Robert Lee Williams is a journalist and poet. His work has been published by Literary Hub, PEN America, Plough Quarterly (United States/and Germany), and Slate. Williams is serving his 15th year of incarceration in New York.
In Sullivan Correctional Facility, a max prison, in the Catskills, I never felt comfortable walking into the education office, even if I knocked on the door first. I never worked any of the prisoner jobs that made the secretary, Ms. Curran, both acknowledge and dismiss my presence with a cursory glance. She was a hawk for unauthorized incarcerated personnel encroaching on her domain. But one summer afternoon I had a legitimate reason to enter the office. A guy had asked me to grab a DVD for a prisoner-run organization, and the DVDs were located past Ms. Curran's desk, inside a large black cabinet in the teachers' break room.
As the civilian fussed with cabinet's lock, I felt like a voyeur looking around at the tables, chairs, fridge and microwave. Regular things you'd find in any break room. But then, I glanced up. Where the wall met the ceiling, painted in Corvette red, were the words: " 'Who opens a school door, closes a prison. -- Victor Hugo' "
"Which DVD do you want?" he said, and turned to see what I was reading.
"Who put that quote up there?"
He shrugged.
I silently saluted the unknown artist, and his act of rebellion. What made the quote so audacious is that it was displayed in the Teachers' break room -- inside a prison -- and, if you take it literally, meant their very presence ensured the eventual shuttering of their employer.
When I strolled by Ms. Curran on the way out, I thought that whoever stood on a ladder, and painted those incendiary words knew that if Hugo's aphorism was located a tad lower, someone, more than likely, security staff, would've scrapped it off the wall with their keys.
Months later, when Governor Hochul announced Sullivan was closing, I didn't subscribe to the radical notion that it was because someone built a school somewhere on earth. Besides, my brain had, in fact, long remixed the quote to "Whoever builds a library, closes a prison."
Maybe this is because a library is as inseparable from the anatomy of a school, as heat is inseparable from the description of a fire. I believe a school is incomplete without its repository of knowledge: they are one. In a correctional setting, the organization of a library is a beachhead, in which the act of reading itself is an abolitionist act.
In an essay published by Literary Hub, "Good Writing In A Bad Place: How One Incarcerated Writer Feeds His Craft," I spoke about how reading "released my mind from confinement," an experience shared by incarcerated people who've made something of themselves in here. It all began with a book. I then imagined the culture and community that would be created if a Freedom Reads Library was installed inside my cellblock in Sullivan.
In the same cellblock, I'd come across a jewel abandoned on a steel table, the place where guys discarded books they no longer wanted. In Brenda Vogel's "Down For The Count: A Prison Library Handbook," she discussed the history of prison reading programs and libraries. In 1870, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the first National Prison Congress produced a declaration of principles.
One hundred and fifty-four years later, Freedom Reads has embodied principle twenty-two: "To assure the eventual restoration of the offender as an economically self-sustaining member of the community, correctional programs must make available to each inmate every opportunity to raise his educational level, improve his vocational competence and skills, and add to his information meaningful knowledge about the world and society in which he must live."
On September 7th, I got drafted to Eastern Correctional Facility, another max prison, Napanoch, New York. Here, our library is closed because there is no civilian to run it. Freedom Reads Libraries are needed inside Eastern's cellblocks. Had the adminstration been made the wiser about the freeing power of books?
Maybe I'm writing this piece as both an invocation of principle twenty-two, and an invitation to our founder.
New to the spot, I strolled through the school building, which felt more like the MoMa, courtesy of formerly incarcerated Galaxy Fellow, Lamar "Starkim" Little, whose paintings decorated the walls. I suddenly felt I needed some paint, a brush, a step ladder, and directions to the education office. Hugo was cool, but I felt the walls calling out for something incredibly doper: my remix.