Welcome to Library Services for Incarcerated Youth

In order to initiate a Nationwide discussion, all school, public, academic, and special librarians who provide or support the provision of library services to incarcerated youth are invited to our wiki. We are beginning our project and have a ton of great ideas! 

All across America, youth are incarcerated or detained with little or no access to high-interest, culturally relevant library materials or engaging programming. Research has shown that free and independent reading is the number one tool to improve literacy. Literacy is a vital component to reducing recidivism as well as of utmost importance in a democratic society and breaking the devastating cycle of intergenerational poverty.  Appropriate library services and programs to incarcerated youth are vital to providing and improving detention based services.   Because youth come from and will return to all communities, library services to incarcerated youth is vital to all communities.  According to the OJJDP website, in 2007 courts with juvenile jurisdiction disposed more than 1.70 million delinquency cases.

The purpose of the wiki is to share best practices in library programming and services to incarcerated youth amongst those providing those services, to share best practices with those seeking to deliver library services to incarcerated youth in their communities, and to encourage librarians in all communities to promote, support and provide outreach of the highest quality to incarcerated youth in their communities.

This is an interactive wiki. You can add, edit, delete, etc. (Just think about it before you do it)!

Want to meet others serving incarcerated youth? Come to our meetups!

WATCH this space for UPDATES to time, place and VENUE. Have a convention coming up and want to plan a meetup? Add yours here!

See who came to the ALA-NOLA meetup here: visit the meetup page and add your contact info!

If you don't already belong to the YALSA-lockdown listserve, subscribe and joining our discussion: http://lists.ala.org/wws/info/yalsa-lockdown

You may also be interested in joining prison-l, the Library Services to Prisoners listserv:  http://lists.ala.org/wws/info/prison-l 

Links to our major pages are in the SIDEBAR on the right, and are also listed below. You can always return to this page by clicking libraryservicestoincarceratedyouth in the grey ribbon at the top of every page.

_____________________________________WIKI INFO_____________________________

1. Take the tutorial. It's great! 

• Learn what makes a good collaboration project and see how other PBworks customers are using their workspaces. Check out our PBworks educator community.

• Need Help? The PBworks Manual can help show you how to edit, add videos and invite users. The best way to get your support questions answered is to click the help link at the top of this page. 

2. If you create and add a new page, always add a link to it on the sidebar on the right of the screen. 

3. NOTIFICATIONS: VERY IMPORTANT!!! 

Go to Settings. Go to Access Controls. Enable Notifications so that you are notified when someone updates/edits the page. In this way you will be up to date with the latest. 

4. Use the COMMENTS section on the bottom of each page to respond if you aren't ready yet to edit. See Options page comments as an example. (in the first examples I posted other people's comments so it looks like they are mine, but the tagline is whose comments they are).