The steady decline in reading is a pattern I’ve noticed over the last 13 years I have been at San Quentin. That made me wonder how much the collection had also changed. And so began a quest to locate the library’s most-read books.

Mass incarceration in California takes its singular shape from the state’s borderlands, its shifting demographics, its drug trade, its gangs and gang culture. And it’s a story that cannot be understood in its fullness unless we highlight just how varied the experience of imprisonment across the state has been, and still can be.