Just over a year ago, my branch of Baltimore County Public Library started doing monthly outreach visits at the Charles Hickey School at the Maryland Juvenile Detention Center for Boys. We do regular outreach to all the other schools in our area, we thought; why not bring library-led reading and discussion to this one, too?
Each year, more than 600,000 people are released from state and federal prisons within the United States, and 9 million are released from jail, according to a 2020 ALA report. How can libraries meet the information needs of all these people — especially in 2021, with the pandemic still affecting our daily lives?
Writing is an agent of change. It begins with a sentence and leads to a connection, a kinship with a reader and the building of a community. It grows into a realization that each of us has a story to tell that emerges from the sum of our best — and worst — moments.
