This year on International Women's day we take the time to acknowledge and honor the women trapped in our countries prisons and jails. Women make up a proportionately small percentage of the incarcerated population, but have experienced a faster rate of incarceration than men in the past decade. Women in U.S prisons face unique challenges due to the layers of institutionalized gender based violence perpetuated in carceral settings. Power imbalances within the prison setting m

We need more books! Please consider donating your used or new books to BTP!  Current categories we are low on: Dictionaries (paperback) Fantasy (paperback or hardback) Horror (paperback or hardback) Thrillers (paperback or hardback) Native American history (paperback) Pagan/Occult (paperback or hardback) Meditation (paperback or hardback) Cars (paperback or hardback) Black fiction (paperback or hardback)

Presidents Day is a federal holiday created to honor the executive leaders of our country and their legacies. Part of these legacies is the maintenance and evolution of a criminal justice system based in racial hierarchy and exploitation. So which of these executive leaders wielded their power to contribute to the horrors of modern mass incarceration and the growth of the prison industrial complex?  The 1970s brought a boom in the prison population and an exponential increase

“The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others” bell hooks Valentine's day is a day we take to celebrate the love in our lives, but frequently we find ourselves focusing on the love in our individual relationships rather than love we seek from community and society. As feminist theorist bell hooks reminds us, love is not a feeling we are struck by, or something we are lucky to fall into, but rather a political

We need more books! Please consider donating your used or new books to Books to Prisoners! We will make sure they find a lovely new home:) Categories we are currently low on: Paperback dictionaries Fantasy (paperback or hardback) Horror (paperback or hardback) Thrillers (paperback or hardback) Sci-fi (paperback or hardback) Spanish-English dictionaries (paperback) How to draw (paperback) Composition books Native American literature (paperback)

2025 was a very productive and prosperous year for BTP!  Some of our favorite highlights: We will have welcomed about 350 volunteers, donating around 8000hrs We grew our successful partnerships with 7 independent bookstores We hired a new Program Coordinator We caught up from being 5 months behind in Jan to being about a month and a half behind now  A fine reading by Board member Anne in Issaquah brought renewed interest to 'Dear Books to Prisoners', a sequel to which we hope

Fund named for Bellingham literacy activist, Nancy Duncan Huss Books to Prisoners, which has been sending free books to prisoners since 1973, was approached this year by a donor whose stated interest was serving as many people as possible. The donor was thinking big, bigger than BTP alone could manage at short notice. What BTP COULD do was recruit others to this worthy cause. "BtP organizers recognize that, over the short term, leveraging other groups' capacities is an effect

Books we're out of: Coloring books for adults (no nudity) Paperback books about automotive repair and maintenance Paperback self help Figure Drawing for Kids, or other paperback drawing guides without nudity Paperback fantasy Paperback dictionaries Paperback Jewish nonfiction and fiction  You may notice a trend here. The number of prisons and jails that don't allow people to have hardcover books grows by the month. Paperbacks can go so many places that hardcovers can't. Book