The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a difference in the resources and library services in men's and women's state prison facility libraries, and to determine to what extent the librarians who administer services to inmates in prisons believe the resources available are adequate in giving library service to the inmates. A questionnaire was sent to the librarians in charge of the library in all women's institutions in the United States and to a random sample of men's institutions. A total of seventy-three questionnaires were completed and returned; thirty-nine from male institutions, twenty-three from female institutions, and eleven from co-ed institutions. The data from the questionnaires were tabulateds-using the Statistical Package of the Social Sciences (SPSS-PC). Major comparisons between the male and female institutions included: 1) the size of the institutions with the size of the library collection, 2) the size of the institutions with the resources available to inmates, and 3) the comparison of resources and services between the men's and women's institutions. Based on the results of the study, the following conclusions were reached: 1) men's institutions had much larger inmate populations than women's institutions, 2) men's institutions had only slightly more books and journals than women's institutions, and 3) because there were fewer females per institution, females had many more resources available per inmate than men. A second analysis was performed to compare male and female institutions within categories of similar size to determine whether or not the differences in the materials and services which were found to be outstanding or significantly different in the first analysis would remain valid. Data from both analyses indicated that women's institutions, in most cases, had more resources and services available than men's institutions regardless of the size of the institution. The majority of librarians in both men's and women's institutions believed they were able to support their goals and objectives, and most were satisfied with the services they were able to provide. A review of the literature indicated that similar problems have existed in prisons from the early 1800's to the present. Those problems, still recurrent, are theft, insufficient funding, overcrowding, and lack of administrative support for prison libraries. / Graduation date: 1991

This thesis introduces the study of inmate marginalia as a method for understanding inmates’ uses of texts in prison libraries and for understanding the motivations for these uses. Marginalia are the notes, drawings, underlining, and other markings left by readers in the texts with which they interact. I use the examples of the Talmudic projects to set a precedent for the integration of marginal discourses into the central discourse of society. Next, I discuss the arguments surrounding the use of texts in prison libraries, including an outline for an ideal study of inmate marginalia. Finally, I discuss the findings of my on-site research at four prison libraries in Washington State. After scanning evidence of marginalia from forty-eight texts, a relatively small sample, I divided the marginalia by gender of facility, genre of text, address of the marginalia, and type of marginalia and found statistically significant correlations (p < 0.05) between gender and genre, gender and address, gender and type, and genre and type. However, while these correlations are statistically weak and require further investigation, the statistically significant correlations indicate the potential for integrating inmate marginalia studies into the scholarly discussions regarding inmates’ interactions with texts in prison.