It started with a pillowcase dangling from torn sheets in a prison hallway.
Inside that makeshift bundle was a single book. And for a 17-year-old in solitary confinement named Reginald Dwayne Betts, it felt like the world reaching out a hand.
“Imagine yourself as a teenager, 17 years old, in solitary confinement, and you’re just calling out, ‘Yo, somebody send me a book,’” Betts told the Washington Post. “Somebody sent me Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets, and it radically changed my life.”
Betts had entered prison after carjacking a vehicle in Fairfax County, Virginia, while a man slept inside. Tried as an adult, he spent almost a decade behind bars, much of it in solitary. But the day fellow prisoners used their rudimentary pulley system to send him that poetry book, something inside him shifted. The reading began. The writing began. And so did the belief that education might be his way forward.
When he was released, he charged into school, earned his bachelor’s degree, then his law degree from Yale. He wrote poetry, fought for prison reform, and eventually founded Freedom Reads, turning the lifeline once tossed to him into thousands more.
“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 2020, Freedom Reads has installed more than 550 libraries stocked with over 275,000 books in prisons across the country. Recently, donations from groups like the MacArthur Foundation and the Mellon Foundation helped open 35 new libraries in men’s and women’s facilities across Missouri. Each library holds about 500 books in a bookcase built to spark community and conversation.
Inside one of those new libraries, inmates experience something Betts once did in the most unexpected way: the quiet, unbelievable joy of having books within reach.
“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,” said one inmate in Maine named Chief Bear.
“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.”
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