My guest today, Reginald Deweyne Betts, is a MacArthur Genius Award winner, found with

a non-profit Freedom Reads, a poet, and a graduate of Yale Law School.

He's accomplished all that despite the fact that he spent more than eight years in prison

from the age of 16 to 24.

I wasn't a model prisoner, but I do think that in a different system that was searching

to cultivate the skills and the talents and the personalities and just the rehabilitation

of people inside, I would have been a model person, because I would have had mentors

around me.

Welcome to People I Am Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

I've really been looking forward to talking to Reginald.

Here's someone who beat incredible odds to turn his life around.

But not only that, after graduating from Yale Law School, he could have made enormous

amounts of money.

Instead, he's dedicated his life to helping those who remain behind in prison.

You started an organization called Freedom Reads, back in 2020.

Could you tell me what Freedom Reads is doing?

Freedom Reads is an organization I started to build libraries in prisons.

And what we're doing is building a place for people to commune over books.

We make bookcases that are handmade, out of walnut, out of cherry, out of maple.

The idea is that to disrupt the built environment that is a prison.

One is really rooted in desperation and a sense of hopelessness.

And one has absence of nature.

...