Why I’m Building Libraries Inside Prisons | Reginald Dwayne Betts | TED

I ate my first mango in a hole. What some called a shoe, the box, Ad-Seg, lock up. But no matter what you call solitary confinement, no one expects it to be where you eat your first mango. (Laughter) And me? I thought the oval-shaped fruit that came with lunch that day was an apple. I've been teaching myself to juggle, to keep from losing my mind. Imagining that I could manage my troubles if I could float apples into an orbit of my creation. When I sank my teeth into the unfamiliar, fragrant fruit, juices ran down my fingertips. I ate until I chipped a tooth, scraping it along the mango seed. I never saw another mango in prison.

And I only learned the name of the fruit when I was home and in my mother's kitchen. Before I started juggling, I trashed the mostly rotten apples without a second glance. Then juggling transformed the apples into my way of escape. That's how prison taught me that you find what you look for. Who would expect to hear a story about prison that includes a mango? I got locked up in 1996. I was 16 years old, five-foot-five and 125 pounds. I hadn't won a fight since the second grade. (Laughter) Becoming a brawler overnight wasn't in the cards for me. That's why people often ask me how I survived. What if I say, I survived prison because I believed you find what you look for. Because of what it means to notice the mango.

To commit yourself to the possibility of a miracle, even without a name for the wonder. I should thank my judge. After I pleaded 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[s] that sending you to the penitentiary is going to help." 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." I figured the judge was saying 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. 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. Star 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. He was not the only one. I remember Mike G. One day he asked, "If you slipped at McDonald's and broke your leg, and they had one of those 'wet floor' signs up, could you sue?" Of course I could sue. We argued. I knew I was right. An hour later he says, "You know you're wrong." And then he shows me a page in a faded yellow book with the word "Torts" on the cover. Who asks a question they know the answer to, and then argues about it for an hour? (Laughter) The devil on my right shoulder said "Swing."

Now remember, I hadn’t won a fight since the second grade. So instead, I picked up a tattered issue of prison legal news from his locker [and] an ad for a paralegal course caught my eye. My mom paid for the classes. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I just didn't want to be anybody's fool. I almost didn't finish the class. You see, I was at Sussex I State Prison, and they had these lines, these yellow lines that you cannot cross. But I was a perpetual line crosser. I would cross lines to get stamps, to say hello to friends, to borrow food, to give people food. One day, I crossed the yellow line to get a book. A new book is a rare occurrence in prison. "Betts, I'm so tired of you stepping over my lines. This time you're going back to the hole," the lieutenant said before he cuffed me.

From the second tier, Luke saw it all. We hadn't exchanged more than a dozen words in his life, but when they opened his cell door, he pushed all his property out of his cell and said, "If Shah go to the hole, I go to the hole." Others began banging on their cell doors, also demanding to go to solitary confinement. It was another miracle. I didn't go to the hole that day. Luke only knew me from the times we hooped together, but that was enough for him to see me as worthy of more than a cell. Even then, I guess I was finding what I was looking for. Now I left prison on March 4, 2005. Before April 1, I tried to enroll at the University of Maryland. I didn't even know what the word semester meant. When I told this kind counselor that I had just come home from prison, he suggested community college.

I took refuge there. Then I started picking up college degrees like felonies. (Laughter) I had an AA, a BA, an MFA. I published a memoir and a collection of poetry before I turned 30 years old. (Applause) But I couldn't even get an interview for a teaching gig. I was 33. I had two small sons [and] a felony record. I was unemployed. But I was once a jailhouse lawyer. And for a pack of tuna, a box of crackers and ramen noodles, I got five years off somebody's prison sentence. (Applause) I decided to go to law school. A year later, I [had] been admitted to as many law schools as prisons where I served time: Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, Michigan.

I went to Yale wanting to be a public defender, but I was working in a public defender's office, and I couldn't stomach my young clients being locked up. Every one of them reminded me of friends in prison doing football numbers: 30, 40, 50 years, life. Then Juvie asked me to help him get out. I started representing my friends, failing and failing and failing again. Then Luke found me. I hadn't talked to him in 20 years. I walked into the parole board with his blind mother on my arm as if I were her son. He made parole. Then Keith did, and then Fettes, then Juvie, and then Tyrell, and I got Dempsey out, too. Six men, all sent to prison as teenagers. All out because my mom spent money for me to take a paralegal course in the middle of a prison sentence that neither one of us knew if I would survive.

I left prison on March 4, the only date that is also a command, advising me to march forth out in the world and leave everything about prison behind. (Applause) But I found myself returning again and again. For friends, for clients, to read poems. So when someone asked, "What would you do for people in prison if money wasn't an issue?" I said, “We put millions of people in prison. I will put millions of books inside.” When she asked me how, I said, "One library at a time." In 2020, it was all a dream. A little over a year later, we opened our first Freedom Library in a gutted cell in MCI, Norfolk. A prison where Malcolm X served time. Our second was in Louisiana's Angola State Prison.

We put freedom libraries on a cell block so that men can step away -- No, so that men, women and children can step away from their bunks and reach for a book that will be the start of the freedom they look for. We've opened more than 600 Freedom Libraries, putting books I once dreamed of reading into the hands of others. What we've heard often makes me weep. Like when Hillary, one of the first women in prison to touch a Freedom Library, wrote, "The smell of wood and the smell of a new book takes me right out of this place. I have been incarcerated for 20 years, and I’m doing life. I love books and I'm an avid reader. I have been since I was a little girl." Hillary makes me think about myself. 30 years ago, I walked into a prison barely older than my 14-year-old son. My 18-year-old is choosing a college. I am the father I am because of what I found in those prison cells.

Long ago, I found out that you [find] what you look for because there is always someone who believes that you'll be searching. These days, I've returned to prisons with something as improbable as the mango I once found in solitary confinement. Luke and Tyrell have both returned to open Freedom Libraries with me. The men who taught me how to hold on to hope are now handing it out to others. Unnamed, unannounced, one book at a time. Thank you. (Cheers and applause)