Goodbye to All Fines

Episode Transcript

Virginia Marshall In July of this past year, Brooklyn Public Library quietly loaned out its one billionth item…

[Checkout sound]

Virginia Marshall Though, it probably sounded more like this.

[Typing sound, mouse click]

Virginia Marshall Because it was, in fact, an ebook.

Adwoa Adusei what was the title?

Virginia Marshall It was a middle grade book called The Time of Green Magic by a British writer, Hilary McKay.

Adwoa Adusei Aw, what a great book to have for this milestone.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, and we actually reached out to the author to let her know. Turns out, she’s a really big fan of libraries. When we told her one of her books was our billionth item loaned out—

Hilary McKay I was speechless, I was absolutely amazed. I did the maths and I worked out that your rate of lending out books over 125 years, that was eight million books a year, and that was pretty good. And it still made it amazing. So I'm still in shock, really. But I am absolutely thrilled and delighted also.

Adwoa Adusei She sounds so nice!

Virginia Marshall Yeah, she is really charming. We chatted about books and her connection to Brooklyn. Let’s listen in.

Hilary McKay The first I heard of Brooklyn was a long time ago when I was a little girl and my grandmother lent me one of her favorite books in the world, which was called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I read that book and I thought, “Oh, Brooklyn is a place and there are little girls in it like me.” And it begins with a little girl going to her library to get her books out on a Saturday morning. 

Virginia Marshall What was your relationship to libraries like growing up?

Hilary McKay I think I must have started going alone to libraries when I was seven or eight. Me and my three sisters, we were allowed four books each I remember, which was sixteen a week. So that was a pretty good haul. We used to carry them home and squabble over them. And the library really was my second home. My happiest library memories isn’t reading at all—I got a blue tin paint box when I was about nine years old. It had really bright colors, and we lived in a very little house and I had three little sisters and I knew I wouldn't get a chance to play with my paint box and try it out, so I took it to the library and I put it on a table and I was very furtive about it because I knew that I shouldn't really have a paint box there, I should be reading books, I thought. And I didn't have any water, although I brought paper. So I tried all my colors by licking the paintbrush. It took a long time to try all the colors, and I was being quite shy in a corner doing it when over my shoulder reached an arm and in the hand of the arm, there was a little glass pot full of water for me and I thought—it seemed a wonderful thing to me. It's not really a story about books, it's a story about librarians and how kind and understanding they were and how they made that library feel like home to us children. 

Virginia Marshall I love to hear a little bit more about The Time of Green Magic, since it is our one billionth book. Can you describe the plot a little bit for us?

Hilary McKay It's funny it should be this book. Well, it's funny anyway, because I'm an obscure British author and you’re an American library, but it's a book about books. It's a book about the immersive power of reading and how books made me feel when I was little. And it begins with a little girl reading a book. She's reading a book I read as a child called The Voyage of the Kon-Tiki. It's about an old balsa wood boat traveling across the South Pacific. You’re in such a salty, wave-roaring world, but it's immersive. I just made her go one step further. So when she came away, she could taste salt water on her skin and took it from there. It was like this book is opening up for the children when they needed them to.

[Music, wave sounds]

Adwoa Adusei That was really touching

Virginia Marshall Wasn’t it? Anyway, those are the kind of stories we’ll be bringing our listeners all season — stories about people connecting with the library, in celebration of our 125th year.

Adwoa Adusei To start it off, we have an episode about how eliminating late fines at BPL might actually mean we get more of our books back, and serve our patrons in the communities that need the library most. I’m Adwoa Adusei.

Virginia Marshall And I’m Virginia Marshall, filling in for Krissa Corbett Cavouras. 

Adwoa Adusei You’re listening to Borrowed: stories that start at the library.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall On October 5th, 2021, Brooklyn Public Library—along with New York Public Library and Queens Public Library—eliminated late fines for all of their patrons.

Adwoa Adusei Shortly before our 125th birthday, we reversed what has seemed like an unshakable fact of the library: that late books mean paying fines.

Virginia Marshall So, now, as long as you eventually bring your books back to us, you’ll never have to pay a cent! 

Lauren Comito “Oh good.”

Virginia Marshall That’s Lauren Comito, BPL librarian at Leonard Library and board chair of Urban Librarians Unite, an advocacy group that has been campaigning for New York City libraries to go fine free for many years.

Lauren Comito What’s happened since we’ve done it, is just sort of this deflation of stress. That sort of letting out of breath they were holding because they were nervous about what their fines were going to be. Fines have always been one of the things that you just have more conflict about. People are upset. They didn't mean to return their books late and they feel this shame, and then that sort of gets taken out on us a little bit. And it's just bad for equity.

Adwoa Adusei Going fine free made us think: where did the idea for fines come from in the first place? How has it become such a fundamental fact of public libraries that it’s taken us 125 years to figure out how to be truly free and truly for all?

Virginia Marshall To answer that question, we went back to try to understand the philosophy that founded public libraries in first place. And it turns out, the earliest examples of “free libraries” in the United States were never really free. There were a lot of restrictions.

Adwoa Adusei Most early libraries were subscription libraries where you had to pay a yearly fee, like Mercantile Library Association and the Society Library, both in New York City. And even when libraries opened up to the general public, like the Astor and Cooper Union Libraries, also in New York City, access wasn’t actually for all. You couldn’t take books out at those libraries, and they were only open during the day on weekdays, when working people would be at work. 

Virginia Marshall Right. The first circulating libraries in New York City—which means libraries where you could take books home and bring them back—those were started by benevolent societies in the 1870s and 1880s and they were certainly libraries with a mission. The founders of one free circulating library in Manhattan said that the library should teach “habits of quiet, neatness, and decorum,” and that the space should be “civilizing and improving to manners as well as mind.” 

Adwoa Adusei And, that idea that libraries should morally instruct the public carried on into the way the library has historically approached fines. We went back to our local newspaper archives to see how people talked about library books over the past 125 years.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall This is where the research gets entertaining!  So there were periodic mentions of stolen books from branches—fourteen books missing from one branch or two or three from another. And in 1909, the Times Union printed an article about a man living under at least one alias and at at least two addresses, who stole between 1,500 and 2,500 library books from all but one of the Brooklyn Public Library branches. He was caught re-selling those books on the subway and at dockyards in Manhattan. And I have to say, the story of his apprehension, arrest, and escape makes for a thrilling read. I’ll just say … it involves a subway chase scene! 

Adwoa Adusei Wow! So what happened to him?

Virginia Marshall Well, the article ended on a cliffhanger—apparently at the time of writing, the thief was a “fugitive from justice” believed to be hiding out in New Jersey.

Adwoa Adusei Oh my goodness. I definitely want to read that. And also I want to see it up on the big screen. [Laughs]

Virginia Marshall Yeah, me too. But we will, for now, just be reading the article … we’ll put it up on our shownotes page so listeners can read it, too.

Adwoa Adusei Amazing. I don’t think I can top that one. But I did come across another article, this one from 1962 and printed in the Kings County Chronicle. It started out with this very dramatic paragraph: “Those who advocate for free libraries and free benefits of various kinds for the general public become thoroughly disgusted at times when they think of how many thieves, how many deceivers, how many conscienceless persons are brought to light by these generosities in the shape of public benefits.”

Virginia Marshall Wow.

Adwoa Adusei The article goes on to say that the loss of books by theft or “mutilation” amounted to 96,000 volumes over two years, which was then equivalent to the entire catalog of Arlington, Bay Ridge, and Canarsie branches, an unbelievable number for “what is supposed to be a civilized and moral community.” 

Virginia Marshall Wow, that's like, pretty shaming. But from those two examples we can see that the library had a real fear of losing books. Lost books meant more money had to be spent on replacing them, which in turn meant that other library programming or improvement projects would suffer.

Adwoa Adusei I guess you could see how people came to regard library lending as inseparable from the practice of charging late fines and, eventually blocking borrowing privileges for patrons who lost books or who were too late in returning them. 

Linda Johnson There were all kinds of, you know, naysayers who felt that if we went fine free, you know, our books were going to sort of never come back. And there was a there was a sentiment that, you know, this is a teaching moment for children and they should actually be taught a lesson through fines.

Virginia Marshall This is President and CEO of Brooklyn Public Library, Linda Johnson. She has been a big supporter of going fine free and actually believes it should have happened here in New York City a long time ago. 

Linda Johnson We think of ourselves as being pretty innovative and we didn't like the fact that we were late to the table. 

Virginia Marshall She even read off a list of other large cities that went fine free before us…

Linda Johnson Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fort Worth, Miami, Nashville, Oakland, Philadelphia, Pheonix, Portland, that's embarrassing bow many are ahead of us! San Diego, San Jose, Salt Lake, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa and Washington, D.C.

Virginia Marshall Wow. Yeah, well, I'm glad we're there now. 

Linda Johnson Me too, I'm happy and proud to be affiliated with that roster of libraries. We wanted to do this sooner. And we had been deep in conversations with our colleagues at New York Public Library and Queens, and we were actually planning to present this in the context of our budget negotiations that would have begun in April, May, June of 2020. And then the next thing, of course, as everybody now knows, the whole world shut down and we went fine free sort of by accident because even though there were like 300,000 books in people's homes all over the borough, there was no place for them to be returned. So it hardly seemed right that we would be fining people for not bringing their books back. 

Virginia Marshall Then, when restrictions loosened and COVID hospitalizations went down in New York City, we started to open our branches again. And listeners might not realize it—but we had to think about how to bring our patrons back, how to remind them that the library is here for everyone.

Linda Johnson And we wanted to encourage them to get back in that pattern of coming to the library regularly. And so we knew that if we were to impose fines again, that those people who needed us most would be the least likely to come back. And so we just sort of kept moving forward without fines.

Virginia Marshall The policy before we went fine-free was that patrons accrued fines based on how long the book was overdue. Once their balance hit $15, they were barred from checking out items. Once they paid some of their fines, they could continue using the library. It was a punitive system that really didn’t have the intended impact. In recent years, different library systems have conducted studies about whether late fines actually get people to bring back their books. The results?

Amy Mikel They have not been able to successfully find any evidence that late fines are actually effective at getting people to return library materials on time.

Adwoa Adusei This is Amy Mikel, BPL’s Director of Customer experience. She’s been involved in BPL’s campaign to cancel late fines for many years. 

Amy Mikel But what the late fines do achieve is a negative effect in the sense that once people have late fines on their account, they're frequently unwilling or unable to pay them. Two things happen: they don't return the materials at all, and then they also don't come back to.

Adwoa Adusei So, the intended result with late fines—getting people to bring back their books—that wasn’t happening. The fact remains that fines themselves do not impact everyone equally. Here’s Amy again.

Amy Mikel We saw that those fines and blocks were disproportionately affecting lower income communities. So in Brooklyn, when you're talking about the the zip codes with the highest number of blocked patrons was coming from Brownsville, New Lots, Flatbush, Canarsie and East New York.

Virginia Marshall It’s not only an economic equity problem. Late fines are an issue when it comes to inclusion, too.

Lauren Comito I have Attention Deficit Disorder and I know that I've known that I've had that for a long time. I recently got a diagnosis of Autism. 

Virginia Marshall This is Lauren Comito again.

Lauren Comito And one of the things that I've always run into on support groups for ADHD, especially support groups of parents who have ADHD, is this inability to use the library because they would just have too many fines. So, parents with ADHD would not use the library with their children because they knew they would return their books late and they'd be paying their ADHD tax, which is a thing. And then, they just wouldn't use the library at all, which means they lose out on educational opportunities, their children do because they feel this shame about not being able to use the library. And really, it's a detriment to them because of their disability. 

Virginia Marshall It’s good to remember that many structures are set up against neuro-divergent people—and canceling fines is making the library more accessible to those folks, too! So, going fine free is an example of inclusion at its finest.

Adwoa Adusei Okay, so that’s a strong argument to cancel all fines. But it has to be said that library fines do bring much-needed revenue into the system.

Virginia Marshall Yes, and Linda Johnson, the president of our library, was really open about that. 

Linda Johnson Right, that is the trick … how are we going to pay for this? Because we were collecting a lot of money, and it was actually going toward our books and materials collections budget. And we're going to figure it out. We will ask for a bigger budget next year. We'll see how that goes. You know, we're going to have to to play around with our priorities in terms of how we allocate the money that we get. 

Adwoa Adusei Right—I mean, if you ask anyone at a public library, most will say that going fine free is just the right thing to do. As far as how our library is going to have to change in order to function without fines, Amy Mikel had a great perspective on that. She said it’s about changing the question. Not asking “how do we get money into the system” but rather, “how do we get our books back so we don’t have to spend so much building up our collection?” 

Amy Mikel So we have more than tripled the amount of book drops across the system. So now at almost 40 of our branches, you can return library materials 24/7. 

Virginia Marshall And we’ve added more friendly reminders that your books are due, or past due, to nudge you to return your books in a timely manner.  

Adwoa Adusei But all this aside, the fact is that a fine free system is already working for many large public library systems across the country.

Brian Bannon The idea of fines—you know, it's been around for almost a century in public libraries—was a way to incentivize people to return materials. 

Adwoa Adusei This is Brian Bannon, currently the Meryl and Tisch Director at New York Public Library. 

Virginia Marshall Brian was the commissioner and CEO of Chicago Public Library when they went fine free in 2019.

Brian Bannon The idea was it was supposed to be a very small amount of money that would likely not make a difference in someone's life. What the reality was, we started to learn, is that fines became a barrier to people actually being able to use the library. And what we started to see was that in the lower income neighborhoods of Chicago, one in three of our library users was blocked from using the library to check out materials. And in our wealthier neighborhoods, it was one in six. 

Adwoa Adusei So, Chicago started experimenting with amnesty periods.

Brian Bannon What we found is actually large numbers of materials were returned over over those fine amnesty periods. So over the course of a month, while we lost the revenue of fines, we typically saw a dramatic increase in the materials returned worth many millions of dollars more than a few thousand dollars of lost fines. And so what we actually learned was not only by doing these short term amnesties did we remove this barrier of using the library, but we actually got back all these materials that were in high demand that we could recirculate back into the collections.

Virginia Marshall Much like New York City did during the pandemic, at a certain point, Chicago decided to make that temporary amnesty permanent. Since then, Chicago has done studies about usage. And the numbers are impressive! Library attendance increased after fines were removed, and there was a 7 percent increase in circulation.

Adwoa Adusei It’ll be interesting to see the numbers from our fine free initiative in several years.

Virginia Marshall Totally. And in the meantime, the work isn’t done. Linda Johnson said we’ve got to keep looking for ways to make sure our resources are easily available to people who need the library the most in New York City. 

Linda Johnson You know, I think the thing we're most focused on right now is internet access, broadband capacity. And we're doing everything we can to help communities, where we're extending Wi-Fi signals in neighborhoods by putting antenna on our roofs or driving our Techmobile into communities where the Wi-Fi penetration is deep enough. 

Adwoa Adusei That initiative Linda just mentioned—extending free internet into the neighborhoods around our library branches—that’s something BPL is a real leader on. The program is called BKLYN Reach and we’ll devote a whole episode to it later this season.

Virginia Marshall It just makes a lot of sense. I mean, a lot of people are accessing the library from home. For those who don’t have internet connections, they’re being blocked from free resources they might really need, which is another barrier to equity—a lot like library fines!—that should be a thing of the past. Anyway, I’m excited to bring our listeners that story soon.

Adwoa Adusei Me too. And before we end this episode, we’re bringing back BookMatchback! We have a year-end book list brought to you by our very own Brooklyn librarians.

Jess Harwick Hi, I’m Jess. I’m the Library Information Supervisor at McKinley Park Libray and I’m one of the BookMatch team leaders.

Adwoa Adusei Thank you so much for being here with us today, Jess. So, every year the library puts out a list of favorite books of the past year, and the BookMatch team does an excellent job of that. So we wanted to ask, how are those books chosen? 

Jess Harwick So these are just chosen by a survey. We sent a survey to everybody who answers questions for our BookMatch service. They get the opportunity to nominate up to four books that they thought were their favorites of the year. These don't have to be they don't have to be published in 2021.  It's just their favorite books that they read this year, regardless of when they were published. 

Adwoa Adusei Oh, okay. Little loophole. [Laughs]

Jess Harwick Yeah, well, we know we know it's hard for people to get to read 2021 books all the time just because, you know, we're waiting for books just like patrons are! We’re on the wait lists. So it's like it can be hard to read really up to date. 

Adwoa Adusei Was there anything notable about this year's list? Or trends that you see and what people are reading?

Jess Harwick Yeah, I think the trends are pretty much what we're seeing or at least what I'm seeing with my friend groups in my personal life. It's a lot of romance. It's a lot of sci fi and fantasy. People are still looking for those escapes, you know, so the list is heavy on that. There are literary fiction books, there are books of poetry. They all exist on this list, but it's a lot of romance and fantasy. And then the nonfiction that's selected is, again, a lot of what we've been seeing the last couple of years, particularly it's people wanting to be more politically aware, be better citizens and just really learn. So there's some really great, really important nonfiction on the list, too.

Adwoa Adusei Thank you. And then lastly, can you tell us about maybe one or two of your favorite books from this year?

Jess Harwick Absolutely. My favorite book, hands down that I read this year was A Psalm for the Wild-built by Becky Chambers. It is just, it's a gentle and kind sci-fi book about a tea monk who travels around their world. It's a world where robots became sentient, they went into the wilderness and people haven't seen them for thousands of years. And this monk, in their travels, stumbles onto to a robot who has decided to reenter society and find out what people need. How are people doing since the robots have left? And it turns out that this tea monk doesn't have answers. And I think it just really resonated with me in a way that—I'm feeling very much like I don't have answers right now. Immediately upon finishing it, I both texted like four people that I know, and it was like, "You need to read this right now because I know you're going through what I'm going through and you just need to read this." And then I turned to the front page and I started it again. 

Adwoa Adusei Oh wow, that's aweome. Any other ones? 

Jess Harwick Yeah. Another book that I really loved this year was One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston. It is a love letter to Brooklyn. It's a book about queer found family, and it's just a lot of fun. It has a speculative fiction element where the main character meets and falls in love with a woman on the subway. And it turns out that that woman is trapped in time. She's been stuck on the subway since the 70s. She doesn't have any of her memories. She's just been existing on the subway. And so part of the the goal in that is to get her unstuck in time. And it's just fun, and just kind of like a big gay hug and again, just something I really needed this year.

Adwoa Adusei I've been hearing a lot of good things about One Last Stop. for our listeners, that was A Psalm for the Wild-built by Becky Chambers. And One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston. Thank you so much, Jess.

Jess Harwick Yeah, no problem. Thank you so much for having me. Any chance I get to talk about my favorite books, you know?

Adwoa Adusei Absolutely. 

[music] 

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, with our guest host on this episode Virginia Marshall. Krissa Corbett Cavouras will be back in the new year. You can find a transcript of this episode as well as the full BookMatch 2021 reading list on our website: BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.

Virginia Marshall Borrowed is produced and written by me and Adwoa Adusei, with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, Meryl Friedman, and Robin Lester Kenton. Our music composer is Billy Libby.  

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed will be back next month. Until then, bring your books back to the library! We promise we won’t charge you late fines ever again.