M.P., a teen with bright, expressive eyes, sat down across from me, placing the three books he was gripping with his long thin fingers onto the plastic table: “Message to the Blackman in America,” by Elijah Muhammad; “The Room in the Attic,” by T.M. Logan; and “The Hawthorne Legacy,” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes.
“I just picked up a book one day when I was bored and started reading it. I just kept picking up books after that,” he said. His favorite, he said, was “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”
He had an easy and unaffected love of books and estimated he’d probably read about half the books on the shelf near his bed. But like most teens being asked about their habits by a perceived authority figure and stranger, he was a little shy and awkward.
We were inside the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center, the building with the rounded front and mirrored windows just past the JFX on Gay Street downtown. The room we were sitting in did its best to be cheery, with tabletops covered with board game patterns, bright colors and murals on the walls, including one of a dirtbiker and another that I recognized as Lor Scoota, the Baltimore rapper murdered on his way home from an antiviolence rally in 2016. But even as a visitor, it is not an inviting environment: the cramped plastic-, metal-, and plexiglass-filled space instills an irrational fear of somehow committing some unknown infraction.
There was an official from the facility and Michael Sharp, a communications director of the Department of Juvenile Services, in the room with us.
“We had to read the same books we have in it that’s been there for years and years,” said M.P., who was incarcerated there. “So it’s basically like after them was gone, it was nothing for us to do. So now with the Freedom Library, it gives a chance to read different books.”
Freedom Libraries aren’t libraries in the way we might normally think of them. They aren’t a building or a room that you go to. But that’s not a drawback, it’s the point — and perhaps the most radical thing about them. Freedom Libraries are not a specific place, because they are specially designed, carefully curated bookshelves located on individual cellblocks in prisons all around America. It’s not a curriculum or an educational program. It’s all about the access.
“It’s definitely like a revolutionary concept to be able to step right outside your cell door and have a library at your disposal,” said Craig Gore, who spent nearly half his life in prison in Connecticut and now works for Freedom Reads as a communications specialist and with the libraries. “To have one door between that library and that human being is so much better than having five, six doors and a bunch of other stuff.”
“It’s definitely like a revolutionary concept to be able to step right outside your cell door and have a library at your disposal…To have one door between that library and that human being is so much better than having five, six doors and a bunch of other stuff.”
Craig Gore, who spent nearly half his life in prison in Connecticut and now works for Freedom Reads as a communications specialist and with the libraries
That’s one of the big things, Gore explained. If there are six doors between a person and the prison library, any number of things can lead to one or more of them being locked and the library becoming inaccessible. Even when the doors aren’t locked, it requires permission from a guard. And it’s even harder to get books in from the outside, especially in a juvenile facility.
Freedom Reads has installed libraries in over 500 facilities, including four new ones in Maryland’s juvenile facilities in 2025, including the one in the city’s juvenile detention center.
The idea for Freedom Reads came from another Maryland teen, Reginald Dwayne Betts, years before M.P. was born. Betts pleaded guilty to an armed carjacking in Virginia when he was 16-years-old, and was sentenced to serve nine years in an adult facility in the state, far from home, where he knew no one.
He decided he had to make something of himself and wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know exactly how to do that, but he knew he needed to read a lot. Books became his salvation. On a few occasions, they even helped him with the COs. But when he ended up in solitary, the books that had saved him were taken away. Then, one day, he heard someone else in another cell in solitary say, “Hey, yo, send me a book.”
“I just figured the person was losing their mind, because who are you talking to?” Betts recalled in a phone interview. “Nobody’s just going to give you a book.”
But, to his amazement, a response came. Another voice called out. Before long, through the small window, Betts saw an elaborate pulley system made of sheets ferrying a book over from a building 40 feet away to the man’s cell.
Soon, Betts called out into the void and asked for a book. He didn’t get the pulley system, but someone — he never even knew who — slid the book “The Black Poets” under his door.
“Having somebody slide me that book was like my first piece of tangible evidence of us making a way for each other, you know, despite the really profound, deep, complex challenges that, you know, we were all confronting,” he says.
“Having somebody slide me that book was like my first piece of tangible evidence of us making a way for each other, you know, despite the really profound, deep, complex challenges that, you know, we were all confronting,” he says.
That radical act of making a way for each other changed Betts’ life, and ultimately those of many more people serving sentences in America’s prisons, through Freedom Reads, which Betts founded in 2020.
“It had to be about the fact that we would create an opportunity for people to have access to more books than they would ever have access to any actual physical library, an actual external library outside of the cell block because of space and time constraints,” Betts said.
The shelves in adult facilities are designed to hold 500 books while juvenile facilities, where a smaller range of material is deemed appropriate, have 250. And they are wooden in an environment made primarily of plastic and metal. They have smooth, curved lines in a world of harsh angles and are hand-built by formerly incarcerated craftspeople.
“It brings a different quality of life to the space, right? So most prisons are made up of brick and mortar, right, still cement. So, you take this beautifully wooden, hand-crafted library, right, with a beautiful shape, double-sided, just level enough so we can observe from each side. You can get books from each sides of it, and we can communicate with each other,” Gore said.
“It’s literally bringing nature into an austere place that is literally seeping the life out of a lot of people, including the staff,” Betts said. “Most of the time when you got a book in prison, you know, you go in your cell and you read the book, and it makes it a solitary activity. It doesn’t make it a communal activity.”
“It made it more like ‘Wow,’” M.P. said of first seeing the Freedom Library shelf. “Like I want to go over there and grab a book.”
Another young person said he didn’t really notice the design of the shelf at all, but wished there was a better selection of books. “I mean, they should have thought about the books more than they thought about the thing that carried it,” he said.
I wasn’t allowed to go into the cellblocks to see a Freedom Library. I saw a shelf in another recreation room. It was wooden and slightly curved, and I thought it was a Freedom Library, but wasn’t sure. It didn’t look like the ones I’d seen online, and it was pushed against the wall in a way that the Freedom Libraries generally aren’t. There were approximately 60 books on it.
“We got good books, but sometimes people will take them home with them or destroy the books completely because I don’t know why, but they just destroy books, write on the books, stuff like that,” one youth, D.F., said. “So I feel like we should just have more books on the unit.”
D.F. demonstrated a spectacular memory, and if they had no books at all in the facility, he would be able to do a pretty good job narrating the books he’d read to his friends. “When I go in my room, I just like to read. It give me more time, like just to think about stuff and just read stories,” he said. “I actually like reading now, so like me expanding what I can do is just making me a better person.”
That’s where the goals of the DJS and Freedom Reads overlap.
“For any child, reading can open up horizons and expand their perspectives. But for a child inside a detention or treatment facility, books offer something even more meaningful – access to the outside world and possibilities for their future,” Sharp of DJS said in a statement. “Our partnership with Freedom Reads helps ensure that the children under our care see themselves and their futures differently.”
These kids can’t tell us yet how these books will affect them or change their lives. They can envision the future but they don’t know it. But the reason Betts founded Freedom Reads is because of how that one book that was slid under his door changed his life.
“The story of me getting that book in the hole, somebody sliding under my cell door, and it was ‘The Black Poets.’ I mean, that’s the origin story of Freedom Reads, but that’s also the origin story of me as a poet.”
“The story of me getting that book in the hole, somebody sliding under my cell door, and it was ‘The Black Poets.’ I mean, that’s the origin story of Freedom Reads, but that’s also the origin story of me as a poet.”
Betts has written six books of poetry and memoir; he created the one-man show “Felon,” along with a book of poetry of the same title; he graduated Yale Law School, where he works as a researcher and has served as a public defender; and, to top it all off, in 2021, he was awarded a “Genius Grant” from the McArthur Foundation. In “Felon,” Betts takes court documents and transforms them into poems through redactions, which he explains in the volume’s opening poem, “Ghazal,” referring also to the book’s cover image and his collaboration with the artist Titus Kaphar on a project called “Redaction.”
“Titus Kaphar painted my portrait, then dipped it in black tar. / He knows redaction is a dialect after prison / From inside a cell, the night sky isn’t the measure–- / that’s why it’s prison’s vastness your eyes reflect after prison /… Jeremy and Forest rejected the template, said for/ it to be funky, the font must redact after prison.”
In “Felon,” Betts specifically uses documents that the Civil Rights Corps used to “challenge the incarceration of people because they could not afford to pay bail,” as he writes in a note.
The effect bridges visual art, poetry, and Betts’ legal work and prison activism. Formatted like a legal document, one of the poems is called “In Alabama.”
“The Plaintiffs _____ impoverished _______________ jailed by the / City____________ unable to pay / _________________________traffic tickets_________ pay or___sit in ____ jail ____________$50 per day.”
But his writing has a lighter, softer side as well. Some of the poems in his most recent book, “Doggerel” are actually about dogs and carry the playfulness and profundity of a young puppy.
“My puppy, who is now older, but just / barely, than my youngest was when he / Learned to climb a tree & notice when / I’m away, this puppy is more miles / from me than my sons have ever been, / & I wonder if today her nose, when / Turned to the wind, searches for me,” he writes in “This Morning.”
Betts’s story presents one possible future for other people who find themselves drawn to books in prison. M.P. or D.F. or any of the kids I met could go on to do something like Betts. We don’t know and they don’t know. Betts did not know he was going to be the “McArthur Genius Reginald Dwayne Betts” during the years he was incarcerated. But that radical act of sharing, sliding the book under the door, planted that seed, one he is trying to keep growing. The goal, he says, is to have a Freedom Library in every cellblock in America.
There’s an epilogue to this story that I have to share for purposes of transparency and full disclosure. There were various internal delays that kept us from running the story over the summer. Then, in September, I had a message from Sharp, the DJS official who had accompanied me on my visit to the Juvenile Justice Center. “One of the children you interviewed for the story has a hearing today and I’m hopeful to try and get something about him from you, since your story has not been published. Is there any possibility for this?”
I called Sharp: the youth was M.P. There wasn’t a lot I could say after a 10-minute supervised conversation, but I excerpted rough drafts of some of what I wrote above and shared it with the court, after discussing the issue with the Beat editors. Journalists are expected to be distant and disconnected from the people they write about, but to us, helping get a real kid out of chains outweighed whatever danger there is in sharing what I was going to publish with the court.
And perhaps it is another one of those connections that Betts and his team hoped that Freedom Reads would facilitate. Because of the Freedom Libraries, I was first in contact with Sharp and then, through him, with M.P., and it pushed us all toward thinking about the youth’s liberation.
“You got to take your time to really understand and put yourself in the predicament of people to write some of these books,” M.P. said when I interviewed him.
And we must put ourselves in the predicament these kids are in, if we hope to ever teach them anything.