YALE DAILY NEWS — After pausing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a Yale Law School Library initiative that brings books to prisons is back. The program first launched in 2020 and returned with a delivery in late February to a facility less than one mile from Yale Law School that did not have a library. The initiative was spearheaded by Julian Aiken, assistant director for access and faculty services at the Law Library. More than 1,300 books have been donated so far to several prisons and correctional facilities, and Aiken hopes to continue its expansion. He spearheaded the project with inspiration from Dwayne Betts LAW ’16. “I started the YLS books to prisons project after some discussions with poet and (at the time) Law Ph.D. candidate, Dwayne Betts,” Aiken wrote in an email to the News. “Dwayne had been a prison inmate himself and described how he rediscovered a sense of freedom after being given a book of poems while in prison.” Betts went on to create the Freedom Reads Project, which develops library spaces within prison housing units.