SF Jail Inmates Free Their Minds, Find Peace Thanks To New Library
Program
SF
Chronicle: 10.04.2018 by Evan Sernoffsky
If
he could live in any other time, Mark D’Ascenzo would choose the Middle Ages.
He imagines he’d be a knight following the legendary code of chivalry.
But
here in this life, the towering 46-year-old is stuck behind bars at San
Francisco County Jail No. 2, where opportunities for valor are slim, and time
moves agonizingly slowly.
In
recent weeks, though, D’Ascenzo has found a way to escape.
Staff
members from the San
Francisco Public Library recently began showing up every Tuesday with a
cart full of books, bringing inmates a week’s worth of reading material, be it
Westerns, self-help and travel books, or anything else requested.
“These
books help me be somewhere else,” D’Ascenzo said from inside the jail during
the anticipated Tuesday haul. “They have pretty much saved me.”
The
library’s program — known as Jail and Re-entry
Services, or JARS — kicked off in August with librarians bringing books by
the tubful into the city’s three jails. Each of the jails previously had a
small collection of reading materials that most inmates had read over and over.
Any other books, they had to buy themselves.
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