Blog

The latest from Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, the Freedom Reads team, and our larger community, both on the Inside and the outside.

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Founder's Take: The Language of Hope

By Reginald Dwayne Betts, Freedom Reads Founder & CEO
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts stands with three people, family and friends, smiling after his March Forth performance at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City this month.
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts with family and friends after his March Forth performance at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City this month.

Dear Reader,

Prison teaches you what it means to be alone and what it means to lean on people who care about you. Inside, we built bonds over fleeting moments, breaking bread over meals, turning books we read into opportunities to see each other more clearly. And we stayed inventing a language of hope: calling letters kites, calling studying doing the math, remembering that one day you’d only have one day and a wake up left. When my confession announced me a convict, when the judge pronounced my sentence, I walked into a cell and called myself a writer. Sometimes it’s just a word that you hold onto until it becomes freedom.

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Founder's Take: Our Impact

By Reginald Dwayne Betts, Freedom Reads Founder & CEO

Without me knowing it, prison became the center of my life. I have thought about what a prison cell does to a man for more consecutive days than I have contemplated what it means to be a good man, let alone a father. Sometimes, I imagine that prison has become more than a metaphor, but the literal antecedent to every move I make. It’s a lonely place.

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Founder's Take: What Started as a Dream

By Reginald Dwayne Betts, Freedom Reads Founder & CEO

It was all a dream. Or not a dream, but a fantasy, this belief that people would get behind the idea of the Freedom Library. The Freedom Library, which, at its root, is simply the notion that beauty and literature matter. That nature matters. That incarceration should not deprive people of these things. To put this all in another way, I’ll say that I was thinking like they thought with the Field of Dreams, that is: If you build it, they will come.

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Founder's Take: The Most Absolutely Free Thing I've Ever Done

By Reginald Dwayne Betts, Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts performs his one-man show, FELON: An American Washi Tale, at Buckingham Correctional Center on March 4, 2024.
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts performs his one-man show, FELON: An American Washi Tale, at Buckingham Correctional Center on March 4, 2024.

This is what they cannot tell you to expect: that you’ll return. No, that’s not true. They predict that you will return in handcuffs. Never as it happened on March 4, 2024. That morning, I returned as a poet who would perform for them as if the men inside were a Broadway audience; I returned as someone who’d served time with them, as a lawyer who’d been trained in the cells they knew too well.

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