Reading in prison: How Dorchester Penitentiary's book club works

Reading in prison: How Dorchester Penitentiary's book club works

Book Clubs for Inmates planning expansion into all of Atlantic Canada's prisons

Katelynn Siddall means no offence to her other book clubs — the one with friends, the one with coworkers — but her favourite place to talk about reading is prison.

She’s a volunteer with Book Clubs for Inmates at Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick. It’s a charity that facilitates over 50 book clubs at prisons across the country. Community volunteers lead the meetings, and the charity provides the books. It distributes a lengthy list of recommendations to the clubs, but it’s ultimately up to the inmates to choose which books to request for the year — books they get to keep.

On the outside, book clubs are beginning to constitute an embarrassment of riches, a flash mob of celebrities and influencers you can’t shake. There’s swag and merch, even clothes for babies proclaiming their status as book club’s newest member.

Book club helps inmates at this Ontario women's prison connect and communicate

At Dorchester, there’s no internet, no comfortable couches or glasses of wine. Even hot coffee, at least at some Ontario institutions, was considered a weapon and not allowed for years. Sometimes the meetings are cancelled because of lockdowns, or because the room they use isn’t available, Siddall said.

With everything else stripped away, all that’s left is the story. For a book-lover like Siddall, it doesn’t get much better than that.

“These were people here to talk about the book and how it relates to their lives, and it was just a really rich discussion,” she said in an interview. “It was very fulfilling to just see how much impact these books are having on these people.”

CBC attempted to visit Dorchester's book club but was unsuccessful.

A lifelong reader, Siddall saw a poster in 2023 calling for volunteers to lead the book club at Dorchester. After meeting with another volunteer for coffee to find out more, she decided to give it a try.

The sun was setting when she pulled up to the institution for the first meeting. “I just remember thinking, wow, it's really beautiful in Dorchester,” she said. “It was kind of like a good omen.”

Siddall repeats that journey every month. A few members have been involved from the beginning, she said, while others come and go, sometimes because they’ve been released.

Themes Siddall has noticed are popular among inmates include family, imprisonment, overcoming adversity and food. Endeavour, a book by Peter Moore about one of the most famous ships of British exploration, depicts sailors eating hardtacks, a type of unappealing, rock-hard biscuit consumed on long voyages. “The food was horrendous. They could relate to that,” Siddall said.

Work at prison book club ‘fulfilling’ for Moncton volunteer

More striking are the moments that demonstrate one of the gifts books offer to readers: empathy. In reading Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, a graphic memoir by Nova Scotia’s Kate Beaton about working in Alberta’s Fort McMurray to pay off her student loans, Siddall recalled one inmate speaking up about his own time doing the same job: “I didn’t realize [women] were treated this way.”

“The micro aggressions of being a woman in a very male-dominated area, it kind of gave them new perspectives on that,” Siddall said.

Other recent reads at Dorchester Penitentiary include Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, George Orwell’s 1984 and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. An upcoming read is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

The Dorchester group, like many of the other prison book clubs across Canada, also reads local authors. After reading The Sound of Fire by Renée Belliveau, a true story about the 1941 fire at a Mount Allison University residence, Siddall said Belliveau answered inmates’ questions about the book via email.

Siddall hopes the books, especially the ones by local authors, will help inmates stay tethered to their communities. “There is this world out there of people who enjoy reading. They belong to that world, you know. It’s important to let them know.”

That world of readers is growing, according to Tom Best.

Best, who's been executive director of Book Clubs for Inmates since 2022, said one of the charity’s foremost goals is to implement a book club within every level of security at every federal institution in Canada. That leaves two in Atlantic Canada — Springhill Institution in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Institution in New Brunswick — where Best said there will be book clubs by the end of this year. The charity is also moving into provincial institutions.

The charity has also been on what Best terms a "great crusade" to stock prison libraries with new material over the past few years — a quarter of a million titles since 2022. The goal is to hit half a million by 2027.

Still, the whole enterprise of reading in prison can be a precarious one. Correctional Service Canada (CSC) had been considering cuts to prison librarian positions following the federal government's mandate to reduce its spending by $132.2 million by the 2028-29 fiscal year.

On Thursday, CSC announced an official rejection of the proposed budget cuts. Its commissioner also reaffirmed the importance of literacy and reading in rehabilitation for inmates.

"[Reading] is very much an opportunity to escape the reality of what they're currently existing with," Best said in an interview. "We kind of forget on the outside, a little bit, about the power that books can have in our lives."

Raechel Huizinga is a reporter based in Moncton, N.B. You can reach her at raechel.huizinga@cbc.ca.