The Sun on Their Shoulders

In The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Andy Dufresne, the movie’s incarcerated protagonist, strikes a deal with a prison guard. Andy, who worked as a banker before his wrongful conviction, would help the guard exploit a tax loophole. In exchange, Andy asked only for a few rounds of beers for him and his fellow inmates, who had been working in the sun all day—a humble request but one of great significance for people otherwise deprived of so much. As Andy’s friend narrates while enjoying the drinks: “We sat and drank with the sun on our shoulders and felt like free men.”

There’s a comparison to be made between this famous scene and the events that unfolded last month at Woodbourne Correctional Facility. There, nine incarcerated men were granted special permission to watch the solar eclipse from the prison yard, despite a statewide lockdown imposed by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) barring the entirety of New York’s incarcerated population from witnessing this rare astronomical event. After seeing the eclipse, Jeremy Zielinski, one of the Woodbourne inmates, reacted similarly to the Shawshank narrator: “It was a new kind of experience. The sun looked like a giant smiley face in the sky. It was like the whole universe was looking at everybody and smiling and saying, ‘This is awesome,’ and we all agreed.”

DOCCS, like the grudging prison guard in Shawshank, was reluctant to carve out an exemption to its lockdown order. It took a federal lawsuit, filed by Zielinski and other Woodbourne inmates, asserting that the eclipse was significant to their religious practices. Only after intense settlement discussions, led by a pro bono team of lawyers at the firm of Alston & Bird, did prison officials relent. The settlement was a triumph in many respects. For a few hours on April 8, 2024, Zielinski and eight other men managed to escape the rigid confines of the prison environment and feel like the universe was “smiling” at them. The case also garnered media attention—including coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian, after Rebecca McCray broke the story in Hell Gate—that largely centered the rights and humanity of incarcerated individuals.

We at Books Beyond Bars were cheered by this story—we hope that the books we send our clients will provide them with experiences of transcendence similar to Zielinski’s. We’d be remiss, however, not to acknowledge the bigger issue that his case illustrates. For each of the men at Woodbourne permitted to view the eclipse, thousands of other people were denied that opportunity for no apparent reason (in what seemed like a cruel joke, DOCCS even distributed eclipse glasses to all incarcerated individuals but refused to let them outside to watch the event). Just the same, BBB is currently only able to reach a small portion of the prison population. Meanwhile, most people in DOCCS custody remain deprived of adequate reading materials for no reason other than the failure of our institutions to provide them with that basic human right. That sad fact keeps us motivated to grow our program, and to send as many books into New York prisons and jails as we can, in hopes of giving more and more of our incarcerated community members the feeling, even if momentary, of the sun on their shoulders.