The Public and the Carceral - Libraries as Vehicles for Justice

Improving Re-entry Services for the Formerly Incarcerated at the Brooklyn Public Library

Service, Systems, Strategy Design, Ethnographic Research, Workshop Creation and Facilitation, Graphic Design, Recommendation Creation

Overview

Defining the Problem

The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is an enormous library,, which consists of 59 branches and provides services to people of NYC. The BPL offers not only literature-related services; being a US-based library (where social services are scarce) it has taken on a lot of social responsibility. The BPL offers a plethora of services for people of all walks of life. This project focused on services that assist formerly incarcerated re-enter society and help their families navigate life during/post incarceration.

Re-entering society after incarceration is particularly difficult - formerly incarcerated often face lack of housing, they are missing necessary documents, are often an unfamiliar with new technologies - all of which make finding work particularly hard (in order to find work, you must have an address, in order to have an address you need to have a personal ID…). The BPL provides holistic assistance to those who struggle with the above, by offering resume-making and technology workshops that lower the re-entry threshold. The faster the formerly-incarcerated find stability, the lower the chance they will have to turn back to crime to survive.

The BPL’s involvement starts during patron’s incarceration. BPL has a team of workers going into the prisons to provide library services - programs like book cart, or a library nook. These programs help the incarcerated in a number of ways: provide a sense of normalcy, encourage reading… but one of the most important aspects of these initiatives is the BPL workers’ ability to educate the incarcerated about the re-entry services offered at the BPL, and help the incarcerated patrons prepare for life beyond incarceration. Thanks to the BPL’s workers presence in prisons, those who are released know where to look for assistance.

Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the BPL was barred from entering NYC prisons, and library workers lost touch with the formerly-incarcerated patrons who were utilizing BPL services, as these patrons often did not have access to a phone or a computer.

My role in this project was to understand:

How might (HM) the BPL get in touch again with their formerly-active patrons?
HM the outreach services can be improved? How to educate the broader community on the existence of the programs the BPL offers?
How to ensure the overworked BPL staff efficiently manages the creation and sustaining of all of the BPL’s programs?

This project was designed and led by me and 3 of my colleagues. We were given the freedom and the responsibility to propose a research process, and to manage the project. The only specification we received was that this research should culminate in a detailed document summarising the research and proposing recommendations for change.

As a team, we shared the role of managing the project collaboratively and took turns to lead parts of the project that correlated with our expertise.

Given the objective of the project, my team and I set out to create an ethnorgaphic research process to understand what happened to the previously-connected patrons, where they are now, how the families of the formerly-incarcerated are dealing with the re-entry challenges and how might we reach out to them again.

One of the major setbacks was that due to the sensitive nature of the project we weren’t granted permission to enter prisons or talk to the family members of the (formerly) incarcerated. Our only way to understand the complex nature of the situation was to work with as many and as diverse BPL stakeholders as we could, and gather a variety of perspectives: this included BPL patrons, librarians, library staff who go into the prisons, branch managers and more…

Understanding
the Problem

Ideation

Having conducted site visits, shadowing and observations at a number of diverse BPL locations (different neighbourhoods consisting of different ethnicities, and needs), as well as having analysed the library offerings we transitioned into conducting over 40+ interviews with BPL workers.

The collated information was analysed and synthesised, and turned into valuable insights. They helped us better understand the complexity of the problem of how the Re-entry services could be improved, how the patrons could more easily find them and how could the service-delivery be made easier to the BPL staff.

Here are just a few insights that emerged from the research:

Spatial narratives: the physical location and architectural design of a BPL branch greatly affects the type and quality of services the Branch is capable to deliver. Therefore, the BPL’s branches operate as separate organisations creating locally-relevant services. This makes centralised approach to service organization impossible;
The Role of the Library: is unclear to the patrons. Not everybody is aware of the library’s role in supporting local people with a variety of services;
Services and their nature: the sheer number of social services offered by the BPL and the turnover of the staff/ librarians causes confusion, and many of the staff simply aren’t aware of the services offered. This results in patrons asking for re-entry services and being sent away. Furthermore, once a patron is sent away, there is no way of keeping in touch with the formerly-incarcerated as many of them do not have access to technology.
Safety: the safety personel who might be easily-confused for a law enforcement, can act as a deterrent to the formerly-incarcerated and prevents them from seeking help.

During the research, we discovered that the BPL is an enormous ecosystem of 59 branches and currently nearly 700,000 active cardholders. What was discovered through the research is that even though the re-entry services are offered BPL-wide, in truth every branch provides these resources independently.

As a small group of outsiders who joined the project for a little over a year, we didn’t feel in the position to recommend changes to the BPL staff providing services, across all 59 branches. We felt that the BPL staff are already experts in what they do, and it would be insensitive to provide them with recommendations that didn’t apply to their branch. What we felt appropriate was gathering all the knowledge together and creating a resource which could empower the staff to learn more about their institution.

Furthermore, we decided that the most appropriate way of creating any sorts of recommendations is to organise a two-week ideation engagement with the BPL staff and students of the Parsons’ Design School. This way the BPL staff actively participated in the process of turning research into ideas for future development. We were hoping to inspire the BPL staff to use our research materials this way after the project was over.

The outcome of the two-week engagement was a conference-style presentation of all student projects.

Outcome

We decided to collate our in-depth research into an easily accessible format. Student projects were also added to the research repository.

The Format: the research repository had to be easily accessible and easy to maintain. Even though online resources i.e. a website with all of the research findings would in theory make the research more accessible, we knew that creating an online resource would only result in more upkeep work for the staff. Additionally, without any marketing effort to make the repository known to the BPL staff, it would fade into oblivion.

This is why our research was collected in a form of 7 paper booklets/zines, that on one side contain text-based information, on the other - a map, showing a visual, systemic representation of the insights about BPL services. The resource had to be versatile: in its current form, the repository could be utilised as a read-only document, could be hanged as a A2 poster, or could be used as workshop materials.

These booklets were distributed among a number of library branches.