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Great Falls Books through Bars is an organization in Franklin County, MA
that sends free books, resources and reading material to prisoners.
DONATING BOOKS
People who generously donate books are an essential part of this project. Please bring your gently used, softcover books to the locations listed below. PLEASE DO NOT DONATE HARDCOVER BOOKS as they are not accepted at most prisons.
Read more about making and donation
Check out our wishlist on Massive Bookshop
Grace Episcopal Church
14 Boltwood Ave. Amherst, MA
Wildflower Alliance
199 High St. Holyoke, MA M-TH 12-4pm
Porch
112 Maple St in Greenfield, MA
10 Forward
10 Fiske Ave. Greenfield, MA
Just Roots Farm
34 Glenbrook Drive in Greenfield
Donation bin is in the barn
Wed 2-6pm & Sat 9am-1pm
June thru October
4th St.
104 4th street in Turner’s Falls, by appointment only (email gfbooksthroughbars@riseup.net to arrange).
Please do not leave donations here without making a plan with us first.
Comics N More
64 Cottage St, Easthampton, MA W-Sa 12-6pm. Masking required.
Media mail
ship to: PO Box 391 Greenfield, MA 01302
Join Our Mailing List
We won’t try to list every desirable type of book, but some examples of what we can always use are:
– comics/manga/graphic novels
– how-to’s/trades
– starting a business
– paperback dictionaries
– urban fiction
– thrillers
– wicca/witchy stuff
– art/drawing without nudity (it’s not us, it’s the prison administration)
– sudoku, puzzle/game books
– people’s histories
– westerns
– personal finance
– language dictionaries/ books in Spanish
– thesauruses
– paper back Role Playing Game [RPG] manuals
Check out our wishlist for more commonly requested books: massivebookshop.com/
We don’t need hardcovers. Or books in poor condition (lots of writing or underlining, loose pages). If you’re anywhere near Greenfield, and you need to get rid of some books, we recommend bringing them to Roundabout Books (26 Kenwood St. Greenfield, MA), that’s where we take our extras; they’ll recycle them, if nothing else.
~ 2,000,000
adults in 1,566 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,850 local jails, 1,510 juvenile correctional facilities, 186 immigration detention facilities, and 82 Indian country jails.
— Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022, Prison Policy Initiative, 3/14/2022
500%
increase in the prison population in the United States over the last forty years
1 in 28
American children has a parent behind bars
25%
of the world's prisoners are in the United States and 5% of the world's population
“The U.S. locks up more people per capita than any other nation, at the staggering rate of 573 per 100,000 residents”
— Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022, Prison Policy Initiative, 3/14/2022
“According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,220,300 adults were incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails in 2013 – about 0.91% of adults (1 in 110) in the U.S. resident population. Additionally, 4,751,400 adults in 2013 (1 in 51) were on probation or on parole.”
—Wikipedia: Incarceration in the United States
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
— The 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution
“…nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.”
— Huffington Post