Last month, when Glenn Ford was released from prison for a crime he didn't commit, the state of Louisiana "gave him a $20 debit card for his troubles." That, plus the four cents he had left in his prison account, was all he had.

How do you build up the material accumulations of a lifetime overnight? How do you do it with no money? Where do you even begin?

Ford's friend John Thompson had a clever idea: Do what millions of Americans do when they are hoping that other people will buy them a whole bunch of stuff. Build an Amazon registry.

So Thompson and Ford sat down and started putting together a wish list. Soon they were joined by Danielle Mickenberg, an investigator with the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana, who had more experience navigating the Amazon site. "Typically what I do is not this at all," she told me. "This is kind of ... extra."

They began with the basics: household goods, such as toilet paper and paper towels, and clothes, lots of clothes. "That was the biggest thing he wanted and needed, because all he had was his prison clothes. That's all he's been wearing for 30 years," Mickenberg explained.

According to Mickenberg, the response has been overwhelming. She and Ford are continually having to meet to come up with more items to add to the registry because everything keeps getting bought up. "Every day, I come back and I'm like, we have to talk again. Because I don't want to get too low that people don't think that there's not much available for them to purchase." She says that around 300 items have been posted and at the moment there are only about 16 left (many of which are gift cards, which don't come down once they are bought up since Ford can use many of them, unlike, say, a dumbbell set, one of which will suffice).