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I can only shake my head and wonder how I got through all the crazy things I did in one piece. Alive. When I was 15, my mom stayed on pins and needles every time I left the house. Even when I went to school she worried. Guess I had more energy than focus in those days. Guess, also, it was just a matter of time when I’d find myself in hot water up to my neck. But before winding up in prison for a robbery that netted me a 20-year sentence, I did something that nearly got me killed at age 17.

You probably know that some books don’t politely knock. They show up, sit down, and make themselves very comfortable – sometimes at a level that makes us really uncomfortable. But that discomfort is necessary. These books might unsettle you. They might haunt you. They might leave you feeling some type of way - and then leave you feeling that way for a while.

I’ve always struggled with the beginnings of things, for me it makes the most sense to meander my way into things. In a way, I meandered my way into prison. I took the crash course: petty crime to carjacking before the midterms of my junior year. I get locked up in December and I might as well have gotten locked up in January. End of the year, beginning of the year – you get to imagine where you’ve been and what you’ve become.

What keeps Freedom Reads thriving is the people who believe in the mission and choose to support it. LeRoy General, our Chief Development Officer, is the person who helps connect would-be supporters to our goal of opening a Freedom Library in every cellblock in every prison in the United States.

In her outstanding new book The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, cognitive scientist and podcaster, Maya Shankar takes a refreshing look at how the typically unsettling process of change can be seen as an opportunity. Change can be frightening and disorienting, but it can also be transformative. Drawing on stories of people who underwent life-altering personal change, including Freedom Reads founder and CEO, Dwayne Betts, the book focuses the reader’s attention on what is possible following reality-changing events. Here is a short excerpt from the chapter entitled “Possible Selves.”

I went to prison when I was 17 years old. 19 years later, I went before the parole board. During my parole hearing, I could not stop looking at my victim's mother. I had an image of her imprinted in my mind from my arraignment and my sentencing. Though she was a little older, the pain that was imprinted on my mind, the emotions that were on her face almost two decades ago, were still fresh. I could hear her saying, “Y’all promised me 30 years.” That is all that the court gave her, a promise that I would be in prison for 30 years. I had been in prison for approximately 20 years, since I was 17, and now, I was granted parole.

Having grown up in Nigeria, I came to study in America with little to no understanding of the Black experience beyond what I had absorbed from television and popular culture. Those images were partial, flattened, and removed from the textures of daily life. It wasn’t until I encountered Richard Wright’s Black Boy that I began to see a deeper, more unsettling truth about America and the struggles of Black life—a truth that resonates strongly for those experiencing confinement.

Dolphins. They were everywhere. Springing and spraying in and out of an undulating tangerine sea set ablaze by a fiery-gold sun. An oceanic dreamscape with splashing dolphins and soaring seabirds doing what they do while the summer sun burns and drips smooth as honey. Such a scene is what a visual artist painted after she visited a prisoner on death row in California and asked him what he thought about from one grey day to the next. He mentioned thinking about a number of things while behind bars. Thinks he should never have committed his crime. Any crime. No time. Though he mostly thought about dolphins and seabirds soaring and splashing in and over the deep blue sea. Perhaps the image represented freedom in its truest form to the prisoner. Freedom in its most elemental state. Freedom in the abstract. Freedom without contract. Freedom that does not detract nor subtract but is pure and simple and intact. Just freedom.

Lori reflects on “Doggerel in the Stacks,” a recent Brooklyn Public Library event with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Dwayne Betts and dog cognition expert Alexandra Horowitz. In the blog, Lori explores the surprising links between prisons, poetry, and life with dogs — and what they can teach us about how we see the world.

Working at Freedom Reads often compels us to give a part of ourselves that we may not realize we can afford to give. When the newly formed Freedom Reads Communications Team—Craig Gore, James Davis III, and Autumn Gordon-Chow—recently entered New Jersey prisons together for the first time to open Freedom Libraries, they encountered something profound: familiar faces reflected back at them. In the eyes of incarcerated people at Middlesex Youth Detention Center and South Woods State Prison, they saw themselves, their children, their shared humanity. Here, they share their reflections on what they found.

If you’ve ever wondered how Freedom Reads libraries seem to appear across the country with care, precision, and soul, chances are David is somewhere in the middle of it all.

As Library Coordination Manager, David’s days resist routine. One morning might begin in conversation with a department of corrections, shift into planning an Inside event with an author, and close with a Zoom book discussion alongside readers on the Inside. Each day unfolds differently, and that constant motion is part of what makes the work feel special.

This November, on his 50th birthday, J. Davis walked into a Maryland prison to open Freedom Libraries. He’d been out of prison fewer days than some of us have spent in the hole. But sometimes, to return is the ultimate act of care.

This year we opened nearly 200 Freedom Libraries across 17 prisons in 7 states. Since this journey began, we’ve now opened more than 600 handcrafted bookcases made of maple, walnut, oak, and cherry. That’s 300,000 brand-new paperbacks. And nearly every one of those libraries was built by the hands of Jimmy or Mike. We knew where they would land because Tyler and David made sure Departments of Corrections said yes, and Kevin made sure that when a prison said yes, libraries were waiting.