Five volunteers at the Grassroots House in Berkeley sit around a wooden table topped with a row of papers, envelopes, a scale and a folder stuffed with documents. All are young, ranging from high school age to mid-20s, and focused on their individual tasks. The tiny room is surrounded by wall-to-wall books, floor to ceiling, with space only for a door, a window, and an entrance to another room.

The books are separated into logical sections, just like a bookstore. On Writing Well by William Zinsser stands out in the writing section. There are sections for dictionaries, magazines (political, literary, and music), ethnic studies, legal studies, fiction and more.

The volunteers weigh the books on the scale, and question each other. They quietly read letters from around the country. Some are requests and others are responses to what these volunteers have already done for people in jail. The latter batch of letters is kept in a black binder on a shelf for future reference. Among the others is one that reads:

“Hello Friend,
It was my honor to have received great books. You or your staff so graciously sent me. You are all generous in deed and compassionate at heart. Good people like you, give imprisoned people like me, hope for a kinder and much gentler nation. Please keep me on your mailing. I am so inspired and have gained an enlargement of knowledge from the various books you blessed me with. I thank you or your staff, and I am deeply grateful.
May God bless you and yours, and all that you set your hand, heart and mind to.”

Prisoners in America are denied the simple luxury of receiving books from private individuals. This is due in part to fear of smuggling contraband, such as drugs or weapons, in with the books. And prison libraries are often not well stocked. If prisoners want books they must be sent through established groups or bookstores. But large chains, such Barnes and Noble, are not likely to send out many books to inmates. The Prisoner’s Literature Project exists to help this neglected segment of the American population. They work together with Bound Together Books in San Francisco to provide books that inmates so desperately need.

The Prisoner’s Literature Project is a Bay Area based volunteer group that responds to letters with free books and literature to convicts throughout the country. They are non-hierarchical; they do not operate under an official banner of non-profit organizations or governmentally recognized charters. They believe literature is a right, not just a privilege.

“It’s not even really an organization. It’s just a bunch of people who do their bit,” says Bruno Ruhland, a 53-year-old employee of Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue.

Why do these people spend so much time sending books to prisoners?

“The whole thing with prisons in this country is so out of control and such a disaster and so expensive,” says Ruhland. “It’s nice to do something, some gesture.”

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, as of Dec. 31, 2005 there are 2,193,798 jailed persons in the United States and the number is still growing. There are more people locked up in the United States than in any other country in the world, leading one to question a country that has the strange custom of incarcerating people first, asking questions later, and certainly not trying to improve the lives of those in prison.

Ruhland believes that “prisons are just crime schools,” and they have no intentions of rehabilitating the many people they lock up for “stupid laws.” He refers to drug laws as the most trivial reason to lock someone up.

Ruhland is a dusty looking Berkeley type who dresses in typical old-school lefty attire with a plaid button up shirt, tan pants, and gray, disheveled hair. Ruhland has volunteered for the Prisoner’s Literature Project for 13 or 14 years now and is the person people usually mention first when talking about PLP. After he inherited volunteering for PLP when he was working at Bound Together Books, he moved on to Moe’s Books, where he is a connection for the project to get books that people can’t sell but don’t need.

In addition to supplying a large dose of books for PLP to the Grassroots House, Ruhland is also the one who makes the trek with the final packages to the post office after they go through the process.

It doesn’t take much time to make this project work. PLP works like this: prisoners send request letters through Bound Together Books in San Francisco, since books may not be sent through individual persons. The letters then go to volunteers at Grassroots House. The volunteers - who run from regulars to those who drop in sporadically – read the letters and then look at a restriction list, a set of rules regarding what can and cannot be sent to the inmate. If the prisoner’s request is allowed, then the volunteer tries to match up what they ask for with what PLP’s got.

“Once in a while you’ll find exactly what they’re looking for,” says Emily Cohen, a 26-year-old tutor at the Making Waves Education Program in Richmond, and a consistent volunteer for PLP, but most of the time they just get as close as they can.

What kinds of books are requested by people?

“It changes all the time,” Cohen says. “Dictionaries are the most requested. I guess it makes sense. The typical education level of people [in prison] is not that high.”

The books are then weighed on the scale to approximate postal costs. They try to keep the books’ weight at one pound so the packages don’t cost more than $2 at media rate. There are a few receipts to include and often volunteers include a note with the package. The packages definitely get opened before they reach the inmates, but most of the time they receive the notes.

Demand for PLP’s services is strong. They receive over 1000 letters a month. (They have a restriction on sending things to Texas because everything’s bigger in Texas,). Response rates depend on time, number of volunteers, and the money coming in. The typical package costs about $2 to mail to each inmate, so expenses can run over $2000 a month, sometimes more. A leftist, philosophically anarchist based group, they depend on donations from individuals, a special shelf at Bound Together Books where money from books purchased off of that shelf go to the Prisoner’s Literature Project, and PLP benefits.

Benefits like the one put on by Ilya Arbatman, a 20-year-old drummer for Santa Cruz punk band Fischer, is just one example of how people just “do their bit.”

The Balazo 18 Art Gallery is cold in temperature but warm in feeling as young punks and lefties get ready for the six bands of the night. With This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb is arguably generating the most excitement. There’s the general loud noise of young people conversing over mojitos, beer, and cigarettes in the back room and cacophony in the front room from people waiting to see the band. Some are lounging on the couches and others are sitting around playing cards.

The show only costs $5, but there is another dimension to the gathering. Before entering the venue the show goers are asked to drop a slightly used paperback book into a box for the PLP. The box already contains a couple hundred books, with people casually dropping in more before paying the cover for the door.

The community effort behind this is astounding, as nothing is ever done in an “official” capacity for PLP. Anyone, like Arbatman, can just decide to make a routine punk show into a benefit by merely scribbling on the flyer before it’s taken to the copy shop. It helps if the show is a band that gets a good draw – also a good idea to keep the cover cheap.

Arbatman does not stand out at the show. Dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans and standing at about five and a half feet tall, he blends in with all the other young punk kids hanging around. But while most of the kids are staking out a spot and sticking to it, Arbatman, is running around like crazy setting up for his set, talking to the door person, and making sure everything is running smoothly.

“I always thought about doing benefit shows,” explains Arbatman in a fast-paced tone that reflects the energy of the show going on around him. “And then we just decided to make a show of ours a benefit show. You know, just ask people to bring books. I e-mailed PLP but then they didn’t get back to me, so I was like whatever, I’ll just do it anyways.”

That was the first benefit show he threw for PLP. This time there has been some communication between the Grassroots House volunteers and Arbatman.

This show is one way for a community to come together and do something that will affect tangible change, something that’s important to Arbatman. Rather than work for some uncertain goal, he knows what he’s doing is working towards real change in an area he feels strongly about: the right to books in prison.

“I have privilege,” he says. “I can go to a library or whatever and I have no restrictions, but someone in prison just doesn’t have access to that. That’s cruel and unusual punishment in my opinion.”

And the project does affect tangible change. According to Cohen, the volunteers try to refrain from becoming pen pals with the inmates; there are other programs for that. But that doesn’t stop some from at least writing in gratitude for what PLP does. Often the letters provide revelations about what good PLP does for those that who are locked up.

In the black binder on the shelf at Grassroots House is a letter near the front of the book, a letter neatly written on a typewriter from a prison in California, reads:

“Dear Fellow Bookworms,
My creativity and imagination wanted me to write you and thank you for your kind donation of books. I received Making Shapely Fiction and The Writer’s Handbook from you. With glutton appetite, I have devoured the timely tips and information.
I’ve come to realize that I couldn’t have chosen a more difficult occupation. I thought I was to typify the American Inmate and laze about in my incarceration, but a power greater than I has punished me to want to write. Now I am working 12 hour days, between thinking about my stories and actually writing them. Miserable man that I am!
Nevertheless, I love every moment of it. I wouldn’t, nor couldn’t, do any thing else.
Thank you for the books. If you don’t mind, maybe I can bother you in another six or so months. Keep up the good work.”