Blog

The role I play here at Freedom Reads gives me the ability to see both the front-end and the back-end results of the great work we do at Freedom Reads. My primary job is to make sure the handcrafted furniture we create here at Freedom Reads Headquarters in Connecticut is put together properly, and we build enough units each day to meet the demand of our efforts to place these Freedom Libraries into cellblocks at correctional facilities all over the country. 

“A yo Shy, you know this ain’t your fault right,” my man calls to tell me the day after he’s been denied parole again. I’m his lawyer. But also his friend. We've called the same prison cells home. And so he wants me to know that he doesn’t blame me for this. He says this failure ain’t on me, it’s on the system. I’ve heard it before. From other friends. Always consoling me as if I’m still going to be serving time instead of them.

It hasn’t been a month since I let you know about opening our 200th Freedom Library, which happened in late October at New York’s Otisville Correctional Facility. Because our team only rests on December the 32nd, we’ll be closing out 2023 with 239 Freedom Libraries in 33 prisons and juvenile detention centers across ten states. But we have a long way to a Freedom Library in every prison cellblock in the United States. We cannot expand our reach without your support.

On November 29, 2023, as part of our goal of opening a Freedom Library in every cellblock in the United States, we opened four more Freedom Libraries at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola). But that ain’t half the story. Walking back inside the acres that were once a plantation but now a prison was James Washington. James entered Angola as a teenager and would go on to serve 25 years there. Those who don’t know better might call him a convict or, better still, formerly incarcerated. But once, I walked onto Angola with James. Angola, one of the most fierce prisons in this country. I watched men greet James like a brother. Watched him embraced by men he did decades with. And I watch him greeted as friend, as brother, as mentor, as counselor – not once, not even by the staff there, as inmate, prisoner, formerly incarcerated.

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.

I tell people: several days after the Freedom Reads team opened three Freedom Libraries at Otisville Correctional Facility in late August, I was still unable to let go of how much of a wonder it was.