My Service Project: Collecting Books for Inmates

Who doesn’t love to read? It gives you a chance to relax and escape into a whole new world for a couple of hours. It helps you forget about your bad day, cure your boredom, or interest you in a specific topic.

Whatever your reason, reading is definitely a great escape.

The Floyd County Jail averages about 714 inmates on any given day. Some inmates are assigned jobs where others have no certain activities to complete. This is where reading comes in; it helps them keep their minds off of their problems and allows that escape.

My papa is a deputy sheriff with the Floyd County Jail, and he told me about the limited supply of books that the inmates had access to. He once told me a story where one inmate tore a book in half to share it with another. I remember thinking that I would hate to be that inmate that had to read the second half of the book first.

I went home that evening trying to come up with a solution. With the help of my papa, I was able to come up with the idea of starting a service project to collect books for the jail, giving the inmates a chance to have a library of their own.

When I first visited, there were almost no books besides several encyclopedias inside their library. I then set up a crate in Darlington's Upper School library and sent out an email to the faculty and students. With about a month left of school, I checked the crate almost daily, hoping to collect as many books as possible. Within that short time period, I collected a total of 438 books.

I spoke to Chief Deputy Tom Caldwell and he explained how the jail library works. Once a week, the inmates are allowed two-hour access, but only a few can visit at a time. They can request to go to the library and pick out a book. They’re only allowed one book per visit and must return it before given permission to get another.

When the deputies have a chance, they will drop by and pick up a few books to take back to the inmates, which will give everyone access to the books. He also explained to me that the library has always had a limited amount of books; there was no money in the jail’s budget for them.

Therefore, they count on people in the community to donate their unwanted books. They have had a few people donate books here and there, but they have never seen this many books donated at once. We came up with a scenario where each book cost $15, and if that price was multiplied by the 438 books, it would total to $6,500. This showed us that the jail would’ve never been able to supply that many books for the library.

Now the jail's library is full, providing the inmates with something to do and giving everyone the opportunity to pick up a book. The books have been in the jail for only a short amount of time, and my papa told me how excited the inmates were about the library.

They were thrilled to have books to read and asked him to thank me. It made me smile to hear that they are enjoying books as much as I do.

After writing an article for Hometown Headlines, the jail has received an additional 18 boxes of donated books from people who read the story. The library is currently overflowing with books with nowhere to put them. I was excited to hear this and I’m sure the inmates were as well.

My goal for this project is to continue collecting books until I graduate high school, and restock the library throughout the year. After hearing that they have run out of room for books, I am now planning on expanding out to the surrounding county jails.

I would not have been able to achieve this, though, without the generous donations of others and the help of my papa. Everyone should be given the opportunity to read, and now the inmates at the Floyd County Jail get their chance to do that.