In 1996, when he was 16, Reginald Dwayne Betts began serving eight years in adult prison after he and a friend carjacked a man.
Children can serve time in adult prison through a process called a bindover. Learn more about juvenile bindovers in Ohio here.
Since his release at 24 years old, he has written a memoir titled “A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival and Coming of Age in Prison,” and three poetry books. In his poetry, Betts writes about prisons and the effects of violence and incarceration on society.
Betts founded Freedom Reads, an organization that brings libraries to prisons. On Thursday, he will lead a conversation about the impact of having books accessible to people in prison. The conversation will be at the Cleveland Public Library downtown from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 18. People interested in attending can register here.
Betts, who is now a lawyer, has won several awards for his writing, including a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction and a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship.
Freedom Reads, which Betts founded in 2020, donates 500-book libraries to prisons. The organization has dubbed them freedom libraries, handcrafted by teams that include people who have served time in prison.
The organization’s mission is to “transform hopelessness into possibility” through access to books, according to its website.
But people who are incarcerated face barriers and have limited access to books.
Incarcerated people in Ohio have been denied access to books like a U.S. Army survival manual, computer programming guides and prison abolition literature, The Marshall Project – Cleveland reported last year.
In 2019, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction instituted new policies that made it harder for prisoners to receive used books. Multiple organizations told media outlets that donating books had gotten harder.
In response, the agency carved out an exception for nonprofit organizations that send books to prisons for free, The Marshall Project reported.
According to the department’s policy, books being mailed to people inside Ohio prisons are first screened by staff members working in the institution’s mail room. Those employees decide whether to let a book through to the intended recipient or send it to a managing officer or a staff member designated by the managing officer. That person decides whether to release the book to the recipient or to send a memo explaining to the recipient why their book is being banned, The Marshall Project reported.
On Thursday, Betts will address some of those access barriers and host an audience Q&A and book signing after his presentation.