Life Beyond the Bars

Students Expressing Truth (SET) - the Jamaican prison rehabilitation program supported by Berkman founder Charlie Nesson, Kevin Wallen, Christina Xu and many others - recently launched The Inmate Diaries, a blog on which inmate-penned poems and letters are posted.

The letters first found audience when read aloud on Kevin Wallen's radio program “Unchained."  Now available to people outside of the listening area, the letters provide insight into the perspectives and talents of those imprisoned in Kingston.

SET is one of the efforts in the orbit of Berkman's longstanding Jamaica Project, which "seeks to bridge the technological, economic and social disparities between nations, building on reform work already in progress and enriching existing initiatives with a new internet dimension."  Read the poetry over at The Inmate Diaries, check in on other projects underway with SET, and check out some recordings that Chris Lydon did in Jamaica with the project in 2001.

Photo by Christina with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.