Our Story: Fifty Years of Books Behind Bars

Long before the Prison Library Project found its home in Claremont, the movement to get books into the hands of incarcerated people was already taking shape across the country. In the early 1970s, a series of landmark lawsuits brought by political prisoner Martin Sostre challenged the censorship policies that had long restricted prison reading material to little more than religious texts. Sostre's victories cracked open a door — and volunteers across the country began sending books to incarcerated readers.

The Prison Library Project was one of them. Founded in 1973 in Durham, North Carolina, through the efforts of Ram Dass and Bo Lozoff, it was part of a growing national movement built on a simple belief: that books matter, and that incarceration shouldn't mean the end of learning, curiosity, or connection to the world outside.

When the original team completed their work, a group of Claremont volunteers stepped forward to carry it on. In 1985, founding director Rick Moore and those volunteers gave the Prison Library Project a new home in Claremont.

In the decades since, we've sent hundreds of thousands of books to people in prisons, jails, and detention centers across the United States — and quite possibly more than a million, though in the early years we were too busy sending books to count them. Today we ship more than 25,000 books a year. Many of the requests we fill are for titles that friends and family aren't allowed to send. We fill the gaps that the system leaves open.

It has never been simple work. Censorship policies shift constantly and arbitrarily. Books have been rejected for depicting knots, for showing images of currency, for containing panels in graphic novels. A growing number of states are now attempting to replace physical books entirely with prison-issued tablets — closed networks, pay-per-minute content, and catalogs shaped by the same administrators who decide what ideas incarcerated people are allowed to encounter. We believe that's wrong, and we keep sending books anyway.

The Claremont Forum has grown around the Prison Library Project over the past forty years. We run the Claremont Farmers & Artisans Market every Sunday in the heart of the Claremont Village, a nonprofit marketplace where every purchase supports our mission. Our bookshop at the historic Claremont Packing House is both a community gathering place and the operational hub of the PLP — where volunteers sort donations, pack shipments, and keep the work moving. And this spring, we're opening The Branch, a new space at 107 Harvard Ave dedicated to art, community, and continued growth.

But through all of it, the Prison Library Project remains at our heart. It's where we started, and it's why we're here.

Books change lives. We've seen it in fifty years of letters from people who had nothing but time and found, in a donated paperback, something that mattered.