The lawyer, poet and recent MacArthur genius grant recipient talks about his initiative Freedom Reads which offer inmates access to books across the US
When Reginald Dwayne Betts fell in love with poetry as a young man, his reading options were limited. He could not spend aimless hours in the library, nor have access to boundless titles, nor browse shelves at will. Convicted at 16, in 1997, of carjacking with a pistol in Fairfax county, Virginia, Betts was serving eight years in prison when an unknown person slipped a copy of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets under his cell door.
The book opened his mind, showed him things he didn’t know were possible. It provided the entryway to a writing practice, a portal to a world outside his cell, a model to envision a future beyond prison.