LILY RESLINK
Staff Writer
Florida State University Department of Religion faculty member Sonya S. Cronin is “by trade, a storyteller and a biblicist,” she said.
At 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, she’ll deliver an Interfaith Lecture informed by her observations of contemporary punitive systems in the U.S. and her experience working with carceral systems. She will connect this background to parables of Joseph and his brothers, Cain and Hagar the Egyptian in her lecture.
“What prisons do is they magnify a problem that plagues everyone,” Cronin said, “So prisons almost become a parable, even though they’re also a reality.”
Cronin is the founder of The Carrier Pigeon Post, a nonprofit newspaper composed of stories, essays and poetry designed to instill knowledge, literacy and hope in people in prisons and reentry facilities. Within her work on prison education, Cronin saw incarcerated people face many obstacles in accessing literature.
She said getting reading materials into prisons is tricky and costly but can be transformative. Cronin referred to these eight pages of volunteer-made newsprint as a periodical of hope.
“What we’re trying to do is instill hope into really dark places through the power of story,” Cronin said.
In conjunction with the weeklong Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Ethics of Enough,” Cronin said she will draw connections to a disposable society and faith’s role in offering hope.
According to Cronin, the U.S. prison system represents a “throwaway culture.”
“Most prisons are about two hours away from anything,” she said. Cronin argues that society’s treatment of people in prisons reflects a similar desire to hide trash.
“There’s psychological reasons that we want these people gone, and some of it has to do with what they remind us of ourselves,” Cronin said.
By sending people outside of society’s sightline, she said prisons reinforce an “out of sight, out mind” mindset that makes it difficult to focus on rehabilitation or reform.
She described prisons as a microcosm that can magnify already existing problems in society.
Cronin will discuss the idea that within prisons — which she described as a place of a disposable culture — there is also the power of hope.
She said interfaith discussion also enters her lecture through exploring her sentiments that “hope is not owned by one tradition.”
She said many of the people The Carrier Pigeon Post has encountered describe hope and transformation in spiritual terms.
She said hope is psychological, emotional and contagious.
In her time working on sending books into prisons, Cronin said obstacles include tailoring to individuals and, sometimes, getting the book there at all.
“It could arrive at a prison mail room, and for whatever reason somebody looks at it and goes, ‘No, we’re not letting this in,’” Cronin said. Although she said she is not sure where these rejected packages have gone, she knows that these discarded books have led to a loss of funds at an unsustainable rate.
“We began to realize that we wanted reading materials that were reading-level appropriate, that were … Department of Corrections compliant,” Cronin said.
She said providing a newspaper as an alternative has influenced cultural change in prisons and reentry facilities.
“Multiple people are reading the same thing, which then allows for conversation and community and the ability to dialogue on something other than prisons and how bad the food is.”
In the earliest stages of The Carrier Pigeon Post in September 2024, Cronin said they distributed 3,000 copies, and they’re now printing 25,000 copies a month.
“We have writing that’s donated, and we have people that are really concerned about the fact that the United States incarcerates two million people,” Cronin said.
As a first-time speaker at Chautauqua, she said she is excited to introduce The Carrier Pigeon Post and, through a spiritual lens, share her experiences observing how literature instills hopes of brighter futures. She expressed how the support network around the nonprofit newspaper is part of the emotional support it provides.
“[The Carrier Pigeon Post is] a way of telling people that are in prison that they have not been thrown away, that they are not alone, that there are people on the outside that do genuinely care about them and we’re making efforts to make their lives better,” Cronin said.
