“The process for choosing the facilities to which we offer the books is somewhat organic, although the general criteria have been proximity, size and interest in accepting the donation,” Benson told the News. The team has reached out to various prisons, correctional facilities, women’s shelters and providers of services to the homeless in New Haven. The two, alongside other members of the YLS community, expanded the focus beyond prisons to also include local jails, shelters and soup kitchens, Aiken said. The initiative continued growing after Aiken began working and sharing ideas with Miriam Benson, a senior administrative assistant at the Yale Law School. “Inmates are often working on appeals or other legal questions, so we delivered a range of recent legal casebooks, as well as hundreds of popular fiction and non-fiction titles,” Aiken told the News. With Betts as an inspiration, Aiken first delivered over 700 books to the Cheshire Correctional Institute - a prison around 30 minutes away from Yale - in the weeks before COVID-19 struck in 2020.
“Dwayne had been a prison inmate himself and described how he rediscovered a sense of freedom after being given a book of poems while in prison.”īetts went on to create the Freedom Reads Project, which develops library spaces within prison housing units. candidate, Dwayne Betts,” Aiken wrote in an email to the News. “I started the YLS books to prisons project after some discussions with poet and (at the time) Law Ph.D. He spearheaded the project with inspiration from Dwayne Betts LAW ’16. More than 1,300 books have been donated so far to several prisons and correctional facilities, and Aiken hopes to continue its expansion. The initiative was spearheaded by Julian Aiken, assistant director for access and faculty services at the Law Library.
The program first launched in 2020 and returned with a delivery in late February to a facility less than one mile from Yale Law School that did not have a library. After pausing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a Yale Law School Library initiative that brings books to prisons is back.
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