There’s been plenty of news lately about states attempting to ban books in their schools, but little has been said about censorship in prisons. Virginia, for example, won’t allow inmates to read more than 25-hundred titles, but one man is helping prisoners to operate what he calls Freedom Libraries – collections of books that inspire readers to be better. Sandy Hausman has his story.
Fifty years ago, a group of five maximum-security inmates at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond bucked the brutal and racist Virginia corrections system and won a significant victory for prisoners nationwide. Calvin Arey, who was one of those inmates, shares his story for the first time.