The Exchange: R. Dwayne Betts On Prison, Poetry, And Justice
December 03, 2010
Dwayne Betts an ARHU Poetry Lecturer writes "A Question of Freedom" which describes his troubled childhood in prison.
Dwayne Betts an ARHU Poetry Lecturer writes "A Question of Freedom" which describes his troubled childhood in prison. By Meredith Blake, The New Yorker
December 3, 2010
On Saturday, December 7, 1996, a skinny sixteen-year-old named R. Dwayne Betts headed to the Springfield Mall, in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, with a friend. Betts had always been a bright, bookish kid—he was treasurer of the junior class—but in recent month he’d begun to drift, skipping classes to smoke weed with friends from the tough Suitland, Maryland, neighborhood where he grew up. That Saturday, Betts and his friend discovered a man asleep in his forest-green Grand Prix in the mall's parking lot. They carjacked him, holding him at gunpoint, and took off on a short-lived joyride. Within eighteen hours, Betts had been arrested and charged with six different felonies; within a year, he would be tried and sentenced as an adult. The judge who meted out Betts’s punishment—nine years in prison—told him, 'I don’t have any illusions that the penitentiary is going to help you, but you can get something out of it if you want to.'
Betts has since proved the judge right—on both counts. In his memoir, 'A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison,' Betts recalls prison as a place of ritualized humiliation, not rehabilitation. Yet his story is also one of redemption. Since his release in 2005, he has racked up a staggering list of accomplishments. It all began with a book club called YoungMenRead, which was featured in a front-page story in the Washington Post. The publicity garnered the attention of literary agents, and in 2007 Betts landed a book deal. He wrote 'A Question of Freedom' while attending the University of Maryland on a full scholarship, and in May of 2009, he delivered the commencement address at his graduation. (The other speaker that day was Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., an irony that Betts relishes.) His memoir was released in the fall, followed by a poetry collection, “Shahid Reads His Own Palm.” Betts now teaches poetry at the University of Maryland, and recently received a fellowship at the Open Society Institute, which he is using to write a non-fiction book about the social impact of incarceration. He also recently got married and became a father. Not bad for someone who just turned thirty.