LeRoy General Jr

Change agent, Educator/Teacher, Idea generator, Musician, Philanthropist

LeRoy General Jr. is Chief Development Officer of Freedom Reads, working alongside founder and CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, a poet, attorney, MacArthur Fellow, and TED speaker, to scale one of the most distinctive cultural interventions inside American prisons. Freedom Reads places 500-book Freedom Libraries directly on prison cellblocks, creating around-the-clock access to literature through handcrafted wooden spaces designed to affirm dignity and possibility. To date, Freedom Reads has opened more than 650 Freedom Libraries across 47 prisons in 15 states, reaching tens of thousands of incarcerated readers. The need, though, dwarfs the progress. Over 2,000 prisons nationwide, averaging 10 cellblocks each, represent a roughly $250 million challenge to bring this work to full scale. LeRoy leads strategy, fundraising, and donor engagement, building the capital infrastructure to move from hundreds of libraries toward that national vision. His career includes leadership roles at NPR, Yale University, Choate Rosemary Hall, and Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, spanning more than two decades in major and principal gifts. He also helps shape Freedom Reads' cultural platform, including the Inside Literary Prize, judged by incarcerated readers, and March Forth, an upcoming documentary on the power of literature inside prison walls.

Books, Opportunity, and the inner life of readers.

"Freedom Begins with a Book" What if the first step toward freedom isn't release, but access? Across the United States, millions of people live in prison environments defined by scarcity: of privacy, of beauty, of intellectual stimulation. Books, one of the most fundamental tools for growth, reflection, and imagination, are often limited, outdated, or simply out of reach. Freedom Reads, founded by Reginald Dwayne Betts, challenges that reality with a simple idea: place literature directly into the daily lives of incarcerated people. Through Freedom Libraries, 500-book collections housed in handcrafted wooden bookcases, this work does more than increase literacy. It changes the environment itself. Thoughtfully curated books and warm, human-centered design introduce a different texture into spaces long defined by hardness and control. They signal that the people who live and work there, incarcerated individuals and corrections officers alike, are worthy of dignity, reflection, and intellectual life. Access to literature expands language, sharpens thinking, and creates space for self-examination. It allows people to encounter new ideas, see themselves differently, and imagine lives beyond their current circumstances. For many incarcerated readers, a book becomes a private companion, a teacher, a mirror, and sometimes a lifeline. For corrections staff, these libraries offer moments of pause and connection in environments that are often stressful and isolating. "Freedom Begins with a Book" is not a slogan. It is a recognition that transformation does not begin with policy alone, but with access to stories, to knowledge, and to the possibility of becoming something more.

Singing, supposedly...