Founder of the Million Book Project Reginald Dwayne Betts takes a turn as interviewee, responding to guest-host Rion Amilcar Scott about his early memories as a reader, the social currency of literature in prison, and his commitment to working on multiple fronts to get people free.
When a poetry anthology was slid under young Betts' cell door 23 years ago is when the Million Book Project -- an endeavor to slide thousands of world-opening books to readers in prisons across the country -- really took root. Betts is an award-winning poet and author of several poetry collections, including Felon: Poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, and Bastards of the Reagan Era. His Memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison was awarded the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Non-fiction. Betts also served on the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile and Delinquency Prevention under President Barack Obama. He continues to work as a poet, lawyer, public speaker, and artist. You can learn more about his work here.
Reginald Dwayne Betts
[theme music]
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:00:01] There's somebody in like, you know, Sydney, Australia, right now with a book in their hand that's thinking about the world along the same lines of the conversation that we're having.
Jason Reynolds: [00:00:13] It's literally us manipulating and maneuvering 26 letters into different arrangements that might just liberate somebody.
Miriam Toews: [00:00:21] Literacy is freedom.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:00:23] And so, so many people was yelling, you know, and it was wild to me, and I was like, "And this is literature right here." You know what I mean? I was like, "This is the importance of books."
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:00:36] You listening to Freedom Takes, a podcast from The Million Book Project. I'm Rion Amilcar Scott, and today I'm stepping in to interview the regular host of this show: poet, lawyer, perennial student, Reginald Dwayne Betts.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:00:49] [laughs]
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:00:49] Student of life.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:00:50] You know what I mean, hey, look. You gotta, you gotta stay a student, man. You gotta stay a student.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:00:54] So, yeah. So, we're going to talk a little bit about Felon and your life as a reader. You talked about, you know, someone slipping The Black Poets underneath your door, in your cell when you were locked up, and that's your origin, but I wonder what about your reading life prior to prison.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:01:15] Yeah.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:01:15] What was, what was that like?
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:01:17] Honestly, man, and I've been coming to this more recently, it's like, and I've said it before, but I was kind of somewhat of a nerd. And I mean, I'm talking about, like, I remember my first internet search. And it was-- my first internet search was: how to speed read.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:01:35] [laughs]
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:01:36] Cause you know, I have read, uh, I read Evelyn Woods, Guide to Speed Reading. That's one of the last books I checked out before I went to prison. And I used to be obsessed with those infomercials. And I was obsessed with all of them, but it was one in particular that was supposed to be a guide to speed reading, and you would dig this, I don't believe I still remember this s***. So to prove the speed reading existed, they had the fastest talker in the world on a show. You know, who that was?
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:02:00] Who was that?
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:02:01] Twista.
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:02:02] [laughs]
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:02:03] Yeah, so, so Twista was on the show, and they had him reading a passage out loud really fast. And then they had the guy who was supposed to be the speed reading expert, and he was just flipping pages. He was just [page turning sound]. You know, it was weird, though, I was obsessed, and, and the thing that I was obsessed with it is cause even then I knew that you could only read so many books in this life. And I just wanted to be able to read them faster. And I read everything. I mean, the books, I remember reading Wake of the Wind by J. California Cooper and just being utterly devastated by how challenging it was to be Black in this country post-Civil War, and what it meant for these folks to rebuild their lives and to become, you know, masons and to become farmers and to become barbers. And I just thought it was a wonderful book, and because I was reading without a filter, I was reading without a medium telling me what mattered, it was just like happenstance that I would discover these things.
And I remember reading Things Fall Apart, and that joint breaking my heart. But, yeah, I read a lot going into prison, and when I went in, I kept reading, but when I went in, it became less of a--I became less afraid to assert my identity. I was like, "I already got all this time in prison, you know, we already here. I'ma sit down on this concrete slab, and I'm a f****** read Faulkner, you know what I mean? I'ma read Lord of the Rings. I'ma read King Arthur's Tale, you know? Yeah, I mean, and that made books a gateway to a world that I had been afraid of before I got locked up.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:03:38] You know, before you got locked up, was it, was it something that you felt that you needed to run from, to hide?
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:03:45] I didn't know where it would take me, and I was afraid of trying to go somewhere that I couldn't name.
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:03:49] Wow.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:03:50] You know, coming, coming into a community where I didn't know anybody who had gone to college, except my teachers. And my teachers felt like college was, was something that was reserved for the students who, who presented themselves in a certain way. Who weren't ignorant in public. Who weren't loud. Who weren't, like, super sarcastic. Who weren't me. You know?
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:04:10] Mm hmm,
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:04:12] Yeah, and so, I just, I don't know. I didn't have a full grasp or understanding of what reading might mean for me? And it ain't that I got locked up and got that. It's just that I got locked up and felt like it no longer mattered, you know? And like reading just became a way of becoming, even if I didn't know the thing it was, I was becoming.
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:04:31] Now, uh, I want to turn to your latest book, Felon, which you know, I love, and I'm obsessed with. Before I ask any questions about it, let's, hear you read a passage from it.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:04:45] Aight. So I'ma read, I'ma read something, and then, and then I'm gonna talk about the book a bit, but I'ma read-- you know, when I was in prison, and I was a poet, I didn't understand that being a poet meant that you should be able to say something off the top of your head, but I've been working to memorize these pieces to learn them by heart because I think it's important. If you run into somebody at the barbershop, and they say, "Let me hear something," you should, you should be to let them hear something--
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:05:05] Be able to spit.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:05:06] Right. So I'm going to do this one. [Recites from book]: "
Blood History."
The things that abandon you get remembered different. /As precise as the English language can be, with words / like penultimate and perseverate, there is not an exact / combination of sounds that describe only that leaving. / Once, drinking and smoking with buddies, a friend asks / if I'd long for a father. Had he said wanted, / I would have dismissed him in a way that youngins / dismiss it all: a shrug, sarcasm, a sharp jab to the stomach, / laughter. / But he said longing. & in a different place, I might / have wept. Said once my father lived with us & then he / didn't & it f***** me up so bad that I didn't think about / his leaving until I held my first son in my arms & only / now speak on it. Once a man who drank whiskey and Wild Irish Rose / like water told me and some friends / that there is no word for father where he comes from, / not like we know it. There, the word father is the same as the word for listen./ The blunts we passed around let us abandon our tongues. / Not that much though. But what if the old head knew / something? & if you have no father, you can't hear right. / Years later, that same friend from before wondered why I didn't give my son / my father's name. As if he ain't know, Some things turn / your life into a prayer. The gods will certainly answer. "Blood History."
And so, you know, when I published the book, and it's wild because in a lot of prisons, you can't get hard back books. And I published it, and some folks were asking me for books, and I realized that I couldn't even send it in to them. And I got this joint right here done. [holds up book] And you see how the front is like Freedom Edition.
And I wanted to get a paperback version that was printed up, that I could send into prisons and get to people as a gift.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:07:49] Mm hmm
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:07:51] You know, cause part of it is like, it's like who talks to us? And I do deeply believe that books talk to us. But sometimes we need the writer to communicate to the reader that I'm talking to you. And so, like, I started it with a letter and it's just like, I imagine somebody wanting to, needing to know, that when we on this process of becoming, we can make a decision, you know, about, about what it is that we become. Cause so much of books, I think, is about recognizing who you are and recognizing who you might be. And then really making a decision about those-- between those two poles.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:08:27] Can we hear the letter?
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:08:29] Oh, yeah. I ain't even think about reading this letter, man, I'ma read this joint. Yeah.
Dear__,
After Judge sentenced me to nine years in prison for carjacking, the world grew dark. Six months before that day I celebrated my 16th birthday. And before turning 18, I'd be calling a cell in solitary confinement home.
If you're like me, you recognize that this is an old story. A crime, handcuffs, a guilty plea, a cell and more cells. But prison is more than that, too. The library didn't come to us in the hole, but there was an unspoken agreement that if you had a book that you could spare, and someone asked for something to read, you gave the book to them.
The single most defining moment of my life was when I asked for a book, and a stranger slid The Black Poets by Dudley Randall under my cell door. The book introduced me to the poetry of Etheridge Knight. Like us, Knight had done time. Once he wrote, "I died in 1960 from a prison sentence, and poetry brought me back to life."
The day that book slid into my cell, I became a poet. Twenty-two years have passed since then, but I think a lot about the moment when somebody whose name I don't even know passed me a book of poems, and the s*** changed my life. Ain't no real possibility of me catching up with the many people in prison that I'd build with on the yard, chop it up with about books, challenge and be challenged by. This is a way for me to say, I appreciate that.
I published a collection of poetry recently, and if you're reading this, you're holding that book. Felon: Poems. Consider this letter a kite that I'm tucking into a book being slid, slid to you.
Take care,
Dwayne.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:10:21] I remember when I visited a prison in Montgomery County. The young people there were-- they were in a class, a writing class, and they were, you know, it struck me when you was talking about their relationship with books, it was like a social currency. It was like a social lubricant. They would-- it was this thing that connected them. It sounds like it was a similar, similar experience--
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:10:41] Yo. I was, I was-- we were on a prison that was locked down. And so you would come out of the cell, and you supposed to go get your lunch tray and then go back to your cell. And they had these yellow lines that was about two feet away from each cell. And you're supposed to not cross the yellow lines. But like I'm a perpetual line-crosser, right? So, so I come out, and my man is like, "Yo Shy, come here!" He like, "Yo Shy, come here." And he at cell one, which is right by where the trays are, and the lieutenant is like, "Betts. Don't cross that line." And dude is like, "Shy, come here, man! F*** dude." And I'm like, "Oh man." You know. And he's like, "Yo, I got this book, man, check this book out!" And that was it. I was like, "I'm going to see the book." So I go check the book out, right? Book probably wasn't even good, either, you know what I mean? We was reading all kinds of wild stuff. But I'm checking the book out. He slide it out. I'm looking at it. So disrespectful, [laughs] you know? So when I slide the book back, the lieutenant's like, "Yo, turn around." And I'm like, "For real? You seriously gonna lock me up for this?" So I turned around, and he put me in cuffs. And they take me into the sally port, right? And so then they open up the next row of cells, and my man Luke--which, I wasn't even close to him, for real--he kicks his lock out: "If Shy, he go to the hole, I'm going to the hole. All that man trying to do is get an education." Then it was like a bandwagon, you know, some dudes, really, they were cool with me, and so they was serious. They were like--my man who I got the book for, he was, he was like irate, you know. He was like, "Look, man, if, if Shy, he go to the hole, I'm telling you, you might as well go ahead and bring the Goon Squad in, right?" And so, so many people was yelling, you know, and it was wild to me, and I was like, d***, this is literature right here, you know what I mean? [laughs] I was like, this is the importance of books. And the Lieutenant was like,"Yo, this is ridiculous." And he took the handcuffs off me. He was like, "Yo, get in your cell, man. And stop crossing them lines." And I was like, "Yo, it was for--," and he was like, "Get in your cell!" And I just went into the cell.
But I think about it though, it's like, it was, currency. And it wasn't currency for everybody. You know what I mean? We wasn't--we was in prison. We weren't in utopia.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:12:41] Right.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:12:42] But it was true, though, that for some of us, man, like, like the books meant something. And it was super idiosyncratic, you know, it would be like-- I remember my man, Funk. T'ain't said this dude name in like 20 years, man, but this cat, Funk, man, he just straight read romance novels and just like regular, just straight good stories. And I was like the block librarian. And he'd be like, "Yo, shy, what you got that's good?" And I'd like, give him some righteous s***, and he be like "Nah, man, I don't wanna read that, man." You know? "Toni Morrison? Nah!" You know, and so I--and I had to like learn like the cache was like, not just the books, but like honoring what people, what people felt to make themselves feel better than that cell did. You know? And so, so yeah, you know, it was like an innocent memory, man. It's, like, cause I hadn't--I ain't said this dude's name in 20 years, and the way I remember him, it's like tied to the books. And those are the dudes, I think, um, in a lot of ways who I had like a much more meaningful relationship because the book was always a kind of bridge, and a kind of location for things, you know, it was like books and sports, you know? But the books, I don't know, the books hit. Books hit hard.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:13:58] Wow. Those are some great stories, man. You know, you talk about, you know, the things we don't think of, you know, for black men, you know, you don't think [of] Black men in prison reading nothing but romance novels, straight romance novels. [laughs]
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:14:14] Straight romance novels.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:14:15] Now, you know, I've read--you know, I've been reading you for a while. When Felon came out, I went--I read both of your books together--you have more than two, but I went back and re-read Bastards of the Reagan Era; I tried to read them together. But it was--they just so different, you know? In a previous conversation you said, you know, you're obsessed with mass incarceration, and you know, that ties them together, but just the language-- it's almost like two different poets wrote it. Were you conscious of that when you were going in to writing Felon, or--
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:14:46] I'm always thinking about how people say, "Dwayne, write about something else other than prison." And I'm always conscious of, like, how do you bring something to this experience, incarceration, post-incarceration. And in fact, you know, in a very real way, Bastards and Felon are both like post-incarceration experiences. You know, a lot of those poems come out of my experience teaching children and thinking about children, children who were just behind me, so who would have really been like the bastards of the Reagan era, you know? Like my generation has a lot of people getting locked up and, and my dad's generation, a lot of folks getting locked up, and so, you know, that generation really is, you know, the bastards of the era. But it's not just the bastards of Reagan, it's the bastards of the era, which meant that like the community disappeared. You know, it wasn't just like our fathers disapeared, it wasn't just the state. It was sorta like, uh, everybody left. And, you know, you think about prison, it is a way in which we have accepted that, that like, some of us can be written off, even if it's for our actions. You know, like I carjacked somebody, but it's a way in which the communities accept that maybe if we amputate the arm, the rest of the body will live. But those arms were, in fact, like, not limbs, but people. And mass incarceration is just [this] notion that you could just lop off everything. Right? And so like, Bastards was about those children and Felon, I think, when I wrote that, I was thinking about like me being a father, and I was thinking about a sort of set of circumstances that I was seeing in a fully different way just because I was different. It's almost like I want to write as if I'm stepping into the river, and you just can't step into the same spot of the river twice. Right? And so to do that as a writer, I trick myself by developing forms, you know, writing in received forms, and taking on kind of challenges with the writing that force me to think about something that frankly, I just wasn't thinking about when I wrote Bastards. I don't know if I'll ever write another book of poems, but part of it is I just don't know what world I'll be confronting that demands me to write something different. I mean, I actually kind of do. I got a project in my head, and it's not so much of a project, but as a series of poems on, on Black men and intimacy in prison and what it means not to be able to touch another and what it means to have everybody condemn touch as perverse. And then if I do that though, I'm approaching something that I wasn't approaching in either one of the previous books, and so I imagine approaching something new will force me to approach it in a way that, that I just, I don't know, you know, I don't know how it's going to be. I'ma be discovering s*** by writing it.
Rion Amilcar Scott: [00:17:19] I think it was wild was people would say write about something else. It's like August Wilson said, you know, "Within the Black experience is the whole world." And I think within any topic, there's the whole world, and I think there's, I think there's a lot that you could say. What I appreciate about you so much is that you are--you're just a different thinker. You have this moral reckoning, this moral understanding that's born of experience that a lot of us focusing on the dogma don't have. So can you talk a little bit about this moral understanding that you're bringing, that runs through basically all of your writing.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:17:54] I don't say this a lot, but it's true. I don't say it in public, a lot, cause you aren't supposed to admit that you think people gonna end up in prison. But I remember being young and runnin with dudes and being like, "Man, I know this dude getting locked up. I know he getting locked up." And part of it was drug dealers got locked up, and I consciously chose not to sell drugs. But also I'll be running with dudes, and everybody's failing all of their classes. And I had some guys that I was around, you know, smart and doing aight, and most of the girls I went to school with was smart and doing aight. But what happened was when I was in like, sixth grade going to seventh, I ended up going to one of them magnet schools. And so I went to school in a wild neighborhood, but I was in class with all of these people from the suburbs. And so, my friend group was just like overlapping, and it was all of these kind of super smart kids, who had--this messed up that this is a quality of education, but they had parents with cars, you know what I mean, like? [laughs]. Then was just like everybody from the neighborhood, and I, and I just actually really thought that I was in some ways better than the people that I was around, my peers, you know? I was like, "Dude, how did you get an 0.0 something GPA? Like, like you, you worked for that." You know what I mean? Like, like, and I would look at him and think fully that I was like, better than them. And I'm like, "you know, I'm on the Honor Roll. I got a 3.1, and I ain't, I ain't did homework all year. I been with you the whole time." And I just knew they were going to prison, and I wasn't, right. And outta all my folks, man, I was like the first one to get locked up. And I've realized that if I was gonna survive prison, I had to immediately recognize that I wasn't better than anybody around me. And I had went there so young, you know, I went there, so young, and I was guilty, and maybe this is why I resent a lot of what I hear people say about incarceration and people in prison, because it is a deep-felt sense of like shame that I f****** went to prison and have to tell my son that I went to prison. You know, it's, it's just not okay. It is not mass incarceration. It is not the system. It is a pistol. You know, and like, and it is an absolute choice, and when I went in, I felt a deep sense of shame, but the awakening was to recognize that I was like everybody around me. And the one thing that many of us had in common, confronted with the silence and confronted with our own thoughts about what we wanted to be and what we had become, the one commonality of many of us had was being unsatisfied with what we were. And it is, it is like frightening to be unsatisfied with what you are and have no clue about how to be different. But I was just in a game for a minute. I was 16, so it was easy for me. But you talk to like an old hustler or something. You talk to, somebody would have been back and forth or been struggling with addiction, and it is hard, and it is a huge challenge. And I think my allegiance is with those dudes. Having them as the people that I, that I feel are like my family and my kin means that I have to grapple with the challenges that they grapple with. I don't know, if I have any moral clarity at all, it's because I want to be accountable to somebody. And I'm thinking about everything that we did to try to become whatever we became.
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:21:04] I don't remember if it was this conversation or last conversation, but you talked about, you know, the doors closing behind you in prison. That sound. That's a sound my dad always talks about, you know, it was like, you know, he could never get used to when he visited his clients. It's just the door [clink!] closing behind him, which, you know, makes me think about the guiding principle behind the Million Book Projects: help us get free. And Frederick Douglas, my man Frederick Douglas said, "When we read, we become forever free. "So, what does that, what does that mean to you?
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:21:37] I mean, first part of it is just Frederick Douglas. You know, the idea of like, one, reading your way, and then, two, writing your way into freedom, like the idea that reading can be the mechanism that makes you more aware of the conditions of your experience. That is just like, whoa! You know what I mean, reading, period, is just eye-opening, and it makes you aware of the fact that like right now, I'm sitting somewhere in New Haven, Connecticut, but like, there's somebody in like, you know, Sydney, Australia right now with a book in their hand that's thinking about the world along the same lines of the conversation that we're having. And becoming conscious of that other soul on the other side of the planet is a really humbling thing, but I think a, it's a sort of freedom inspiring thing.
And then I think the other point, though, and this cat asked me this, man. I was in a prison in Trinidad.
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:22:28] Wait, Trinidad and Tobago?
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:22:28] Yeah.
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:22:28] Okay.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:22:30] You talk about shook. First, they sent me an email that say, "Listen, we just thought it would make sense for us to tell you this, but it's rumors of another prison break, and you shouldn't be worried." And I was like, "I'm never scared." You know? And then like two weeks before the event, I was like, let me click on this link, though, to see what they was talking about, just in case, you know. I click on the link, and they was like: Violent Prison Break Leads to the Death of One Person. And I was like, "Ooh, shh..." but then I'm like, "You know, I, ain't never scared, man." You know, so I go to Trinidad, and when I go into the prison doors, the prison's right in the center of the city. And the doors, nondescript, you know, and they open the doors and go inside. And I turned around, I watched them put the lock back on. I was like, "I put that same lock on my gym locker." [laughs] And the lock, the lock said Yale! And the lock said Yale! It was like, a Yale lock, right, because there's some company called Yale, and I was like, s***. You know, and the metaphor of it was like profound, you know, the same thing that make you free could enslave you. And I go inside, and they, they put me into it like a steel cage, and they locked everybody in. I'm like, "You just going to lock me in this joint?" And so I sit down, and I'm just like, "Oh, Jesus, where do they got me at? This is, this does not seem safe at all." And also, I'm thinking to myself--I'm, I'm, I'm mad that I'm feeling like it don't seem safe. You know what I mean? But they didn't lock all of us in together, like, if it jump off, it's going to jump off in there, and I get up and I'm reading poems. And I ain't getting no response from the audience. And I was like, "What's up?" Y'all don't like this?" He was like, "Bruh. Brethren. You keep reading these love poems, man!" You know, and none of the poems was love poems! They was all like elegies for dead dudes, you know what I mean? And so anyway, I told them they could write their own poems, and I would come around and talk to them. And they was all loving this. And they was, like, 80% of them was writing love poems, you know what I mean? [laughs] I was like, get out of here! Right? And so I'm going around person to person, but this cat pulls me to the side, and he's like, "Star, let me, ask you something. I ain't want to put you on the spot, so I ain't asked you when you were up there when you were answering questions, but Star, let me ask you something." And these dudes have been locked up for 10 years without seeing a lawyer. You know, they have respected me because I had been locked up and then I was a lawyer, but they ain't care about the poet thing, right. And this cat was like, "Yo, Star. Been in here 10 years, man. I just want to know. Have you ever felt free in prison?" And, um, and I think, man, when I think about that quote from Douglas, I think what he's saying is that, uh, books give you access to a life of the mind that can sustain you and gives you access to an understanding of freedom that is not limited to the construction of like physical mobility. And it is a humbling and a hard thing to accept. I mean I know dudes doing life in prison, dudes did 30, 40 years when I was inside, a couple of my mentors had already done 25. I got cats that just got out after 20, but to be able to sustain yourself in an environment like that, and to work so very hard not to become other than what you want to be, you know, demands that you believe that you are free.
And I, I just think books is a pathway to that kind of freedom, and it is as necessary as air. And, you know, everybody has a, a gateway, and it's like, how do you give people the opportunity? Like for somebody, it's going to be "Juba," you know, it's going to be Insurrections. But, but this joint don't exist in a penitentiary like Cross, like f*** the book. Cross River doesn't exist in the penitentiary. And that is like a profoundly unsettling fact that you can create a space, a location for freedom that can exist in your head, and when I read it, it exists in my head, and to know that, arbitrarily, it doesn't exist in the penitentiary. And, like, The Million Book Project is fundamentally about changing that reality, you know? Cause had it not been The Black Poets, I might not have become a writer. And it is, it is quite depressing to realize that something as whimsical as the decision of a cat who I don't know to throw me a book that I asked for, could so like profoundly change my life.
Rion Amilcar Scot: [00:27:01] Well, thank you for that. Always always grate to talk to you.
Reginald Dwayne Betts: [00:27:05] Yeah, man. I appreciate it, man. You, you, you doing your thing, and of course you, you know, you are the first guest host for the Million Book Project podcast. And you know, you can't be replaced, man. Definitely appreciate it. And I look forward to chopping it up in person.
[theme music]
Thanks for joining us for Freedom Takes, a new podcast from the Million Book Project. We'll be back next time with another contemporary writer. You can find out more about The Million Book Project and subscribe to our newsletter at law.yale.edu/justicecollaboratory. Our initiative was made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This podcast was produced by Erin Slomski-Pritz with theme music by Reed Turchi. Production assistance was provided by Elsa Hardy, Tess Wheelright, and Molly Aunger.