Blog

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

Tagged with Showing Up

Reflections on My First Time Back

By Steven Parkhurst, Program Coordinator at Freedom Reads

Tyler Sperrazza, the Chief Production Officer at Freedom Reads, and I pulled our 26-foot Penske moving truck full of Freedom Libraries into the staff parking lot of the Maine Correctional Center, just a couple dozen feet from the sally-port that gave entrance to the prison grounds. We had just driven 240 miles from Hamden, Connecticut, to Windham, Maine, and my heart was pounding.

Continue Reading

Founder’s Take: Why I Return

By Reginald Dwayne Betts, Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads
The first ever reading of Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kafar’s Redaction ocurred at Great Meadow Correctional Facility. “I let them be the first to hear some of this new work; they said the work was funky enough.”
The first ever reading of Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kafar’s Redaction ocurred at Great Meadow Correctional Facility. “I let them be the first to hear some of this new work; they said the work was funky enough.”

Twenty-six years ago today, on December 8, 1996, I confessed to carjacking a man. In some ways, everything that I’ve done since then has been moving towards a kind of amends. Sometimes books are the opposite of violence, opening up the possibility for another tomorrow. I started Freedom Reads, not just to place beautiful, handcrafted wooden shelves with five hundred of the best books you can find on prison housing units all across this country, I started it to return to prisons with something more than the violence that first brought me there. 

Continue Reading