✰ Books to Prisons ✰

Chevalier's is Los Angeles' oldest indie bookstore. We have partnered with prison librarians across the country to get books into the hands of incarcerated individuals.

For many of us, it’s hard to imagine a life without books—without getting lost among the shelves of a bookstore, without your TBR stack teetering on your bedside table, without e-books, audiobooks, books from your local bookshop, the library, or even, yes, Amazon. We at Chevalier’s don’t think any person should have to live without books. We believe that books bring power, knowledge, community, and joy—and that every human is deserving of these things.

America's mass incarceration project relies on out-of-sight-out-of-mind thinking. But, as Angela Davis reminds us, “prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.” Life in a cage is the reality of approximately 2 million people in the United States. For those whose existence is relegated to the margins, books can rewrite and reshape the world. 100% of proceeds from this fundraiser will go to supplying books to prison, jails, and detention centers.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X writes about his time in prison in his early twenties. What started as flipping through a dictionary to learn some new words became the education of a leader, an intellectual, and a revolutionary. In his words: “I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”

Any amount helps and is greatly appreciated. Feel free to recommend books in your comment and we'll make sure they get donated.

Want to learn more? Join us at the bookstore on Thursday, Nov. 14 for a conversation with the people living and working on the frontlines of the the fight for change—Ra Avis, Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy, Luis Garcia, Ahmanise Sanati, and Christopher Soto. We invite you to what will be a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion on literacy in prisons, the possibility & power of art, and how decarceration paves our way to a better, more just world.

further reading:

Noname on Books , Rap, and Poetry

Criminal Justice Reading List

LGBTQ Books in Prisons

Books for LA Jails

Book Bans Behind Bars