Felony and Freedom with Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the visionary behind Freedom Reads—a groundbreaking organization that brings book collections to people in prison in the form of handcrafted wooden libraries. These “freedom libraries” are a seemingly modest but profound intervention helping build a powerful sense of fellowship within the carceral system—and beyond.

Outside of Freedom Reads, in his 2010 memoir, A Question of Freedom, Betts has shared an honest account of his time being incarcerated, including how a book of poetry—slid underneath his cell door while in solitary confinement—opened his understanding of the form and much more. In his 2021 collection of poems, Felon, readers experience Betts’s reflections of life post-incarceration, which are told through traditional and new forms of poetry.

As Freedom Reads enters its third year, Betts’s writing, activism, and practice as a lawyer are helping shift attitudes around incarceration.  

Sitting down with us at Mellon’s offices in New York City, Betts discusses how having books in prisons is just the beginning. 

The central activity of Freedom Reads—to bring curated, five-hundred-book libraries to prisons—began almost three years ago. How do you talk about the impact these Freedom Libraries are having so far? 

Eight and a half years in prison, the only thing I saw in those housing units was plastic chairs and steel benches that were affixed to the floor. They weren’t really bringing hardwood into housing units, and they were never bringing things that build community or create opportunities for civic engagement. We haven’t had the imagination. So, we don’t actually have to talk yet about what happens on the back end in terms of how people are engaging with the books, or how people are engaging with each other around the books—I like to tell people the first metric for success is to show up. 

The size and shape of the libraries themselves is intentional . . . What would you say about how the libraries affect those spaces?

Why aren’t the shelves six feet high? Why aren’t the bookshelves just pressed against the wall? Because we’re trying to build community, and we don’t want to create opportunities for people to browse books in isolation. That’s what Freedom Reads is: it’s creating a new norm that exists in the system, a system that is woefully lacking the kind of norms that lead to possibility and hope.

The range of books in Freedom Libraries is designed to be broad, so that every reader can “find joy, belonging, and new possibilities.” What works have come up in conversation recently? 

I was having a conversation in a women’s prison in California, and one woman says, “Hamlet—what is this about?” 

Another woman says, “It’s a tragedy.” 

And the other woman says, “What does that mean?” 

I said, “That kind of means everybody . . . dies.” 

She’s like, “It’s what he said.” 

And then I was like, “Well, I mean, it’s more than that.”

And then we are going back and forth about Hamlet. They did not know each other. We did not know each other. But because we were having a conversation about books, our guards were down, and we felt a little bit more vulnerable.

How might you have felt differently if, when you experienced incarceration, the process of sharing books had been institutionalized in the way you are providing it now? If you imagine being in that position, what do you think you’d say?

What we do with Freedom Libraries is give people the opportunity to have literature presented to them on an everyday basis, which means they can slow-walk the discovery of who they want to be. They might read three, four, or five detective novels before they decide “I want to write what Walter Mosley is writing.” But you have to be able to read the three, four, or five before you make that decision.

I don’t know the name of the person who slid me The Black Poets under my cell door—because, when they did it, I was in solitary confinement. If the person who gave me that book had been a poet, then they might have made it that much more efficient for me to have somebody to talk to about poetry, about what I was reading. It means that a person like me—who’s kind of digging poetry, but doesn’t really understand—has somebody to talk to. What the Freedom Library does is say, “Yo, you have permission to look somebody in the face and tell them, ‘You should read this book.'

The Freedom Reads organization began with a focus on book collections, but evolved to include programs like the Prison Letters Project, which seeks to ensure every letter from a person in prison is answered and, with permission, logged into a public database. Can you talk about why the support of writing in prison is important, alongside the support of reading?

For the Prison Letters Project, it began when we started thinking that it’s thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people who write letters but whose voices don’t get heard. Folks write us letters, and it's law students who go over the letters. These are people who have been disappeared. These are people who sometimes have committed acts of violence. These are people who, sometimes, are innocent. But these are people who need to be remembered, and this is what it means to hear their stories and try to tell it back to the world.

In the acknowledgments of Felon, you write that art can be “influential and lead to change” without being “didactic.” Can you unpack this idea—and explain its importance in the context of challenging practices of incarceration?

I mean, listen, a lot of us enter conversations and start spitting out talking points. And art doesn’t do that. Art isn’t trying to tell you what to believe—it’s trying to give you a landscape from which you can discover what matters. You could read a book that’s really powerful, and from that book take away these lines. Everybody takes away different lines, and those lines create their own kind of gravity that’s centering you towards something that matters. So, you’ll read and start to carry around these lines that make you understand something about being alive in the world.

Writing gives you an occasion to lift out really powerful and meaningful things that you would’ve said anyway, given an occasion for it. Art becomes that occasion.