Tell me more about the mistake that you made then and how you were adultified by the system as a child.

Yeah, you know, it's fascinating because I committed a carjacking.

It was a month after my 16th birthday.

I walked into a mall with a friend and I pulled a gun on somebody who was asleep in their car and we drove off.

And earlier I attempted to rob somebody else all in the same night.

It was the first time I ever had a gun.

At that point I had never touched a bullet, never fired a gun.

Tell me quickly about how Yale comes into the picture.

To get us started, here's a clip from Reginald's TED Talk.

I should thank my judge.

After I plead guilty to carjacking and he sentenced me to nine years in prison, I was certain that I was going home.

I waited for him to tell me it was all a dream.

Then he confirmed my intuition.

"I don't have any illusion that sending you to the penitentiary is going to help." Do you know what the cruelest word in the English language is? The preposition but.

The judge said, "But you can go down there, and you can make the best of it or not." I figured the judge was saying that I could choose what I look for in those cells.

Hm.

Hmm

... of community, basketball court, the weight pile, but it's way more spaces of conflict.

And, and you never, like, see, you know, wood in a prison.

You never see, um, you know, oak, cherry, maple, walnut.

And, and you never see things that are handcrafted.

And we effectively have, you know, figured out how to create a, a manufacturing business, a, a, a furniture manufacturing business, and a logistical company that, that navigates, you know, um, every, every state in this country.

And actually, our, our, our deep and close collaborators are the Department of Corrections.

Like, what has seeing your story on screen changed about how you understand not just the work that you're doing, but how you understand yourself?

[laughs]

But, uh, but then I went to the hole, and they take all your books, and then I found out that the guys had set up a underground library, because the one thing about prison is that we take care of each other when we can, and it might not be consistent, and it might not be enough, and it might not be acknowledged, but it happens.

And so I was like, "Yo," somebody sent me a book, and they slid Dudley Randall's The Black Poets under my cell door, and I discovered Robert Hayden, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight in particular, because he had been to prison, and he was writing about prison.

And actually, he was writing about a kid named Gerald.

The first poem I read was called For Freckle-Faced Gerald.

It said, uh, "With his precise speech and innocent grin, he couldn't quite win the trust or the fists of the young Black cats around him." And then it goes on to talk about Gerald getting raped in prison.

And, you know, I have been, like, remarkably loved, even in the worst of the shit, man.

Right

pork barbecue keeping

you young.

And that white sauce.

That white sauce.

And three, though.

It's the Louisiana.

The crazy thing about it, though, it's like, you know, I say all the time that literature and real... tangible ways saved my life.

Yeah.

Could you describe the bookcases in more detail? What do they look like and why were the choices around them made and who makes them?

I started doing some research on micro libraries because that was the first word that popped in my head that described what I wanted to do.

But a lot of these are designed architecturally to think about what the space does for the people.

because you recognize the building as being what attracts people to build community.

Well, we had to make the actual structure of where the book set be the thing that builds community almost as if it's operating as a building.

So we couldn't put the bookcases on the wall because I wanted you to look at books and look at the person across from you.

And so I reached out to some architects and then former commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Corrections, Scott Simple, had a relationship with Mass Design and he introduced me to them.

And I've come to bristle at that over time because I feel like exactly what you said, a lot of what matters is We're never going to measure using the kind of measures we have.

What's been your path since then?

You know what? I came home, right? And...

My first job, it was at this paint store called Duron.

I filled out the application to say, have you been convicted of a felony in the past seven years? I had done eight and a half years in prison, so I was able to easily say no.

I had that job for about six months, maybe not even six months.

My second job, I met this brother named Hokey Glover.

Everybody calls him Brother Yao.

These were essentially liberal clergy for the time too, weren't they, Mr. Betts?