Talk:Prison library

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 29 January 2020 and 29 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): 68Kath.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:42, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Suggestions for article

FYI

 – Section heading added by Undead Shambles (talk) 22:42, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

There are various points I would like to make about this article. What follows is Not a comprehensive list. 1) The citations and references section of the article could do with being cleaned up (ie: the enumerated citations should link directly to the Bibliographic references and not to the Surname of an author associated with the publication). This is a minor point.

2) It is only under the section that deals with the United States that there is any mention of “access to justice”, or access to legal material which would be useful either for someone to develop their own defence whilst they are within prison Or just to enable them to be able to confirm the current state of the law as it stands. There is definite scope for finding out whether “access to law” or “law libraries” is at least a guideline requirement or a legal requirement for prisons.

3) It would be worthwhile to document whether there are guidelines for Prison libraries indicating how often they are required to carry out inventories or checks to make sure that they are meeting their obligations for providing legal literature to prisoners. In particular (and I may very well repeat this point), due to the voluminous nature of legal statues, and even the most basic & condensed statements of the law, the amount of TIME that each prisoner should have to access legal information (whilst they are on remand, for instance) should be commented upon and discussed within the article. The mere existence of a non-attended library with very restrictive conditions upon access (including, but not limited to its opening hours) would DEFEAT THE POINT of having a prison library, one of whose central functions should be to provide “access to justice” or “meaningful access to the courts”. Further, given that Prisoners presumably cannot take reference texts from the library (with almost every formal statement of law being stated within a “reference text”, such as Archibald), this reduces Prisoner access to the law. It would thus be eminently reasonable for Prisoners to be given access to photocopier credits of a sufficient degree to enable them to have their own copies, and their own access to material that they would need to inform themselves of the current state of the law, or even to formulate their own defence (where this applies).

4) Standards of Training and vetting for Prison Librarians. What are the qualification requirements for Prisons librarians? Are they given special training to ensure that they can carry out their functions for ensuring the well-running of a Prison Library (this would clearly not only involve being taught how to use photocopiers, printers, etc.. as well as stock-taking for books but also customer service skills). — Preceding unsigned comment added by AnInformedDude (talk • contribs) 21:16, 25 July 2012 (UTC)