This guide collects resources related to prison education and prison librarianship with an emphasis on Chicago and Illinois, the voices of incarcerated students and people, prison industrial complex activism, and the many ways you can get involved in this work. In addition, this guide is also home to the NPEP Library, a collaboration with the Northwestern Prison Education Program, and our services for incarcerated students and NPEP instructors, tutors, staff, and volunteers.

For more information or to suggest a resource to be included on this guide, please contact Josh Honn, English & Digital Humanities Librarian, via email at josh.honn@northwestern.edu.

"Increasing attention is being given to the language people use when discussing individual or group identities and experiences. In large part, marginalized people must demand the respect to create and amplify language that they consider more humanizing than the negative narratives imposed on us by dominant society." —Underground Scholars Initiative

Any language on this guide that does not follow the above preferred language has been taken directly from the websites of organizations. For more information and a glossary of terms, please read the Underground Scholars Language Guide. For more accounts of the importance of humanizing language in relation to carcerality, please see the Marshall Project's The Language Project.