Why I’m Building Libraries Inside Prisons | Reginald Dwayne Betts | TED

Name: Why I’m Building Libraries Inside Prisons | Reginald Dwayne Betts | TED
Duration: 12 min 27 s
Description: Shadow "Why I’m Building Libraries Inside Prisons | Reginald Dwayne Betts | TED" sentence by sentence: 132 lines, advanced level, American accent, 12 min....

AdvancedAmerican accentTED talk12 min

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incarcerated
penitentiary
representing
frustration
possibility
preposition
transformed
unannounced

Transcript: 132 sentences

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0:04 I ate my first mango in a hole.
0:09 What some called a shoe, the box, Ad-Seg, lock up.
0:14 But no matter what you call solitary confinement, no one expects it to be where you eat your first mango.
0:23 And me?
0:25 I thought the oval-shaped fruit that came with lunch that day was an apple.
0:31 I've been teaching myself to juggle, to keep from losing my mind.
0:36 Imagining that I could manage my troubles if I could float apples into an orbit of my creation.
0:44 When I sank my teeth into the unfamiliar, fragrant fruit, juices ran down my fingertips.
0:53 I ate until I chipped a tooth, scraping it along the mango seed.
1:01 I never saw another mango in prison.
1:05 And I only learned the name of the fruit when I was home and in my mother's kitchen.
1:12 Before I started juggling, I trashed the mostly rotten apples without a second glance.
1:18 Then juggling transformed the apples into my way of escape.
1:24 That's how prison taught me that you find what you look for.
1:30 Who would expect to hear a story about prison that includes a mango?
1:36 I got locked up in 1996.
1:39 I was 16 years old, five-foot-five and 125 pounds.
1:44 I hadn't won a fight since the second grade.
1:48 Becoming a brawler overnight wasn't in the cards for me.
1:53 That's why people often ask me how I survived.
1:58 What if I say, I survived prison because I believed you find what you look for.
2:04 Because of what it means to notice the mango.
2:08 To commit yourself to the possibility of a miracle, even without a name for the wonder.
2:15 I should thank my judge.
2:18 After I pleaded guilty to carjacking, and he sentenced me to nine years in prison, I was certain that I was going home.
2:30 I waited for him to tell me it was all a dream.
2:34 Then he confirmed my intuition.
2:37 “I don’t have any illusion that sending you to the penitentiary is going to help."
2:45 Do you know what the cruelest word in the English language is?
2:49 The preposition "but."
2:52 The judge said, "But you can go down there and you can make the best of it or not."
3:03 I figured the judge was saying that I could choose what I looked for in those cells.
3:11 Becoming a computer engineer was now out of the question.
3:15 Earning a college degree from prison was just as unlikely.
3:21 But because of what the judge said, I thought not only of what I would lose.
3:28 I was 16 years old, planning who I would be when I left.
3:33 I've loved books since I was a kid.
3:38 And so on my sentencing day, I told myself that I would be a writer.
3:44 In a crucible that is prison, I learned to see other people.
3:49 I remember Star.
3:51 We spent months in adjacent cells in a hole.
3:55 We were both obsessed with stories of our past and with fantasy novels like "Lord of the Rings," books that let us imagine ourselves
4:06 as people who chose to be heroes instead of villains.
4:11 He was a boxer.
4:13 I wasn't.
4:15 Star taught me what he knew, how to train, how to breathe, how not to let frustration and a lack of discipline turn into something that ends up costing you
4:26 far more than you can afford to lose.
4:29 He was not the only one.
4:31 I remember Mike G.
4:33 One day he asked, "If you slipped at McDonald's and broke your leg, and they had one of those 'wet floor' signs up, could you sue?"
4:46 Of course I could sue.
4:48 We argued.
4:50 I knew I was right.
4:52 An hour later he says, "You know you're wrong."
4:56 And then he shows me a page in a faded yellow book with the word "Torts" on the cover.
5:04 Who asks a question they know the answer to, and then argues about it for an hour?
5:13 The devil on my right shoulder said "Swing."
5:17 Now remember, I hadn’t won a fight since the second grade.
5:21 So instead, I picked up a tattered issue of prison legal news from his locker an ad for a paralegal course caught my eye.
5:29 My mom paid for the classes.
5:32 I didn't want to be a lawyer.
5:35 I just didn't want to be anybody's fool.
5:40 I almost didn't finish the class.
5:43 You see, I was at Sussex I State Prison, and they had these lines, these yellow lines that you cannot cross.
5:53 But I was a perpetual line crosser.
5:55 I would cross lines to get stamps, to say hello to friends, to borrow food, to give people food.
6:04 One day, I crossed the yellow line to get a book.
6:08 A new book is a rare occurrence in prison.
6:12 "Betts, I'm so tired of you stepping over my lines.
6:17 This time you're going back to the hole," the lieutenant said before he cuffed me.
6:24 From the second tier, Luke saw it all.
6:27 We hadn't exchanged more than a dozen words in his life, but when they opened his cell door, he pushed all his property out of his cell and said, "If Shah go to the hole, I go to the hole."
6:40 Others began banging on their cell doors, also demanding to go to solitary confinement.
6:48 It was another miracle.
6:51 I didn't go to the hole that day.
6:54 Luke only knew me from the times we hooped together, but that was enough for him to see me as worthy of more than a cell.
7:01 Even then, I guess I was finding what I was looking for.
7:07 Now I left prison on March 4, 2005.
7:11 Before April 1, I tried to enroll at the University of Maryland.
7:16 I didn't even know what the word semester meant.
7:20 When I told this kind counselor that I had just come home from prison, he suggested community college.
7:27 I took refuge there.
7:29 Then I started picking up college degrees like felonies.
7:37 I had an AA, a BA, an MFA.
7:42 I published a memoir and a collection of poetry before I turned 30 years old.
7:54 But I couldn't even get an interview for a teaching gig.
7:57 I was 33.
8:00 I had two small sons a felony record.
8:02 I was unemployed.
8:04 But I was once a jailhouse lawyer.
8:08 And for a pack of tuna, a box of crackers and ramen noodles, I got five years off somebody's prison sentence.
8:18 I decided to go to law school.
8:21 A year later, I been admitted to as many law schools as prisons where I served time: Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, Michigan.
8:33 I went to Yale wanting to be a public defender, but I was working in a public defender's office, and I couldn't stomach my young clients being locked up.
8:44 Every one of them reminded me of friends in prison doing football numbers: 30, 40, 50 years, life.
8:52 Then Juvie asked me to help him get out.
8:55 I started representing my friends, failing and failing and failing again.
9:03 Then Luke found me.
9:05 I hadn't talked to him in 20 years.
9:08 I walked into the parole board with his blind mother on my arm as if I were her son.
9:15 He made parole.
9:17 Then Keith did, and then Fettes, then Juvie, and then Tyrell, and I got Dempsey out, too.
9:23 Six men, all sent to prison as teenagers.
9:28 All out because my mom spent money for me to take a paralegal course in the middle of a prison sentence that neither one of us knew if I would survive.
9:41 I left prison on March 4, the only date that is also a command, advising me to march forth out in the world and leave everything about prison behind.
9:58 But I found myself returning again and again.
10:02 For friends, for clients, to read poems.
10:06 So when someone asked, "What would you do for people in prison if money wasn't an issue?"
10:14 I said, “We put millions of people in prison.
10:18 I will put millions of books inside.” When she asked me how, I said, "One library at a time."
10:27 In 2020, it was all a dream.
10:31 A little over a year later, we opened our first Freedom Library in a gutted cell in MCI, Norfolk.
10:38 A prison where Malcolm X served time.
10:41 Our second was in Louisiana's Angola State Prison.
10:45 We put freedom libraries on a cell block so that men can step away -- No, so that men, women and children can step away from their bunks and reach for a book
10:56 that will be the start of the freedom they look for.
10:59 We've opened more than 600 Freedom Libraries, putting books I once dreamed of reading into the hands of others.
11:07 What we've heard often makes me weep.
11:10 Like when Hillary, one of the first women in prison to touch a Freedom Library, wrote, "The smell of wood and the smell of a new book takes me right out of this place.
11:21 I have been incarcerated for 20 years, and I’m doing life.
11:26 I love books and I'm an avid reader.
11:28 I have been since I was a little girl."
11:31 Hillary makes me think about myself.
11:34 30 years ago, I walked into a prison barely older than my 14-year-old son.
11:40 My 18-year-old is choosing a college.
11:43 I am the father I am because of what I found in those prison cells.
11:49 Long ago, I found out that you what you look for because there is always someone who believes that you'll be searching.
11:57 These days, I've returned to prisons with something as improbable as the mango I once found in solitary confinement.
12:04 Luke and Tyrell have both returned to open Freedom Libraries with me.
12:08 The men who taught me how to hold on to hope are now handing it out to others.
12:15 Unnamed, unannounced, one book at a time.
12:19 Thank you.

Why I’m Building Libraries Inside Prisons | Reginald Dwayne Betts | TED

Hard words

Transcript: 132 sentences

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