The mission of the Foundation is to provide correctional institutions across the country with materials to enrich the lives of their inmates. The Foundation presently focuses primarily on its Literacy Initiative, by which the Foundation provides free books to libraries in correctional institutions across the nation. Other goals of the Foundation include the creation of programs to supply inmates with art supplies and with athletic equipment.

It is well-documented that prisoners who engage in reading and other educational endeavors while in prison have a much lower likelihood of returning to prison than others. The cost of incarceration is astronomical: between $25,000.00 and $60,000.00 dollars per inmate per year, depending on which institution the inmate is in. According to the government’s own analysis, $68,747,203,000.00 was spent on prisons in the US in 2006. Studies have shown that the budgets of the states and of the federal government stand to benefit greatly by facilitating inmates’ efforts to seek education.

The Foundation’s Literacy Initiative aids correctional institutions across the United States by providing them with high-quality books and other educational materials in good condition for use by the inmates in their custody. The Foundation’s donors share the belief that reading is good in itself—and has a transformative power that offers the best opportunity available to improve humanity and human life. There were 2,292,133 people incarcerated in the United States the last time the government counted them. That is more people, per capita, than have ever been incarcerated in any society in human history, with the dubious exception of the gulag system under Stalin’s totalitarian regime. Under Stalin, the U.S.S.R. had only slightly more inmates per capita than we have today in the US. And one should note that the figures we have do not count those imprisoned in the many secret prisons that the United States government operates abroad.

We have all kinds of people in American prisons. They are incarcerated regardless of their race, regardless of their economic background, and regardless of whether or not they are guilty of any crime. A large percentage of our prisoners were prosecuted for nonviolent offenses, and are serving lengthy sentences under new tough-on-crime measures.