PHA Honoree Rebecca Ginsburg Works to Change the Narrative Around Incarceration 

Censorship and moves to challenge, or ban, books have dominated the news in recent months. 2023 Public Humanities Award winner and Director of the Education Justice Project Rebecca Ginsburg faced this issue long before it grabbed national headlines. In January 2019, Danville Correctional Center officials removed more than 200 books from the EJP’s library inside the facility. 

Ginsburg co-founded Education Justice Project (EJP) in 2008 with a vision to build a more humane and just society, sustained through education and critical awareness. Through its educational programs, publications, and outreach, EJP—a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—supports higher education in prison and educational opportunities for individuals who were formerly incarcerated.

“We continue to advocate for more space for our library, even as we try to creatively squeeze books into a finite space,” Ginsburg shared.

The challenges EJP faces are, sadly, not unique. A report from PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, found that book censorship in U.S. prisons represents “the largest book ban policy in the United States.”

That is one of the myriad reasons Ginsburg’s work encompasses advocacy and policy change to create an environment conducive to higher education in prison programs and better conditions for people in prisons and their families.

“Decarceration is essential for the social and economic health of our state. It costs to lock people up, not just the individual [themselves] that is behind bars pays the price for incarceration, but so do families and the communities from which people come and our society as a whole,” Ginsburg shared. “The fewer people we have in prison, the healthier our society.”

Through her multi-faced work, Ginsburg is undoubtedly a potent example of the ways that the humanities can transform communities.

“We’re very interested in helping to change the narrative around incarceration in Illinois and helping to provide more robust, complete portraits of people who are incarcerated, such that we on the outside come to recognize the humanity of individuals who are in prison. They are people like us and people for whom higher education serves as much good and as much value as it does for me and for my children and for the rest of us,” she said.

Ginsburg will be recognized at the Public Humanities Awards on Wednesday, May 17 in Chicago, Illinois alongside Chicago radio producer, journalist, and teaching artist Stephanie Manriquez and Alyson Thompson of the Marshall Public Library. The Beacon Award will be presented to Tracie D. Hall, Executive Director of the American Library Association.