A Poet and Ex-Con Writes About Life After Prison

Reginald Dwayne Betts' book Felon was reviewed in the New York Times.

In Felon, his searing third collection of poems, Reginald Dwayne Betts leads his readers through the underworlds of incarceration and its aftermath, “& if prison is where Black / men go to become / Lazarus,” it is in the aftermath that the attempt to come back to life is systematically thwarted by a society that desires something like eternal retribution. “There is no name for this thing that you’ve become,” he writes: “Convict, prisoner, inmate, lifer, yardbird, all fail.” What does not fail is the language Betts sends prismatically through his experience, rendering the entire spectrum of the prison-industrial complex visible.

As a 16-year-old student who had never been in trouble, Betts hijacked a car at gunpoint, confessed to the crime, was “certified” an adult despite his age, and sentenced to nine years in prison, serving eight years and three months. He spent 14 months in solitary confinement for various infractions against spoken and unspoken rules (such as cursing and touching a guard’s arm). One day someone slipped an anthology of poetry under his cell door: “The Black Poets,” edited by Dudley Randall, Detroit’s first poet laureate. Betts had already been writing, but now began a serious apprenticeship, copying the anthologized poems by hand, breathing the lyric art of Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay into the sunless, malodorous cellblocks of his confinement. In a moment of premonitory recognition, Betts took as his prison name “Shahid,” the Arabic word for “witness.”