Report: “National Nonprofit Partners with University to Open Libraries in New Jersey Prisons”

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Before he graduated from Yale Law School and became a MacArthur Fellow, Reginald Dwayne Betts spent nine years in prison after pleading guilty to carjacking. He was only 16. It was the availability of books, and the engagement with literature, that got him through those years without crushing his spirit.

An award-winning poet, Betts was a resident artist at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts in 2021. In a new connection with the University, Betts’ national nonprofit Freedom Reads has just opened nine Freedom Libraries at Garden State Correctional Facility, a state prison for adults in Chesterfield, Burlington County. Princeton University Library is a supporter.

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See Also: Freedom Reads Partners with Princeton University Library Open First Freedom Libraries in New Jersey Prisons (via NJ Dept. of Corrections)

“Princeton University Library is proud to provide support for the first Freedom Libraries in New Jersey,” said Anne Jarvis, Dean of Libraries and Robert H. Taylor University Librarian. “Collaborating with organizations like Freedom Reads to promote opportunities to read and discover is a critical part of our mission.”

Freedom Reads is a first-of-its-kind organization that empowers people in prison through literature to imagine new possibilities for their lives. Books in the Freedom Library have been carefully curated through consultations with hundreds of poets, novelists, philosophers, teachers, friends, and voracious readers, resulting in a collection of books that are not only beloved, but indispensable. The libraries include contemporary poets, novelists, and essayists alongside classic works from Homer’s The Odyssey to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – titles that remind us that the book has long been a freedom project.

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