Felon: Poems

"My next book is Felon , a poetry collection by Reginald Dwayne Betts, from Maryland in the US. When Betts was 16, with his friends, he carjacked someone using a gun. Betts wanted to hold the gun because he knew that if his mate held it he would probably panic and things would get messy. The boys took the driver’s credit cards and went spending for the day. Betts was arrested, tried as if an adult, and given a sentence of nine years in prison at age 16. Whilst in solitary confinement, someone slid a copy of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets under his door. Betts read it and he started to write himself. Betts’s story brings to mind other black writers who found more opportunity to learn about black history and culture in prison than they did at school. Like Malcolm X, who read about colonial history in prison and the novelist Alex Wheatle who, after growing up in care, was sentenced to time in HMP Brixton, where his Rastafarian cellmate spoke to him about Jamaican history and identity. When political dissidents like the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka go to prison, their writing tends to deconstruct the system of oppression that is pressing down on them. At the other end of the spectrum is Reid’s book, which focuses more on internal questions about agency and personal fallibility and less on socio-political analysis. What’s really rich about Betts’s writing is that he does both. He never minimizes the crime he committed and violent crime generally. But he also pans out to look at what his situation means in an America where mass incarceration is in full swing and he is a young black man. This sometimes makes for an experience for him of what the philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness. There’s a poem called ‘Parking Lot,’ which just starts with “A confession begins when I walk into a parking lot”—he is talking about his crime. Over the page, there’s the same poem, again, only it’s called ‘Parking Lot, Too.’ One of the first lines is: “A confession begins when I walked Black out of that parking lot.” Betts is looking at his crime from within, but he’s also looking at himself as white supremacist society would be looking at him. In Felon , the poems are about life after prison, when Betts is out, but he is still a ‘felon.’ That has all sorts of implications for whether you can vote and what you have to write on forms for jobs and housing and more besides. If you’re 16 and your brain is still plastic and then you spend nine years in prison, what’s it like to come into the outside world after that? Betts is not in prison anymore, but he’s not quite free, either. There’s yearning in his poems, like freedom and happiness are right there, but ‘right there’ is a world away. “A lot of people in prison feel themselves to be victims” Many young heterosexual men in prison lay in their cells thinking about being with a woman, but with no reality to test those fantasies against, they don’t relaize the images they are conjuring are idealizations that are further putting them adrift from the real world. When they get out and they have sex with a flesh and blood woman, they have to reach through that mire of dreamery in order to experience real intimacy with another person. In one of Betts’s poems, he shows how sexual closeness can be blocked not just by the projections ex-prisoners put onto their lovers, but also by the projections they receive too. In a moment of carnal passion with his partner, she says to him, ‘You’re mine’, and his automatic thought is, ‘No, I belong to the state.’ He remembers he’s supposed to be a violent criminal and becomes self-conscious about his lust for her. He loses the moment. Then she’s left yearning. These moments of masculine vulnerability are all the more powerful when you think that 93.5% of prisoners in the US are men (in the UK the number is 95%). Masculinities are a huge factor in crime. Prisons themselves are hothouses of patriarchy, predicated on domination, hierarchy and violence. Betts writes about his sons. He’s aware that soon they will become men. When he was on the brink of becoming a man, he did something violent and went to prison. It’s painful because children often offer parents a vicarious experience of innocence, but unable to forget that he is a felon, Betts is anticipating how he is going to have to tell his sons about the things men do, particularly the things men do to women. Betts is doing a PhD at Yale in law, so his poems contain a wealth of personal, social and intellectual perspectives. His viewpoint is also informed by working through his own conflicting feelings about the justice system. When he got out of prison, his mother told him that she had been raped whilst waiting for a bus. Today, Betts believes that mass incarceration is a social evil, but he also thinks that the harms of certain crimes get lost if we only talk about justice as an issue in mass incarceration. Betts is not someone you should read if you want easy answers: that’s what makes him one of the most essential voices about questions of crime and punishment. I try and keep the entry point to the class as accessible as possible. In my class I sometimes have someone with a PhD sat next to someone who can’t read, so I don’t usually use texts. Also, Covid has created a huge backlog of cases in UK courts at the moment. Some prisons have 75% of their population on remand, awaiting a hearing. This means the churn is high in prisons. I can’t say, ‘I’m going to give you this book and in a week’s time, we’ll talk about it’, because tonight they might get transferred to another prison. Teaching in some prisons is like teaching in an airport; you can’t rely on people being around for long enough for you to develop a relationship with them. Prisoners don’t want to invest in relationships they know might disappear in the morning. That’s one reason prisons are such emotionally detached places."