Dr. Seuss seems an unlikely sort to jump the walls of the Adult Correctional Institutions. All that delightful innocence seems so out of sync with the hard stone and steel of maximum security.

But in one of the small rooms off the visiting room, where lawyers usually meet with clients, Alvin Reyes settled in with The Cat in the Hat. And he closed just a tiny piece of the distance between him and his family.

He is 24 and doing some serious time for burglary. But he’s almost somewhere else when he reads to his young daughter and stepdaughter.

“Sometimes, I feel like I’m there reading to them.”

He isn’t of course. He’s in that medieval looking place off Pontiac Avenue in Cranston. He’s doing his time and missing the small, important parts of his daughters’ growing up.

“My daughter was born while I was in prison,” he says. “I didn’t get to see her first step.”

When the chance came to claim a small piece of fatherhood, to do something fathers and mothers do when they hold their children close, he took it. He was in a parenting class in the prison when he learned about Books Beyond.

It is simple and direct and provides a parent who’s a prisoner the opportunity to do something strikingly normal — read to a child.

It started four years ago when Ken Findlay, professional services coordinator at the ACI, got a grant from the Reading Is Fundamental program, which promotes reading and literacy for children. The state kicked in matching funds and a big stack of children’s books was purchased for a different kind of book club. A donation of audio cassette recorders completed the very basic needs of the program.

So Reyes reads to a recorder, with a volunteer from Books Beyond sitting with him and encouraging him to make the experience as personal as possible. The tapes and the books are sent to his children.

“Sometimes, I try to do the different voices,” he says.

Reading, which has been a source of internal escape for prisoners for as long as there have been prisons, has now become a way to maintain a vital family connection.

“I feel like they’re there,” says Yesenia Cruzado, who has a 4-year-old daughter and 11-month-old son. “My daughter has the book in front of her while she hears me read it. My son loves it, too.”

She is 20 and eight months into her sentence for selling drugs. A friend in the women’s section of the ACI told her about Books Beyond.

Like Reyes, Cruzado says she was nervous when she first sat down with the recorder and the volunteer.

“It’s a great experience, especially for my daughter. She used to run to me and say ‘Mommy, can we read this book?’ She’d sit in my lap.”

That is the part of it that Books Beyond cannot match, of course. The prisoners still see their children on visiting days, but the visiting room is just too noisy and frantic to allow for the slow, close luxury of reading and listening. It does, however, provide the chance for kids to tell their parents about turning the pages of that book and hearing that voice.

Prisoners can record books for their children every four months. Books Beyond volunteers choose books appropriate to the age of the child. And on the subject of volunteers, it needs them. It needs books and tapes, too. For more information, go to the Books Beyond listing on volunteersolutions.org.

“It gives me that connection with them,” says Alvin Reyes. “I did one positive thing.”

bkerr@projo.com