Reginald Dwayne Betts on His Upcoming Book of Poetry and the State of the Criminal Justice System Today

Could you tell us about your upcoming book of poetry, Felon, and what inspired you to write it?

Over the past decade, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with people involved with criminal justice reform, prosecution, and community safety issues—often these groups overlap, and nearly always I’ve found that we, as people who care about the lives and health of other people, know very little about them; particularly about people who have committed crimes. Our perspective is too often shaped by just The Wire or Oz. And this is not to say that The Wire isn’t a great show, but to suggest that there is a broader bandwidth of ways to think about these issues. Both as issues of over-incarceration and violence that feels endemic to the black community, and just as a very American problem. Felon is my attempt to talk about some things outside the normal bandwidth. And it’s really about the ways that men hurt other men and the women they love and the women they barely know. It’s about the way all of this hurts the children around us—and then, how inadequate, ultimately, a word like felon is, to ever grasp this thing we’re all struggling with.

How is Felon similar and different to your previous work, especially your last book of poems, Bastards of the Reagan Era?

It’s one of those things where I feel if one book were enough or one poem, Shakespeare wouldn’t have written so many plays and Tupac wouldn’t have written so many songs. Bastards is very much about what crack cocaine and violence did to communities I know—Felon is about what prison has done to some men I know, myself included, and what we’ve done to people in our community to end up there, and what we’ve done upon leaving. There is more grief in the new book, maybe.

In your National Magazine award-winning New York Times Magazine article you chronicled the difficulties previously-incarcerated individuals face in overcoming societal stigma and getting a second chance. Do you see this dynamic changing anytime soon, and if so, how?

The dynamic changes daily. But the real change is going to come when we become more invested in answering the question of what we should demand from people who have harmed others, people who have committed crimes, and a system that doesn’t seem bent on making anyone whole. But there really are changes on an almost weekly basis, even if it’s just the change that happens when a person gets from the start of a poem to the end of one.

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