Positive News: Former Inmate Who Received Contraband Book While In Solitary Has Now Built Hundreds Of Prison Libraries

Former Inmate Who Received Contraband Book While In Solitary Has Now Built Hundreds Of Prison Libraries

Reginald Betts was only 17 years and imprisoned in solitary confinement when the lifeline arrived that would change everything.

Someone delivered a book.

“Imagine yourself as a teenager, 17 years old, in solitary confinement, and you’re just calling out, ‘Yo, somebody send me a book,’” Betts, who’s now 45, told the Washington Post. “Somebody sent me Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets, and it radically changed my life.”

Betts entered the prison system after he carjacked an automobile in Fairfax County, Virginia, while a man was sleeping inside. He was tried as an adult and spent almost a decade in prison, with most of his sentence in solitary confinement.

But one day, fellow prisoners used a rudimentary pulley system rigged up with torn sheets and a pillowcase to deliver the poetry book.

The metamorphosis began rapidly. He started reading every chance he got. He began writing too—and before long, he realized that education could provide an escape route.

When he was released from prison, he went full speed ahead into his studies, earning a bachelor’s degree and then a law degree from Yale. He wrote poetry and advocated for prison reform. Eventually, he founded Freedom Reads, a nonprofit that provides libraries and books to prisoners all across the country, repaying exponentially the good deed he received in solitary confinement.

“Prisons are the loneliest places on Earth,” says The Freedom Reads website. “This is a fact that our Founder and CEO, Reginald Dwayne Betts, knows all too well.”

Since its inception in 2020, Freedom Reads has installed more than 550 libraries with more than 275,000 books and counting. (Watch their video below…)

For Betts, delivering books in prison represented “a community of people, working together to enrich their environments, against the odds, by transforming a place of desolation into one in which a radical idea would have a chance to blossom—freedom begins with a book.”

One inmate in Maine named Chief Bear said, “It was a great surprise upon returning from work for the day and seeing all of those books and new shelves that they were on.”

“It was kind of like seeing children on Christmas morning after all the presents were opened. I saw a couple of people out of their cell who you never see unless it’s meal time. The saying of freedom begins with a book is spot on.”

The nonprofit is funded by donations and grants from the likes of the MacArthur Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

Just recently, that money helped opened 35 libraries in both men’s and women’s facilities across Missouri. Each library has about 500 books in a bookcase designed to promote a community atmosphere and thoughtful conversation.

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• Prisoner in ‘Dirtiest Jail’ Rehabilitates Fellow Inmates with Recycling Program That Unites Convicts
• Prisons Across the World Are Shaving Days Off Sentences for Every Book Read by Their Inmates

It’s quite a different aesthetic than the pillowcase with the book inside that made its way down the tattered sheet line toward Betts cell when he was in solitary confinement.

But once the prisoners crack the covers open, the end result is the same: Liberation lies within the pages.