In the federal prison system, all inmates are required to hold a job. Unfortunately, on any given day, at most prisons, the number of able-bodied inmates outnumbers, often greatly, the actual number of jobs available. As a result, many of my fellow prisoners are “employed” only on paper. Now, I am originally from Chicago, a pioneer in the field of “no-show” jobs, so this doesn’t shock me.

The scarcity of any real employment makes me value the fact that, as of about ten minutes ago, I just scored a gig, an honest-to-goodness, “have to actually show up and do something” kind of gig, and I could not be happier. Matter of fact, working in a library, even one located in a maximum-security federal penitentiary, is a dream come true – it’s a job I’d do for free, and considering I’ll be paid twelve cents an hour, I pretty much am.

Provided that I have unfettered access, I can and often do read at least twenty books a month. Much like anyone else who finds themselves on the wrong side of a locked door, I find myself with a lot of empty hours to fill, and reading is my preferred way to fill them. I was an avid reader long before becoming a failure at most aspects of life. As the only child of a single mother who was often working multiple jobs to make ends meet, the town library was for me, from the age of six to the age of fourteen, a babysitter. My mother was nothing if not practical, and saw the Yorkville Public Library as free childcare. I was routinely dropped at the library’s entrance at 8:00 a.m., Monday through Friday, and left to my own devices until late afternoon.

Today, I’m sure that conduct would earn the offending parent, at the least, a visit from Child and Family Services, but to me, it was heaven. And, while our community’s library was by no means the largest or most impressive of the roughly 17,000 public libraries in the United States, it was, to me, the Library of Alexandria. This was pre-internet, so books and the libraries that held them were the only game in town as far as one’s information needs went.

People have always found solace in libraries. During the Great Depression, the number of library patrons nearly doubled, and circulation went up almost 60 percent. And the appeal of the library knows no bounds related to wealth or class either. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie was so stung by the fact that once, as a small child, he was denied access to a library for not being able to afford its subscription fee that, after making his fortune and dedicating one-third of it to philanthropy, he launched a library-building program. Carnegie’s program ended up building 1,700 libraries, many of which still stand today.

In 1949, UNESCO published a “Public Library Manifesto,” designed to spur the replication of America’s public library system worldwide. It described the public library as “a living force for popular education and for the growth of international understanding, and thereby for the promotion of peace.” “ It also saw libraries as essential for democracy: “Citizens of a democracy have need of such opportunities for self-education at all times. The complexity and instability of life today make the need an urgent one.” In the United States, libraries outnumber McDonald’s. Who would’ve thought that the hunger for a Big Mac would be topped by a hunger for knowledge? Maybe there is still hope for humanity.

And prisoners are no different. Many of us have done some pretty dumb things. All that aside, most of us crave knowledge. Being incarcerated means getting used to having things taken away, not having choices and having very little hand in decision-making. A good book can teach you, a good book can enlighten you. Any book, even a bad one, can make you think, and thoughts are about the only thing that the warden can’t figure out how to lock up. When I read, be it a novel or a work of nonfiction, it gets me out of my cell for a while. My body may be sitting on a cold, steel bunk in a six-foot-by-nine-foot concrete box, but my mind is floating down the Mississippi with Huck Finn, hurtling toward the moon with the first astronauts in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff or waiting for the waters to recede with Noah in the Ark. It’s a word most prisoners don’t like to say out loud in here, but books are an escape.

So, to find myself being paid, even in pennies, to be the guardian of the prison’s literary wealth is exciting. But, like so much behind these walls, excitement is soon beat down by reality, and our library is, plainly put, trash. At last count, there were maybe three hundred books. Of that amount, a little more than half are in Spanish. It seems prisons are no different from other institution – budgets are always tight and programs involving education and personal enrichment are the first to suffer. Simple cures to glaring problems end up buried beneath so much bureaucratic red tape that the best of intentions often disappear in the wringing of hands and unprintable oaths muttered to nobody in particular.

Back when I was merely a patron of our prison library, I took it upon myself to increase its inventory. At my own expense I wrote a half-dozen publishers, thinking that surely at least a few of them would have some excess inventory they could donate. At the same time, the editor of a popular sports writing anthology was advising me on a piece I wrote about the prison’s flag football league, so I tried to enlist his help as well. In the end, three of the publishers offered up books by the box full, and the editor of the sports anthology offered up a decade’s worth of volumes.

I was proud of myself and couldn’t wait to tell the Supervisor of Education what I’d managed to pull off. I found myself daydreaming of all the new titles I’d have access to. Prisons are built to shatter dreams, though, and this was no different. When I finally met with her she looked at me and said: “We don’t accept donated books.”

“Excuse me,” I asked, “why is that?”

“We don’t have the manpower to inspect them.”

“For what?”

“Drugs … other contraband”

“But they’re coming from a publisher.”

She gave me a blank stare. Then, with a sigh that was clearly meant to let me know she didn’t want to explain further, she went on reluctantly. While donations were verboten, perhaps I could direct any interested publishers to a particular .gov website that would allow them to register as “authorized vendors” and, in turn, allow them to sell their wares to the prison. She then proceeded to inform me that, due to budget cuts, there would be no room in any foreseeable future budget for new book purchases. Truth be told, I’m just as confused by this puzzling double-edged sword as you are. I guess I will have to be content guarding the three hundred books that do call our little library home.

Were prisoners not the industrious and adaptable sort we are, our story would end here, with me re-reading the limited bit of literature the prison provides access to. But no – enter the Library of Convicts. Since the draw of the book is powerful and the human race holds the idea of the library sacred, people are committed to thinking outside the box to fulfill a community’s literary needs. In 1936, the Work Progress Administration deployed a Pack Horse Librarian Unit to deliver books and periodicals throughout the mountain regions of Kentucky, a service that, up until it lost its funding in 1943, routinely delivered upward of 3,500 books and 8,000 magazines a month!

In 1956, the federal Library Services Act funded almost three hundred bookmobiles to serve rural communities. When it comes to books and library services, “where there’s a will, there’s a way” is the order of the day. Kenya has a camel-powered bookmobile, Beijing has book vending machines, Norway has a “book boat,” and Colombia has a biblioburro, a donkey-drawn cart which delivers books, printed materials, and internet/electronic communications access. In one province of Peru, there is no building for the library, so seven hundred of the region’s farmers each house a section of the “library” in their home.

But the free-world trend we’ve modeled the Library of Convicts on comes courtesy of the Little Free Libraries Organization, a nonprofit that currently boasts over sixty thousand branches in at least eighty countries. Each of these free libraries is nothing more than a wooden cabinet about twice the size of a birdhouse, operating on a “take one, leave one” honor-system exchange program. Out there in The Real World, Little Free Libraries are set up and run by any individual who is willing to put up one of the cabinets and stock it with second-hand books.

In here, each branch of the Library of Convicts is housed in an inmate’s cell. The inventory is provided by those prisoners lucky enough to still have some manner of support system left on the outside. Prisoners are allowed to receive up to five books at a time in the mail, provided they come from a publisher or bookseller. It’s not a perfect system, but it works – those with people who still care enough to send them books have them do so and, once they’ve read them, they put them into circulation within the cellblock. Currently, in my housing unit, we have three cells that constitute our library, and for a bunch of criminals, from a wide swath of backgrounds, we’ve got a pretty smooth operation going, with each cell housing a different genre: nonfiction, periodicals, and fiction, which is currently housed in my cell.

Maybe it’s just me, but being surrounded by books, no matter the subject, no matter the author, helps. I’ll never meet James Patterson, Lee Child, Stephen King, or any of the other authors whose words help take me out over these prison walls, but I owe them all a debt of gratitude. Long live the magic of the book!