When Kwaneta Harris was a little girl, she dreamed of being a librarian. Books offered a world of possibility and safety, and the hope of one day opening that world to others sustained her throughout her childhood in Michigan. “I loved to immerse myself,” she said of browsing the shelves at her local library. “It was how I coped. Not just reading the books, but the circumstances: where I was and how I felt. It is a comforting memory to me. Things I read that remind me I’m not alone.” 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. “Solitary confinement—it’s designed to drive us mad,” she said. “So the only way I can try to have a remembrance of sanity is to read.” In 2022, the number of people living in prison increased for the first time in nearly ten years, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The overwhelming majority of the more than 1.23 million incarcerated people in America are serving sentences of one year or more. And many of them, like Harris, say that access to libraries, books, magazines, and other reading material is both sanity-saving and life-preserving…. Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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What Can You Read in Prison?
