On libraries, bibliotherapy, and the future of reading at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Resting on a small peninsula in the San Francisco Bay is a 172-year-old penitentiary with a new name. The San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, as it was rebranded by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023, now hopes to return people to society with even stronger chances of not coming back to prison.

Before rehabilitation became so clearly codified in the mission of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), prison libraries were the most likely gateway to success. They are a vital place to learn the law and build knowledge on a variety of subjects. The library is also arguably the best place to get a glimpse into the minds of prisoners. What better way to understand them than to explore what they read?

San Quentin’s dilapidated walls have long held a library where political thinkers, radicals, and revolutionaries once forged and fortified their ideology with books. For decades, this library was stationed in an old brick building on the institution’s upper yard, adjacent to the North Block. Today, it sits inside a $136 million dollar medical facility constructed in 2010. 

Painted near the library entrance is a sign that reads: “Maximum capacity, 38 occupants.” Most mornings, San Quentin’s library is at capacity or over, but little reading takes place. Instead, prisoners congregate there to play games, hold meetings, listen to music, or scroll through their wireless tablets. Those who use the legal library usually consist of the same group of older prisoners. 

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. 

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The San Quentin library is above average for prison. 

Senior librarian Gabriel Loiederman attributes its resources to the prison’s proximity to the Bay Area. He’s visited other facilities and said the more remote prisons are neglected because of their distance from urban areas, and staff positions are hard to fill. San Quentin gets “a lot more assistance,” Loiederman said, which comes in the form of book donations and volunteers. “This library is very privileged,” he added.

The library is also easy for prisoners to access to check out books or take freebies that stand on a cart.

The space is divided into a reading section and a law section. There are 12 tables that seat 27 people. Nine of those tables are reserved for legal research on computers that access Lexis Nexis. It’s not a particularly large space for a prison population of 3,300 incarcerated persons. Because of that, more often than not, the noise level rises.

Behind the library counter are six bookshelves lined up like shelves in grocery store aisles. Four more shelves on a wall in the back sit perpendicular to those in front. With room for only 15,000 titles, the San Quentin library has slowly been shedding less checked-out books for popular ones. Largely graphic novels, urban novels, and the manga genre are made available.

With room for only 15,000 titles, the San Quentin library has slowly been shedding less checked-out books for popular ones. Largely graphic novels, urban novels, and the manga genre are made available.

Also behind the counter, patrons can find resident circulation clerks, like Dante Knight, a 34-year-old Hispanic man who has been incarcerated for eight years. Last year, I explained to Knight that I was doing research to write a story about the most checked-out books at San Quentin in 2023. I asked if he knew or had a list. It did not take him long to locate the information in a computer and print it for me.

In 2023, “Dragon Ball, Vol. 1,” by the late Akira Toriyama, was checked out at San Quentin’s library 43 times, the most of any book that year, according to library records. The second most sought-after book was “Fairy Tail, Volume 1,” by Hiro Mashima. It was checked out 41 times. By contrast, the carts containing books for anyone to take without checking out are stacked with literary fiction. Recently orphaned titles include “Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Brontë and “To Kill A Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee. 

More recently, I stood by the circulation desk, chatting with library clerks George Coles-El and Jarrod Williams. Shaved bald with a graying beard, when Coles-El is not working, the 6-foot African American reads or writes in one of his notebooks. “I’m Mesro, the human sun, and I’m a prolific writer,” the 45-year-old says to introduce himself. Coles-El said he has worked in the library “off and on for the past 10 years.” 

“There’s a lot of political discourse stuff [in the library],” Coles-El said. “We’ve got some really good stuff from the left and the right [books that cover politics from Obama to Trump], but it just doesn’t move.”

“It’s a different time,” said Williams, a 40-year-old Black library worker who looks more like 30.  Williams is short and stocky with an easy-going manner behind the counter. Like Coles-El, he wears his head shaved. 

“The most popular books in here are easy to read,” Williams told me. He said prisoners stray away from classics and that the days of reading literature are all but gone. 

That’s true in prison and on the outside. A representative sample of 26,400 Americans conducted by The American Time Use Survey found that between 2004 and 2023, the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 44%. For women, it was down by 39%.

A Gallup opinion poll found the proportion of Americans who do not read a book in a given year tripled between 1978 and 2014, standing at 17% of Americans in 2022.

“Complex literary fiction is particularly suffering,” journalist Johann Hari wrote in “Stolen Focus,” a deeply researched and reported book on the decline of attention spans. “For the first time in modern history, less than half of Americans read literature for pleasure,” Hari writes. “The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded.”

Williams told me, “It’s all about what can I read to pass the time. The style has changed. It’s not revolutionary.” He said it is a reflection of reading habits on the outside, such as the increase in reading groups like women’s book clubs that focus on romance novels.

As I stood at San Quentin’s library counter for 45 minutes talking to Williams, I watched mostly younger prisoners check out and return graphic novels. Two older prisoners asked for a dictionary. Another asked for “The Makers of Rome” and “The American Heritage Dictionary.”

Another library patron was in search of “Dragon Ball, Vol. 1.” 

“I just like the fight scenes,” he said to Williams.

Victor Torres, 34, a quiet Hispanic man with dark hair and a thin mustache was incarcerated six years ago. He was reading “Inuyasha” from the manga genre when I approached him in the library. 

“They’re about demons,” he said, and reading them is “just to entertain” himself. He told me he watched the animated show on Cartoon Network when he was a kid. “That and ‘Dragon Ball Z,’ fighting the bad guys,” he added.

I asked Torres how many “Inuyasha” books he had read. His answer was “all of them,” volumes I through XXV. Then he showed me a catalog of the library’s manga and graphic novels.

“I read all kinds of books,” he said, naming authors such as James Patterson and Lee Child. “I also read graphic novels.”

That rings true to clerk Williams.

“It’s not about political or revolutionary [movements],” Williams said. “It’s about pleasure.” 

He said during his 12 years of imprisonment he has noticed a change in prisoners’ reading material, and how even the gang culture has shifted to what he called “nonsense.”

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The San Quentin reading experience used to be different. In the 1940s, California established a “bibliotherapy” rehabilitation reading program for prisoners, according to Eric Cummins’, “The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement.”

From 1947 to 1968, the San Quentin library was run by senior librarian Herman Spector, who “joined eagerly in the group therapy effort, conducting goal-directed reading programs, group discussions, special study groups, writing groups, and group forums,” Cummins writes. It was Spector’s job to “select books appropriate for group therapy objectives, to highlight certain passages, and to conduct small group discussions, eliciting personal insights that might foster moral growth and maturation.

By the ’60s and ’70s, California’s prisons experienced a “highly developed” prisoner resistance movement, Cummins writes. By then, prisoners such as Caryl Chessman, Eldridge Cleaver, and George Jackson had moved in a different direction and became political readers, thinkers, and writers. San Quentin is credited for the role it played in the reading and writing program that created the so-called “radical convict ideology” in those decades. Over the years, that thought process changed, but not only in prison

“It’s worse out there,” library clerk Knight said about the culture shift. “Stupidity is more coddled on the outside. People are losing interest in bettering themselves, learning, and being productive in society.”

While I spoke with Knight, a prisoner walked up to the counter and requested “Geology for Dummies,” but it was checked out and never returned. “Who would do that?” Knight asked aloud, not expecting an answer. Then he laughed and said, “Probably someone like me.” 

Law books are another option. “I read whatever I have to read, to know my rights,” Knight said.

Interestingly enough, the most checked out books in 2023, that came in third and fourth place, were “Algebra I for Dummies” and “Trigonometry for Dummies,” both written by Mary Jane Sterling. I asked Williams about the math books on the list. He said one person on Death Row checked out those two books repeatedly.

To encourage wider reading, Loiederman runs a monthly book club inside, in addition to his duties as librarian. The last two books read were novels — “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey and “Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. 

Loiederman said the book club is important for two main reasons: “It’s a civil forum” and “it offers people an opportunity to read stuff that’s recently published, of note.”

“The books touch on a lot of things that are in vogue or that society is in touch with,” he added. The club consists of 10 prisoners but is open to any interested readers.

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Historically, prison administrations in the CDCR have gone through painstaking efforts to control their wards’ ideology through its form of rehabilitation, including regulation listed in CCR Title 15, Section 3134.1. For that reason, books believed to be subversive, lacking social redeeming value, or “penological interest,” are legally banned by prison regulations. The practice, in some instances, is viewed as censorship because it obstructs prisoners’ ability to obtain certain books and knowledge.

But there still are some die-hard, ambitious readers here.

“When I came to prison, my attitude was, ‘Now I have the time to read the books that I never took the time to read,’” said Stu Ross, a 58-year-old white prisoner from Southern California. He arrived in prison in 1992. “The first classic that I wanted to read was ‘Lolita.’ I’m not the audience for urban novels.”

Ross was perusing the book “Fair Game” by Valerie Plame Wilson, when I spoke with him. He said Jonathan Franzen is an author he enjoys reading. “’The Corrections’… is on my desert island list.” Ross said he would rather not read books chosen by Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

Todd Winkler, 57,  pays little attention to mainstream media, book clubs, and bestseller lists. “They’re not taste makers,” he said. Winkler, a white Air Force Academy graduate who holds a bachelor’s degree, is an anomaly by prison standards. Winkler’s reading preferences speak not only to his education but also his age. “My favorite genre is speculative fiction, specifically dystopian novels,” he added. 

I spoke to Winkler as he browsed through discarded books on a cart in the library, titles such as “The Best American Short Stories 1963,” “Great American Short Stories,” “Short Story Master Pieces,” and “Anansi Boys,” by Neil Gaiman. Winkler said, “I like short stories because you can consume them in one or two sittings.” Classic literature seems to be the reading choice of older prisoners.

Not surprisingly, Winkler has read “1984” and “Animal Farm,” by George Orwell; “The Handmaid’s Tale,” by Margaret Atwood; “Fahrenheit 451,” by Ray Bradbury; and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed.”

I have to wonder if the genre of books prisoners read today indicates they have moved beyond the politics of incarceration.

Winkler and I share an interest in challenging reading material. Two days after I arrived at San Quentin in 2011, I inquired about books written by Noam Chomsky and was given a printed list of about 30 titles. Up to that point, I’d only read two books written by Chomsky, so I checked out his “Deterring Democracy” and “Manufacturing Consent,” co-authored with Edward S. Herman.

Many of those Chomsky titles from 2011 are no longer available in San Quentin’s library. They’ve been replaced by the growing demand for graphic novels, urban novels, the manga genre, and some other surprises. “The most requested poetry volumes are love poems,” book columnist Barbara Lane wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about San Quentin’s library in 2022. “Inmates use [the poems] to write letters to their sweethearts.”

As the population continues to shift and decline in California’s prisons, there is seemingly little interest in books that advocate resistance to the repression in America. I have to wonder if the genre of books prisoners read today indicates they have moved beyond the politics of incarceration.

The general consensus on what San Quentin prisoners read, and why, mirrors that of outside society. They immerse themselves in authors’ words for various reasons, entertainment being the most common. They’re stimulated by fantasy situations as opposed to the real-life experiences of others. The fact they read at all is probably a good thing because worse can happen in a prison.

“I strongly believe that books can play a big part in rehabilitation,” Lane wrote.

During my 28-plus years of incarceration, I have read 452 books. Bored, my first was “A Time to Kill,” by John Grisham, which I read in county jail. About a month ago, I read “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach. In 1970, when I was a child, my parents took me to see the movie adaptation. I didn’t understand it. Reading the book, coupled with my personal growth, made its theme clear. 

Maybe Lane and Spector were right about rehabilitation and bibliotherapy, but what that will actually look like in the coming years is — like much of Winkler’s favorite fiction — speculative.

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Kevin D. Sawyer writes from San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, San Quentin, California. Sawyer serves as the editor-in-chief of the incarcerated-run newspaper San Quentin News.