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

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1. 0:04I ate my first mango in a hole.
2. 0:08What some called a shoe,
3. 0:10the box, Ad-Seg, lock up.
4. 0:13But no matter what you call solitary confinement,
5. 0:17no one expects it to be where you eat your first mango.
6. 0:21(Laughter)
7. 0:23And me?
8. 0:24I thought the oval-shaped fruit
9. 0:26that came with lunch that day was an apple.
10. 0:30I've been teaching myself to juggle, to keep from losing my mind.
11. 0:36Imagining that I could manage my troubles
12. 0:39if I could float apples into an orbit of my creation.
13. 0:44When I sank my teeth into the unfamiliar,
14. 0:46fragrant fruit,
15. 0:49juices ran down my fingertips.
16. 0:53I ate until I chipped a tooth,
17. 0:56scraping it along the mango seed.
18. 1:01I never saw another mango in prison.
19. 1:05And I only learned the name of the fruit
20. 1:08when I was home and in my mother's kitchen.
21. 1:11Before I started juggling,
22. 1:13I trashed the mostly rotten apples without a second glance.
23. 1:18Then juggling transformed the apples into my way of escape.
24. 1:24That's how prison taught me that you find what you look for.
25. 1:29Who would expect to hear a story about prison that includes a mango?
26. 1:35I got locked up in 1996.
27. 1:38I was 16 years old,
28. 1:40five-foot-five and 125 pounds.
29. 1:44I hadn't won a fight since the second grade.
30. 1:46(Laughter)
31. 1:48Becoming a brawler overnight wasn't in the cards for me.
32. 1:53That's why people often ask me how I survived.
33. 1:57What if I say,
34. 1:59I survived prison because I believed you find what you look for.
35. 2:04Because of what it means to notice the mango.
36. 2:07To commit yourself to the possibility of a miracle,
37. 2:11even without a name for the wonder.
38. 2:15I should thank my judge.
39. 2:17After I pleaded guilty to carjacking,
40. 2:20and he sentenced me to nine years in prison,
41. 2:23I was certain that I was going home.
42. 2:29I waited for him to tell me it was all a dream.
43. 2:34Then he confirmed my intuition.
44. 2:37“I don’t have any illusion[s] that sending you to the penitentiary
45. 2:41is going to help."
46. 2:44Do you know what the cruelest word in the English language is?
47. 2:49The preposition "but."
48. 2:52The judge said, "But you can go down there
49. 2:57and you can make the best of it or not."
50. 3:02I figured the judge was saying
51. 3:07that I could choose what I looked for in those cells.
52. 3:11Becoming a computer engineer was now out of the question.
53. 3:15Earning a college degree from prison was just as unlikely.
54. 3:21But because of what the judge said,
55. 3:23I thought not only of what I would lose.
56. 3:28I was 16 years old, planning who I would be when I left.
57. 3:33I've loved books since I was a kid.
58. 3:37And so on my sentencing day,
59. 3:40I told myself that I would be a writer.
60. 3:43In a crucible that is prison,
61. 3:45I learned to see other people.
62. 3:48I remember Star.
63. 3:51We spent months in adjacent cells in a hole.
64. 3:54We were both obsessed with stories of our past
65. 3:59and with fantasy novels like "Lord of the Rings,"
66. 4:02books that let us imagine ourselves
67. 4:05as people who chose to be heroes instead of villains.
68. 4:11He was a boxer.
69. 4:13I wasn't.
70. 4:14Star taught me what he knew, how to train, how to breathe,
71. 4:19how not to let frustration and a lack of discipline
72. 4:22turn into something that ends up costing you
73. 4:25far more than you can afford to lose.
74. 4:29He was not the only one.
75. 4:31I remember Mike G.
76. 4:33One day he asked, "If you slipped at McDonald's
77. 4:37and broke your leg,
78. 4:40and they had one of those 'wet floor' signs up,
79. 4:43could you sue?"
80. 4:45Of course I could sue.
81. 4:48We argued.
82. 4:50I knew I was right.
83. 4:52An hour later he says, "You know you're wrong."
84. 4:55And then he shows me a page
85. 4:58in a faded yellow book with the word "Torts" on the cover.
86. 5:04Who asks a question they know the answer to,
87. 5:07and then argues about it for an hour?
88. 5:10(Laughter)
89. 5:13The devil on my right shoulder said "Swing."
90. 5:17Now remember, I hadn’t won a fight since the second grade.
91. 5:21So instead, I picked up a tattered issue of prison legal news from his locker
92. 5:25[and] an ad for a paralegal course caught my eye.
93. 5:29My mom paid for the classes.
94. 5:32I didn't want to be a lawyer.
95. 5:34I just didn't want to be anybody's fool.
96. 5:39I almost didn't finish the class.
97. 5:42You see, I was at Sussex I State Prison,
98. 5:47and they had these lines,
99. 5:48these yellow lines that you cannot cross.
100. 5:52But I was a perpetual line crosser.
101. 5:55I would cross lines to get stamps,
102. 5:58to say hello to friends,
103. 6:00to borrow food, to give people food.
104. 6:03One day, I crossed the yellow line to get a book.
105. 6:08A new book is a rare occurrence in prison.
106. 6:12"Betts, I'm so tired of you stepping over my lines.
107. 6:16This time you're going back to the hole,"
108. 6:20the lieutenant said before he cuffed me.
109. 6:24From the second tier, Luke saw it all.
110. 6:27We hadn't exchanged more than a dozen words in his life,
111. 6:31but when they opened his cell door,
112. 6:33he pushed all his property out of his cell and said,
113. 6:35"If Shah go to the hole, I go to the hole."
114. 6:40Others began banging on their cell doors,
115. 6:42also demanding to go to solitary confinement.
116. 6:48It was another miracle.
117. 6:50I didn't go to the hole that day.
118. 6:53Luke only knew me from the times we hooped together,
119. 6:56but that was enough for him to see me as worthy of more than a cell.
120. 7:01Even then, I guess I was finding what I was looking for.
121. 7:06Now I left prison on March 4, 2005.
122. 7:11Before April 1,
123. 7:12I tried to enroll at the University of Maryland.
124. 7:16I didn't even know what the word semester meant.
125. 7:19When I told this kind counselor that I had just come home from prison,
126. 7:24he suggested community college.
127. 7:27I took refuge there.
128. 7:29Then I started picking up college degrees like felonies.
129. 7:32(Laughter)
130. 7:36I had an AA, a BA, an MFA.
131. 7:41I published a memoir and a collection of poetry
132. 7:44before I turned 30 years old.
133. 7:48(Applause)
134. 7:53But I couldn't even get an interview for a teaching gig.
135. 7:57I was 33.
136. 7:59I had two small sons [and] a felony record.
137. 8:02I was unemployed.
138. 8:04But I was once a jailhouse lawyer.
139. 8:07And for a pack of tuna, a box of crackers and ramen noodles,
140. 8:11I got five years off somebody's prison sentence.
141. 8:15(Applause)
142. 8:18I decided to go to law school.
143. 8:21A year later, I [had] been admitted to as many law schools
144. 8:24as prisons where I served time:
145. 8:26Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania,
146. 8:29Georgetown, Michigan.
147. 8:33I went to Yale wanting to be a public defender,
148. 8:35but I was working in a public defender's office,
149. 8:39and I couldn't stomach my young clients being locked up.
150. 8:44Every one of them reminded me of friends in prison doing football numbers:
151. 8:4730, 40, 50 years, life.
152. 8:51Then Juvie asked me to help him get out.
153. 8:55I started representing my friends,
154. 8:58failing and failing and failing again.
155. 9:03Then Luke found me.
156. 9:05I hadn't talked to him in 20 years.
157. 9:07I walked into the parole board with his blind mother on my arm
158. 9:11as if I were her son.
159. 9:15He made parole.
160. 9:17Then Keith did, and then Fettes, then Juvie, and then Tyrell,
161. 9:21and I got Dempsey out, too.
162. 9:23Six men, all sent to prison as teenagers.
163. 9:28All out
164. 9:30because my mom spent money for me to take a paralegal course
165. 9:34in the middle of a prison sentence
166. 9:36that neither one of us knew if I would survive.
167. 9:40I left prison on March 4,
168. 9:42the only date that is also a command,
169. 9:46advising me to march forth out in the world
170. 9:48and leave everything about prison behind.
171. 9:51(Applause)
172. 9:57But I found myself returning again and again.
173. 10:02For friends, for clients, to read poems.
174. 10:06So when someone asked,
175. 10:07"What would you do for people in prison if money wasn't an issue?"
176. 10:13I said, “We put millions of people in prison.
177. 10:17I will put millions of books inside.”
178. 10:21When she asked me how,
179. 10:23I said, "One library at a time."
180. 10:27In 2020, it was all a dream.
181. 10:30A little over a year later,
182. 10:32we opened our first Freedom Library in a gutted cell in MCI, Norfolk.
183. 10:38A prison where Malcolm X served time.
184. 10:40Our second was in Louisiana's Angola State Prison.
185. 10:44We put freedom libraries on a cell block so that men can step away --
186. 10:49No, so that men, women and children can step away from their bunks
187. 10:53and reach for a book
188. 10:56that will be the start of the freedom they look for.
189. 10:59We've opened more than 600 Freedom Libraries,
190. 11:01putting books I once dreamed of reading
191. 11:04into the hands of others.
192. 11:07What we've heard often makes me weep.
193. 11:10Like when Hillary,
194. 11:11one of the first women in prison to touch a Freedom Library, wrote,
195. 11:16"The smell of wood and the smell of a new book
196. 11:18takes me right out of this place.
197. 11:21I have been incarcerated for 20 years, and I’m doing life.
198. 11:25I love books and I'm an avid reader.
199. 11:28I have been since I was a little girl."
200. 11:31Hillary makes me think about myself.
201. 11:3430 years ago, I walked into a prison barely older than my 14-year-old son.
202. 11:39My 18-year-old is choosing a college.
203. 11:42I am the father I am
204. 11:45because of what I found in those prison cells.
205. 11:48Long ago, I found out that you [find] what you look for
206. 11:52because there is always someone who believes that you'll be searching.
207. 11:57These days, I've returned to prisons with something as improbable
208. 12:00as the mango I once found in solitary confinement.
209. 12:04Luke and Tyrell have both returned to open Freedom Libraries with me.
210. 12:08The men who taught me how to hold on to hope
211. 12:11are now handing it out to others.
212. 12:14Unnamed, unannounced,
213. 12:17one book at a time.
214. 12:19Thank you.
215. 12:20(Cheers and applause)