On February, 26, the New York Times published an essay about an alternative sentencing program in Massachussets that allows some sentenced offenders to avoid going to jail by participating in a book group.
Some of the essay's insight about the role of reading for prisoners reminds me of why Pages to Prisoners is so important.
Reading has always provided a lifeline for prisoners, whether for utilitarian purposes or for spiritual searching. (In 2006, when Beard v. Banks upheld a prison’s right to deny inmates access to printed matter, religious and legal texts were among those excepted.) A broader literary tradition stretching from medieval English dream visions to Solzhenitsyn’s novels situates the most intense and uninterrupted reading in prison. (Waxler points out that “cell” can refer to the space in which monks write as easily as to a room in jail.) Traditionally, books have offered virtual escape from physical confinement. In alternative sentencing programs, though, books provide a more literal alternative to incarceration; and the authorities’ job is not to censor books, but to supply them.
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There’s nothing surprising about the idea that certain books teach lessons, whether the Bible or “The Last Lecture.” Here, though, the medium becomes the message: the act of reading changes — or, as we used to say, converts — the reader, even when the texts being read contain no explicit moral injunctions."
