From Prison to Poetry

"I tried to remember what caliber pistol it was, but couldn't," R. Dwayne Betts read to a packed crowd at Washington's Busboys and Poets restaurant Monday night.

It was the recent graduate's first public reading, a notable event for any budding author, but one more notable for Betts considering the tumultuous road he took to the stage.

"It was automatic and weighed nothing in my palm, and I couldn't figure how something that weighed nothing could have me slumped in the back of a car driving me away from my life," he continued, reading from A Question of Freedom, his memoir that hit bookshelves last Thursday.

At 16 years old, Betts and a friend carjacked a man outside of a mall in Springfield, Va., threatening him with a borrowed pistol.

The next day, Betts was arrested. In Virginia, carjacking automatically lands defendants in adult court, and Betts was convicted of six felonies.

"That was 1996," the 28-year-old said. "I didn't get out of prison until March 4, 2005."

Since his release, Betts has founded a book club, YoungMenRead, for young boys and left Prince George's Community College with honors. When he graduated from this university in the spring, he spoke at commencement.

He also earned a full-tuition scholarship for an MFA poetry program at Warren Wilson College, a North Carolina liberal arts school. Betts is also the program director for the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop - a nonprofit that teaches public school students poetry - and a husband and a father.

After a profile on Betts and the book club he founded appeared on the front page of The Washington Post two years ago, Avery/Penguin publishers asked him to author a memoir.

"And it just happened that I could write a little," Betts said.

Betts' former advisor at PGCC, Melinda Frederick, said Betts stood out because of his drive to succeed and his positive nature.

"He has managed to take a devastating experience and turn his life into something positive, for himself and others," she said.

In a recommendation letter for Betts to speak at commencement, English professor Joshua Weiner wrote, "He's earned the honor in the hardest way imaginable, though he'd never make you feel he knows it."

But despite his accomplishments, Betts still struggles with the fact that nothing can erase the crime he committed and the nine years he spent in prison. Although he received a scholarship to Howard University in 2007, Betts' admission and scholarship were revoked when the university learned about his criminal record.

Betts grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Suitland, where he said crimes like his weren't abnormal.

"We lived in a world where, foolish as it was, we thought you could do something like that without it defining the rest of your life," he said.

But he added, "When an adult commits a crime, we don't ask how they got involved with the wrong crowd, or something like that. When a young person commits a crime, we look for trouble, and most of the time we look outside of that young person for it. But I made a truly egregious mistake."

His memoir, compiled from journal entries and essays he wrote in prison, details the nine years he paid for his mistake. Although always an avid reader, in high school Betts favored subjects like computer science and physics - he dreamed of becoming an engineer. In prison, he turned to books and writing as a refuge from the violence around him and his fear that he would not be able to emerge from prison as the man he wanted to be.

"It's time you can't get back," Betts said. "If you fill that time with lifting weights, basketball, talking trash, you can't take that back home."

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