Every Thursday and Sunday evening, a dozen volunteers file into the back room of Vesper, a community space in East Austin. In the workroom-turned-library, there is a small kitchen, bright overhead lighting, and hundreds of books and magazines stacked every which way on floor-to-ceiling shelves that line the walls. Each person plucks a handwritten letter from a neat stack on the folding table in the center of the room. The letter, written by a Texas prisoner, contains a request for three books, sometimes accompanied by details about daily incarcerated life. Then they search the stocked shelves for books that fit the person’s genre or author preferences. They write a return letter, assemble the package, and pass it off to “quality control”—the lead volunteers who check and seal the package, before it gets mailed to the inmate’s prison.
These volunteers fuel the nonprofit that is Inside Books Project, which sends around 40,000 free books per year to incarcerated men and women in correctional facilities around the state. In 1999, Dave Martinez, who had previously developed the Prisoners Literature Project in San Francisco, moved to Austin to start a Texas-based prison book project, working with a handful of other activists in the area to get the organization off the ground.
That included Scott Odierno, the current coordinator of Inside Books Project, who’d moved to Austin from New Orleans, where he’d worked at Crescent Wrench, a now-disbanded bookstore collective with a radical bent, and joined the group in 2000. In 2009, the organization moved operations to Vesper and obtained nonprofit status in 2012. Now, Odierno, 55, is the only full-time employee and receives a small stipend for his work.
There are about 56 prison book programs in the United States, serving almost every state. Most of these are entirely volunteer-run and rely on donated books to operate. At Inside Books, the only prison book program in Texas, about 80 percent of all books are donated, but the organization buys some from secondhand retailers to bolster its inventory. The scrappy team is constantly scrambling to keep up with the never-ending demand for books from what is the largest imprisoned population in the country. The group usually works two months behind, fielding letters and fulfilling requests twice a week. It’s necessary, rewarding work that benefits everyone involved: Not only does maintaining access to books and educational materials in prison preserve the intellectual freedom of incarcerated people, but it also makes facilities safer and reduces recidivism rates.
Almost half of all requests sent to Inside Books are for fiction—generally mass-market paperback titles by authors like Dean Koontz, Louis L’Amour, and James Patterson. Prisoners often request dictionaries, reference books, and topical works on psychology, business, and self-help. Travel books and National Geographic magazines are unsurprisingly a common request. Each requester has a goal for their reading lives: to be entertained, to better themselves, to learn, and most often, to escape from their confined reality.
Olly Wasser, a volunteer, said the mission of the nonprofit immediately grabbed him when he started with Inside Books last year. “I just instantly fell in love with the whole place and the whole idea,” he said. Some inmates write from solitary confinement or share specifics about their lives and the moments that led to their prison sentence. Volunteers write letters back to those incarcerated in state prison explaining why they chose certain books, offering other reading recommendations, and otherwise responding to other information in the correspondence. “I think in some ways that is the real highlight in the way that it helps one reflect on one’s own life,” Wasser said.
But despite its enormous output and impact, Inside Books Project is facing a new hurdle: In April, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), which runs the state prison system, implemented a new ban on hardcover and used books in its prisons. According to prison officials, the new restrictions are designed to curb drugs coming into prisons via the spines and binding of hardcover books and via used books soaked in narcotics like K2, a synthetic marijuana, or fentanyl.
The full extent of the contraband problem is murky, and definitive data is hard to come by. Amanda Hernandez, a TDCJ spokesperson, told the Texas Observer that in 2025, the department logged 385 instances of books allegedly laced with narcotics. Hernandez also said that between January and April of this year, facility mail rooms scanned 25,000 packages that contained two or more books. The department recently introduced RaySecur scanning machines into facility mail rooms designed to “detect powders and liquids” on mail and books—a new technology that critics argue sometimes flags false positives.
The roughly 140,000 people incarcerated in Texas state prisons now have two options for receiving books: They can have a loved one send a new paperback book through an approved retailer or they can check out books from their facility’s prison library, which is operated by the state’s Windham School District. Hernandez pointed out that Windham School District accepts general book donations but not for individual recipients. If an inmate has access to a tablet, they can read preloaded public domain books—those that are over 100 years old—for free.
Eldon Ray James, a retired researcher and librarian, was incarcerated in a federal prison in Texas for five years. He received an associate degree while incarcerated and after his release obtained a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Access to books, particularly textbooks, was critical to his educational success. To James, the new TDCJ restrictions are shortsighted: “To ban books simply because they have a hardcover or they’re used is just trying to solve a problem that may exist in prison by finding the easiest target,” he said. “And the easiest target they can find is to change the rules for what books can come in.”
Since the ban was announced, Inside Books has been stuck in an exhausting limbo. Odierno says his group has had to decline almost half of the books they would normally take as donations and been forced to donate or recycle books that are no longer accepted. Prisoners write almost daily to volunteers with concerns over how to access free books. Questions remain: How used is too used? Is a cracked spine or underlining on a few pages disqualifying? Will all mail room employees use the same set of criteria to assess books? Hernandez said “no stains and no tears” is the criteria mail room employees will be looking for, but she was unsure about underlining or highlighting in books.
At a recent board meeting, Odierno urged TDCJ to reconsider the ban and has repeatedly expressed concerns that being unable to send certain types of books will severely limit what Inside Books can provide for free. TDCJ has also moved to implement an online portal that would require volunteers to input the information of every inmate and every book in each package. “We send about 250 packages every week, and having to enter everything in each package is just overwhelming,” Odierno said.
For now, Odierno said, Inside Books has a stockpile of about 5,000 books that meet the new TDCJ criteria, though he’s not certain how long that will last. “In a year, we might wind up having to purchase a lot more books,” Odierno said.
Limiting accepted book formats adds another layer of difficulty to what is already a challenging process. The need for free, accessible books in Texas prisons is clear from the overwhelming amount of requests the organization receives and the genuine appreciation for the volunteers’ work expressed by each letter writer.
In one recent letter Wasser read, an incarcerated person wrote that while he felt he never learned anything in school, he’s now trying to educate himself through reading. “It’s a pleasure to help such a person,” Wasser said. “It really opens up worlds for people, doesn’t it?”
Medar de la Cruz is a Pulitzer Prize winner for a visually driven story set inside Rikers Island jail using bold black-and-white images that humanize the prisoners through showing their hunger for books.
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