Books Offer Lifeline in Incarceration
Poets & Writers Magazine|January - February 2021
In the first letter Danny Harris wrote to Gary Fine from solitary confinement, he made what seemed to Fine like a simple request.
By Alissa Greenberg
Books Offer Lifeline in Incarceration

“‘Books are like a window to the world,’” Fine remembers Harris writing. “‘I have no window.’” He wondered if Fine could send him one.

Fine, who works at the Durland Alternatives Library on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, responded that he was sorry, but his library didn’t send books into prisons. When, to his surprise, he received a follow-up soon after thanking him for writing to Harris “like I’m a real person,” it got Fine thinking: Maybe he could send Harris some books. The epistolary relationship they developed over the next several years eventually grew into something much bigger. Prisoner Express, the sprawling literature-by-mail program Fine oversees from his corner of Cornell, has provided windows to the world for more than thirty thousand people living in incarceration in forty-nine states since its inception in 2004.

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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