2003 Annual Report

In 2003, the Jail Library Student Group continued to provide recreational, educational, and community resource reading materials to inmates located in the Dane County Jail facilities.

2003 by the numbers

• 1 award
• 40 volunteers*
• 65 Kids’ Connection participants
• 400 jail visits*
• 975+ filled requests for materials

*approximate

The Year in Brief

The group was recognized at the 2003 South Central Library System Celebration on September 25. Our representatives traveled to Wisconsin Dells to receive the Chester Pismo Snavely Memorial Award for a Nifty Activity, given to a person or group for a special project. The event was covered in the Libraries@UW-Madison newsletter.

Other achievements of the year included the creation of an updated collection development policy and the return of a weekly bagel and coffee fundraiser. Our online presence was enhanced with a wish list on Amazon.com and pages at both Madison.com Community Pages and VolunteerYourTime.org. In September, “The Common Rabble,” a student radio program on WSUM 91.7FM, featured the group in the last third of a show entitled “The Secret Lives of Librarians.” In November, we sent representatives to the Restorative Justice Fair at Dale Heights Presbyterian Church. We also welcomed more than ten new volunteers to the group and bid farewell to several others, including many 2003 SLIS graduates.

Kids’ Connection

Kids’ Connection continues to be a popular program and is much appreciated by the inmates in the Public Safety Building. We estimate that our numbers are slightly down from previous years, but sixty-five inmates participated (not counting repeat sessions with the same inmate). We sent a total of 120 books to 132 children. Most of the inmates were parents but there was at least one aunt that made use of Kids’ Connection and there may have been some grandparents that also got involved.

City-County Building

With eleven different library volunteers, we filled milk crates with books and magazines that were then distributed to the four wings on a rotating basis. Our goal was to have new crates distributed once per week, so that each wing could have a new set of crates approximately once per month. Instead of twelve new sets of crates, each of the four wings got seven or eight new sets of crates in 2003.

Volunteers also filled requests for specific items or types of items submitted by the inmates themselves. In 2003, we filled approximately 556 requests.

Public Safety Building

Another six regular volunteers worked over 280 hours during about 150 separate visits to the Public Safety Building. We rotated book carts between the pods forty-eight times. We also filled 419 requests, many of which were for multiple books. In almost one hundred additional cases, we attempted to deliver materials but inmates had already left. In about 136 cases, we were unable to find materials to match an inmate’s specific request.

Outside the Jails

The work that Jail Library Group does inside the jails represents only part of the time and energy put forth by its volunteers. We spent about as much time outside the facilities as inside on various support activities: soliciting, processing, and delivering donations of materials; fundraising and shopping for popular items; and recruiting and training volunteers.

Supporters

Our supporters this year included:

• Dane County Legal Resource Center
• Dane County Library Service
• Friends of the Madison Public Library
• South Central Library System
• UW Morgridge Center for Public Service
• UW Memorial Library Reference staff
• UW School of Library and Information Studies, especially SLIS Library staff
• Individual donors

Thank you to everyone who helped Jail Library Student Group reach its goal to provide recreational, educational, and community resource reading materials to inmates at the Dane County Jail facilities. We appreciate your support.