Here we continue our journey on looking into the perspectives of retired prison librarians. We previously looked at Frances Saniford and Glennor Shirley. Our final retired librarian we will look at is Brenda Vogel.
Brenda Vogel, famous in the prison library world for Down for the Count: A Prison Library Handbook and The Prison Library Primer: A Program for the Twenty-First Century, was the coordinator of Maryland Correctional Education Libraries for 26 years.
Vogel calls the prison library “[a] curious mismatch, a triumph of good over evil, when it works” (xiii).
In “A Retired Prison Librarian’s Dream,” Vogel tells us that she still dreams about prison libraries, [l]ike a cigarette smoker who quits, not because you want to but because it’s time, you never get it out of your head” (xi).
In this piece, I like Vogel’s perspective on highly stolen books, partly because most of the dialogue is either to not stock the highly thefted books anymore or that it happens, so get over it:
Did you ever think of buying multiple copies of them so reading them wouldn’t be exclusive? So their value in the ‘marketplace’ would go down? [….] What if you had a procedure that would keep books from being stolen – like random shake-down of patrons by a CO as they left the library? The officer can check to see if the book is date-stamped. (xii)
Vogel offers a piece of advise before readers move from her retired librarians’ dream into her book, The Prison Library Primer:
And it only works under the heroic leadership of a librarian who is passionate, imaginative, cunning, conniving, creative, and convincing, a librarian who knows the course and stays the course and who keeps the library true to form in sight of the madness, corruption, and cynicism of the environment. (xiii)
Source:
Vogel, Brenda. The Prison Library Primer: A Program for the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009.
- You can find a large portion of this book on Google Books.
Exploring Prison Librarianship 