Introduction

A subject keyword search in Library and Information Science Abstracts for ‘prison librar*’ OR ‘jail librar*’ over 50 years of writing from 1970 to 2020 yields just 380 results. When limiting to scholarly, peer-reviewed publications, the number reduces to just 120. Individual papers from within these 120 often appear together in publications such as the 1977 issue of Library Trends that saw the first issue of volume 26 publishing nine articles relating to various aspects of prison library research. Similarly, the Bulletin des Bibliotheques de France published five articles together in their fifth issue of volume 53 in 2008, and Library Trends published nine articles in their third issue of volume 59 in 2011 each about some aspect of prison libraries. The most recent of these, the 2011 Library Trends publication gives us a location focussed collection where prison libraries are described across multiple countries: Canada (Ings & Joslin, 2011), France (Cramard, 2011), Germany (Peschers, 2011), Japan (Nakane, 2011), Italy (Costanzo & Montecchi, 2011), Poland (Zybert, 2011), Spain (Pulido, 2011), and the United Kingdom (Bowe, 2011). Some of these same places are also represented in this current volume, along with writers from countries that are often absent from such collections.