“Books have always made a difference, particularly to those behind bars. The most famous example is that of Malcolm X who attributes his transformation to reading first the dictionary and then anything he could get his hands on in his prison cell. ‘Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge,’ he recalled in his autobiography. ‘In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.’

Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts was placed in solitary confinement because the jail lacked space for incoming adolescents. A book by James Baldwin sustained him through his ten days in isolation. Two years later, while in solitary confinement (again), someone slid Dudley Randall’s “The Black Poets” under his cell door. Betts was eighteen years old. The book changed his life. ‘From that point on, I decided that I was going to be a poet.’ Now age thirty four, he has since published a memoir about coming of age in prison, written two books of poetry, gone on to get his undergraduate and MFA degrees, and is finishing law school.

Books can be a lifeline to people in prison. That lifeline doesn’t always get profiled—not every person becomes an award-winning poet or writer, stages headline-grabbing mass hunger strikes, or becomes a legacy. But for people locked away, sometimes without human contact and sometimes with all-too-much human contact, books can provide a pathway to possibilities.”