Founder's Take: Hope, Joy & Beauty
On October 20, 2025, I was at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in California. Just outside the prison, you can look out and see one of the most beautiful views in the world. Staring out on the bay, near the horizon, the fog slowly lifts and you would be surprised that a prison is within walking distance. Dozens and dozens of us showed up to the second annual San Quentin Film Festival, brought to us by Rahsaan “New York” Thomas, who's spent more than two decades of his life at San Quentin, and his cousin Cori Thomas—who is not really his cousin but is his cousin in the way that prison teaches you the profound ways that we choose our families.
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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.
How books — and bookshelves — are helping incarcerated people in Connecticut
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.
Why a Cellmate is Not like a Roommate
“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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September 2025 Newsletter
Freedom Reads: Remembering Through Stories
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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)