The March 15 article on prison libraries raises the question of acquisitions. It seems that the acquisition budgets are very modest. Do prisons have a purchasing budget, or are they at the mercy of donations from the public?
For several years, I organized the Friends of the Montreal Library Book Sale (which, each spring, puts on sale more than 125,000 books pruned from Montreal public libraries).
I remember that at the end of each sale, we gave, to some prisons, several hundreds (if not thousands) of unsold books; the books were chosen by our volunteers based on vague criteria given to us.
It gave us pleasure to give these books to the prisons and we are ready to continue to do so, but I consider that this cannot replace a policy of acquisition and purchase established by those in charge of these prison libraries according to the needs. of their inmates.
To see in video