Poet, lawyer, MacArthur fellow, and formerly incarcerated leader Dwayne Betts recently launched an ambitious campaign to put a million books into prisons, called Freedom Reads, with early support from the Mellon Foundation, Art for Justice, several publishers and others. More funding is needed, and donations of all sides accepted, so definitely check out the website and consider a contribution!
The project entails installing pre-assembled libraries of about 2000 books into 1000 prison housing units. I had the chance to attend a dinner celebrating this project and to see the model for the custom bookshelf in person. On the beautiful polished wood with curving lines, I saw dozens of brilliant and provocative books in the collection. I heard Dwayne speak about what the project means to him and the people inside, and I felt the transformative power of it. He said, there’s nothing beautiful in prison. Everything is hard edges and sharp lines, dull colors. By contrast, these bookcases, these colored spines, exude possibilities.
I’m particularly excited for the potential that the project will link readers and allies on the outside with readers on the inside. One of the big strategic challenges in this work is figuring out how to engage the millions of people across the country that are motivated to end mass incarceration but don’t know how to get into the work. There has to be a daily practice of it. In Freedom Reads, I see the possibility of a broad, decentralized effort to move these Freedom libraries into each of the thousands of prisons and jail cell blocks around the country, and to inspire people inside and outside to realize the dignity of spirit and imagination of people who are incarcerated.
To get a real feel for what this project means, best to listen to Dwayne himself. Here’s an excerpt from an email he sent me about one of his installations:
For days now I’ve been telling people how we installed our first Freedom Library at MCI-Norfolk last week. And it’s hard for people to get it, as you say. Because people believe there are already books in prisons. But also, most of us believe that the things people in prison need most are policy changes, sentence reductions, lawyers. And they do need all of those things. But there is something about being proximate that demands understanding how brutal the day to day is.
It takes about two hours to get to this prison from New Haven, and leaving at first light I headed to the prison with some folks from my team.
We’ve been planning for this for a while, and still, in the morning it felt like a kind of absurdist dream. I’ve returned to prison more times than I care to admit. Going back, almost, as if there is a kind of freedom to be found there or planted there. And at least yesterday we were headed to transform a space.
And so leaving my cellphone at the gates, being told to leave my fountain pen because it might be a weapon, being searched, it all felt like a breeze on a surprisingly fall day.
Prison cells are places that augur doom. No matter what. And headed to the cell that we’d transform, I was thinking of that doom. Brendan and Jem, the woodworkers who built the library arrived an hour or so before us. They’d never been to prison. And so the searching startled them. The demand that they leave half their tools in their truck surprised them. The peculiar space called the trap, where you stand waiting to have one door to freedom close and the door to prison open was startling. And they say the cell looked like the darkest place on earth, even though the bunk was gone, even though the toilet was gone.
When we met them in the cell, wood was scattered everywhere. The bookshelves awkwardly waiting to be nailed into the concrete. The cell felt small. A mural was on the wall freshly painted. A man who looks like me sits in grass reading a book, leaning against another book. The book on the ground has its spine to viewers and says Black Poets.
I watched them measure, and cut, and nail, and glue. And the space changed. Two hours or so later it was hopeful. I mean everyone felt it. The staff wanted one. Everyone wanted one in their home. A piece of scrap wood was held fondly by a guard - I can put my bourbon on this, it’s too beautiful to throw away.
We sat down and read. I read from Malcolm X’s autobiography in a prison cell in a prison that he called home once. And the cell was a library, literally a calming and wildly beautiful space.
Everyone felt it was a moment. And we’ll be back a month from today, for an event and grand opening of sorts.
The work feels good, honestly. Like each one these things makes impossible a little less so.