Reginald Betts
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and founder of Freedom Reads, which builds libraries in prisons across the United States. In his work, he draws on his experience of incarceration as a teenager.
Reginald Dwayne Betts Has Opened More Than 600 Prison Libraries
Reginald Dwayne Betts argues that prison libraries put books—and the possibility of imagining who a person could become—within reach, while hope passes from one person to another. Sentenced to nine years at 16, Betts says books helped him imagine himself as someone who could choose a different path; he has since opened more than 600 Freedom Libraries in prisons, with former friends and fellow prisoners helping carry the work to others.
The Iliad Finds Human Choice Within Fate and Violence
The Iliad examines what choice and responsibility remain when people are bound by fate, hierarchy, violence and grief. Poet and Freedom Reads founder Reginald Dwayne Betts and EconTalk host Russ Roberts argue that Homer’s warriors continue to make consequential decisions under severe constraint, while the poem measures those decisions through the dead, their families, and the homes and obligations war leaves exposed. Betts draws on his experience of incarceration to illuminate choice within narrowed circumstances, and both readers locate the poem’s moral turn in Achilles’ recognition of Priam’s grief.