Resisting the Lines: Carrying Prison Wherever You Go
Taking the train from New Haven to Grand Central Station for the first time was the first step of my journey to Tribeca. Then again, maybe my first step was getting out of prison last July. Or maybe it was two years earlier, when I was granted a commutation and my 48-year sentence became 30. Being outside gave me access to a kind of freedom that Dwayne talks about throughout March Forth, a documentary about his incarceration as a juvenile. The film also raised questions that I still cannot answer: When does freedom truly begin for those of us released from prison? And what does it mean to be free when you carry prison with you wherever you go?
Continue ReadingResisting the Lines: Carrying Prison Wherever You Go
Taking the train from New Haven to Grand Central Station for the first time was the first step of my journey to Tribeca. Then again, maybe my first step was getting out of prison last July. Or maybe it was two years earlier, when I was granted a commutation and my 48-year sentence became 30. Being outside gave me access to a kind of freedom that Dwayne talks about throughout March Forth, a documentary about his incarceration as a juvenile. The film also raised questions that I still cannot answer: When does freedom truly begin for those of us released from prison? And what does it mean to be free when you carry prison with you wherever you go?
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Freedom of the Mind
Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts discovered a new path through reading while incarcerated. Now his nonprofit Freedom Reads inspires hope by bringing books to prisons nationwide.
A smuggled book changed his life. Now he’s built 500 prison libraries.
Reginald Dwayne Betts was locked up as a teenager for carjacking. Books were his escape, and he went on to be a poet, lawyer and founder of Freedom Reads.
Why a Cellmate is Not like a Roommate
“The prison is like an isolated town with nowhere to go. And the cell is our whole house,” Biktor B. writes, adding that this “house” is shared by complete and often incompatible strangers, who have next to nothing in common.
What Is it Like to Live in a Halfway House?
Kashawn Taylor writes about the expectations and realities of living in a halfway house after leaving prison, noting “it feels like freedom, with an asterisk.”
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The Past's Presence: Jesmyn Ward
In today’s episode, Jesmyn Ward reads from her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is at once a bildungsroman, a ghost story, an epic, and a road novel. In portraying the suck of Parchman Prison on the generations of one Mississippi family, Ward deftly explores how the real threat of incarceration haunts these psyches and, in turn, these familial relationships. In this moving conversation, Ward reflects on living with grief, on listening for communications from beyond our immediate reality, and on the central commitments of her work: to restore agency to the kinds of characters too often denied a voice—and to grant acceptance to the ones harder to forgive. (July 26, 2021)