Address This!

“In today’s climate of mass incarceration, joblessness, and the dismantling of educational opportunities through the state, we must find ways to help ourselves and to challenge the forces in places that are causing us so much agony. We cannot succeed if we operate with an individualist/opportunistic frame of reference because solidarity is necessary if we are to create serious structural changes in America.”

—David “Dawud” Lee, incarcerated educator, activist, and co-designer of the Let’s Circle Up course

Address This! is a Philadelphia-based, volunteer-run project providing innovative correspondence courses to people incarcerated throughout the state of Pennsylvania.

Our courses aren’t traditional credit-granting classes. Instead, we use volunteer transcribers to share participants’ responses back out to the cohort as a whole, creating a collective learning experience, even for people held in the most restrictive housing units. This structure and the coursework are designed to foster dialogue, promote collective critical thinking and reading skills, raise awareness, and encourage participants to feel their own agency to tackle issues inside and outside of prisons.

Courses we offer:

  • Control & Resistance: The U.S. Prison System and Its Oppositions

  • Let’s Circle Up: Restorative Justice from the Inside Up

  • Reentry: History, Strategy, and Transformation

Since we started over a decade ago, more than 1,000 people have enrolled in Address This! courses across the state! Every semester, we welcome newcomers to the project, many of whom go on to take every course we offer. 

All those participants mean a whole lot of stamps! We’re funded by grassroots donations and grants from small funders. Fortunately, because we’re an all-volunteer organization, every cent donated goes directly toward course readers, mailing costs, supplies, celebratory book awards, and the design of innovative new curricula/courses with the assistance of an incredible team of inside educators and activists who are our constant collaborators. 

If you’d like to support our work, you can give online (make sure to specify Address This! in the Designation field), or by writing a check to Books Through Bars (with the memo “For Address This!”), sent to:

Books Through Bars Attn: Address This!
4722 Baltimore Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19143 

If you have questions about Address This! or would like to get involved in transcription, mailing worknights, or any other role, please don’t hesitate to contact us at addressthispa@gmail.com.

Feedback From Address This! Participants

  • “Prisoners are, for the most part, looking for an education that will help them to find an identity. Address This! provides that and more… educational material that acts as a history lesson, a primer on civil discourse and a vehicle for an empowered future.”

  • “[The course] was informative and mentally stimulating and I look forward to the next assignments. I didn’t know the civil rights movements dated back to the ’40s, nor did I know the role Black Leftists played in the early stages of that movement. Continue the good work and the struggle.”

  • “Thank you for reaching out to us and letting us be part of this project. As prisoners our free time is being used in a positive manner and also keeps us in touch with the outside world and opens our minds to women who are in the same situation as us and lets us hear their opinions about the subjects we are reading about.”

  • “I want to thank you and the rest of your staff there for taking the time to reach out or should I say reach ‘in’ to those of us locked up and educating us. The knowledge you send is very beneficial and I am greatly pleased to be a part of this building process. Not only are you sharing knowledge with me, you make my stay in prison easier and more meaningful.”