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I stumbled upon Freedom Reads Founder Reginald Dwayne Betts’ book, FELON, in a random room at Cybulski Correctional Institution in Enfield, Connecticut. I talked about the book with my now colleague, Steven Parkhurst, while we were both on the inside. Steve talked about potentially speaking with Dwayne soon and I talked about what amazing work Freedom Reads was doing. We both talked about how thrilling it would be to work for an organization like that.

This is what they cannot tell you to expect: that you’ll return. No, that’s not true. They predict that you will return in handcuffs. Never as it happened on March 4, 2024. That morning, I returned as a poet who would perform for them as if the men inside were a Broadway audience; I returned as someone who’d served time with them, as a lawyer who’d been trained in the cells they knew too well.

Freedom Reads put on literary events at Rhode Island prisons for the first time last week. Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts performed his one-man show, FELON: An American Washi Tale. Following the show, Dwayne and Freedom Reads Program Coordinator Steven Parkhurst, who served over 26 years at Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institution (ACI), had a wide-ranging conversation about the experience of incarceration and the importance of literature and literary events in transforming the lives of incarcerated people.

Tyler Sperrazza, the Chief Production Officer at Freedom Reads, and I pulled our 26-foot Penske moving truck full of Freedom Libraries into the staff parking lot of the Maine Correctional Center, just a couple dozen feet from the sally-port that gave entrance to the prison grounds. We had just driven 240 miles from Hamden, Connecticut, to Windham, Maine, and my heart was pounding.

Twenty-six years ago today, on December 8, 1996, I confessed to carjacking a man. In some ways, everything that I’ve done since then has been moving towards a kind of amends. Sometimes books are the opposite of violence, opening up the possibility for another tomorrow. I started Freedom Reads, not just to place beautiful, handcrafted wooden shelves with five hundred of the best books you can find on prison housing units all across this country, I started it to return to prisons with something more than the violence that first brought me there.