Rogue Liberation Library

Rogue Liberation Library was founded in 2018 to share our love of books and reading with people in our nation’s prisons. Our mission is to provide quality books and reading material free of charge to incarcerated people to foster knowledge, communication, connection, personal development, and well-being. We believe in the right to read and that books are tools of liberation. Books change lives.

About Us

The Rogue Liberation Library was founded in 2018. One of our past volunteers, who had been working with books to prisoner programs for about 10 years, relocated to Oregon and brought a small collection of books with him. We began by renting a space to store this collection from the Peace House in May of 2018. The first year we received 30 to 40 requests per month.

In February of 2019, our organization was formally adopted as a program of the Peace House. Peace House provides us with rent free space, financial and administrative support, and 501c3 tax exempt status.

Donate to Rogue Liberation Library

Every dollar you donate will go directly to postage and shipping supplies.

RLL receives thousands of requests for books each year. A few years ago, we expanded our service area, which now includes all state prisons in the western U.S. and federal prisons nationwide. This doubled the number of requests we receive each month. We need your support to continue this work.

We ship our packages via media-mail. It currently costs $4.35 to mail a 2-lb package, and $5.05 to mail a 3-lb. package. Our monthly postage bill is often $1500. Any contribution you can make to offset this cost is greatly appreciated and helps us to respond to more requests. All donations are tax deductible. Please use our secure, online checkout to donate with a credit card. Checks can be made payable to Peace House with “RLL” in the memo, and sent to Rogue Liberation Library: PO Box 524 Ashland, Oregon 97520.

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What we do

RLL sends books to people in state prisons in the Western half of the U.S., and federal prisons nationwide. Incarcerated people send us letters requesting books. We have a library of donated books to pull from, and we select books that best fulfill each request. We then package the books up and mail them directly to inmates. Each year we send over 2,000 packages of books, with one to five books per package. Books are a gift to the person requesting them and are theirs to keep. They do not need to be returned.

Why we do it

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Prison libraries, if they exist, are often underfunded with a limited selection of books and hours of access. Many prisoners lack money to buy books and are restricted from accessing Internet resources. Some facilities only allow new books to be shipped directly from the publisher or approved vendors (such as Amazon), but many families and friends cannot afford to purchase books to mail to their loved ones behind bars. Some people have been incarcerated for so long that they no longer have connections on the outside. Programs like ours are one of the few options available to prisoners in need of books.

Book Donations

We couldn’t exist without book donations. We ship hundreds of books per month, and we depend on donations to stock our shelves.

Donations may be dropped off 24 hours a day, seven days a week at Peace House in Ashland: 543 S. Mountain Avenue. (Place the books in our outside the donation box on the lower level.)

We accept paperback (no hard covers, please) books in gently used, like new, or new condition. We cannot accept books with notes, highlighting, underlining, or stains, or books that contain nudity or gang related material. We created a Guide to Donating Books that you can download here.

We cannot guarantee that donated books will be added to our collection. Items not added may be exchanged or sold to used bookstores or donated to local thrift stores.

How to Request a Book

If you know someone in prison who would like to request books, please share the following information.

People in prison may request books by writing a letter that includes their name, prison ID number, and address. The letter should indicate what topics or types of books they would be interested in receiving.

People in prison hear about us through word of mouth, see our information on a flyer, or respond to an ad we place each year in the Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC) directory. PARC is distributed to over 50,000 incarcerated people per year.