National non-profit Freedom Reads returns to California to open 21 Freedom Libraries at the California Institution for Men (CIM) in Chino; Titus Kaphar’s debut film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, screened for an audience inside the prison.
This week, the national non-profit Freedom Reads is opening 21 Freedom Libraries, including one for staff, across CIM in Chino, California. The Freedom Libraries are being opened directly in cellblocks across the prison, allowing incarcerated individuals direct access to inspiring literature. Freedom Reads has previously opened 56 Freedom Libraries across California prisons. With this week’s openings, Freedom Reads has opened 413 Freedom Libraries across 44 adult and youth prisons in 12 states.
On Wednesday, Freedom Reads hosted a film screening of Titus Kaphar’s Exhibiting Forgiveness for an audience in the prison. After the screening, Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts led a discussion about the film with the audience inside the prison. Wednesday’s screening was the first of Kaphar’s yet-to-be released film in a prison.
Exhibiting Forgiveness is a soulful, sophisticated, and beautifully crafted debut feature from visual artist and multi-hyphenate Titus Kaphar, that premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January of this year. The film follows a Black artist on the path to success who is derailed by an unexpected visit from his estranged father. Exhibiting Forgiveness is a film about family, generational healing, and the power of forgiveness.
The cast of the film includes André Holland, known for his performance in Academy Award-winning film, Moonlight, John Earl Jelks, a Tony Award-nominee, Andra Day, a Grammy Award and Golden Globe Award-winner, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Emmy Award-nominee.
“This week, we’re bringing Freedom Libraries full of inspiring literature and thought-provoking art in the form of Titus’ film to CIM to start conversations, create connection, and remind those Inside that they have not been forgotten,” said Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts. “It means so much that we are able to share Titus’ debut film with an audience inside CIM before it is screened in theaters. We are grateful to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for partnering with us to make the Freedom Library openings and film screening happen.”
“The work of Freedom Reads is the work of creativity and hope,” said Titus Kaphar. “The organization brings libraries into prisons. They bring the creative manifestations of artists to a place where creativity and hope are so desperately needed. This film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, is rooted in the same ideas of creativity and hope. The film is fundamentally about one artist's struggle to use his work as an escape from the past and a vehicle toward the future healing of himself and his family. I am so honored that this film is being screened in this institution. It feels good to have a film in the theaters, but it feels important to have this film playing at the California Institution for Men.”
“I would like to thank the Freedom Reads team, this is a great program for the incarcerated persons as well as the staff,” said California Institution for Men Warden Travis Pennington. “Looking forward to the discussions between the staff and incarcerated persons that are reading the same books.”
Freedom Reads is a first-of-its-kind organization that empowers people in prison through literature to imagine new possibilities for their lives. The Freedom Libraries are the brainchild of 2021 MacArthur Fellow and Yale Law School graduate Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was sentenced in Virginia to nine years in prison at age 16. Freedom Libraries are spaces in prisons to encourage community and in which reaching for a book can be as spontaneous as human curiosity. Each bookcase is handcrafted out of maple, cherry, oak, or walnut and is curved to contrast the straight lines and bars of prisons as well as to evoke Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s observation about the “arc of the moral universe” bending “toward justice.”
Books in the Freedom Library have been carefully curated through consultations with hundreds of poets, novelists, philosophers, teachers, friends, and voracious readers, resulting in a collection of books that are not only beloved, but indispensable. The libraries include contemporary poetry, novels, and essays alongside classic works such as Homer’s The Odyssey and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – titles that remind us that books have long been a freedom project.