How reading can transform your life (w/ Reginald Dwayne Betts)

How to Be a Better Human

In this episode of How to Be a Better Human, host Chris Duffy interviews poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts about the transformative powe

Key takeaways

• Reginald Dwayne Betts founded Freedom Reads to install micro-libraries in American prisons.
• Literature serves as a vital tool for understanding human experiences far removed from one's own reality.

Main topics

• Prison reform
• The power of literature

Notable quotes

We have tried to create a system devoid of beauty, and it has failed.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a profound meditation on how art and beauty are

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hi there, Better Human listeners. Really quick before we get to our episode, you would be doing me a huge favor and really helping out our show if you could take a moment to fill out our listener survey at bit.ly slash bhsurvey6. That's bit.ly slash bhsurvey6. You can also find a link that you can just click directly on, which is in our show description. Wherever you're listening to this, look at the episode description and at the bottom, there's a link that you can click directly. Please tell us what is resonating with you, what you want more of, what you'd like to see changed, topics you would like to see covered. Your honest feedback means the world to us. It just takes a few seconds of your time, and it would really help us to improve the show and have future seasons be even better. Thank you. It means a lot to me and to the team that makes this show. Thanks for listening, and thanks for taking a few seconds to do the listener survey. Now, on to the episode. Speaker 3 (0:54) This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today's episode is all about how to find beauty, even in the most unexpected of places. How can we preserve and nurture our humanity, even when we are in a really tough moment? For me, reading books and poetry has always been a source of joy and pleasure, but it's also been a way to understand the world and myself more deeply. In my opinion, there is nothing as great as getting really, really deep into a fantastic book. But books aren't just a source of joy. They can also be a lifeline. They can be a way to transport yourself, to escape your current situation. And today's guest, the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, I know feels much the same way about reading. Reginald is a beautiful writer, but he is also the driving force behind Freedom Reads, a unique organization that brings beautiful handcrafted bookcases into prisons and, quote, transforms cell blocks into freedom libraries, end quote. Reginald took his own experience of incarceration, and he is trying to change the circumstances of others still inside. He is so many things. He's an incredible poet. He's a distinguished lawyer. He's a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. But to me, above all else, Reginald Dwayne Betts is a human who loves books. And so in a time where people are reading fewer books than ever, we're going to talk about the power and the necessity of reading and of beauty. To get us started, here's a clip from Reginald's TED Talk. Speaker 4 (2:24) I should thank my judge. After I pled guilty to carjacking and he sentenced me to nine years in prison, I was certain that I was going home. I waited for him to tell me it was all a dream. Then he confirmed my intuition. I don't have any illusion that sending you to the penitentiary is going to help. Speaker 4 (2:54) Do you know what the cruelest word in the English language is? The preposition, but. The judge said, but you can go down there and you can make the best of it or not. Speaker 2 (3:11) I Speaker 4 (3:12) figured the judge was saying. Speaker 4 (3:16) that I could choose what I looked for in those cells. Becoming a computer engineer was now out of the question. Earning a college degree from prison was just as unlikely. But because of what the judge said, I thought not only of what I would lose, I was 16 years old planning who I would be when I left. I've loved books since I was a kid. Speaker 4 (3:46) And so on my sentencing day, I told myself that I would be a writer. In a crucible that is prison, I learned to see other people. I remember Star. We spent months in adjacent cells in a hole. We were both obsessed with stories of our past and with fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings. Books that let us imagine ourselves as people who chose to be heroes instead of villains. He was a boxer. I wasn't. Starr taught me what he knew, how to train, how to breathe, how not to let frustration and a lack of discipline turn into something that ends up costing you far more than you can afford to lose. Speaker 3 (4:39) We are going to be back with so much more from Reginald Dwayne Betts in just a moment. Speaker 1 (4:57) I'm Phelan Johnson, the host of See You in Court, and we are back with an all-new season. Our first episode is about a woman named Gwen Jacob, who, on a sweltering day in 1991, did what she had to do to cool down. She took her shirt off. She was catcalled, fined, and arrested. But she refused to back down, sparking a national debate about baring breasts. Listen to the story of Gwen's topless walk on See You in Court, on CBC Listen, and everywhere you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (5:31) And we are back. We are talking with the poet and MacArthur genius, Reginald Dwayne Betts, about the power and importance of literature and beauty. Speaker 4 (5:40) Hello, I'm Reginald Dwayne Betts. I'm the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads, but I'm mostly a poet. Speaker 3 (5:47) With your organization, Freedom Reads, you have built 629 micro libraries in prisons around America. What do you think is so important about getting books inside of prisons? Speaker 4 (6:01) I found that one thing, see, people often say something like, I don't really understand what you went through. I don't understand what it means to be in prison. But they forget that the human condition is the human condition. Speaker 4 (6:15) And literature, a good book is how you connect to things that you've never experienced before. How do I understand something of what Vancouver is? It's because I've read A Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed. And that doesn't give me a full and accurate understanding of Canada or Vancouver, but it lets me know how much I don't know. And so I would just say the power of a freedom library, the power of a book is it lets you confront the reality that. Most of us will never know enough people, and we want to. Most of us are finding ways to fight loneliness, and we struggle. But maybe more importantly, most of us want a way to better understand ourself. Speaker 1 (6:56) And Speaker 4 (6:56) you don't understand yourself necessarily by mining your personal history in your own brain. You understand yourself better by mining the lives of others, the situations of others through really complex and interesting literature, even if that literature is a children's book. One of the first books I read when I was in prison or one of the ones that had the most profound impact on me was Sophie's Choice. And I remember reading it, knowing really little about the Holocaust, knowing really little about what it meant to be Jewish in a time when your life was literally under threat. And maybe that's what I thought I was going to read from that book. But you get to the middle of the book and you realize that the choice was one that, you know, she had to choose between her children. Who do you want to save? And I realized that it was a limit to what I could understand about the world having been in that situation to be forced to make that decision. And I began to understand how radically complicated it is to forgive yourself for some things that you do. And I don't think that I would have learned that. any way else. Because honestly, most of us are fortunate enough not to make those kind of decisions in this life. And so to understand a decision like that, you will only get it through a book. And it was the slow pacing, the accumulation of details, the realization that everything I knew about this character. was wrong Speaker 3 (8:34) because Speaker 4 (8:35) everything I knew about the character was shaped by this secret that she had and and for me that's an example how book fiction a novel offered me a way to understand something about the world and about myself that I could have got no other way so Speaker 3 (8:49) much of the Speaker 3 (8:52) system of incarceration in the United States is not built around rehabilitation at all. And it's interesting to hear you talk about that radical understanding and exposure to literature and how that profoundly changed your life. And it seems like a lot of the... The work of Freedom Reads is to give people who are behind bars an opportunity to have that same experience as well. How does that butt up against the like institutional pressure that isn't always trying to improve people's lives, trying to give people a better path out afterwards? Speaker 4 (9:30) Well, I would argue that in a lot of ways, prison is a black box. And whenever you're dealing with a system that's a black box, it's easy to decide what the system is attempting to do. Speaker 3 (9:39) And Speaker 4 (9:40) the truth is that. It takes a lot of money, a lot of resources, and a lot of time to change anything in this country. And nobody's arguing that Department of Corrections, that a warden, a lieutenant, even a commissioner has any kind of surplus of funds where they could make ideas happen that might change the lives of people. Speaker 3 (10:02) So Speaker 4 (10:02) I will push back a little bit and say that it's not just that the institution doesn't want to do a thing. The institution itself isn't equipped to do the thing. Speaker 2 (10:11) I Speaker 4 (10:11) don't Speaker 2 (10:12) know Speaker 4 (10:12) if you've ever met somebody who wants to be a correctional officer or even who wants to be a warden. I can name a half a dozen people who want to be basketball players, who want to be football players, who want to be doctors, who want to be engineers, who want to be scientists, who want to be coders. And so we put some of the most harmed, damaged, and people who have done egregious things in a system. And we do not equip them with the resources that could come from having the best and brightest into a space. And Speaker 3 (10:40) then Speaker 4 (10:40) we denigrate that space for not doing the thing that we know will cost a massive amount of resources to fail it. And so I will argue that what I do with literature is literally the lowest cost solution to the troubles that we have. This is an entryway into thinking more expansively about how to radically transform people's lives. It's not a panacea. But it is an entryway, and it is the entryway that is most necessary because there aren't any other resources coming in. I went to prison at 16 years old. I was 5'5 and 125 pounds. I never saw a therapist. I just found out this year that I'm bipolar, that I have ADHD. You think that it was any screening that was asking how prison was rewiring my brain and how it was compounding. Any problems or troubles or inconsistencies in my way of thinking that I had when I walked into a prison cell. And so for me, I'm just reluctant to blame the system. One, because the blame game is too easy. But two, I mean, because I'm at TED and I see what resources can do. And even if we're just talking about the resources to bring all of us in a room together, that is profoundly more than has ever been done for most prisons in this country. Speaker 3 (11:52) Because it's true. I haven't ever met someone who wants to be a corrections officer or a warden or anything like that. That's not true for me. Speaker 4 (11:59) Right. I mean, because, and one, because we don't honor people who do that work. So why would somebody want to do it? But if we know that somebody's doing work that's essentially thankless, and we know that it's a problem, I mean, maybe it's just better to focus on the solution and not make the human beings who are trying their best or not. What does it mean not to make them the problem? Because even when they're failing. They're failing in ways, candidly, that don't reach my level of failure. I was pulling a pistol on people. Most CEOs aren't doing that. Most CEOs aren't making the problem worse. Speaker 3 (12:33) But Speaker 4 (12:34) they all get clumped up in the same group and stigmatized in the same way and denigrated for doing work that nobody else wants to do. It's like being a coal miner. And somebody says, well, you're ruining the planet. And you're like, so you think I just chose to be a coal miner? You think I decided on consumption? I decided on shortening my life with this work? It's like, no, maybe you didn't make that decision. And how can we focus our lens on solving a problem as opposed to, you know, identifying? A scapegoat. Speaker 3 (13:06) Thinking about the solution, thinking about solving the problem, what role does beauty