E.R. Murrow Award Excellence in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Submission - Disrupted

Disrupted is a show about change and the people who make that change possible. Exploring the inequities that permeate our society is central to what we do, whether we are talking about race or class or gender.

But one of the most powerful episodes we have ever created focused on a different type of inequity— the way we treat people in our prison system. Our host sat down with poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts to talk about what it was like to be incarcerated and how he came to start Freedom Reads, an organization that provides bookcases full of brand new books to prisons.

Through the interview with Betts, we could hear the emotion in his voice, and his long, thoughtful pauses gave us a sense of the psychic toll his time in prison had taken on him. It’s something he is just starting to process even now, nearly twenty years later. “I should still be grateful for the fact that I did eight and a half years and have never, in prison, felt as bad as I feel some days now,” he says.

As part of the reporting process for this episode, our team traveled to the Freedom Reads workshop to see where the bookcases are made. There, we talked to some of the formerly incarcerated people who build those bookcases, and heard about both the power of books and the pain of prison. One of the workers compared prison to being “stocked on a shelf in Amazon.”

Through the sheer raw emotion of this episode, we hope to give listeners a sense of what prison can do to a person— that it’s not just about the time a person spends there— it’s about an entire lifetime trying to recover.

Original airdate: December 6, 2024
Murrow Award submission date: February 12, 2025