2006 Annual Report

In 2006, the Jail Library Student Group continued to provide recreational, educational, and community resource reading materials to inmates located in the Dane County Jail facilities. We also expended our services to reach more people than ever.

2006 by the numbers

• 1 poster session
• 30+ volunteers
• 55 Kids’ Connection participants
• 275+ jail visits
• 800+ volunteer hours
• 1350 filled requests for materials

Kids’ Connection

Kids’ Connection (KC) promotes family literacy and communication between incarcerated custodial parents and their children by giving inmates the opportunity to record themselves reading a children’s book aloud. In 2006, Kids’ Connection recorded 76 sessions with 55 different inmates and sent 151 books to 134 children.

A grant from the Herbert Kohl Foundation helped us expand Kids’ Connection to the Ferris Center (work release jail) in early 2006.

Other generous sponsors of KC included Bashford United Methodist Church and St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, as well as Sony, which donated 20 Walkman cassette players.

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. We filled 854 requests, up slightly from 2005. We were unable to fill 209 requests. Volunteers contributed over 200 hours at the CCB.

Public Safety Building

Another eight regular volunteers worked over 225 hours during about 100 separate visits to the Public Safety Building. We rotated book carts between the pods fifty times - once a week, nearly every week. We also delivered requests 615 times. In about one hundred additional cases, we attempted to deliver materials but inmates had already left.

In November, the PSB library also relocated from an office with a leaky floor into a different office down the hall, but took the opportunity to do some needed weeding and cleaning.

Outside the Jails

Volunteers spent over 300 hours on various support activities. We gathered donations from local library book sales, used book stores, and collection bins; prepared donations at monthly "processing parties;" and delivered carload upon carload of boxes to the jails, among other activities.

Elsewhere

JLG presented a poster at the 2006 Wisconsin Library Association conference in Wisconsin Dells, November 1-3. As part of the first poster session in recent memory at a WLA conference, JLG volunteers were among the brave who faced crushing crowds, all eager to see what they had to share.

Supporters

Our supporters this year included:

• CIMC, College Library, and Dane County Legal Resource Center, donation dropoff sites
• Dane County Library Service
• Friends of the Middleton Public Library
• South Central Library System
• Herbert Kohl Foundation
• Bashford United Methodist Church
• St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church
• Sony Corporation
• 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.