarcerated for a significant amount of time. Certainly not in that kind of medium-high security type of place, and it was in Texas, which has one of the highest rates of incarceration, and they have the death penalty too. That personal connection has been important and a lot of our core volunteers have either been to jail or know someone that has so many of us have some sort of direct connection or history there.
PC: Closing thoughts for our readers?
Cintas: Thanks for reading this far! We love to meet more people and show them what we do. Definitely follow us on social media, Instagram and Facebook, to learn about what we’re up to. If you want to volunteer, we’d love to see you! We table at the annual Juneteenth event and sometimes at PCC when they do community engagement events. We’ve done presentations for the Oregon Library Association as well. If you ever want us to present or you have an event coming up that you think we would be good fit for, please reach out.
