October 11, 2025 • 19 mins
Reading is fundamental, so they say, and it can also be a major factor in cutting down prison recidivism rates. The Prison Book Program in Quincy has been providing free books to incarcerated people around the country since 1972, helping people behind bars grow, study, and prepare for a healthier and more productive life upon their release. Executive Director Kelly Brotzman joins Nichole this week to talk about their mission, their efforts to get books into prison "book deserts", and their upcoming fundraiser later this month.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
From WBZ News Radio in Boston. This is New England Weekend.
Each week we come together right here and talk about
all the topics important to you and the place where
you live. Thanks for joining us again this week. I'm
Nicole Davis. We've talked a few times here on the
show about the efforts by nonprofits, community groups, and even
local sheriff's departments to cut down on prison recidivism rates.
(00:29):
Since the early nineteen seventies, the volunteers of the Prison
Book Program have been sending free books to incarcerated people nationwide,
including right here in the Bay State. Their aim is
to give people who want to change their lives the inspiration, education,
and training to do it, and studies have shown that
this approach works. The thing is, many prison facilities still
don't have proper access to reading materials, which is why
(00:52):
the program says its work is still so critical. Kelly
Brotzman is the executive director of the Prison Book Program. Kelly,
it is great to have you here again. The program
has been around for decades doing this work. Tell us
a bit more about the history and how it all
came together in the first place.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Prison Book Program goes back to nineteen seventy two. It
was you know, sort of peak counter culture years with
all of the rights movements, women's rights, gay rights, civil rights,
and there were sort of a group of activists who
(01:29):
decided that incarcerated, you know, incarcerated people, just like other
oppressed people groups, should have access to the kinds of
books and literature that would allow them to reflect critically
on their situation and to take meaningful political action on it.
So it really started as an activist sort of thing,
(01:52):
But nineteen seventy two was really before mass incarceration as
we know it in the United States really got rolling.
That would come in the eighties, and so very very
quickly the project transformed from mostly sending political books, political
and philosophical books behind bars to sending any kind of
(02:14):
book behind bars. In that time period between sort of
the early eighties and the early two thousands is really
when our prison population in this country multiplied four and
a half times, and with that rapid rapid population increase
came a worsening of conditions inside prisons and jails. You
(02:40):
just can't grow a system that quickly without seeing serious
deterioration in terms of conditions, So things like rehabilitative programming,
educational programs, therapeutic programs really started to wither on the
vine in sort of the tough on crime era, you know,
lock them up and throw the key kind of era,
(03:01):
And so getting your hands on books actually became more
difficult in that time period, and books still today with
conditions inside prisons and jails, books are very difficult to get.
Even though most facilities have a library, it might not
be open. Maybe your facility doesn't have a librarian on staff.
(03:22):
We're hearing from lots of folks that that's the case,
or there's one librarian handling the entire state, so they're
there like two days a month or something like that.
And your library, your facility's library might be a rolling
cart with three tiers on it and you know, one
hundred paperbacks. It can really be anything. And then the
(03:43):
important difference is between prison and jail. So jail, unlike prison,
jail don't have to offer any kind of educational programming
or really any kind of programming at all. And so
most jails do not have a library. They don't have to.
They're not legally obligated to provide any d of services
like that. And half a million of the two million.
(04:04):
Just under two million people who are incarcerated today are
in jail, so we're talking about a quarter of the
incarcerated population potentially having no access to books, and so
it just it's important for people to know that incarcerated
people do not have access to the real Internet as
you and I know it. Increasingly, they do have access
(04:27):
to a sort of device that has has can can
access some secure apps and so on, but it's not
what you and I know as the real Internet. So
if people are looking for information, if they're looking for
resources for you know, personal growth, if they're just looking
to travel to other places in their minds, use their imaginations,
(04:47):
books are really where it's at. And so Prison Book
Program has been focused on getting incarcerated people the books
that they want and need to read. So we try
very hard to match the books that we send with
the with the requesters interest areas what they're looking to learn,
(05:09):
what they're looking to read. So last year alone, we
sent about seventy thousand books to about twenty thousand people
in over a thousand correctional facilities in all fifty states
as well as Guam and Puerto Rico. So yeah, we
try to send everyone three pounds worth of reading material, again,
(05:32):
reading material that they're asking for. So we respond to requests.
We don't just send books into libraries or anything like that.
We serve individual readers. We're constantly explaining that we serve
incarcerated readers, not necessarily correctional systems. So we supply the
individual reader. The books become their personal property. They do
(05:54):
not need to be returned. They can do with them
whatever they like. We're able to do this because of
a library that we maintain that on average has about
fifteen thousand books in it on any given day, about
eighty percent of those are donated. They're just community donations.
People walk in, they come to us when we were
(06:15):
having a volunteer session in our space, They bring us
their books, they mail as their books, they get their
books to us, they help us find new homes for
their books. And then there are some books that we
do purchase in bulk which are super super in demand
and would never come in enough via donation. And the
classic example there is a college level dictionary that is
(06:38):
the number one request. It has always been the number
one request since nineteen seventy two. So I mean, nobody
really has a paper dictionary anymore. No, they do. They
want it on their telth Yeah, So you know, we
buy for the dictionaries, for example, we buy by the
palette and when we do, we get a very very
good bulk price on them. Same goes for other fuler
(07:00):
categories of books that would just never come in in
enough quantity to satisfy the demand, things like foreign language dictionaries.
Taking up the study of a foreign language is a
super popular hobby in prison, so things like Spanish English dictionaries,
things like almanacs are super popular in prison. Nobody has
Almanacs on their shelves anymore. We have a super computer
(07:22):
in your pocket, you don't need one. So those are
the kinds of things we spend our book budget on
in bulk. And then we have other streams of books.
We have wish lists at about eight local independent bookstores
in Greater Boston. We're always looking to bring business to
those indie indie bookstores. And then we have wish lists
(07:42):
on Amazon and Better World Books as well. Those are
some online outlets where we have wish lists, and so
all those wish lists all told, are great sources of
books for us. We also collect arcs, which is advanced
review copies or pre publication copies of books that bookstores
receive in order to promote books, but they can't resell them,
(08:05):
so but they're great for us because they're generally a
new condition, very good condition. So we have a whole
number of streams through which books find their way to us.
But we strive to maintain a very diverse inventory. We
have a little bit in every section. It's basically exactly
what you would find in a small bookstore sort of,
(08:25):
you know, a shelf or two in hundreds of different
categories fiction and nonfiction. And we are volunteer powered. We
have just myself and one other person on our paid staff,
so over two hundred times a year we gather volunteers
in our program space in Quincy Center. We can have
(08:47):
up to thirty five volunteers per session, and they are
very frequently full in advance. We're very fortunate to have
a wildly enthusiastic base of volunteers, many of whom have
been coming to volunteer with us for years and years
and decades in some cases. So yeah, it is volunteers
(09:10):
who do the core work of fulfilling book requests. My
colleague and I basically just make that possible, open up
the space, keep everything stocked. So that's what we do.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Okay, wow, I mean this is it's a great idea
first and foremost, but it's also important. But you know,
I would be curious to know what you would say
to somebody who would maybe ask, Okay, these people are
in prison or they're in jail, why should entertaining them
or educating them be a priority? What would your response.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Be to that? Well, I generally have two responses to that.
One is kind of the core belief on which prison
book program is based, and that that is that reading
is good for everyone. Reading is just a good thing
to do. It's healthy. It can be just as effective
as yoga and deep breathing in terms of achieving calmness,
(10:03):
dealing with feelings of distress. It is again a great
way to learn more about yourself. A lot of people
tell us, you know, that they've basically books helped them
through recovery or through an addiction, that you know, books
helps them understand, you know, trauma and various kinds of things.
(10:23):
And then the second reactions that I have to that
is ninety five percent of people who are in prison
are eventually going to rejoin us out here in the
free world, and they will be our neighbors again, very
often after long periods of incarceration. What do we want
them returning to us? Like, do we want them returning
(10:47):
to us more educated, more thoughtful, more evolved, more developed
as human beings, or do we want them to come
back to us less? So I think you know one
of the one of the things we know is that
education is the number one preventor of recidivism. Yes, so
(11:11):
the single best intervention you can provide to someone during
a term of incarceration to prevent their odds of returning
to incarceration is education. And one thing a lot of
people don't know is that the educational offerings in most
prisons top out at a high school diploma. So a
GED or a high set a high school equivalency test
(11:31):
is about as far as the educational programming goes in
most prisons. Again, we do, we have some college and
prison programs here in Massachusetts and other states do too.
Those programs are they're not everywhere by any means. They
tend to be pretty isolated, and so self education is
(11:51):
what people are left with if they achieved that that
high school diploma they didn't have it, or if they
had it before they went in. Reading and self educate
is really the only way to further your education. And
so since we know that people do learn a lot
from their reading, both fiction and nonfiction, by the way,
(12:12):
we know that we are by providing books, we are
contributing to lowering the chance of recidivism in the case
of any particular reader. And so those are my two
primary responses to that question, which we do get a
fair amount.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Well, I figured you would get that question, but honestly,
you know, you're setting people up for success at the
end of the day, in whatever way that looks like
for them. If they are going to stay incarcerated for
their life, this gives them something to essentially have a
new purpose. But if they are going to be getting
out cutting back on recidivism rates, It's incredible what education
(12:49):
and a desire to push for something or learn something
and then pick up a new hobby. It's amazing what
little things can do to get somebody motivated enough to
say I want to try again and I want to
do right this time. And I think that benefits all
of us at the end of the day.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
And I think a lot of people understand that in
the case of nonfiction, like you know, self help books
or job related, career related books, but a lot of
people don't know that there's an entire science of reading
fiction and what it does to people. And there's a
very very strongly held academic consensus that the primary benefit
(13:32):
of reading fiction is empathy. Empathy development. And so people
who say, oh, send me you know, fantasy books and
sci fi books and so on, and it's not that
they don't want to learn, it's that they want to imagine,
and so they want to go to other places, they
want to understand other lives. And that benefits us as well,
because the more empathy develops, the less criminal tendencies, the
(13:59):
less power that criminal tendencies have.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
You have a very special guest coming for an event
on the twenty third over at More than Words, another
wonderful bookstore that we have here in the Boston area,
great independent bookstore. Tell us about Sean Ellis, a little
bit about him for people who might not know, and
what your evening is going to be about.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, Sean Ellis is the subject of the Netflix docuseries
Trial for Sean was a very young man when he
was wrongfully convicted for the murder of a Boston police officer.
Sean was factually innocent of that crime and nonetheless was convicted,
(14:42):
And the title of the docuseries comes from the fact
that it took four trials who eventually correct this miscarriage
of justice, and Sean remained wrongfully incarcerated for twenty two
years before he was able to finally be exonerated, fully
(15:03):
exonerated of the crime for which he was convicted. And
today he does amazing work with the New England Innocence
Project directing the Exonery Network. Exonerations are not as rare
as they should be. The system gets it wrong a
(15:24):
certain amount, and so there are many exoneries in the
Greater Boston area and the Exonery Network helps them to
connect and thrive and flourish post exoneration. So Sean is
going to be the keynote speaker at our event at
More than Words on Thursday evening, the twenty third. He's
(15:45):
going to tell his story, which is incredibly moving and
in many ways incredibly an incredible outrage, and he's going
to talk about the role that books played in helping
him survive and overcome his situation, and so there will
be excellent food and beverage and people can purchase tickets
(16:11):
for twenty five dollars on our website Prison Book Program
dot org. It's going to be a great evening.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, and this is a fundraiser for you as well.
Correct it is it.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Is we are It's sort of the first, you know,
major fundraising event that we have tried to put together
here at Prison Book Program.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
We have.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
One hundred and seventy five tickets and where they're selling well,
and get your tickets you know now early soon if
you if you can. And yeah, we're we're hoping to
raise raise money but also raise awareness. Prison Book Program
for forty seven years was run by all volunteers. There
(16:55):
were zero paid staff actually, and so for that reason
it kind of remained for far too long, kind of
one of the best kept secrets in Greater Boston. It
did a lot. There weren't a lot of people who
knew about us. So we're also kind of trying to
raise awareness about the fact that we exist, about the
need for our services and just how important books are
(17:18):
for incarcerated people.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Sure, and I was going to say, let's get the
word out right now about what you need so when
people want to send you books or drop books by
to your headquarters, we are not talking going up into
Aunt Tillie's attic and grabbing every browned, brittle book that
you've got and bringing it down to the bookstore and saying, hey,
these are free books. Enjoy like yes, No, and probably
(17:42):
no like detective crime stories or anything like that either.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Definitely no true crimes. Okay, we can't have any true crime.
But you know, if someone loves mysteries, bring us all
your mysteries. But yeah, thank you for saying that. We
do ask for good condition paperback, so you know, moderate
signs of age are okay, But if you've got torn covers,
broken spines, pages that are so brittle they're breaking apart,
(18:10):
that's not a book we can do anything with. Not
that it's not important to you or to anyone, but
it's just not a book that the prisons are going
to accept. So it's not a book that's going to
be able to make it into the hands of an
incarcerated reader. So we say good condition or better focus
on paperbacks. We have really detailed guidelines about what we
(18:30):
can and can't use on our website on the donate
books page of our website. But generally speaking, if it's
a paperback in good or better condition, we can we
can use it. We do have the most popular genres
listed on our website as well. They're ones that people
ask for all the time, and in those categories we
(18:50):
will take a good condition hardback as well. Oh, but
definitely focus on the paperback.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
All right, great, and again you don't have to necessarily
just go into the attic.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
You can.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
You can go to local bookstores. You've got the Amazon
wish list. There's a lot of great information tell us
how people can get a hold of you.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
The best way for people to learn more about us
and get in touch with us is via our website
Prison Book Program DOTRG. There's a contact form on there.
You can also come on by our space anytime we're
having a volunteer session. Like I said, we're there more
than two hundred times a year. You can bring books
as a walk in donor. You don't have to be
signed up to volunteer, just come on buy. We're accepting
(19:29):
books anytime we're there, and they can also sign up
to volunteer. If you're interested in coming to one of
our volunteer sessions, you can sign up on our website
as well.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Kelly, thanks so much for the time and congratulations and
to many more years.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Thank you very much. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I hope you have a safe and happy and healthy
holiday weekend. Please be sure to tune in again next
week for another edition of the show. I'm Nicole Davis
from WBZ News Radio on iHeartRadio.
From WBZ News Radio in Boston. This is New England Weekend.
Each week we come together right here and talk about
all the topics important to you and the place where
you live. Thanks for joining us again this week. I'm
Nicole Davis. We've talked a few times here on the
show about the efforts by nonprofits, community groups, and even
local sheriff's departments to cut down on prison recidivism rates.
(00:29):
Since the early nineteen seventies, the volunteers of the Prison
Book Program have been sending free books to incarcerated people nationwide,
including right here in the Bay State. Their aim is
to give people who want to change their lives the inspiration, education,
and training to do it, and studies have shown that
this approach works. The thing is, many prison facilities still
don't have proper access to reading materials, which is why
(00:52):
the program says its work is still so critical. Kelly
Brotzman is the executive director of the Prison Book Program. Kelly,
it is great to have you here again. The program
has been around for decades doing this work. Tell us
a bit more about the history and how it all
came together in the first place.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Prison Book Program goes back to nineteen seventy two. It
was you know, sort of peak counter culture years with
all of the rights movements, women's rights, gay rights, civil rights,
and there were sort of a group of activists who
(01:29):
decided that incarcerated, you know, incarcerated people, just like other
oppressed people groups, should have access to the kinds of
books and literature that would allow them to reflect critically
on their situation and to take meaningful political action on it.
So it really started as an activist sort of thing,
(01:52):
But nineteen seventy two was really before mass incarceration as
we know it in the United States really got rolling.
That would come in the eighties, and so very very
quickly the project transformed from mostly sending political books, political
and philosophical books behind bars to sending any kind of
(02:14):
book behind bars. In that time period between sort of
the early eighties and the early two thousands is really
when our prison population in this country multiplied four and
a half times, and with that rapid rapid population increase
came a worsening of conditions inside prisons and jails. You
(02:40):
just can't grow a system that quickly without seeing serious
deterioration in terms of conditions, So things like rehabilitative programming,
educational programs, therapeutic programs really started to wither on the
vine in sort of the tough on crime era, you know,
lock them up and throw the key kind of era,
(03:01):
And so getting your hands on books actually became more
difficult in that time period, and books still today with
conditions inside prisons and jails, books are very difficult to get.
Even though most facilities have a library, it might not
be open. Maybe your facility doesn't have a librarian on staff.
(03:22):
We're hearing from lots of folks that that's the case,
or there's one librarian handling the entire state, so they're
there like two days a month or something like that.
And your library, your facility's library might be a rolling
cart with three tiers on it and you know, one
hundred paperbacks. It can really be anything. And then the
(03:43):
important difference is between prison and jail. So jail, unlike prison,
jail don't have to offer any kind of educational programming
or really any kind of programming at all. And so
most jails do not have a library. They don't have to.
They're not legally obligated to provide any d of services
like that. And half a million of the two million.
(04:04):
Just under two million people who are incarcerated today are
in jail, so we're talking about a quarter of the
incarcerated population potentially having no access to books, and so
it just it's important for people to know that incarcerated
people do not have access to the real Internet as
you and I know it. Increasingly, they do have access
(04:27):
to a sort of device that has has can can
access some secure apps and so on, but it's not
what you and I know as the real Internet. So
if people are looking for information, if they're looking for
resources for you know, personal growth, if they're just looking
to travel to other places in their minds, use their imaginations,
(04:47):
books are really where it's at. And so Prison Book
Program has been focused on getting incarcerated people the books
that they want and need to read. So we try
very hard to match the books that we send with
the with the requesters interest areas what they're looking to learn,
(05:09):
what they're looking to read. So last year alone, we
sent about seventy thousand books to about twenty thousand people
in over a thousand correctional facilities in all fifty states
as well as Guam and Puerto Rico. So yeah, we
try to send everyone three pounds worth of reading material, again,
(05:32):
reading material that they're asking for. So we respond to requests.
We don't just send books into libraries or anything like that.
We serve individual readers. We're constantly explaining that we serve
incarcerated readers, not necessarily correctional systems. So we supply the
individual reader. The books become their personal property. They do
(05:54):
not need to be returned. They can do with them
whatever they like. We're able to do this because of
a library that we maintain that on average has about
fifteen thousand books in it on any given day, about
eighty percent of those are donated. They're just community donations.
People walk in, they come to us when we were
(06:15):
having a volunteer session in our space, They bring us
their books, they mail as their books, they get their
books to us, they help us find new homes for
their books. And then there are some books that we
do purchase in bulk which are super super in demand
and would never come in enough via donation. And the
classic example there is a college level dictionary that is
(06:38):
the number one request. It has always been the number
one request since nineteen seventy two. So I mean, nobody
really has a paper dictionary anymore. No, they do. They
want it on their telth Yeah, So you know, we
buy for the dictionaries, for example, we buy by the
palette and when we do, we get a very very
good bulk price on them. Same goes for other fuler
(07:00):
categories of books that would just never come in in
enough quantity to satisfy the demand, things like foreign language dictionaries.
Taking up the study of a foreign language is a
super popular hobby in prison, so things like Spanish English dictionaries,
things like almanacs are super popular in prison. Nobody has
Almanacs on their shelves anymore. We have a super computer
(07:22):
in your pocket, you don't need one. So those are
the kinds of things we spend our book budget on
in bulk. And then we have other streams of books.
We have wish lists at about eight local independent bookstores
in Greater Boston. We're always looking to bring business to
those indie indie bookstores. And then we have wish lists
(07:42):
on Amazon and Better World Books as well. Those are
some online outlets where we have wish lists, and so
all those wish lists all told, are great sources of
books for us. We also collect arcs, which is advanced
review copies or pre publication copies of books that bookstores
receive in order to promote books, but they can't resell them,
(08:05):
so but they're great for us because they're generally a
new condition, very good condition. So we have a whole
number of streams through which books find their way to us.
But we strive to maintain a very diverse inventory. We
have a little bit in every section. It's basically exactly
what you would find in a small bookstore sort of,
(08:25):
you know, a shelf or two in hundreds of different
categories fiction and nonfiction. And we are volunteer powered. We
have just myself and one other person on our paid staff,
so over two hundred times a year we gather volunteers
in our program space in Quincy Center. We can have
(08:47):
up to thirty five volunteers per session, and they are
very frequently full in advance. We're very fortunate to have
a wildly enthusiastic base of volunteers, many of whom have
been coming to volunteer with us for years and years
and decades in some cases. So yeah, it is volunteers
(09:10):
who do the core work of fulfilling book requests. My
colleague and I basically just make that possible, open up
the space, keep everything stocked. So that's what we do.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Okay, wow, I mean this is it's a great idea
first and foremost, but it's also important. But you know,
I would be curious to know what you would say
to somebody who would maybe ask, Okay, these people are
in prison or they're in jail, why should entertaining them
or educating them be a priority? What would your response.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Be to that? Well, I generally have two responses to that.
One is kind of the core belief on which prison
book program is based, and that that is that reading
is good for everyone. Reading is just a good thing
to do. It's healthy. It can be just as effective
as yoga and deep breathing in terms of achieving calmness,
(10:03):
dealing with feelings of distress. It is again a great
way to learn more about yourself. A lot of people
tell us, you know, that they've basically books helped them
through recovery or through an addiction, that you know, books
helps them understand, you know, trauma and various kinds of things.
(10:23):
And then the second reactions that I have to that
is ninety five percent of people who are in prison
are eventually going to rejoin us out here in the
free world, and they will be our neighbors again, very
often after long periods of incarceration. What do we want
them returning to us? Like, do we want them returning
(10:47):
to us more educated, more thoughtful, more evolved, more developed
as human beings, or do we want them to come
back to us less? So I think you know one
of the one of the things we know is that
education is the number one preventor of recidivism. Yes, so
(11:11):
the single best intervention you can provide to someone during
a term of incarceration to prevent their odds of returning
to incarceration is education. And one thing a lot of
people don't know is that the educational offerings in most
prisons top out at a high school diploma. So a
GED or a high set a high school equivalency test
(11:31):
is about as far as the educational programming goes in
most prisons. Again, we do, we have some college and
prison programs here in Massachusetts and other states do too.
Those programs are they're not everywhere by any means. They
tend to be pretty isolated, and so self education is
(11:51):
what people are left with if they achieved that that
high school diploma they didn't have it, or if they
had it before they went in. Reading and self educate
is really the only way to further your education. And
so since we know that people do learn a lot
from their reading, both fiction and nonfiction, by the way,
(12:12):
we know that we are by providing books, we are
contributing to lowering the chance of recidivism in the case
of any particular reader. And so those are my two
primary responses to that question, which we do get a
fair amount.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Well, I figured you would get that question, but honestly,
you know, you're setting people up for success at the
end of the day, in whatever way that looks like
for them. If they are going to stay incarcerated for
their life, this gives them something to essentially have a
new purpose. But if they are going to be getting
out cutting back on recidivism rates, It's incredible what education
(12:49):
and a desire to push for something or learn something
and then pick up a new hobby. It's amazing what
little things can do to get somebody motivated enough to
say I want to try again and I want to
do right this time. And I think that benefits all
of us at the end of the day.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
And I think a lot of people understand that in
the case of nonfiction, like you know, self help books
or job related, career related books, but a lot of
people don't know that there's an entire science of reading
fiction and what it does to people. And there's a
very very strongly held academic consensus that the primary benefit
(13:32):
of reading fiction is empathy. Empathy development. And so people
who say, oh, send me you know, fantasy books and
sci fi books and so on, and it's not that
they don't want to learn, it's that they want to imagine,
and so they want to go to other places, they
want to understand other lives. And that benefits us as well,
because the more empathy develops, the less criminal tendencies, the
(13:59):
less power that criminal tendencies have.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
You have a very special guest coming for an event
on the twenty third over at More than Words, another
wonderful bookstore that we have here in the Boston area,
great independent bookstore. Tell us about Sean Ellis, a little
bit about him for people who might not know, and
what your evening is going to be about.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, Sean Ellis is the subject of the Netflix docuseries
Trial for Sean was a very young man when he
was wrongfully convicted for the murder of a Boston police officer.
Sean was factually innocent of that crime and nonetheless was convicted,
(14:42):
And the title of the docuseries comes from the fact
that it took four trials who eventually correct this miscarriage
of justice, and Sean remained wrongfully incarcerated for twenty two
years before he was able to finally be exonerated, fully
(15:03):
exonerated of the crime for which he was convicted. And
today he does amazing work with the New England Innocence
Project directing the Exonery Network. Exonerations are not as rare
as they should be. The system gets it wrong a
(15:24):
certain amount, and so there are many exoneries in the
Greater Boston area and the Exonery Network helps them to
connect and thrive and flourish post exoneration. So Sean is
going to be the keynote speaker at our event at
More than Words on Thursday evening, the twenty third. He's
(15:45):
going to tell his story, which is incredibly moving and
in many ways incredibly an incredible outrage, and he's going
to talk about the role that books played in helping
him survive and overcome his situation, and so there will
be excellent food and beverage and people can purchase tickets
(16:11):
for twenty five dollars on our website Prison Book Program
dot org. It's going to be a great evening.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, and this is a fundraiser for you as well.
Correct it is it.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Is we are It's sort of the first, you know,
major fundraising event that we have tried to put together
here at Prison Book Program.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
We have.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
One hundred and seventy five tickets and where they're selling well,
and get your tickets you know now early soon if
you if you can. And yeah, we're we're hoping to
raise raise money but also raise awareness. Prison Book Program
for forty seven years was run by all volunteers. There
(16:55):
were zero paid staff actually, and so for that reason
it kind of remained for far too long, kind of
one of the best kept secrets in Greater Boston. It
did a lot. There weren't a lot of people who
knew about us. So we're also kind of trying to
raise awareness about the fact that we exist, about the
need for our services and just how important books are
(17:18):
for incarcerated people.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Sure, and I was going to say, let's get the
word out right now about what you need so when
people want to send you books or drop books by
to your headquarters, we are not talking going up into
Aunt Tillie's attic and grabbing every browned, brittle book that
you've got and bringing it down to the bookstore and saying, hey,
these are free books. Enjoy like yes, No, and probably
(17:42):
no like detective crime stories or anything like that either.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Definitely no true crimes. Okay, we can't have any true crime.
But you know, if someone loves mysteries, bring us all
your mysteries. But yeah, thank you for saying that. We
do ask for good condition paperback, so you know, moderate
signs of age are okay, But if you've got torn covers,
broken spines, pages that are so brittle they're breaking apart,
(18:10):
that's not a book we can do anything with. Not
that it's not important to you or to anyone, but
it's just not a book that the prisons are going
to accept. So it's not a book that's going to
be able to make it into the hands of an
incarcerated reader. So we say good condition or better focus
on paperbacks. We have really detailed guidelines about what we
(18:30):
can and can't use on our website on the donate
books page of our website. But generally speaking, if it's
a paperback in good or better condition, we can we
can use it. We do have the most popular genres
listed on our website as well. They're ones that people
ask for all the time, and in those categories we
(18:50):
will take a good condition hardback as well. Oh, but
definitely focus on the paperback.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
All right, great, and again you don't have to necessarily
just go into the attic.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
You can.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
You can go to local bookstores. You've got the Amazon
wish list. There's a lot of great information tell us
how people can get a hold of you.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
The best way for people to learn more about us
and get in touch with us is via our website
Prison Book Program DOTRG. There's a contact form on there.
You can also come on by our space anytime we're
having a volunteer session. Like I said, we're there more
than two hundred times a year. You can bring books
as a walk in donor. You don't have to be
signed up to volunteer, just come on buy. We're accepting
(19:29):
books anytime we're there, and they can also sign up
to volunteer. If you're interested in coming to one of
our volunteer sessions, you can sign up on our website
as well.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Kelly, thanks so much for the time and congratulations and
to many more years.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Thank you very much. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I hope you have a safe and happy and healthy
holiday weekend. Please be sure to tune in again next
week for another edition of the show. I'm Nicole Davis
from WBZ News Radio on iHeartRadio.
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