Reginald Dwayne Betts carjacked a man who was asleep in his car in a parking lot in Fairfax County, Virginia. Betts, who was 16 at the time, was tried as an adult and spent nearly a decade in state prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. Books weren’t allowed in “the hole.” But the men in the prison devised a pulley system using torn sheets and pillowcases to pass books from the general population to people in solitary. “Imagine yourself as a teenager, 17 years old, in solitary confinement, and you’re just calling out, ‘Yo, somebody send me a book,’” Betts said. “Somebody sent me Dudley Randall’s “The Black Poets,” and it radically changed my life.” Betts started writing every day and reading anything he could get his hands on. Books transformed him, he says, revealing that other ways of living were possible. When Betts got out, he earned his bachelor’s degree, then a law degree from Yale Law School. He became a poet and an advocate for prison reform, as well as a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient for his work with his nonprofit Freedom Reads, which installs libraries in prisons across the country. Read more
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