Reading Books in Prison

“A Canon for the American Prisoner”

John J. Lennon in conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Review of Books, Oct. 5, 2021

Everyone needs to escape sometimes—in their minds. But to read involves examining the deeper way people live their lives. That is happening in fiction in a way that it’s not on television (except in the best kind of TV drama). There’s something that books do for us that we just can’t get anywhere else. This is critically important for people in prison because so much of prison is trying to master the art of becoming: Who do you want to become?

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I went to prison a kid, and books literally saved my life.

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This is what Freedom Reads is about. It’s creating opportunities for the conversation that goes: ‘Yo, you should check this book out: Paradise Lost.’ ‘Nah, I ain’t trying to read that.’ ‘Yo, John wrote the intro. Check that joint out, man! He actually mapped it out. This is about what we dealing with.’ When we read a book in community, your reaction may be: ‘I think the book means this.’ To which, I’m saying: ‘I don’t know, man; maybe it doesn’t mean that. Maybe it means this.’ And voicing your opinion about that gives the book room to become something else, and gives us room to become something else.

In 2001, Reginald Dwayne Betts was about five years into a nine-year sentence in a Virginia prison for a carjacking he’d committed at age sixteen. That was the year that I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street, when I was twenty-four years old. I am now twenty years into a sentence of twenty-eight years-to-life. In that time, I’ve become a journalist writing from prison. Since his release, Betts has become an acclaimed poet and attorney. His 2018 article for The New York Times Magazine about his journey from teenage carjacker to working lawyer won the National Magazine Award. His most recent collection of poetry, Felon, explores the post-incarceration experience; just last month, he was appointed one of the 2021 MacArthur fellows (an award commonly known as the “genius grant”).

I currently live in Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison set in New York’s Catskill Mountains. It was a creative writing workshop in Attica, of all places, that led me toward my vocation. In 2019, I wrote a review of Felon and Betts saw it, responding in a tweet: “I’m certain no one has written anything about my writing and life that has hit me so hard in the gut.” With this connection, Dwayne and I subsequently became friends. (Currently, in his capacity as a lawyer, he is pursuing a clemency petition for me, among others.)

Through Betts, I have become involved in the initiative he created in 2019, Freedom Reads, to curate microlibraries and install them in prisons and juvenile detention centers across the United States and Puerto Rico. It’s a project close to his heart.

“I did time where knowledge was always obtained a book at a time,” Betts told me, when I called him recently, “and a lot of the knowledge was bootleg, things I’d later discard as absurd, things that sowed hate or envy or just misinformation.”

Dudley Randall’s anthology The Black Poets and John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers were two books that came around on the cart when he was in solitary confinement. Those two will likely be among the titles in the five-hundred-book collections that Freedom Reads is putting together, the first to be installed in Massachusetts’s Norfolk (where Malcolm X once served time) and Concord, with five by the end of 2021, and Louisiana’s Angola soon to follow.

When Betts got out of prison, in 2005, he enrolled at Prince George’s Community College and took a job at Karibu Books, a bookstore in Bowie, Maryland. He started a book club there, aiming to encourage boys to read, which soon brought in groups of kids aged between six and sixteen on Sunday afternoons to talk about writers from August Wilson to Walter Dean Myers.

Betts went on to the University of Maryland at College Park and earned his bachelor’s degree, then got an MFA from Warren Wilson College and began his writing career. Before long, he was a published author: his books include A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (2009) and the poetry collections Shahid Reads His Own Palm (2010) and Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015). Now he’s pursuing a PhD at Yale Law School.

Today, I can be sure that whenever I call from the prison yard, Dwayne will always pick up. We talk about the magazine pieces we’re writing, the solo theater piece he’s working on. We’ve become writing partners, keeping each other honest with identical due dates for our book manuscripts. And, of course, we talk about the Freedom Reads library. His latest inspiration for the project has been to enlist an array of journalists, novelists, and poets to write new forewords, in the form of letters, for sixteen classics that Freedom Reads will publish under its own imprint as new editions for the collection.

Nicholas Dawidoff is writing a letter for Great Expectations, Jamaica Kincaid is contributing one for Jane Eyre, as is George Saunders for Dubliners. The list of contributors also includes Nikole Hannah-Jones, Marlon James, Laila Lalami, and Kiese Laymon. (I am writing a letter for Paradise Lost, so resonant with themes of envy, pride, disobedience, and redemption.) Betts’s hope is that these new editions, along with access to many other well-chosen books, will lead people in prison to read these classic works of literature and find a way to the imaginative freedom great writing offers. What follows is an edited transcript of our recent conversation about what reading in prison can mean. [….] The transcript of the conversation (the remainder of the essay) is here.

See too this piece from Mother Jones, “Books Have the Power to Rehabilitate. But Prisons Are Blocking Access to Them,” by Samantha Michaels (with photos by Carlos Chavarría), January/February 2020.  

Recommended:

• Bernstein, Lee (2010) America is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Brottman, Mikita (2016) The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s New York: HarperCollins.
• Chevigeny, Bell Gale, ed. (1999) Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years of Prison Writing. New York: Aracade.
• Coyle, William J. (1987) Libraries in Prisons: A Blending of Institutions. New York: Greenwood Press.
• Davies, Ioan (1990) Writers in Prison. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
• Desai, Ashwin (2014/Unisa Press, 2012) Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
• Franklin, H. Bruce (1978) The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Franklin, H. Bruce (1998) Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America. New York: Penguin Books.
• Fyfe, Janet (1992) Books Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading, and Libraries in British Reform, 1701-1911. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• Harlow, Barbara (1992) Barred: Women, Writing and Political Detention. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
• James, Joy, ed. (2003) Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• James, Joy, ed. (2005) The New Abolitionists: (neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Johnson, Paula C. (2003) Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison. New York: New York University Press.
• Karpowitz, Daniel (2017) College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Kornfeld, Phyllis (1997) Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe (2016) Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison. New York: New Press.
• Melville, Samuel (1972) Letters from Attica. New York: William Morrow and Co.
• Miller, D. Quentin, ed. (2005) Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
• Monroe, Gary (2009) The Highway Men Murals: Al Black’s Concrete Dreams. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
• Peltier, Leonard (Harvey Arden, ed.) (1999) Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
• Sachs, Albie (1990) The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. London: Paladin/Grafton Books.
• Salinas, Raúl (Louis G. Mendoza, ed.) (2006) raúlsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon is My Pen. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Scheffler, Judith A., ed. (2002) Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings, 200 [CE] to the Present. New York: Feminist Press.
• Schorb, Jodi. (2014) Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700-1845. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Barbara, ed. (1992) A Snake with Ice Water: Prison Writings by South African Women. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers.
• Suttner, Raymond (2001) Inside Apartheid’s Prisons: Notes and Letters of Struggle. Melbourne: Ocean Press/Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of Natal Press.
• Sweeney, Megan (2010) Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Waldman, Ayelet and Robin Levi, eds. (2011) Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books and Voice of Witness.

Related Bibliography: Punishment and Prison