Jailbirds in Flight
Everything You’ve Wanted to Know About Enlightenment in Prison but Were Afraid to Ask
Fifteen women. One federal prison. A living monastery.
Inside MDC Brooklyn, fifteen women cook, meditate, argue, fall in love, make each other laugh, and refuse to disappear. Jailbirds in Flight brings you into their world—messy, fierce, hilarious, and holy.
Jailbirds in Flight is not simply a prison memoir. It is an exploration of freedom under the most constrained circumstances.
It began with one woman who was incarcerated for her beliefs. Inside the Metropolitan Detention Center, she met other women — women the world had tried to make invisible — and discovered that confinement, real as it was, could not reach the deepest part of a person.
Each woman in these pages is a teacher. Not because suffering made her noble, but because she was paying attention.
They laughed, plotted, mourned, protected one another, and refused to be reduced to the worst thing that had happened to them. Their names are Lyric, Janiya, Dakina, Miss Wu, Nevaeh, Royal, Diamond, CO Smith, Luciana, Mari, Miriam, Emunah, and Ramona. Each one carries a lesson the world outside the walls desperately needs.
What does human flourishing look like when the conditions are hard?
Jailbirds in Flight is part of a larger movement toward freedom, dignity, attention, and community. It asks whether a person can become more fully themselves while the world tries to make them no one at all.
The Path Forward
Discover what is waiting
You are not being asked to believe anything. You are being invited to look, to listen, and to recognize something of yourself in the lives of these women.
They were given walls.
They created a universe.