Reginald Dwayne Betts
speaker
250 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 7 Aug
Reginald Dwayne Betts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's one of the biggest prizes in the country.
And so when the New York Times reported on it several years ago, people kept reaching out to me saying Freedom Read should do that.
And then we got some collaborators, the National Book Foundation, the Center for Court Innovation, um
uh a a librarian named Lori Fellas, they reached out to me and and we became a team to put this together.
And the thing is we choose six states or territories, a men's prison and a women's prison in each state, and twenty five judges at each locale.
So three hundred judges total.
They read five books
they all engage with the books independently.
People in the sale blocks read the books too who not even in program because, you know, they get engaged with the with the books.
We always bring a writer in so that um so that they have a three hour conversation and then they do rank order voting.
But then we bring a writer in and and they have an event, um, with a writer, author event.
But what's been really amazing though is that people get to be seen as like um
Citizens citizens.
You know, to judge is to be valued.
Yeah, you know I mean and and and and and we are talking about folks who never get a chance to judge.
We have been judged, you know.
And so to be judged is sometimes to be reviled.
But and to be able to judge for something that matters, but man, also you just hear them talking about the books.
I I heard a judge talking about um a book from last year's contest, Chain Gang All-Styles One.
But this guy had voted for one woman's madness.
Showing 161–180 of 250 · page 9 of 13
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