The Exchange: R. Dwayne Betts on Prison, Poetry, and Justice

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 months 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.

I recently spoke to Betts about his time in prison and his writing. An edited version of our conversation appears below.

Did you know that books and writing would be so important to you in prison? I was pretty pragmatic. I wanted to be an engineer before I got locked up. I knew I would do nine years and I didn’t want to come home with no talent. I thought being a writer was one thing you could do while you were in prison, one thing you could develop and take home with you. I just didn’t know I would be any good at it. From the very beginning, I was writing essays, reading books. I knew that that was the thing I was holding onto—I just had no idea how the world of writing and literature would open up to me.

There’s a scene when you’re in isolation (“in the hole”), and someone tosses you a book called “The Black Poets,” a collection edited by Dudley Randall. It was a pivotal moment for you. At that point, I’d been in the hole for three or four months and I was reading three or four books a day, anything I could find, but I hadn’t read poetry, I hadn’t read Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, and all these poems that were in this book. It was the one thing that happened that I honestly think if it didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be a poet right now. It was sort of magical. I had been yelling out for books, and then somebody just threw me that one.

Did your enthusiasm for literature set you apart among the inmates? I was pretty much a nerd, but I actually found that education was more democratic in prison. I met people whom I wouldn’t have expected to read a lot who did&#8212everybody read. The weird thing is that I read a lot before I got locked up—Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, anything I could get my hands on. But it was always in my room, or by myself on the train. In prison, nobody would ever question why you were reading.

Did you ever have trouble getting access to books? Were the prison libraries well-stocked? I never really found lack of books to be a problem. The only place where that was an issue was at Red Onion [the remote supermax facility to which Betts was transferred for several months] because they didn’t have a library. Most places the libraries were pretty good, because they had the old books, the classics, Shakespeare. I also bought books from mail-order catalogs. You know, I think the final battleground for mail-order catalogs is prison.

Nora Roberts was popular with the inmates. Was that just because of the love scenes?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com