Every Thursday and Sunday evening, a dozen volunteers file into the back room of Vesper, a community space in East Austin. In the workroom-turned-library, there is a small kitchen, bright overhead lighting, and hundreds of books and magazines stacked every which way on floor-to-ceiling shelves that line the walls. Each person plucks a handwritten letter from a neat stack on the folding table in the center of the room. The letter, written by a Texas prisoner, contains a request for three books, sometimes accompanied by details about daily incarcerated life. Then they search the stocked shelves for books that fit the person’s genre or author preferences. They write a return letter, assemble the package, and pass it off to “quality control”—the lead volunteers who check and seal the package, before it gets mailed to the inmate’s prison.
These volunteers fuel the nonprofit that is Inside Books Project, which sends around 40,000 free books per year to incarcerated men and women in correctional facilities around the state. In 1999, Dave Martinez, who had previously developed the Prisoners Literature Project in San Francisco, moved to Austin to start a Texas-based prison book project, working with a handful of other activists in the area to get the organization off the ground.
