A month ago I had the chance to listen to a man read a passage from a book he had written. The man was a convicted felon, and the book had begun in his jail cell.
R. Dwayne Betts, a boy from Suitland, Md., never thought he’d end up in prison. A student on the gifted and talented track in school, he had big plans to go to college and perhaps become an engineer. But when he was 16 years old, Dwayne messed up, big time. Dwayne and a friend carjacked a man, and Dwayne ended up with a nine-year prison sentence. “I had never held a gun before then,” said Dwayne. “It only took 30 seconds for me to become a statistic — another African-American man behind bars.”
Dwayne spent much of his teenage years and his early 20s in jail. He is the author of “A Question of Freedom: a Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison.”
The United States has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. As of 2007, the United States incarcerated 750 inmates per 100,000 people; the world average is 166 per 100,000 people. Compared to other democratic, economically developed countries, the United States has more people in prison by several orders of magnitude.
Growth in U.S. prison population is due to changing policy, particularly regarding drug-related offenses — not increased crime. It also has been pointed out that the prison system has a hugely disproportionate impact on minority communities. African-Americans, who make-up 12.4 percent of the population, represent more than half of all prison inmates compared to one-third 20 years ago — numbers that bring up a whole host of questions as to whom we arrest and why.
When I announced that I would be moving to Baltimore for a school year, a city with a notoriously high rate of crime, the most common response was “Why?” If people have any picture of Baltimore, it’s often the crime- and corruption-riddled depiction presented by the popular TV show “The Wire.” And while Baltimore, as I have discovered, is so much more than its crime, that crime is still undeniable.
Dwayne’s story, sadly, is far from unique. What sets him apart is the way he spent his prison time — and his astonishing post-prison success. Dwayne walked into the world after his sentence was served committed to proving his life wouldn’t be reduced to his crime. He worked hard and won first the prestigious TAES scholar-ship to attend the University of Maryland, then the Holden Fellowship to attend Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. Today he is widely published, the winner of the 2009 Beatrice Hawley Award, and works as the program director for the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop.
Dwayne will be the first to tell you his isn’t a straightforward fairy tale story of redemption. He struggles with the dissonance of being both a convicted felon and a celebrated author. Rather than focusing on his crime or moving beyond it, he focuses on how he managed to learn, grow and endure while behind bars.
“Prison is an incredibly violent environment,” Dwayne says. “Just surviving it was very difficult.”
Dwayne read every book he could get his hands on while incarcerated, and against the odds, he changed his life from within a prison cell. Few other inmates have had experiences like Dwayne’s. Most do not. Michael Corbin tries to boost those numbers: He teaches a GED program in the Baltimore prison. Corbin, who used to teach high school in East Baltimore, sees former students pass through with distressing regularity.
Prisons began, conceptually, not just as a place where criminals could be held removed from society, but a place where positive change of some kind — the “penitence” in penitentiary — could happen. Today, it’s astonishing how few resources inmates are actually given to make something of themselves. Not everyone in prison is someone who can re-enter society the way Dwayne did. Not everyone is “lost” and in need of a break, either. But at the same time, we need to ask ourselves: What is the point of prison? Many would argue that law-breakers have ceded their right to education. But with 70 percent of people leaving prison functioning at the lowest level of literacy, how can we really expect them to be able to re-enter society and get an honest job to earn their living?
Once a week, I drive past the big, boxlike Baltimore prison, seemingly unbroken by windows and lined with curling razor wire. I often forget to count the people behind those walls when I consider the residents of Baltimore; they are invisible neighbors, individuals who have been put away from the world. And yet, counted or not, they are still there, living out their lives in whatever way they can with what they’ve got. To forget about them is a mistake. To assume that each person will come out of there prepared for life out here, unaided, is an even bigger one.
Literacy Volunteers, a Bangor-based nonprofit organization, works with the prison population through Charleston Correctional Center and the Women’s Re-entry Center in Bangor. For more information about Literacy Volunteers and prison literacy work, check out www.lvbangor.org or call 207-947-8451.
Meg Adams, who grew up in Holden and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor and Vassar College in New York, shares her experiences with readers each Friday. For more about her adventures, go to the BDN Web site: bangordailynews.com or e-mail her at meg@margaret-adams.com.