From NEWSWIRE:
NEW HAVEN, Conn., March 8, 2023 (Newswire.com) - Today the national nonprofit Freedom Reads opened six Freedom Libraries at Maine Correctional Center (MCC), one library at Southern Maine Women's Reentry Center (SMWRC) and one library at Maine Correctional Women's Center (MCWC) in Windham, ME. The Freedom Libraries will be placed in the facilities' housing units for unfettered access to the 500-book collection. One of MCC's six Freedom Libraries will be dedicated to staff use. The Maine Department of Corrections was one of the first to welcome partnering with Freedom Reads. MCC opened their first three Freedom Libraries on Nov. 8, 2022.
The brainchild of 2021 MacArthur Fellow and Yale Law School graduate Reginald Dwayne Betts who was sentenced to nine years in prison at age 16, the Freedom Libraries seek to create a space in prisons to encourage community and where reaching for a book can be as spontaneous as human curiosity. Each bookshelf is handcrafted out of maple, walnut or cherry and is curved to contrast the straight lines and bars of prisons as well as to evoke Martin Luther King Jr.'s line about the "arc of the universe" bending "toward justice." The libraries were made with the help of Emerge Connecticut, a reentry organization that works with formerly incarcerated individuals in New Haven.
Betts' nonprofit is a first-of-its-kind organization that empowers people through literature to imagine new possibilities for their lives. Books in the Freedom Library have been carefully curated through consultations with hundreds of poets, novelists, philosophers, teachers, friends, and voracious readers, resulting in a collection of books that are not only beloved, but indispensable. The libraries include contemporary poets, novelists, and essayists alongside classic works from Homer's The Odyssey to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, titles that remind us the book has long been a freedom project. Continue reading >>>
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