The Write of Freedom: The Dwayne Betts Story

» by Sia Tiambi Barnes August 16, 2009, 20:44pm

When Dwayne Betts was 16-years-old he was an average extraordinary teenager, made the dean's list every semester, talked “trash” with his friends, played basketball, occasionally skipped class. Then one day, he and some folks went to a mall. He had a gun – the first time he ever held one. They carjacked a man and the joy ride took him on a journey to an 8-year bid in an adult penitentiary. Now, in his twenties and less than five years since his release, Dwayne is an award-winning poet, author, a husband, a father, and a spokesperson for Campaign for Youth Justice. He talked to HipHopWired.com about coming of age in the system.

HipHopWired: Congratulations on your first book, “A Question of Freedom.” What makes your story different from other prison tales?

Dwayne Betts: I think my story was unique because I was incarcerated at 16, I was certified as an adult, tried in an adult court, sent to prison with adults. My formative years were spent in prison. Because prison formed this huge chunk of my life, I wanted people to read the book and really have to deal with prison and not have to deal with what might've happened before prison and with the success afterwards. In interviews and on TV I get to talk about graduating from the University of Maryland, being a husband, being a father, and I get to talk about working in the community. So when people read the book, they'll see that what's in the book is what prepared me to do the things that I'm doing now.

HipHopWired: What was it like being a young man in an adult prison?

Dwayne Betts: It was interesting. It was different. Prison is probably not the most violent place in the world, but it's one of the most...

HipHopWired: Where would be more violent?

Dwayne Betts: Iraq. Afghanistan. See in prison the idea of violence is ever present, but death is not ever present. People die and it's on your mind, but the truth is, you see people live 20 and 30 years in prison. It might be a terrible life that they live... that's what I wanted to convey, the violence, the humanity that's buried underneath the violence. A lot of people talk about prison and they don't talk about the humanity that's underneath the violence. Because they don't talk about the humanity, the recidivism rates could be so high without us really saying, ‘Why is this going on?' But if you recognize the inherent humanity and people could see sort of the beautiful ugly of prison then it'll be easier to do some things policy-wise and in our own personal behavior to help people transition from criminal acts to upright behavior.

HipHopWired: Can you articulate for me what the humanity is in prison?

Dwayne Betts: I went to prison at 16, 5'6', a hundred and twenty-five pounds and I never once had anybody try to take something from me. A lot of that was because it was always other men around me who sort of took me under their wing. I remember once, I was in solitary confinement and across from me was a guy that grew up near where I live, I didn't know him growing up, but we knew a lot of the same people. We didn't have that much money at the time, so we had like one soup and a packet of cookies between us and we split it in half. And because we were in solitary confinement we had to rig a pulley system to slide the cookies from one cell to the next, and get a trustee to pass one half the soup. We weren't brothers, we don't even talk to each other to this day and I don't think either one of us expected for us to be talking five or ten years from now, but it's a matter of principal and I think that a lot of people don't recognize to the extent that principal exists.

HipHopWired: That's not only an example of humanity, but ingenuity.

Dwayne Betts: I'll give you one other story. I knew a guy who had never been to college, this guy had his GED or something, right, he made a walkman that could record from two walkman circuit boards and neither one of them had the record button, so he had to write the schematics. He had to envision something that he never saw on paper, put it on paper, get the transistors and all the things that he needed. He also was brilliant enough to recognize that you could use headphones as a microphone and he made a device that could record music, conversations, or whatever. He was recording mixtapes from the rec yard, I mean, some of the illest rappers I ever heard.

HipHopWired: How long were you locked up?

Dwayne Betts: 8 years, 3, 4 months. Long enough to know I don't want to go back.

HipHopWired: Was your sentence fair?

Dwayne Betts: Nah. Sentences aren't meant to be fair, though. I mean, my judge told me, ‘I'm under no illusion that sending you to prison will help, but you could get something out of it if you want.' So if sending me to prison won't help me, how will it help society? Because at the bottom of this we're talking about public safety and I was 16 when I went to prison. I saw people get robbed, people get raped, get molested, people just getting abused in a way that they became other than what they wanted to be without even knowing it and judges and lawyers know it just as well as I do. And who is more susceptible to this, an adult or a child?

Well, I know grown men who couldn't handle the pressures, so to send a child to prison is preposterous to me. It's not about the amount of time I spent in prison, it's not about the idea that I couldn't go home, it's about the place that I was sent, the lack of treatment that was there, and the lack of vision on the part of the justice system to believe that I could be more than what I displayed in that 30 seconds. My thing is, if you went to a job that had that high a failure rate it would go out of business. But the juvenile justice system and the prison system they had the highest failure rate of anything I've ever seen, but it's not ever at the risk of going out of business.

HipHopWired: America has the highest population of incarcerated people in the world, why do you think that's so if the system is such a failure?

Dwayne Betts: Even though it's failing the way that it is, the public usually isn't aware of its failing. Most of the people that read this article won't know that juveniles get certified and transferred to adult court on a regular basis. Most of them don't even know to the extent in which the system is making young people worse to when they come out from when they go in. And more importantly, most of the people won't be aware about how the education system ties into the failures of the young people. When society start saying that we all should be devastated because our prison rates are this high and it's not solely the responsibility of the person who committed this crime, but it's a problem that we have in a society in which crime is so prevalent, then things will change.

HipHopWired: How does education tie into more than 200,000 young people being sent to adult courts each year?

Dwayne Betts: Like the public school system, I mean you're expecting when you send your child to school [that] they graduate. But like in Detroit or D.C., you see schools with 30% graduation rates. A lot of people I met a prison didn't graduate from high school or graduated and still were functionally illiterate. I mean they aren't prepared to enter the workforce if they weren't committing crimes.

HipHopWired: What is freedom?

Dwayne Betts: Freedom is the ability to have a vision that something is possible. Freedom existed in prison. I mean simple stuff, like right now I have a vision of getting a good night's sleep tonight. You can't be happy if you can't have a vision of having what you want in your life and believing that you can get what you need, and I think that's the beginning of freedom. I started writing the “Question of Freedom” the essay in prison trying to figure out what it means to be free and I kept going and I just was fortunate enough to be able to turn it into a book where I got to pursue some of the questions revolving around freedom and incarceration more in depth. Ultimately, the book is not about prison, but it's about living.

For more information on Campaign for Youth Justice, visit: www.CampaignForYouthJustice.org

A QUESTION OF FREEDOM: A Memoir of Survival, Learning, and Coming of Age in Prison