Lessons from Shawshank
In praise of the Prison Libraries Act of 2023
It’s one of the great storylines in one of the all-time great movies: the building of the Brooks Hatlen Memorial Library in Shawshank Prison.
Shawshank, of course, is the penitentiary featured in The Shawshank Redemption, director Frank Darabont’s Golden Globe-winning film that starred Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins as inmates who become best friends. Robbins plays Andy Dufresne, an accountant convicted — wrongly — of killing his wife and her lover.
After struggling to adapt to prison life, Dufresne finally finds a worthwhile project: revamping the run-down library. He writes one letter a week to the Maine State Legislature, asking for funds. The legislature responds by sending book donations, a check for $200, and a letter saying, “We now consider the matter closed. Please stop sending us letters.”
Dufresne does not stop, and in 1959, he secures an annual appropriation of $500, “just to shut him up.” Some time later, in “the year Kennedy was shot,” that money completes the transformation of “a broom closet smelling of turpentine into the best prison library in New England.”
