The Hekman Library staff congratulates the 76 graduates at the Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, MI! These graduates are participants in CPI - the Calvin Prison Initiative - which has been in existence and growing since 2015.

Students in the program at Handlon face different and more difficult challenges than the average Calvin student who is served from the main campus. One of the challenges is lack of available library services on site. Although the students in the program have access to a library at their location that supports the CPI curriculum, it is relatively small. To increase access to books the CPI students can search a downloaded version of the main library's catalog. It's not completely up-to-date, but it does open up many more thousands of books to them. In addition to books, students can search a database called JSTOR for scholarly journal articles.

Many staff in the library are involved in supporting the nearly 100 CPI students, from catalogers who help to add books to the shelves of the library at Handlon, to reference librarians who support students' research, to IT experts who make the online library request system work smoothly. 

We're grateful that we can be a part of this amazing program that seeks to transform prison culture from the inside out.