Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is

econtalk.org where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and

find links and other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is

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Today is September 15th, 2020, and by guest is author and poet, Reginald Dwayne Betts. Dwayne is

the founder of the Million Book Project, a project to put a curated collection of 500 books in

over a thousand prisons in the United States. The project is supported by the Mellon Foundation and

is part of Yale Law School's Justice Collaboratory. Dwayne's memoir of life in prison, a question of

freedom, was published in 2009. His most recent poetry collection is felon, published in 2019. I want

to thank Plantronics for providing the Blackwire 5220 for today's conversation. And I want to let

parents know that this episode may include conversation that is inappropriate for children. Dwayne,

welcome to econtalk.

Hey, it's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Let's talk about the Million Book Project. How

did you conceive of it and what is it? Yeah, I think you know, it's interesting really because when you

aren't incarcerated, certain things that you can have in abundance, you don't understand what

it means not to have it. And so books are really the main thing that I'm referring to. And I just

remember when I was in prison, I was probably 17, 18 and I was in solitary confinement. Now, I was

already in a prison that didn't have a library. But now I'm in solitary confinement and books are

literally contraband. I remember being in a hole and we had set up a sort of underground network of

book sharing. You asked for a book and a person was sending you the book. You might not know who they

are. You might not know what cell they were in. You might have never seen that face. And it was wild

...