Colorado Department of Education (Colorado State Library)

Colorado State Library's Library Research Service (LRS) will conduct an assessment of prison library services related to pro-social behaviors in incarcerated people and their successful re-entry in Colorado and create tools for other states and departments of correction to use to conduct their own assessments. LRS will partner with Institutional Library Development, a unit of the Colorado State Library; Remerg, a Colorado-based reentry organization; and the Colorado Department of Corrections to complete the study. The project team will use focus group interviews, a standardized set of surveys, and analysis of data from the prison’s information systems and the libraries’ systems to complete the assessment. They will develop data, the survey instrument, and a research design toolkit that will enable other states to undertake similar research studies and ultimately establish a dataset describing outcome of prison libraries across correctional environments nationwide.