Blog

The latest from Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, the Freedom Reads team, and our larger community, both on the Inside and the outside.

Tagged with Openings

Founder’s Take: We Rest on December 32nd

By Reginald Dwayne Betts, Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and University of New Haven Professor Randall Horton – both highly-regarded, award-winning poets – conduct a poetry reading in November 2023 at Carl Robinson Correctional Institution in Enfield, Connecticut.
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and University of New Haven Professor Randall Horton – both highly-regarded, award-winning poets – conduct a poetry reading in November 2023 at Carl Robinson Correctional Institution in Enfield, Connecticut.(Photo: Keenan Hochschild)

It hasn’t been a month since I let you know about opening our 200th Freedom Library, which happened in late October at New York’s Otisville Correctional Facility. Because our team only rests on December the 32nd, we’ll be closing out 2023 with 239 Freedom Libraries in 33 prisons and juvenile detention centers across ten states. But we have a long way to a Freedom Library in every prison cellblock in the United States. We cannot expand our reach without your support.

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Reflections on My First Time Back

By Steven Parkhurst, Program Coordinator at Freedom Reads

Tyler Sperrazza, the Chief Production Officer at Freedom Reads, and I pulled our 26-foot Penske moving truck full of Freedom Libraries into the staff parking lot of the Maine Correctional Center, just a couple dozen feet from the sally-port that gave entrance to the prison grounds. We had just driven 240 miles from Hamden, Connecticut, to Windham, Maine, and my heart was pounding.

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