15 Years: From Two Sides
The 15th annual National Conference for Higher Education in Prison was held in Cleveland, OH this year - and I was there. I went to prison in January of 2000 and got out in July of 2025. In 2011, while Inside, I joined Wesleyan University’s Center for Prison Education Program (CPE) - I had been in college almost since the first NCHEP.
Continue ReadingWords of Joy
Every other Wednesday, twenty of us chained and rustled like cattle, formed a motley crew. Destination; courthouse basement. We waited in bullpens, (large holding cells), as if in purgatory drowning in sweat, uncertainty, and fear. Not quite hell, not quite hope. We shared cold benches, bologna sandwiches with green edges, and an unspoken understanding that most of us would not be going home. It was better left unsaid. Words were weaponized against us, in the foreign language of reports and plea offers.
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A smuggled book changed his life. Now he’s built 500 prison libraries.
Reginald Dwayne Betts was locked up as a teenager for carjacking. Books were his escape, and he went on to be a poet, lawyer and founder of Freedom Reads.
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In Connecticut, formerly incarcerated people are building bookshelves and filling them with books for donation to prisons. They say reading helped them get through their own sentences.
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“The prison is like an isolated town with nowhere to go. And the cell is our whole house,” Biktor B. writes, adding that this “house” is shared by complete and often incompatible strangers, who have next to nothing in common.
What Is it Like to Live in a Halfway House?
Kashawn Taylor writes about the expectations and realities of living in a halfway house after leaving prison, noting “it feels like freedom, with an asterisk.”
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The Past's Presence: Jesmyn Ward
In today’s episode, Jesmyn Ward reads from her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is at once a bildungsroman, a ghost story, an epic, and a road novel. In portraying the suck of Parchman Prison on the generations of one Mississippi family, Ward deftly explores how the real threat of incarceration haunts these psyches and, in turn, these familial relationships. In this moving conversation, Ward reflects on living with grief, on listening for communications from beyond our immediate reality, and on the central commitments of her work: to restore agency to the kinds of characters too often denied a voice—and to grant acceptance to the ones harder to forgive. (July 26, 2021)