How this MacArthur genius is turning empty prison cells into redesigned libraries
Through the nonprofit, Freedom Reads, Reginald Dwayne Betts and his team are bringing a better library experience to incarcerated folks across the country.
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It’s a Wednesday in New Haven, Connecticut, and I’m looking at slabs of maple on an assembly line. Reginald Dwayne Betts, a poet and lawyer, is giving me a tour. His team is telling me that certain parts of the wood have started to swell in the July heat; they’re focused on sanding the pieces down so they can continue to build the bookshelves that they’ll soon install in prisons across the country.
Betts is the founder of Freedom Reads, a nonprofit with a mission to “transform access to literature in prisons” by opening handcrafted micro libraries in as many carceral facilities as possible. He credits his access to books as his avenue to freedom while caged in solitary confinement for 14 months, on and off, during his eight-year incarceration. “We put millions of people in prisons,” he says. “What if we put millions of books there instead?”
Since its launch in June of 2020, Freedom Reads’ micro libraries, which typically consist of two to six bookshelves that can hold up to 500 books, are now in 31 facilities across 10 states. Freedom Reads has built 173 libraries so far. With its 13-person team, it aim to open upwards of 1,000 libraries in the next three years.
In the carceral world, where design isn’t typically a consideration, Freedom Reads’ libraries are a notable exception. The bookshelves don’t hang on a wall—they sit, hand-built and curved, as locus points inside a facility’s housing units. The libraries have been built into the smaller community rooms where people gather to watch TV or in the center of a dormitory inside an empty cell. Betts describes them as “almost like storefront churches.” The libraries exist in a space where those inside can congregate, becoming what Betts calls “an intellectual life blood.”
Typically, correction facilities’ libraries have specific hours, limit the number of people across multiple housing facilities who can come into the space, and require that those inside request books ahead of time. Freedom Reads’ libraries act as a supplement, coming directly to where those inside live—at the center of their cell blocks, with open access and hours (unless staff decides to restrict or restrain readers, which has happened).
Prisons are notoriously full of constraints, from cramped space and limited natural light to inhumane heat levels. Following prison regulations, the library bookshelves are only 44 inches high so as to not obscure guards’ sight lines, and have varying configurations with the ability to fit in the smallest of spaces. In Massachusetts Correctional Institution (MCI-Norfolk), for example, Freedom Reads’ first library opened within a gutted 9-by-11-foot cell—the one believed to have been Malcolm X’s during his incarceration in the ’40s. Made of maple, walnut, cherry, or sapele, the curved bookshelves stand in contrast to the plastic and steel angles of a prison’s traditionally hostile environment. “The wood is alive; the bookshelves have moods. They’re not stagnant . . . like sterile and unsanitary prisons,” says Betts.
For its latest opening, the Freedom Reads team packed around 36 walnut bookcases wrapped in blankets in a rental truck for their Connecticut-to-Maryland journey down I-95. A combination of incarcerated folks, Freedom Reads reps, and correctional officers worked to unpack the 10 to 15 boxes of books per housing-unit library—an all-day affair followed by a performance of Betts’ solo show, Felon. The result is 15 libraries now housed at Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center and the Dorsey Run Correctional Facility.
Freedom Reads is adamant that they shelve the library books alongside the incarcerated folks inside. This process has a purpose, making it so “you’re not a voyeur, you’re actually a member of a community,” says Betts. There’s no prescriptive criteria for the books that fill the shelves. I asked if Freedom Reads hopes to line the shelves with abolitionists and theorists like Angela Davis, Gina Dent, and Bell Hooks. In response, Betts recalls how he stayed up all night reading Ernest Gaines’ Lesson Before Dying while he was incarcerated. He shares that the work that shaped him into who he is today came from Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner. “I’m going for books that I believe are timeless and allow us to connect more deeply,” he says.
Betts is aware of the decarceration advocates who take issue with a Department of Corrections partnership. “I have to convince people I’m not betraying the revolution,” he says. Initially, there were questions around if converting a cell block into a library was meaningful for the people inside. Now, though, Betts says that such skepticism has disappeared. For him, these libraries are a way to “show up, inspire, and confront what prison does to the spirit.” It’s why he insists on building a library for the correctional staff, too. “I want us to have resentment about what happens in prisons, I do,” he adds. “But I also think that if I really want to make change, I don’t want to ask the public to choose who is more worthy of empathy.” In building staff-specific libraries, Betts hopes to “get their buy-in.”
During our headquarters tour, Betts says that there’s a design element that he’d like to implement in future iterations of the bookshelves. Each of the shelves is built by Freedom Reads employees, many of whom have been directly impacted by incarceration; Betts wants them to sign the wood like a work of art. “When people [inside] see that, they’ll see us,” he says. “And that’s an opportunity for others to imagine what they could do.”