How to Be a Better Human - How reading can transform your life (w/ Reginald Dwayne Betts)

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

“We have tried to create a system devoid of beauty, and it has failed. We have never tried to create a system that is replete with beauty and ask us what it might do.” Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, a lawyer, and a prison reform advocate. In this episode, he joins Chris to discuss the detrimental effects of prison systems and how lack of resources and the lack of beauty in prison perpetuates dehumanization. Reginald and Chris also share their favorite poems and books and discuss Reginald’s work with the Freedom Library to bring books to prisoners and correction officers.Poems and Books MentionedFrom the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. KonigsburgFree Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Leewon’t you celebrate with me by Lucille CliftonThose Winter Sundays by Robert HaydenFailing and Flying by Jack GilbertThe Forgotten Dialect of the Heart by Jack GilbertA Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towlesunder a soprano sky by Sonia SanchezFor Freckle-Faced Gerald by Etheridge KnightFeatured guestFollow Reginald on Instagram, LinkedIn, and at FreedomReads.orgBuy Felon: Poems and Doggerel: PoemsConnect with the teamFollow Chris on Instagram and at chrisduffycomedy.comBuy Chris’ book, Humor Me Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPodsFollow TED on X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTokFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscriptsFill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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's survey at Bitley slash BH Survey 6. That's bit.L.L.Y slash BH Survey 6. 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 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. 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. I should thank my judge. After I played 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. 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. Earned in 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 the lack of discipline turn into something that ends up costing you far more than you can afford to lose. We are going to be back with so much more from Reginald Dwayne Betts in just a moment. And we are back. We are talking with the poet and MacArthur genius, Reginaldwayne Betts,

about the power and importance of literature and beauty. Hello, I'm Reginald-Dwayne Betts. I'm the founder and CEO of Freedom Reeds, but I'm mostly a poet. With your organization Freedom Reeds, you have built 629 micro-libraries in prisons around America. What do you think is so important about getting books inside of prisons? 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.

condition. 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 Ismail 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 ourselves. And you don't understand yourself necessarily by minding your personal history and your own brain. You understand yourself better by minding the lives of others, the situations of others, through really complex and interest in literature, even if that literature the 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 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 a situation, to be forced to make that decision. And I began to understand how radically complicated it is to forgive yourself for some, 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. Because everything I knew about the character was shaped by this secret that she had. And for me, that's an example how a book fiction, a novel,

offer me a way to understand something about the world and about myself that I could have got no other way. So much of the 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 work of Freedom Reeds 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? 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. And 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. So 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. I don't know 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 then 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 and thinking more expansively about how to radically transform people's lives. It's not a panacea, but it is an entryway and it's the entryway

that it's most necessary because there aren't any other resources coming there. 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 it's ever been done for most prisons in this country. 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. 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 this essentially, thankless, and we know that it's a problem. I mean, maybe it's just better to focus on a solution and not make the human beings who are trying that 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 COs aren't doing that. Most CEOs aren't making the problem worse. But they all get clumped up in the same group and stigmatized in the same way

and denigrate it 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 in my life with this work. And 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 scapego? Hmm. Thinking about the solution, thinking about solving the problem. What world does beauty play in solving problems?

Especially this problem, right, of the world inside of a black box. Somebody told me that when he touches a freedom library, it feels like he is closer to the ocean than he's ever been in life. It is profound what can happen when you give somebody an object that is beautiful. When you give somebody something that feels like art, that actually is art. It was a woman who wrote a letter very early on. She said, listen, I come out of my cell and I look and I notice this strange thing in a cell block. And it's beautiful, but I don't understand what it is.

And I walked down to the steps and it's a bookcase with these beautiful books. And they're new. And I couldn't believe it. And I'm browsing the books. And then I look up and I see a woman that I've had conflict with for weeks. And I got nervous. And then she smiled at me. And I smiled at her.

And she says, in the most unlike. of places, we found beauty in a common barn, and we let go whatever petty thing had been consuming us just like that. And so I deeply believe that giving people access to beauty, I mean, we all know it. You're a child, you put a feather or flower in your hair. You know, we all know, you, you wear a nice suit on Easter. You wear something beautiful on New Year's. you make a paper airplane when you're in grade school and everybody is coloring that paper airplane to jazz it up a little bit.

It's a neuroesthetic value that allows us to access joy in a way when we're around something beautiful that's much more difficult to access when we're not. And I spent a lot of time in the most drab, dingy, righteously harrowing prisons

and they were mostly harrowing because of the architecture. They were mostly harrowing because of the lack of light. I was once in a prison, yo. The window in my cell was the size of my palm and the length of my arm. What part of that was supposed to be rehabilitative? But no CO, no warden, you know, no health care professional in the Department of Corrections was consulted when architects decided that their mission,

was to strip the prison of anything close to beauty. It was no safety reason to make it impossible for you to look out the window. And so I think that we have tried to create a system devoid of beauty, and it has failed us. We have never tried to create a system that is replete with beauty and ask us what it might do.

Something that I have found as a real source of beauty in my own life and matters a lot to me is poetry. and obviously you're a poet. And I actually don't meet that many people who value poetry in that same way. I think, unfortunately, many people think of poetry as something that has to rhyme,

something that is, you know, roses are red, violets, or believe they think of it as kid-like, or on the flip side, they think of it as totally pretentious and not at all relatable to their lives. Most people have never had a poem read to them, period. Most people have never been given a permission to live with a poem for more than just one reading.

All of the music we listen to rhymes, nobody thinks that's juvenile. It's all in the structure that's recognizable. It has a hook. It has a bridge. It has like, you know, three verses. And we get it, and we don't complain when we don't know what the lyric means.

In fact, we sing lyrics wrong all of the time. And then people say, hey, you know that's not what it says. For real? Wow. I didn't know that's not what it says. I like my version better, though. I'm going to keep singing my version because we give ourselves permission

to get joy as if we own a thing, as if it's not so precious, right? So I tell people all the time, and this is what I started doing. I never did this before. I said, man, I'm going to start singing to people. I'm going to start memorizing some of my own poems, and I'm going to meet people on the street

and say, yo, can I read you a poem? Strangest. And it is the most profoundly complex, humbling thing to have somebody say yes. Somebody could say no, and it's just like fine. That means your ego. That means that you get to realize

that the world isn't just about you and this person might have other things going on in their life. But when a person says yes, two things happen. For me, two things happen. One, I started to pay more attention to the responsibility I owe the person that I was singing to.

I do sing songs of sorrow, but I recognize that it's always two trains running. And I don't have to have anything I write be overwhelmed with sorrow. I could strike two notes at once. I could say something that makes you weep and sigh. I could actually chase joy. And when you start reading to people,

you'd be like, oh, man, I need something. I want to touch this person. How do I want this person to be touched? How do I want them to understand that my life in prison was more than a long, endless heartache? And I think that far too often poets have relegated ourselves to the back of the room.

We've decided that because nobody listens to us, we're not going to try to communicate. And I do get it. You know, we can have different ways of approaching a page. But I think in a contemporary literary landscape, we have decided that poetry is best if it's inscrutable. And I have decided for myself that I could write poems that bring people joy,

that I could write poems that make people laugh. and that I can sing to you in public and have you think about what it is that I've said. We're going to take a quick break and then we will be right back. And we are back. In your collection of poems fell in, which I loved,

I think it's a beautiful collection of work. You say at the end, I've always thought of my own writing as having something of the desire of the quilt maker. A book filled with thousands of words will sometimes have a few moments, echoes of the work of others, homages to poems and poets that gave me voice and belief.

So I'd love to hear you talk more about that, but who are some of the writers whose work gave you belief and hope? Rita Dove, she has a line that says in a poem about Billy Harvey. The poem is called Canary. And she says, if you can't be free, be a mystery. And I always carried that around with me because I thought it meant, if you can't be free, recognize that you are a thing that needs to be. be discovered. Recognize that you are a person that is discovering yourself. And that was a line,

Lucille Clifton, come celebrate with me. Every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. Robert Hayden, what did I know? What did I know of loves or still and lonely offices? So I had these lines in my head that helped me understand the world that I could go back to again and again. But some of the lines I have and I riffed on very intentionally, it's like Bruce Springsteen. I got debts no honest man can pay. It's Tupac, eating Jack Mack staring at the walls in silence inside this cage where they captured all my rage and violence. I have discovered that if I could infuse my work via illusion with the work that helped me shape me, then I'm recognizing that the tradition is the tradition. When I first first,

used that Bruce Springsteen line. A friend of mine said, Duane, I don't know if you know this, but that line you used, I got debts, no honest man can pay. Bruce Springsteen used the same line. So you really think that like me and Bruce Springsteen randomly came up with the same line? And I was like, brother, you are a philosopher. You riff on the philosophy of other people. This is a part of your whole career. You exist within a tradition. And you think that I'm supposed to be a writer that doesn't exist within a tradition. I exist within a tradition in a way that we acknowledge our tradition is through illusion, A-L-L-U-S-I-O-N. But we don't get taught these things in school, and so sometimes we mischaracterize

what it means to create a bouquet of references and resources. And the last book in that one, it's a poem, it's a beautiful poem by George Herbert called Prayer One. It's a sonnet that's defined in Prayer. It's like Prayer, Prayer, and then he just goes in. has all of these lists, but he said, the paraphrase of fractured. What? It was so beautiful that I said, oh, you know what?

I'm going to riff on this. And in this case, the way I riffed on it was to write a poem called prison in which I was defined in prison. So I didn't use any of his lines, but I used his rhyme scheme. I used his idea. And people who know prayer one see this as within the tradition of the poem that was written by George Herbert. He wrote that in the 1800s.

Now, I get it, man. I don't expect everybody. who reads that to recognize it. That's maybe just for me. That is my delight. But that's what we're building, a delight for ourselves that might end up being a delight for a reader who can get hip to some of the things that's happened. It's so obvious the passion and the depth of feeling that you have for other writers and for the work that has shaped you. It makes me wonder about a really technical question, which is in the Freedom Reeds Libraries. Are you picking the books yourself? Do you personally select the books that go in?

we were a much smaller team when we started and it was the pandemic. I was like, how do I involve other people in this? Because this is my idea and it was always important that other people would be involved. I was in a PhD program and I did a lot of work.

I was going to do ethnographic research. So I was like, I'm going to do a focus group. And it's a pandemic. I said, look, you and two of your friends, get on Zoom, record it, each of y'all get a glass of wine or whatever you drink and just talk about books. And it was just the most wondrous conversations.

Wesley Morris, saying something about angels in America. I had never read this. And it was like, it's just like a wise person who has gone into the depths of what other people were called melodrama, but pulled out something else that says what it means to be American, what it means to grapple with something really real

and complicated, and did it in a play. He said, I could study this every day for the rest of my life and not get to the bottom of it. I started reading the book, and it came out of 1996, and I just thought that myself, it's just arrogant and ridiculous in a way to say this. But man, I was like, I might not have went to prison if I knew this book existed.

And the book is not a reflection on my life, you know. But I connected to it, and I didn't have to be a gay black man who was experiencing the age crisis to connect to it. I connected to it on like this profoundly human level, and it was just because of what he said about it. And so, you know, for me, in choosing the books, it was me recognizing that they couldn't just be my choices. Because any library that's worth it sought is going to be a combination of books

that you love and you want to return to. Books that you always wanted to read because people say it you should read. And books that people gave you that you planned or getting to and you haven't had a chance to get to yet. And so we did that and we listened and we moved around and then we put it into prisons and we listened to the responses. And then we recognized that I was going put every August Wilson book in there. And I was like, okay, okay, I need some kind of limiting principle. And so it became, you can only have two books.

And if you're not named Faulkner or Homer or James Baldwin, your odds of having two books in a library tank tremendously, right? And that was a real challenge. I didn't even have my books in there for a long time. And then I got

peer pressured by my team to be like, no, dude, you got to put your book in there. And so I put, I put redaction in there, actually, and a beautiful thing about that was that it was a part of my lesson that I get to choose what I bring to people. You know, like poetry is the one place where people

act like, your audience doesn't matter. And I think our audiences matter. And our audiences for the library matters, and that's why we spend so much time talking to people trying to get a sense of what book that they were wanting in there. Matter of fact, what's your favorite book? Oof.

I actually feel like that's almost an impossible question. I could do it by genre. I don't think I could do it overall. Give it to me by genre. One of my favorite books is from the mixed-up files of Mrs. Basily Frank Wiler. That's a young, adult book. Oh, I got a whole, you got to say that again. Okay, from the mixed-up files of Mrs. Basilie Frank Wiler. That is a great title. It's a great title. Yeah. It's a book about a girl who wants to have an adventure and ends up running away and living inside the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York City. Oh, my God. This is so great, man. Yeah. Oh, that's good. That's dope. We're putting that in a library. We got a Y.A. Library, too. Oh, really? It's a great one. That's a classic. We got a wide library, but we're going to put it in a regular joint. And the reason is that, you know, libraries have to move up and down. And so we try to recognize that, like, beautiful literature is beautiful literature. And then maybe my favorite adult book is Free Food for Millionaires by Minjin Lee. Oh, okay.

I think that's a really beautiful book about a Korean-American woman who works on Wall Street and sees the challenges and hypocrisy of that world. But it's just so beautifully written and really fantastic. And it's a novel? Yeah, a novel. But you noticed that, right? you hear the title, Free Food for Millionaires, and you might think that it is sociology.

And you realize that, like, novels are literally the best way to have a sociological conversation. Because as the writer, you already understand that you have to be more than one person. Yeah. And it forces you to think seriously about the kind of decisions that a whole kaleidoscope of people make, a whole community makes.

And I'll give you one less one just because it's so fun to talk to you about books. Probably my favorite book of poems is Jack Gilbert's collective world. Oh, my God. Look, Jack Gilbert. That's mine. He has his poem called Failing and Flying. Yeah. And I read it years ago, and I loved it.

And I didn't know why I loved it. Because at the time I was married and I wasn't thinking about getting divorced. But the poem spoke to me and it made me understand people who go through things in a way I wouldn't. And he was saying, essentially, people, when a relationship ends, people often act like it was always bad. And he's saying, people forget about the summer. in this country. Yeah. And then he says,

people forget the Icarus also flew. And, you know, Icarus might be a cautionary tale, but Icarus is also a reality of flight. And it's just such a beautiful poem. And he has another thing called

The Secret Dialect of the Heart Oh, yeah. And he says, like, it's strange how words can almost mean. And he says, I say Machiko, and I mean love. Yeah.

And he's talking about the ancient text of a Samerian scroll might be a love poem or business or business records. And it's just such a beautiful poem. Jack Gilbert is, Jack Gilbert is a man, yo. Jack Gilbert, he climbed a 40-foot tree for a woman and then fell and broke his back and said,

I'm still in love with you. Yeah. I mean, it's rare to connect with someone over that. Like I said, it's not that many people who are big poetry fans. Okay, now I got to know. Give me a few of your favorite genre books. I really love a gentleman in Moscow. One, I didn't expect to like it.

How do you tell a story about somebody who doesn't get to leave a hotel? And you're trying to create a whole world in a life of this person who never gets to walk out of a hotel. And two, I just thought it was funny, arresting, interesting, and it ended up being about the indomitable human spirit. And there's several characters that make a mistake and that change their mind. It tells you a lot about Russia after the revolution. It is just a well-written, beautiful book. And then poetry, and this is hard because you have to ask yourself, who's listening?

It ain't going to be like, I can't believe the way they say me, right? But Sonia Sanchez. Oh, yeah. I went to prison as a kid, and I'm in a hole, and I get to black poets, and I can introduce to all of these writers. And the first two books I paid for with my own money with an art of war. and under a soprano sky. I love that title because how's the sky going to be soprano?

I was like, wow, sky sing. I went to a super maximum security prison after that. I thought I was going to read the art of war to learn how to fight. I never finished reading the art of war. It just was not my kind of thing. I read under soprano sky so many times. And what's beautiful about Sister Sonia is that she's always written with a lot of heart.

But she is like radically changed, you know, and she's somebody who is a voice of peace, a voice of compassion. And she's somebody that reminds me that you can do the thing. And I've had a chance to meet her. I've had a chance to talk to her. And I've just had endless opportunities to be humbled by how, as an artist, she lives in a world as an artist. And so I would say her work has had a deep and profound, you know, impact on me. Maybe this is an impossible question to answer, but how do you as a person keep your sensitivity? How do you not get dulled and calloused by the world?

Oh, man, I mean, listen, dude, I cried twice in prison. I think in a lot of ways I grew up with literature allowing me to protect the part of myself, but not being able to really access that in any real public way. Cried twice in prison, came home, I didn't cry in my wedding. I didn't cry when either one of my sons were born. You know, I had cried when I met Lucille Clifton. I remember listening to her, asking her, yo, you know the lost baby poem?

That's riffing on her psalm, right? I think it's like Psalm, and then she recited Psalm 23 from memory. The one about let my right hand figure get his skill. That was the only time I cried when I came home. And I didn't understand it, but I was calloused. And then I, like, stopped drinking whiskey. I had this nightmare one night that I had left an open bottle of, I won't say the name of the brand, but I had left an open bottle of bourbon in my cup, and I used to, like, always drink out of this cup.

That was my whiskey glass, and I had a dream that I left a half full in the bottle open, and I woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning and ran down the steps, and the glass was up high where my kids couldn't reach it, and the bottle was capped and put away, but I was so devastated that I pulled it out, and I haven't had a drink in my house since then. But then when I stopped drinking like that, I started losing weight. I was weighing 225 pounds. I started getting profoundly depressed, and I started weeping all of the time, man. And it was me no longer self-medicate.

My first poem I published, I'm in prison. First poem I published was in this magazine called Poet Law. It was literally a poem about somebody who had two children, and it's in the first person. and it's me talking about my old neighborhood, talking about going back to my old neighborhood to discover what my wife and my kids say has turned to stone in my own eyes. I wrote this poem as a teenager

with no wife, no kids, no girlfriend, no relationships. And decades later, I felt myself in that situation, trying to figure out what it is that I had lost. And so now I think about how I keep from not becoming as callous as I once was, even as I was successful, even as I was living in the world. I keep from not becoming that because I've just decided that

we live in a world where people don't weep enough. I started crying all the time and people act like something was wrong with me. I write a poem about rape in prison. Nobody asks me if anything's wrong with me. Nobody asks me if I'm okay. I write poem after poem about the degradation and the challenges of incarceration.

I get on stages and talk about it, and nobody ever said, were you okay? The woman who gave me that glass, her name is Amy. low. She gave it to me as a gift. Then in like 2020, 2020, she gave me another gift. She told me she had colorectal cancer. And I said, I'm going to write a poem for you. Every day you got to go to chemo. And at this time, I wasn't depressed or anything. I was writing for her. And she became my audience. And I would write a poem. And it would veed towards sorrow. And I would like, no, no, no. You can have a

different landing. And I was doing it for her. And then the poems ended up being good. And they ended up being a poems that I put in redaction, when I started going through something and I'm depressed and I don't know I got bipolar, I don't know I'm having manic episodes, but I know that like I had days that I couldn't stop crying. I was getting divorced and it was my only, my only adult relationship. And it's not that I didn't think we needed to be divorced, but it ripped a son to something inside of me because I felt like I was profoundly failing my sons. I'm writing these poems, and I remember what I did for Amy, and suddenly I'm telling myself, you can write towards joy. Even when it's hard, you can write towards joy. And I started writing poems for myself in ways that I had never done before. I mean, I'm writing poems with flowers in it. You know what I never read the poem with a flower in it.

You know, I'm writing poems with trees in it. I'm writing more poems with dogs in it because I'm now starting to see that these animals are connecting me to humans in a way that I had been, consistently distant from them. And I've learned that, at least for me, I don't have much of a choice, but to be tenderhearted. Because I do believe that we live in a world

where people don't weep enough. And I am still really devastated by how many people were asking me if I'm okay when they saw me weeping, but the only problem was the weeping. You know, nothing grows without weeping, not even joy. And once I came to hold on to that, I came to recognize that it is not a choice that I'm making.

You know, it is like a commitment to living. To go back to the libraries, right? Like, you are putting the keys inside of a place full of locks. Yes. So what role does creativity play in liberation, whether that is actual, like, physical emancipation or whether it is just a mental liberation? I think on the very surface level, creativity is the thing that allows you to be in one place

and really imagine moving to a different place. That's creativity. And on another level, I mean, creativity allows you to live. See, creativity is what allows you to believe things are possible even when people tell you it's not. And oftentimes, creativity comes out of our own brain and not the message that we've received. And you think about like the Count of Monte Cristo and all of these books that really talk about how creativity allows you to see something that, it's not in existence. I mean, maybe that's a real definition of creativity, the ability to see a thing that is not yet in existence and do the work to make it exist primarily because you believe it should

exist and that it can exist. People told me it's no way that you could be successful in this project. We're talking about in the world 2020 deep in the rhetoric around mass incarceration that was talking about incarceration as a product of racism, as an extension of slavery. And that was kind of the moment that led somebody to ask me the question, what would you do for people in prison if money wasn't an issue? People got all kinds of answers. I was like, we put millions of people in prison. I would put millions of books.

And a lot of organizations that send books to prisons, they send it in like, I'm going to send books to individuals. So a person said, how will you do it? I mean, I know those organizations. I've collaborated with those organizations in the past. I was like, I would do it elaborate at a time. Because already the question forced me to think about scale in a radically different way.

And I was given permission to dream. And yet, and still, when I started, most people thought it was absurd. They said, well, the Department of Corrections is not going to partner with you want this. And I asked myself, what were they not thinking about Department of Corrections? And I was like, well, people in prison have a high rate of substance abuse,

a high rate of domestic violence, a high rate of trauma in their lives. People who work in prisons have a high rate of domestic violence. substance abuse, suicide, as compared to people in other professions, what if I treated the people who worked in prison as worthy and deeply connected to this issue as everybody else? Because we say that this is an American issue. If it's an American issue, if it's a societal issue,

you can't carve out part of society and act as if they don't care, and you can't homogenize this whole group. And so I had to be creative. I had to push back against all of the voices that told me no. And my real gift was to have so many people that were going to tell me no no matter what. I had gone to Yale Law School, and I wasn't able to get what I imagine would be easy to me after getting the degree from Yale Law School. And so I had already been bewildered enough by my own inability to live in a world in a way I wanted that I had to check myself and realize that I wasn't even trying to live in a world in the way I wanted.

I was chasing all of these dreams that came to me as if I wanted to do it, but I had never had a chance to think about what I want to do. whether it was you know, deciding to be a professor because I thought that's how you can make a living as a professor. Whether it was going to law school saying I'm going to be a public defender. I had to step back and tell myself

all of the ways in which I was living off and received wisdom and all that I received wisdom was predicated on no. And I had to start saying yes to myself. You know, we entertain children who say that they want to be whatever when they're three, four, five years old.

And then when you become nine, you're like, I don't know. I don't think you could do it. that. And then you start hearing that again and again and again and stop your ambitions unless you come up in a different household and your whole life people telling you as possible. As a person who sends books into places where often people don't have access to books, and as a person who thinks a lot about the power of books, how do you think about book bans? How does that affect you? How do you think about it?

If you're going to ban a book in prison, you know, you could challenge the book and it's not lawsuits really challenging these books. It's not lawsuits challenging the decisions that are being made. And frequently, the decisions are absurd, but they're also being made by people who have no training, who have no understanding of the book. And are we seriously thinking that people have read a 500-page book that they banning or have they read a synopsis or summary? And so the way I deal with it is trying to solve the problem instead of focusing on the thing that will get me more media attention. I make a point really not to talk about censorship. I mean, I once had the Department of Corrections in Virginia ban my memoir.

And they banned it because my homeboy bought 12 copies because he wanted to do a reading group around it. And they just thought, somebody getting 12 copies in a book must be trying to do something nefarious. And I had a chapter called How to Make a Knife in Prison. One of my colleagues pressured me to do a cease-sendicist. It was like, you're a lawyer, you're the main one who should be doing this. And I was like, nah, I don't want to rock the boat. And I recognize a lot of people say that. They say, I don't want to rock the boat because they want to get other books in. And I was trying to do other work. I was trying to get in there to do a reading. I was trying to get people out of prison. And I was like, I shouldn't be afraid to challenge something that feels unjust. And so I

got them to write a cease and desist order. And then the assistant attorney general called me during COVID of Virginia. We had a call and it was like, well, can you talk to me about this chapter? And I was like, well, the chapter's called how to make a knife in prison. But it's literally about every decision I made not to make a knife and what that caused me what decision I made not to get a knife

I mean if you read my book you see that I have not want to fight since the second grade I was not violent in prison I was not curing in real knives she read the book and they let the books in

a lot of times when we talk about book bans people respond to the way I did at first it's just like it's not worth it or it's somebody in prison who responds to way I responded at first because they have

other things to do or the person that sent them the book doesn't have resources to actually do the challenge. What I say is that we need a more robust system that spent challenging some of these censorship decisions that spent understanding the people who make the decisions

and is trying to get a prison a pathway to understand it fully. But then I think that we need to be real too. I mean, there are ways that some books are triggering. We have trigger warnings in college classrooms, but we expect the Department of Corrections not to be able to evaluate and make bad decisions. But to really think it's their duty to evaluate the kind of books that come in because books are powerful that can be triggering. It is a complex conversation.

If my chapter did actually teach you how to make a knife in prison, I'm going to be the first one to tell you that I don't think that I would feel safe. If people find out how to make a knife in prison based on something I read. So I think that it is a complex discussion and conversation I have. And for me, I put a freedom library in the hands of every correctional officer. When we go into a prison and we build one for the guys inside, we build one for the staff. Why? Because I'm being fully transparent. And so for me, I'm not trying to downplay book bans, but we put 400,000 books in prison.

You know, and what I would rather do is convince people to support this organization. And I do not want to turn book banning into the conversation that allows me to do this work. Because candidly, book banning suggested the work is impossible. And what we have done successfully proves that it's not impossible. You are doing exactly the thing we talked about before, which is like not leaning on received wisdom, but rather seeing the creative path towards the future that you want, towards the result that you want.

And I'm not saying that book bans don't exist. I'm not saying that they don't exist in prisons. They do. We struggle with it, but not nearly as much as people say. Getting the books in is the important part. And we have done it. You know, we have done it. Thank you for being here. Thank you for this conversation. This has really been a gift. Thanks for your time.

That's a pleasure. I really appreciate everything I've experienced here. And thank you for taking a time to talk to me. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Reginaldwayne Betts. His organization is called Freedom Reeds and his most recent poetry collection is called Felon. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my book is called Humor Me. You can find more about my book and all of my other projects at Chris Duffy Comedy.com. This episode of How to Be a Better Human was brought to you by a team of highly enlightened and exquisitely sensitive poets. On the TED side, our library of masterpieces includes Danielle Valereseo, Ban-Banchang, Michelle, Quint, Chloe Shasha, Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laini, Lanier, Lanier, and Joseph Bionni, Ryan Lash, handcrafted this video while working silently inside of a library. And Mattéez-Sellis checked all of our facts, and then for good measure, he checked all of our figurative language as well. on the PRX side, they each deserve their own individual MacArthur Genius Grants.

It's Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it. Please share some of the beautiful poetry and beautiful thoughts that Reginald shared with us with someone who you think would appreciate them. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until that, take care.