For Reginald Dwayne Betts—a poet, lawyer, and activist who supports and contributes to prison decarceration efforts—reading and writing have a mind-expanding power that never wanes. The author of three books of poetry and a memoir, his prose is intimate and raw. Even when he’s not writing about himself, Betts finds ways to build personal connections with his subjects for his award-winning work in The New York Times Magazine—subjects that have included the rapper Tariq Trotter of The Roots, the late actor Michael K. Williams, and Vice President Kamala Harris. He also brings a literary bent to his activism: In 2020, he founded Freedom Reads, a nonprofit that aims to build libraries inside 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers across the country. The program recently installed its first sets of bookshelves at MCI-Norfolk, the Massachusetts prison where Malcolm X was incarcerated, and last month, in a public event at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., it presented the 500 titles that comprise each collection.

Betts, a graduate of Yale Law School (where he’s currently in a Ph.D. program), became an advocate for respecting the rights and dignity of the people who are in or who have gone through the American carceral system after experiencing it firsthand himself. Instead of resigning himself to the violence and dehumanizing conditions of incarceration, he turned his focus to books—many by Black writers and poets—that showed him the depth and richness of self-reflection, and that got him thinking about the stories he himself had to tell. 

On this episode, Betts speaks with Spencer about the long-term impacts of his time behind bars, the current renaissance of prison writing, and the transformative act of giving people who are incarcerated access to literature and books.

Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

• Full transcript
• dwaynebetts.com
• A Question of Freedom [18:39]
• Betts’s 2021 commencement speech at Wesleyan University [25:46]
• Felon: An American Washi Tale [30:24]
• “Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me” [30:36]
• “A Son, A Mother, and Two Gun Crimes” episode of Death, Sex & Money podcast [38:06]
• “The Lives They Lived” [42:55]
• Shahid Reads His Own Palm [01:00:27]
• Bastards of the Reagan Era [01:00:27]
• Felon [01:00:27]
• “Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out” [01:03:01]
• Freedom Reads [01:10:23]
• “Memorial Hoops” [01:16:54]