“Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself.”
– Roxane Gay
The list of items you can send to someone who is incarcerated is pretty short. It usually includes letters, money, sometimes cards and photographs, sometimes pre-approved care packages from vendors, and books. But navigating the myriad rules and regulations around sending books can be complicated. Restrictions vary from state to state and sometimes even prison to prison. Here’s our guide to maximizing your chances of getting reading material to your friend or loved one inside.
- Know what you can and can’t send. You can usually send books and magazines, as long as they come directly from the publisher or a large, established bookseller. This means the books must be shipped new and unopened from someone like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You cannot buy books yourself and mail them from your home or they will be rejected.
- There are some restrictions around size and types of material that prisons will accept. Some prisons won’t accept anything that is spiral-bound. Some will not allow hardback books, only paperback. Some places will allow both hardback and paperback, but only if they are within a certain size. For instance, Arkansas allows books that are no larger than 9×11 inches and 3 pounds or less. For hardback books, they can only be 2 inches in depth, and for paperback they can be 4 inches thick. These rules may vary by prison, so it’s best to double check before sending anything.
- There are limits to how many items you can send in one package, or how many books people can receive in a month. A safe bet is to not send more than 3 at a time.
- Be sure to think about the content of whatever you are sending. Certain topics are easy to guess as off-limits: prisons won’t accept anything explicit or that promotes violence or drug use, so no subscriptions to High Times or Playboy magazines. But some items that have been rejected might surprise you. This article from The Marshall Project outlines some of the books Arizona prisons rejected and why. Included in them are “The Big Book of Solitaire” (rejected because it promotes gambling) and Arizona Highways magazine, (rejected because it “depicts, encourages or describes methods of escape and/or eluding capture, or contains blueprints, drawings, road maps of Arizona [or] areas contiguous to Arizona”).
You can see if your state is in this database of banned books in prison, but most of them are not. You can always call the prison and ask, or if you can’t find any information, try sending it from Amazon. If your book gets rejected and sent back to them, Amazon will refund your purchase. - Be sure you provide information for the shipper to address your book properly. You should be sure to include:
•The person’s full name and ID number
•The PO box or regular mailing address
•The facility name - Some prisons may only accept books that are shipped via USPS. Or some of them may not accept Amazon. Again, it’s best to try to find out what the regulations are at the prison you are hoping to send something to.
- So how do you find the rules at these prisons? There’s a couple options. The first is to try to find them online. You can check your state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) site for any information about mail policies. In case you missed our article “How to Write to Someone Who is Incarcerated,” here’s an overview of how to find the DOC website:
To find the right site, you can simply search the name of your state and “Department of Corrections”, and it should bring up your state’s appropriate website. All states have a Department of Corrections website that includes an inmate roster and search function. States may call their site something different from DOC, such as Texas Department of Criminal Justice or Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety: Corrections Division, but they serve the same function. Look for a website that has a .gov ending, that should be the right one. Once you’ve found your state’s site, look around for a search feature. There should be one on all these sites. You can try searching for things like “mail a book” or “mail policies” or “write an inmate.” Those may bring up some links to some of the published policies.
The other option is to call the prison directly. Every prison has a mail room, and you can usually call the facility and ask to speak with someone in the mail room, who can then answer your questions. While this involves finding the phone number for the facility, this may be the best way to get the answers for specific prisons. You can usually find the main phone lines for facilities on your state’s DOC site.We realize this overview still leaves a lot up in the air; it really does come down to what each state and facility allows. A safe bet if you still aren’t sure if your book will be accepted is to send it with Amazon. If the prison rejects it, the book will simply get sent back and Amazon will refund your money.
Featured photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash