Almost 30 years later, the image Caron Butler paints of being in solitary confinement remains vivid.

“No sunlight or human interaction except the occasional strip search,” the former NBA veteran writes. “Completely isolated from the rest of the world, you begin to lose track of time. Your sense of reality begins to slip away. You become anxious and paranoid. You are haunted by hallucinations and nightmares. You endure the humiliation of having every biological need — eating, sleeping, showering, urinating, defecating — happen within the same few square feet. Like an animal in a zoo. Imagine what that does to your spirit. Imagine what that does to a fifteen-year-old.”

Butler had been arrested in his native Racine, Wis., as a teenager, after cocaine and a gun were found in his locker at school. (Butler, who acknowledges he was dealing drugs at the time to help his family financially, says it was a setup.) He spent two weeks in solitary at the Racine Correctional Institute, an adult facility. After two months there, he was transferred to a juvenile detention center and reform school. There, he took stock of his life and made the decision to lead it differently.

He became a star hooper at Washington Park High School – where he played against an outstanding scorer from Burlington High named Tony Romo – went on to play at Connecticut for Jim Calhoun, and embarked on a 14-year NBA career, making two All-Star teams while with the Washington Wizards and winning a ring with the Dallas Mavericks. Now an assistant coach with the Miami Heat, Butler has made the issue of juvenile justice reform, including intervention, mentoring, diversion and decreasing the use of solitary confinement among inmates, a priority of his adult time. He has talked openly about his former life, and written about it.

He’s doing so again, in the book “The Power of Basketball,” an upcoming collection of essays from the NBA’s Social Justice Coalition, established by the league and the National Basketball Players Association amid the maelstrom of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the wrenching public protests and debates that played out worldwide in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The book will be published next month by The New Press.

Since 2020, the NBA’s Social Justice Coalition, composed of five active players, five team governors, commissioner Adam Silver and deputy commissioner Mark Tatum, has focused on advocacy and public support for legislation to reform criminal justice, voting rights, policing and community safety.

The Coalition says that between 2021 and 2024, it has publicly supported 27 bills in federal or state legislatures. Of those bills, 18 have moved forward to receive a full vote, and nine have been passed into law.

The book was edited by coalition executive director James Cadogan, and Ed Chung, vice president of initiatives for the Vera Institute, which seeks to end mass incarnations in U.S. prisons.

It features essays from players including New Orleans Pelicans guard C.J. McCollum, the president of the players’ union, Wizards guard Malcolm Brogdon, Atlanta Hawks forward Larry Nance, Jr., from coaches including Detroit’s J.B. Bickerstaff, Milwaukee’s Doc Rivers and Orlando’s Jamahl Mosley, and governors Steve Ballmer (LA Clippers), Vivek Ranadive (Sacramento Kings) and Clara Wu Tsai (Brooklyn Nets). Former WNBA guard Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, a founding member of the WNBA’s Social Justice Coalition, also contributed an essay, “The Time is Now.”

It was intentional to have the book’s contributor makeup roughly mirror that of the coalition.

“That’s one of the things we think is most important for folks to understand, especially now, when we have so much disagreement, so much partisanship, and so many fractures in public dialogue,” Cadogan said by phone Wednesday.

“When the coalition first started, we knew we were building an organization where people can have really different perspectives, and really different positionality. Over the course of, we’re now in season five of the Coalition’s existence, that turned out to be true, unsurprisingly. But it’s really an important fact. If we can demonstrate and continue to show people that folks of goodwill can get around a table together, even if they think differently about a lot of different things, but find a path forward on important issues, that’s a good things, and something we should lean into.”

San Antonio Spurs guard Tre Jones writes about his affiliation with the Tree City Spurs, a 9-11-year-old girls’ basketball team in Uvalde, Texas, the site of the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Two of the players on the Tree City team were among the 19 students killed; other players were injured.

After the shooting, Jones writes in the book, he became aware of the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, founded in 1997 and now based in San Antonio, which serves kids who have recently lost loved ones, and have to suddenly deal with grief and the subsequent trauma. Some of the survivors of the Uvalde shooting sought counseling from the Bereavement Center taking part in a “grief education camp” led there.

“They cried, laughed and healed,” Jones writes.

Brogdon, acquired from Portland by Washington on draft night in June in the Deni Avdija trade, writes about his grandfather, John Hurst Adams, a towering figure in the civil rights movement as a pastor, college president (Paul Quinn College, an HBCU in Dallas) and activist during stints in Seattle, Los Angeles, South Carolina and D.C.

“For me, he embodied so much more than civil rights,” Brogdon said at a panel discussion on the book last week at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C.

“He embodied perseverance. He embodied bravery. He embodied, I think, most importantly, for me, he embodied sacrifice. When I talk to my mom, my mom is one of three sisters. She talks about all the late nights they had, all the early mornings — very similar to my job, but far greater impact, far more important. I just understand the sacrifice that they made. Growing up in that family, I understood, no matter if I was going to be a professor, was going to be a doctor, lawyer, NBA player, I knew I would have a purpose, of advancing not only people of color like myself, but everybody, trying to advance the country, trying to advance the world.”

Four years ago, as people’s attention was more available because COVID restrictions kept most home and in front of their screens, the issues were easier to center in the public’s mind. The country was shocked as it watched, via the smartphone recordings of witnesses, Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. It was angered by the shooting death of Breonna Taylor in her Kentucky home by Louisville police officers. The need for greater diversity, equity and inclusion in all phases of American life was centered, and supported, in marches across the country and around the world.

And the NBA’s players, taking part in the Orlando Bubble to complete the 2019-20 season, had the attention of much of the sports world. The Milwaukee Bucks led a player boycott of playoff games following the shooting of Jacob Blake during a traffic stop in Kenosha, Wis. that reverberated, with most of sports shutting down for several days as players in other sports followed the NBA’s lead.

But in the intervening four years, DEI programs have been eliminated around the country in businesses and academia. The news cycle gradually pushed Floyd’s and Taylor’s deaths off the front pages and digital platforms. The coalition’s work shifted, inevitably, from the macro to the micro, though the players’ desires to use their platforms didn’t wane. (The original working title of the book was “Why We Care.”)

“One of the most important questions we have is how we continue to talk about work that is ongoing, and how we continue to tell the stories that need to be told when the headlines are different,” Cadogan said.

“You know as well as I do that 2024 is not 2020 or 2021 in terms of public attention on justice. But the needs are there. And there’s so much incredible work, certainly across the NBA community, but more importantly in NBA markets, and community organizations, activists and leaders, people who are still doing the work on all of our issues. We thought one of the ways we can do things a little bit differently, and make sure we’re trying to reach new audiences and continue to tell the story of justice, is by writing a book and having this collections. Having a tangible thing that you can pick up and hold is different when we spend so much of our time in the digital space.”

Brogdon, while with the Boston Celtics, along with current Finals MVP Jaylen Brown, championed the “Raise the Age” initiative, a program supported by Citizens for Juvenile Justice in Massachusetts, that sought to keep some 18- to 20-year-olds in the state’s criminal justice system from being tried as adults for certain crimes. The initiative diverts juvenile offenders into rehabilitative programming rather than incarceration. The Massachusetts Senate approved the legislation this past July.

The Timberwolves’ Karl-Anthony Towns won the NBA’s 2024 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award for his work in support of Restore the Vote, an initiative in Minnesota signed into law in 2023 by Governor Tim Walz, now the Democratic vice presidential nominee, that restored the voting rights of an estimated 55,000 people statewide who’d served time for felony convictions.

The Philadelphia 76ers and the Social Justice Coalition supported “Clean Slate 3.0,” a Pennsylvania initiative signed into law by Governor Josh Shapiro last December, that will seal the records of former felons for minor drug and property offenses after 10 years if they have no further misdemeanor or felony convictions.

As training camps start in a couple of weeks, players will again get in where they can fit in in each NBA city — not replacing those who spend their lives working in these spaces, but to help bring awareness to causes, advocate in public for legislative proposals and raise funds, when necessary.

“Fortunately we have a bunch of folks who are working across all of the coalition’s issue areas – community safety, criminal justice, informed voting rights,” Cadogan said. “We have a little bit of range. Showing breadth, I think that matters in folks’ understanding of how they can get involved and engaged.

“And ultimately, that’s the reason for the book. It’s not just to tell the story; it’s to tell the story to inspire, and hopefully have people connect in a different way to what the work is. The question we’ve often gotten is ‘What’s next?’ This is part of the answer.”

(Photo of Alencia Johnson, Malcolm Brogdon and James Cadogan: David Aldridge / The Athletic)