Written entirely from inside a federal detention center, Jailbirds in Flight is a rare and intimate portrait of incarceration shown through the eyes of Nicole Daedone during her first six months of incarceration at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) Brooklyn.
Rather than being consumed by the discomfort and dehumanization of incarceration, Daedone commits deeply to her spiritual practice. Through that lens, Jailbirds in Flight becomes a lived inquiry into how discipline, attention, and compassion transform suffering. Daedone introduces the women she lives with, revealing moments of tenderness, flashes of dark humor, moral clarity born of necessity, and the dignity that arises when people are truly seen.
The book is not about escaping prison but about awakening within it. Each chapter carries an implicit lesson—about fear, attachment, forgiveness, power, grief, loyalty, or grace—demonstrating how freedom is not dependent on circumstance, but on the capacity to meet reality as it is.
Daedone shares stories of the women she is incarcerated with, offering a deeply human account of prison life rarely captured from the inside. With its intimate character sketches and unflinching honesty, the book has been described as a counterpart to Orange Is the New Black—but written in real time, from within the walls, and grounded in lived spiritual practice.
Jailbirds in Flight shows that beauty can be found in even the darkest places and that the possibility of liberation exists anywhere—even here.
Nicole Daedone has given the copyright and any related rights to this book to the Jailbirds in Flight Trust, so her story can keep benefiting others. The Trust money is shared between a group of women who were incarcerated at the same time as the author, some of whose stories inspired portions of the book, and the Unconditional Freedom‘s Prison Monastery Project.
The book is published by Soulmaker Press.
The book is available now on Amazon https://a.co/d/aVpSIj9
