Today, that memory is Harris's lifeline. In 1997, she was sentenced to fifty years in prison for killing her abusive partner. Now fifty-two, she has served the past eight years in solitary confinement at Lane Murray Unit, a Texas women's prison. The same solace she found in books at her hometown library is once again keeping her spirit and her mind intact, even within a prison cell.
And many of them, like Harris, say that access to libraries, books, magazines, and other reading material is both sanity-saving and life-preserving. But navigating the prison library system and obtaining books from the outside can be fraught.
The people who need information the most, who need access to books the most, are often the ones who would have the most difficulty accessing books, said Alexandra Schoenborn, the program coordinator for Books Beyond Bars, a nonprofit organization sending books to inmates in New York state prisons. It's not everything. It's not enough. But it's something we can do for now to combat some of these dehumanizing effects of incarceration.
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]