Bay Area librarians bring information to inmates, one letter at a time
By Esther Lo article
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - An older transgender woman incarcerated in a West Coast prison wanted to learn how to put on makeup. A simple Google search could have given her 6,440,000 results. But behind bars, she had no access to any of that.
With extremely limited and expensive access to the Internet, she wrote to librarians through the Reference by Mail program. It’s so beautiful that she was willing to share this with us, said Rachel Kinnon, manager of the Jail and Reentry Services in the San Francisco Public Library, She trusted us enough to reach out and thought of us as a resource in that kind of very personal search.