Not too long ago, the Freedom Library was but an idea. A dream under development. My entire life had been spent thinking about prison: in poetry, in essays, when I had to explain to my son what it meant to be in prison. But as much as I’d thought about prison, I’d spent little time thinking of what it would have meant to have been able to read Shakespeare before being required to by Professor Sandy Mack years after prison. When asked how I might make the most difference in addressing all the suffering caused by prisons and incarceration, I thought of what saved me: books.
Where others might see only suffering, I knew we wanted to see need and possibility. And so, I thought, what represents the balance of need and possibility necessary to find joy and hope in prison? A library. There are few places more starving for the community that is a library. We bring in beautiful, handcrafted bookcases of maple or oak or cherry and with a specially curated collection of 500 books transform cellblocks into Freedom Libraries. And we wanted to bring these libraries to every cellblock in every prison in America. But until we could do one, it was all a dream – even if a bold one.
In November 2021, Freedom Reads opened the first Freedom Library at MCI-Norfolk in Massachusetts — a prison partly known for its library where Malcolm X transformed his life some 75 years ago. Since then, in a thousand dreams coming true, Freedom Reads has opened 192 Freedom Libraries in 33 prisons and juvenile detention facilities across 10 states. Whose dreams? My own. Our team. The hundreds and hundreds of supporters and funders. But also, and most importantly, the people incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola; the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center; Rikers Island in New York; the Central California Women’s Facility; and, most recently, in the Maine State Prison, that state’s maximum-security prison, to name but a few of the dozens of prisons where our patrons now have access to beauty and the bounty of great literature.
Where are we now? We’ve been busy and have a lot of catching up with you to do. 2023 has been the year of rapid growth. In January, we loaded an eighteen-wheeler with 24 libraries and headed for Salinas Valley, California. We were bringing Freedom Libraries to California’s Correctional Training Facility, once known as Soledad. We entered with Anne Irwin, her mother Marsha Irwin, and her Aunt Elle. The three had never entered before but walked in with our motley crew to help shelve the Freedom Library. As we crouched around the bookcases and split open the boxes of books, I could hear scrapes of a story. “My husband served time here.” “I’ve always loved mystery books.” “A yo, they have books in Spanish here.” Then Marsha placed two books by her late husband John Irwin on the shelf. John Irwin did time at Soledad in the 60s. Five years. What those who know will call a bid. He came home and ended up becoming a well-respected scholar and professor, and ultimately Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University. He created Project Rebound and was a founding member of Convict Criminology. He never forgot that he got his desire to know the world in a prison where the only pieces of the world that you could touch were in books. Anne had never been inside of Soledad. Nor had his mother. With Freedom Reads, they returned, believing, like we believe, as John believed, that freedom begins with a book.