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 30,000 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.
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.
My first day as a teaching assistant for an Inside-Out class was the first day I walked inside a prison. I had no idea what to expect and did not know what questions to ask. When we arrived at the…
The first rule of Book Club: You must talk about Book Club.
In many ways this [book club] and your time/effort have been an emotional and intellectual lifeline for me.
Because of your book program sending me Michie’s West Virginia Code Annotated, I was able to litigate an amended sentence order from life without parole to eligibility for parole after serving 15 years. In other words, you helped save my life. Thank you.
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.)
