Challenging mass incarceration through books, education, and community engagement.
Our work emanates from two interconnected premises: education is a basic human right, and engaging the community in educational justice efforts is a requisite component to building sustainable restorative justice models.
Since 2005, we have mailed over 45,000 books.
100 imprisoned people (75 women, 25 men) and 27 volunteers have participated in our book clubs.
Over 300 people have volunteered.
We’ve hosted 16+ wrapping parties for community volunteer groups.
But don’t just take it from us. Hear what our friends on the inside have to say about our work.
Prisons aren’t prepared for pandemics like COVID-19. For Steven, incarcerated in Pennsylvania, such an inadequate response means he is helping other incarcerated men write compassionate release papers.
In this excerpt from his journal, Magical Charlie wrote about his experience with COVID-19 restrictions in a Pennsylvania prison:
On January 23, 2020, Dwayne Betts announced that his memoir A Question of Freedom, which chronicles Betts’s time as a young man in prison and how reading saved his life, was officially banned from Virginia state prisons.
Thank you for providing books directly to prisoners free of charge. Yours is a great service, especially for those whose library’s collection is meager, outdated, or otherwise inadequate and who simply do not have the funds to buy books out of their own pockets.
I have passed the first book I received on to two others so far, and plan to do so until the cover falls off! (The library here can fix it up when I donate it.)
In many ways this [book club] and your time/effort have been an emotional and intellectual lifeline for me.
