Reginald Dwayne Betts didn’t consider himself a reader until he was sent to solitary confinement for the first time. Betts, then a teenager serving an eight-year prison sentence for carjacking, was surprised by what he saw: a world centered in many ways around books. “I witnessed men setting up elaborate pulley systems to drop books in bags and send them through the air, thirty to forty feet from building to building,” he says.
It was the beginning of Betts’s lifechanging love affair with literature. After his release in 2005, he published a memoir and multiple critically acclaimedliterary life in prisons across the United States. Now he’s helping to facilitate the first national book prize in the U.S. judged exclusively by incarcerated people: the Inside Literary Prize.
