Without me knowing it, prison became the center of my life. I have thought about what a prison cell does to a man for more consecutive days than I have contemplated what it means to be a good man, let alone a father. Sometimes, I imagine that prison has become more than a metaphor, but the literal antecedent to every move I make. It’s a lonely place.
Because, I have been told, in innumerable ways, by people who love, despise, or simply lack regard for me, that because I am a convict, the only way that what I do will matter is if it balances some ledger that only G-d scribbles in. It can be exhausting. And that which exhausts most is being looked at for the story of sorrow that someone needs to imagine you’ve suffered enough to be worthy of being loved.
And yet, what does it mean to look at someone in irons and say their voice matters? Been a long time listening to people tell me how smart I am. Even copped a fellowship that branded me genius. And I won’t front, receiving awards feels good. But, believing an award is your conduit to being loved or employable, is a game even a fool should avoid.
All of which takes me to what matters most. Everyone wants to know what Freedom Reads is about. How do we characterize our success? And who does the characterizing? We have struggled over these questions. Then realized, when we open a Freedom Library we return to where some on our team imagined we might die. I juxtapose those memories with what you’ll see if you visit our website: a talented and diverse team, filled with people with knowledge gleaned from prisons and universities, the twin major American institutes. When I say I thought I wasn’t going to make it, I mean that I saw people smarter than me, braver than me, stronger than me, and definitely more righteous than me broken into the nightmares that haunt others. And when I say it matters that we return there, to those prisons, I mean that for all of us – we return to mine stories of hope, to bring joy, and to share those stories with the world.
We know what we have done so far and we know how much more work there is to do (opened 413 Freedom Libraries, but that is just a fraction of all the cellblocks we plan to go to). Our first Impact Report talks about our work, but it is fundamentally about the effects our work has on those we serve. The Impact Report was inspired by the words we have received from over 700 people still Inside who tell us why Freedom Reads matters to them. There is part of me that wants to excerpt some of the Impact Report here. To give you a glimpse. But the Report itself is just a glimpse.
When I was at Sussex 1 State prison, I spent nearly two years in the cell with Christopher Tunstall. He’d been incarcerated at 16 like me. But he’d been sentenced to life. The window that we stared out was about the width of my hand and the length of a taller man’s arm. We stared into darkness. It was the same 2am darkness that I often ride my bicycle in, seeking some truth or hope or inspiration now as we once did. And I remember Christopher, who we called Juvie, telling me that he might die in a cell like that.
Maybe the Impact Report is just a collection of people admitting that they needed to be kept afloat and that the Freedom Library was a conduit. And if that’s all it is, I believe that’s enough. That night when Juvie said he’d die in prison – I thought to myself, nah. But I felt hopeless and didn’t contradict him.
Twenty years later, after I’d graduated from Yale Law School and become a lawyer, I successfully stood in front of a parole board and argued that Juvie should be free. And this is what I hold on to now. There are people in this world who bet on me when I had nothing but a state number. Freedom Reads is born of that. And many of us, all of us, on this team, with a state number or without, remember a time when someone said all you might have imagined was within reach was just a pipe dream. The Impact Report is a love letter, I believe, to all of us. It shows that sometimes, some dreams come true, and if they haven’t yet, they are still worth having. The Freedom Library brings more joy than we might have ever imagined. And honestly, what other accolade could matter more?