 So, my name is Avista Yub. I'm director of the Fellows Program here at New America. Thank you for joining us for this conversation as Zwayne launches his new book into the world today, which is actually New York Times Reviewed. This is one of our 20th anniversary series events. New America celebrating its 20th year this year. We were founded in 1999 as a civic platform that really engaged with new ideas and helping amazing writers like Clint and Dwayne publish books. It was one idea that came up during those radical first few years and 20 years later we've helped support over 200 fellows who published over 116 books. Actually, I think 116 is yours. Nine films and also several award-winning books as well in our first Pulitzer this year. So, what was once probably just considered a radical crazy idea is actually proven to be very successful 20 years later. So, with that, I will transition the conversation over to Dwayne and Clint. I will give a quick introduction of each and then I'll transition over to Dwayne who will actually open with a poetry reading from his new book. Dwayne Betz is a Class of 2018 Emerson fellow here at New America. He is now the author of four books with the publication of his newest book today and including the 2015 collection of poems faster to the Reagan era. He's a graduate of Yale Law School and he's received fellowships from the Soros Foundation, Pan America and the Poetry Foundation at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies. Joining him today to moderate the conversation is Clint Smith. Clint is actually one of just our newly accepted Class of 2020 Emerson Fellows and he's completing a book on how the word is passed, a narrative nonfiction project that explores the relationship between place and public history in which you travel to different sites throughout the country examining how each of them reckon with or fail to reckon with the relationship to the history of slavery and Jim Crow. His book will be published by Little Brown in the next year or two. He's also a prolific poet so it's an amazing opportunity to have two very dynamic writers who just know how to bring words together in ways that are both beautiful, articulate and also very informed. So with that, Clint, the conversation's yours or actually Dwayne, did you want to start with a poetry reading? Can I get a book? Yeah. I cannot get a, I think I changed it. Okay. A lot. Okay, a hard one. Yeah. So I'm gonna read, if we pass a book then I promise to read from it. Thank you guys for coming. This is a lot of people. This is, I didn't know it was gonna be this many people there. Neither did Aristotle who was like, I'm coming today because it's raining and ain't nobody coming to hear you in the rain. I was like, I don't know man, I'm kinda decent. He's like, nah. You know. So I'm gonna read a few. We do have copies of the book. I'm gonna read the first poem and I'm gonna tell you about it just so that, so what I'm gonna try to do is I'm gonna read some poems that's thematically connected and I'm gonna read the first poem, it's called Guzzoo. And this poem is a Persian sort of Persian form. And the thing that you should listen for is the poem is each, so the first couplet is all it's written in couplets and the idea is that each couplet is like a pearl on a string of pearls. And so it's a part of a unit, but it's also its own thing. And in the first couplet, it has a line of repeats, a phrase of repeats at the end of each line and it's after prison. And then in each subsequent couplet before you hear the phrase after prison, you'll hear a word that's rhyming. So in this case, it'll be suspect, expect, dialect and the idea is that that's just the form and the notion is how do you structure the circle a theme or a topic? None of that was relevant, but sometimes it's cool to know stuff like that. Oh, the other thing that is relevant is that you signed your name in the last couplet. Guzzoo, name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison. Explains Occam's razor, you're still a suspect after prison. Titus Gouffard painted my portrait, then dipped it in black tar. He knows redaction is a dialect after prison. From inside a sail, the night sky isn't the measure. That's why it's prison's vastness, your eyes reflect after prison. My lover don't believe in my sadness. She says whiskey in that time is what left me wrecked after prison. Ruth, paper maker, take these tattered gray sweats. Make paper of my beard. In the past, I won't reject after prison. The state murdered Khalif with a single high bill, always innocent. Did he fear time's effect after prison? Dear Wharton, my time been served. Let me go. Promise that some of this I won't recollect after prison. My mother has died. My father, a brother and two cousins. There is no God, no reason to genuflect after prison. Jeremy and Forge rejected the template. Said for it to be funky, the font must redact after prison. Now, the reason why that couplet is really cool, it's because I broke the rules of the other thing too. Because if you notice, redact doesn't actually rhyme with reflect and all of the other ones. And so I was like Jeremy and Forge rejected the template while I was also in the very phrase rejecting the template. That didn't matter, but I just wanted to tell you. And so since I broke up the poem I want to tell you one other thing. So this poem also was like a guide to a project that me and my friend Titus Kfar did. And so the line, so what I did is I was like old school rapper that shouts out all his friends. So Titus Kfar, he painted a portrait of me and we did this series of prints. And so that refers to that. But we also got, I bought a whole bunch of towels from prison that was made by prisoners in Virginia. And I also got my homeboys to send me their clothes. It was like their sweats and shit that they had been wearing for decades. And they sent it to us and we made paper out of it. So when I say Ruth, paper maker, take these tattered gray sweats, make paper of my bid, a pass that won't reject after prison. It's actually literal. And Jeremy and Forge, we created a font for the project. So when I say they rejected the template, they rejected the existing fonts and they created their own font for the project. And it was like for them to make it funky. The font must redact. And actually like the font, we redact spaces in the font. That's like the feature of the font. The font is featured within a book, but you're gonna see it, you're gonna see some of the distinctions when it's blown up. Anyway, he came home saying, righteous, kuchi and jab turkey, all in lost years, his slings are protect after prison. The printer silk screens a world onto black paper. With ink, Eric reveals that we, Eric reveals when we neglect after prison. My homeboy says he's done with all that prison shit. His wife and baby girl gave him love to protect after prison. And then the fools say, you can become anything when it's over. Told him straight up, ain't nothing to resurrect after prison. You have come so far, beloved. And for what? Another song? Then sing, Shahid, you're loved, not shipwrecked after prison. I like clapping after parties. That is dope. I personally like throwing money at people after parties. I just, you know, they do it at church. You know what I mean? So whiskey for breakfast. My liver, a wash and all but drags of a charred old cask. Soaked in Bali's amber, shadowed as blood dim as a sail in the hole. Survived, brackish prison water, only to become collateral. The things that haunt me still drown now, Francie, and nearly 50 pounds of brick cube rocker, Spirittis frumenti, a gallon of whiskey weighs eight pounds. And all of this becomes a man confessing that he's riven and I drink. Mornings I turn sunrise into another empty glass and a dozen angels diving behind a mire, I swallow to save my body from itself or scream. Me and even the cherubim lost in that smoky, dense comfort, lost in darkness. And sometimes I swear even God has no alibi. I'm gonna read a couple more. I'm gonna read some, some that I think are. So maybe we'll talk about this, but I just want to say this is y'all get the book, y'all might get the book, y'all read the book. It's like one of the things about being a poet is this is really hard to be a poet and not turn your poetry into a dating ad. No, no, it's just like, it's like what happens is when you reveal your flaws, you reveal your flaws that you have like carefully manicured to show something about yourself that you're sensitive, that you're righteous, or you are sensitive, you are righteous, you are employed, you aren't a abuser, you haven't assaulted anybody. But if you want to write about incarceration, if you want to write about the lives of black men, if you only write about the things that you have expressed, oh, what's going on, man? You made it. He was mad at me a few weeks ago because I was supposed to go climbing with him, right? And then I told him three minutes before we were supposed to go get on the boat that I wasn't going to make it, that was really bad for him. Now, if I wanted to really show you the kind of person I am, I will put that in a poem. But because that makes me horrible, I'm never going to say anything like that publicly, right? But anyway, so I wrote these poems and they're all in the first person and it's because I want to be, if I want to be, people say shit like the people that's closest to the problem, I'm closest to the solution. I don't know if that's true. Sometimes if you're closest to the problem, you're just closest to the problem. But I wanted to write about what it means to be close to problems and be close to problems that you don't want to talk about. So some of the stuff is like rough and I'm going to read a few of these and then me and Clinton talk, me and Clinton talk. Night, in the night, night asleep, her eyes woman, my woman, I name her as if she is mine. As if these hours that pass for the night belong to us, my nights belong to the memories I can't shape. My night and this woman, my woman, she tells me how it wasn't supposed to be like this. This insight, another Hail Mary, another haymaker. We live somewhere between almost there and not enough, almost there. Her dreams and all that she lost for me is a kind of accountant. My woman, not my woman, not this night, not these nights. The mind is less mine, more hurt, more hover than anything else. Shadow cloud, or as she says it, you stalk me until I submit it. Love shapes itself into my hands wrapped around her throat. Have you loved like that? I'll call you P.O. It's the thing she says on this night with the men I robbed still lingering. A threat to the freedom I imagined she gave when we became cliche, neck it, tangle. This is always about me. How violence called to me like my woman moans when she thought all this was the promise of more than a funeral. When I grabbed it like that the first time her legs held me tight. My woman thinking the sales in my past can make her control this. All the ways I starve. She threatens to call my history back as a constraint or madness. She stared at me once and said she saw her brothers doing life in my eyes. And this night when we talk to each other, it is in shouts. The quilt of solitary sales I've known confess that my woman has never been my woman. How ownership and want made me split that bastard's head into a stream is what I'll never admit. What she tells me, prison killed you my love. Killed you so dead that you're not here now. You're never here, you're always. Her eyes closed at night and I awakened and swear she stares at me. She is saying that brown liquor owns me. Saying that the sales own me and that there is no room for her unless she calls the police, the state calls upon her pistol and sets me free. So I read two more and then I want to shut it down. I'm gonna read this one because I like the title. On voting for Barack Obama in a Nat Turner t-shirt. This is actually about me. The ballot ain't never been a measure of forgiveness. In prison, people don't even talk about voting, about elections, not really, not the dudes you remember because wasn't nobody black running no way. But your freedom hit just in time to see this brother has stepped in with the burden with the albatross, willing to confess that he knew people like you and you are free. And you are what they call out and off papers and living in a state where you're not disenfranchised. In prison, you listen to the ballot or the bullet and imagine that neither was for you. Having failed with the pistol and expecting the ballot to be denied. But nah, you fell free and in line, notice that this is not like the first time you and the woman you married got naked and sweated and moaned and pumped up a room not belonging to either of you. That lady is with you now and the kid is in your arms and you are wearing a Nat Turner t-shirt as if to make a statement at the family reunion. Everyone around you is black, which is a thing you notice. And you know your first ballot will be cast for a man who has to swag the seams inherited. It's early, but there's no crust in your eyes. You want it this moment like freedom. You cast a ballot for a black man in America while holding a black baby. Name a dream more American than that. Especially with your three felonies serving as beacons to alert anybody of your reckless ambition. That woman besides you is the kind of thing fools don't even dream about in prison. And she lets you hold your boy while voting as if the voting makes you and him more free. Sometimes it's just luck. Just having moved to the right state after the cell door stopped clinking behind you. The son in the arms of the man was mine and the arms of the man belonged to me. And I wore that Nat Turner t-shirt like a fucking flag, brown against my brown skin. I should have read that yesterday. My wife was like, you don't have any happy poems. I think that's a happy poem. I should have read that one. How are we going to do 20 minutes and leave 20 minutes? It's exciting to be here with Wayne. And we've been in conversation a couple of times throughout the years. Dwayne, we have similar research topics and so the book that I'm writing for New Americas, intellectually related to the issues of incarceration and has threads of these issues in there. But it's a little bit different as it deals with slavery but my dissertation, which is on its way to being done, it is, we're gonna get there. February 1st, I'm gonna turn something in. There will be words on a piece of paper. It's on the experience of people sentenced to juvenile life without parole. And so I spent a year going back and forth to Philadelphia. Pennsylvania has the largest concentration of juvenile life or juvenile lifers in the world. The United States is the only country in the world on the books that sends children to spend the rest of their life in prison. And so I'm specifically interested in how people sentenced to juvenile life without parole experience education while they're incarcerated. What does it mean to try to get a degree? What does it mean to read a book? What does it mean to write a poem? What does it mean to learn when learning is stripped of its vocational and social utility? And when you are 14, 15, 16 years old and ostensibly told that you're gonna spend the rest of your life in a cage, like what motivates education in that context? And so reading this book and knowing Dwayne and sort of his journey and his broader work, there are obviously a lot of sort of interrelated strains in that and one of the things that is, I find interesting and I find as a tension is that so many of the people that I've spoken to spoke about specifically solitary confinement as transformative space in their individual educational journeys and that going to the whole something happened there, either they met someone or the time in which they were alone and like could do nothing else led them to books in many ways led them on a trajectory from illiteracy and motivated them to learn and sometimes gave them an informal community of learning in ways that ultimately were really generative for their lives and the tension and I'm always feeling and trying to name is like, you don't want so many people, I think so many people have written in their memoirs about that, so many people I've interviewed have talked about that, but I don't wanna fall into the trap of making it seem as if like going to the whole was a good thing, right? And so even though solitary confinement is the space where so much transformation can happen, it is also a place of immense violence and psychological torture. And I guess I'm thinking of generally, how do you think of, did you experience that tension? How do you think of like learning in those contexts? I think it depends though and I think and I bristle, like every time people, I call prison cages too on occasion, but I bristle with even when you say it's a cage, right? Because like, I know people that spend their whole life in prison and you know, when you assert that it's a cage, also you assert that the other thing, like you say, there's no social or vocational utility to education, but it's immense social and vocational utility to education, even in prison. Like I am who I am because I was the person who was helping somebody get in the GED. I was the person who, I wrote somebody fucking habeas corpus petition. I got myself out of prison 60 days earlier. I got them out of prison five years earlier. Like that is an immense social and my fucker paid me. I mean, he paid me at Oodles and Noodles, but I ate well for three weeks. And so that is, so I think one of the challenges is that, you know, how do we think about incarceration in prison as something that's more complicated and nuanced and imagine how people that serve in time have had to think about, you know, if we decide that this is just a place, if we decide that it is just your approximation of hell, and it really is just folks approximation of hell, because none of us have been a hell either, right? If it just becomes your approximation of hell, then there is no ability to think about it in any kind of rich way. So yeah, I know a lot of somebody I was listening to a podcast with this, I'm not gonna say the podcast, but I was listening to a podcast and the guy was like, I went on a silent fast and I went on a retreat. And I was like, that shit sound like the hole to me? Why is that not the hole? You went to a place that you paid thousands of dollars that gave you a small room to sleep in and told you not to talk to anybody. And he was talking about how this profoundly changed his life. And so it's not this, I think we're afraid to say, like I think we're afraid to talk about the freedom that comes with constraint, which is all a gazelle is. It's an enormous amount of constraint. You gotta figure out what words Ryan would expect. When the last time that you listed a number of words that rhyme with any word, right? When's the light like, so even as a writer, the gazelle is an enormous amount of constraint. The sonnet is enormous. The last poem in the book is a crown of sonnets. But again, it's an enormous amount of constraint, but it's freedom in that. That I mean, everybody's gonna access that freedom, but some will. And I think what happens, so for those people who you don't told you those stories, maybe it was just like the space that was needed for them. But I don't know if we need to one, generalize from their experience about what conditions of solid circle confinement may do to people. Because like one of the things that comes with solid circle confinement is all of the other variables about whether or not you could deal with the shouting or whether or not you could deal with the noise, whether or not you imagine the decision of being in a hole is some type of choice that you had some proximate control over, whether you checked yourself in a hole, or whether you just able to abandon. And like, you know, this is like one of the most frustrating things about prisoners. You sit there and you think, what if I just decide that I wanna get out of this city? What happens? Like literally, like what just happens if I just say, fuck it, I don't wanna be in this cell no more. And you kick in the door and the door doesn't open. Like that's what breaks you, right? So it's not even just like being in a hole, that's the thing that happens is some people aren't equipped emotionally or intellectually to deal with what it means to just be absolutely deprived of those types of possibilities. Only time that I was in a hole that it really like fucked my head up a little bit. And only thing to say to me was to do beside me and I was like, oh fuck it, I'm good. Cause I was like, you know, he did it for me and I just don't wanna deal with this shit that he dealing with. And he said something, he was like, this is my poem, this fucked up, I just thought about this, but it's in that poem. And I said, this is all about me or something. You know, people be like, you know, some kind of saying that it's not about, it's not about me, it's you or something like that. But he was like, it's not about you. And he was like, he was spitting on a door, he was throwing a chair, he got charged with assault for throwing a chair at the door. I don't know how because the door was made of like steel. He got charged with assault, was spitting, attempted assault for like spitting at the glass that the spit was not gonna go through unless it was like sephalitic spit. And I still don't know if it would have worked there. But like watching this dude degenerate was like, oh shit, I'm good. This is somebody that's fucked up. And then what was crazy to me is the whole reason why he was degenerating though is because they tried to take in the population. Can you just explain what that means? Folks who might not know. Oh, so he was in a hole because he like checked himself in. Then he had caught a bunch of charges to stack up time so that he had to be in a hole for like longer and longer. And then all of that time had been served and they were saying now it's time for you to go to general population. It was a smallish prison. They didn't have a lot of sales in a hole. And they was like, we need this space for somebody who's actually a threat to the institution. And he just flipped and he snapped and so he got this other series of charges. But I was in a hole that time and I missed the Super Bowl. It was for some bullshit. Like I gave somebody the finger and I didn't have to demonstrate in that way. Sorry. And I told somebody, fuck you. I called this woman a bitch too. That's one of those things that I don't like talking about. This is the last time I called a woman a bitch but we were in a unit. And another reason I don't like the word cages is because a lot of people live in dorms. And so we were living in a dorm. We were living in a barrack and we were supposed to go outside. They didn't let us outside. And I was like, you forgot to let us outside. She was like, no, I didn't. I let y'all and I got mad. And I was like, bitch, that's why I'm like talking to y'all. And she was like, what you called me? And I was like, oh, shit. I called you a bitch. I was like, this is my, you know. And then I was like, but I didn't mean anything by it. And I walked away and I told the other guy to let me out. He was like, no, we already opened the door. I was like, motherfucker, you lying. And I just like tapped my finger up against the glass. And they said that they were afraid of me. And they made me go to the first unit manager. And the guy didn't. He was like, this is bullshit. He sent me back, made them let me go outside. They waited to do left and called the next supervisor and say they were afraid of me. And they put me in a hole. They gave me 15 days in solitary for calling somebody a bitch twice. And they gave me 15 days in a hole for giving do with the finger. And I remember that experience because that hole was like, I had like 46 days before I went home. And I was just like, why the fuck am I in a hole? And the Eagles were about to be in a Super Bowl when Dominic Minerva, Terrell Owens, and I just knew they won and they didn't. And I felt like it was my fault. But, and they just gave me a Bible to read. And I literally though, remember like day 17, I was like, man, shit. I was like, you gotta let me out this motherfucker. Can you describe what solitary, to the best of your ability to describe what solitary confinement is like? Because I've heard some people do this thing where, I imagine it's impossible to describe unless you've been there. And I imagine it's also different in different prisons and jails, but like some of my people say like you locked yourself in the bathroom for an hour long. Yeah, maybe like, it's like, cause it depends, different prisons is different. Some prisons you in a hole, but you could, you could talk to people and you could see people and you could see on a yacht and you could yell and talk to people on a yacht. So in that prison, you know, you're still deprived of your freedom, but it feels like you could still be like connected to a community. Some prisons you in a hole and you could lay on one prison I was in a hole for like six months. I could lay on the floor and talk to the dude beside him. And we literally like, like told each other like out of fucking life story. You talk for like three, four hours a day, laying on the floor, talking through a vent. So you can't see them when you're... You can't see them, but some prisons, like the one I was at then, it was just like a really narrow pathway. The fucking window was up real, real high. You couldn't see through the window and that was like oppressive. And you could kind of yell out the vent or you could yell out the door, but you know, you didn't really know who you was talking to. So it kind of depends on what prison you were. I was at one prison where the door was so thick they took your mattress every day. So you couldn't sleep through all the days and the door was so thick that you couldn't yell or talk to anybody. So you would have mattress at night? You would have it from five o'clock on. So they would take it at eight o'clock in the morning. So you couldn't like sleep during the day. It depends on what institution you're at, how clean the hole is, it depends on what institution you're at. How often they let you take a shower, what it looks like when they let you outside for rec. Some places they let you outside for rec and you're sort of like in a dog kennel. How long would you go? Three hours. So you go out and push up for three hours, talk shit for three hours, whatever. So it depends. I mean, it was different from every institution. But I remember all of them though. I mean, you don't forget. I remember every single fucking cell in the hole I was in. So you don't forget. So in that way, maybe it is like dangerously oppressive, but yeah, and even that poem night though, that's what the poem is about too. It's like the challenge and the fallibility of somebody who's been in prison or their own memory of that experience. Because you got to tell yourself a story about it that makes you okay anyway. So that story isn't necessarily true. Yeah. One of the things I was going to ask next is in the book, I think it's mostly all in first person. And some of the stories are autobiographical and some of them are not. Like, how did you think about what it meant to, why, how did you make a decision to make everything in first person, even the stories that were not specific to your experience? And was there to hear around that, right? That like somebody- I would tell you one thing, it was like, this shit is real. And I was so glad that the cat in New York did this review before the book came out and that I don't know this motherfucker and when he might be in this room right now, I literally don't know what he looks like. And I'm glad though, because he talked about this very thing. And the reason why I was important is because, you know, like I ain't raped nobody. I ain't sexually assaulted nobody. I haven't beat up my wife. I haven't tried to beat up my wife because I think she probably would beat my ass anyway. But like, and I drink, but like I don't think I'm alcoholic. Like it's a whole lot of shit ahead that I just think does not capture me at all. She say, why put it in the first person? It's because I got a really good life. And I feel like it's something obnoxious about me trying to tell all of these stories that I want to tell and constantly shifting those stories away from me. So then what happens is like, I get to be the hero of this narrative. And you read the book, I was like, Dwayne is a great guy, but he knows some scumbag motherfuckers, you know? Like, why does he talk about them? And I think, but also I think that like, we want to start these conversations that we don't want to have, you know? Like, I'm tired of people talking about mass incarceration. The shit is like, it's like boring to me now. Nobody talks about who should be in prison. Everybody talks about who shouldn't be in prison, right? But then you get robbed, or like your folks get raped, or like, you know, somebody get the shit beat out of them, or somebody get murdered. And then everybody wants to talk about prison now and it's okay for somebody to be locked up. But we never talked about it in the context of our own lives. And so the book was me like really contemplating just shit that I knew. And I remember sending one of the poems to poetry. I didn't even send a shit to get published, right? I have recorded it, because I started to say poetry should live. And so the way to make poetry live is if I write something that I think is dope, I'll record it into this contraption that's like my cell phone, my camera, my video camera, my spy equipment, like it's everything, right? I recorded it into this and I just texted it to somebody. And I was like, yo, I was like, don't know what the fuck with this, right? And I- So poetry is poetry magazine. Oh, poetry. It's a magazine called Poetry. Yeah. It's confusing because you're like, I sent it to poetry, and you're like, really? And people were like, this motherfucker is crazy. He sent it to his poems to poetry, did he send it to a son or a haku? No. Yeah, thank you. So, but I sent it to them and he was like, yo, this is dope. We'll publish it. And I was like, oh, You sent it to the audio record. I sent the audio recording. And I was like, oh, that wasn't really, really why I sent it. You know, like, one, I feel like it's super unofficial. And then two, I was like, I was like, I fuck it. I'm excited, you know, publish it. So then I get an email back and I'll read the last on it. I just, I'm not gonna read the old poem, but I'll just read the last piece. It says, and live without regret for your guilty pleas. Shit. Mornings I rise twice, once for account that will not come and later with the city's wild birds who find freedom without counsel. I left prison with debts no honest man could pay. Walked out imagining I'd lapped my troubles. But a girl once said no to my unlistening ears. Dismayed that I didn't pause. Remorse can't calm those evils. I've lost myself in some kind of algebra that turns my life into an equation that zeroes out regardless of my efforts. Algophobia means to fear pain. I still fear who knows all I've done. Why regret this thing I've worn? The sentence bouquet, house shredded and torn. And so like they email me and it's like the way and I don't know if you know this but it seems like somebody might've got assaulted in that last sonnet. And we just, and I was like, yeah, yeah, I was like, yeah. I was like, all right, we just wanted to make sure because you know, seems like you assaulted somebody. And I was like, no, it doesn't seem like I assaulted anybody, right? And then I'm ready to say about this shit too. And then me and her had this conversation later and I was like, you know, the real thing is you was saying Dwayne, it seems like you wrote this poem in the first person and I know somebody got raped in the last sonnet and I kinda liked you. But now I kinda think that you're a bad person. And also I wanna give you a chance not to come out like that in our magazine, right? And I was like, well, sometimes I didn't do it. But what does it mean to live in a society where a woman is raped as often as a woman is raped? And nobody talks about it ever in verse. And then when they talk about it, they always wanna distance themselves from it because they wanna make clear that they don't know anybody who does shit like this, right? And so the decision is that it was too much uncomfortable messy shit in the book. And I was thinking about the book as a one-man show from the very start. And I was like, well, if it's a one-man show from the start and if it's all these stories, I think it's apparent that all of them aren't the same person. Well, fuck it. Somebody read my last book and was like, and I had a line that said, I sold crack to pregnant women. And somebody, a reviewer, wrote a review and said, in this book, Reginald Dwayne Betts submits to selling crack to pregnant women. And I was like, well, what is it that maybe wanna defend myself so much? And I was like, oh, it's what makes us all wanna defend ourselves. I fucking hate dudes that sell crack to pregnant women. They belong in prison. We all want people in prison. We don't ever wanna say it. And so I was like, if I write this book, then I gotta at least confront my own feelings about all of these things. And then maybe like end up in this situation when I'm having a public conversation about it. And I guess, thinking about what are the, cause you read this book and you don't know, and you have no blame that's here to preface, that like this is not all autobiographical. And I guess I'm thinking too of what this, what it looks like to write something like that in the first person in ever, but also in a me too era moment in which like people's thinking around how we collectively reckon with the history of people who have harmed women and others, what that looks like and that there's no, and I don't, you know, did you ever think of putting an author's note? Did you ever think or making clear that these were like, either stories of other people or composites or were you just like, I am willing to accept that people may think that this is me given my, the fact that you are writing a poem about prison and coming out of prison that you wrote a memoir about being in prison. Like it's very much entrenched in your own narrative. Like, how do you sort of hold those things together in the way that you were thinking about it? Or were you just like, I want it to be messed up? No, I mean, I guess I'm afraid for my children. You know, like, I don't, you know, you know how they respond, how they respond when they grow and I don't want them to think that like, I mean, they'd be like, damn, this motherfucker's a ninja. Like, he was beating shit out of mommy. How could we never hurt him fighting? Like, how is this possible? You know, like, I suspect that my kids, like, even I'm afraid of what my kids will think. I suspect that my kids will be like, no, no, mommy would have beat his ass, that shit did not happen at all. Like, so I, so in that front, I think I'm kind of clear. My family, maybe I'm concerned, but I think they know me. But I, you know, fuck it, I mean. For their conversations you had to have with your wife or your family before you made those? No decisions. No, I mean, I sent her the book. Like, you know, if you got time to read it, but you don't read it, you don't read it. And I was at a reading once and I started to read night. And I was like, oh no, I'm not reading this in front of these people. It was a bunch of people from like, from my school or shit. And it was like a bunch of friends and I was like, it was like at one of these dinners. And I'm reading it. I'm like, oh, I'm not gonna read that poem. But no, but then there's other poems that I think strike some kind of balance. You know, it's like, if absence was the source of silence, which is a poem about what it means to be raising sons and having to talk to my sons about the violence that the hands of men do. And that poem was born out of a real experience. I used to get on the train early in the morning to go to New York for work. And one morning I'm out, it's like three o'clock and walking to the train station. And this woman saw me as I turned the corner with a new fort. And swear to God, it's like her whole soul jumped out of her body. And she ran into the street. And I was just like, you know, and then the other part, and I say this because I talked about it before. So the day I came home, my mom, how long has it been now? 14, I came home March 4th, 2005. Not that I remember the exact date. So I guess it's been 14 years almost. And a little bit more than 14 years. But the day I came home, my mom told me that she got raped. Like a couple of weeks after I got locked up. Not the whole time, you know, fucking hate and system, like fuck prosecutors, fuck the police, fuck the government, I'm a modern day slave. You know what I mean? I was like, all that shit, you know? All the conspiracy theories. My mom was like, yeah, I got raped. Another bit of black community, you know? Don't white people don't need to come around today. They just, they don't come around here unless they buy and drugs. So I know who raped my mom, you know? And took her five years to go through the prosecution. Five years, fucking public defender represented the dude. Say my mom was lying. My mom got raped. The gunpoint, she runs into the middle of the street. Right? My mom told me the story years later. But the first time she just said, what happened, let it go. We can talk about it again for 10 years. So 10 years later, people asked me if I wanted to talk to my mom on a podcast. My mom wanted to be interviewed with me. I was like, well, fuck what my mom wanted to do that shit. No, she don't want to do that. But she's an adult. So I'm gonna ask her, let her make her own decision, but don't expect too much. This was in a sex love and death podcast. So whatever the hell it's called. So my mom says, yeah, sure. I was like, okay. So she's like, should we prepare? I was like, no, no. So I mean, what are we gonna say? I was like, I don't know. I mean, she'll ask some questions and we'll just, you know, we'll just play it by ear. So we go on. Lady asked my mom, how was it going to trial for your son? Face of time in prison. My mom was like, well, you know, it was really difficult because at the same time I was going to trial for the person in prison. I was like, wait, wait, huh? I was like, oh, shit. So we talking about, damn, we, so we, we're gonna talk about, you know, this is gonna be on television and like, and so my mom is like, yeah. So we talked about it. And she talked about the experience and how fucked up it was and also how fucked up the system was. I wasn't a single defense attorney she could call. Not one, not no public defender, not no righteous, I'm against mass incarceration, motherfuckers ain't exist at all. And they always want to be super righteous. They want to like, they want to tell this story that like they need to defend as other people. And I'm like, where was they when my mom got raped, right? And so, so then, so then I write this poem or I'm trying to broach these questions. But part of the reason I'm trying to approach these questions is because what I know is that the dude that raped my mom raped two other black women. He went to prison. He was able to disappear, right? And ain't no real way to know what people locked that for. For things separate from those from the rape or for the rapes. Yeah, yeah. And then what I know is that he's like a bunch of dudes that I did time with a bunch of dudes that I did time with. So like, I'm supposed to advocate for the decrease in incarceration. And I can't even have a conversation about what it means to like wanna see somebody not in prison who's committed a sexual assault. And if I write about it, I'm supposed to like I'm supposed to be afraid about how you gonna think about me if I write about this shit. But I don't know, I just don't think that that should be my primary concern. I think that I got some other concerns and I ain't even got shit anyway. Like what the fuck it look like? What you want, like, I'm not gonna be on the podcast. I'm not gonna be in your next magazine. You gonna put some Facebook posts about me because you think I raped somebody. It's like, I don't even have shit for you to take from me actually. So I felt like in writing a book, I was better off saying a shit that I needed to say and trying to say it in a way that provoked the conversation as opposed to trying to say it in a way that continued to kind of make me look like, I know who I am. And I'm certain that people who know me know who I am. And so I don't know, I just didn't, I might just be really, really reckless though. And I might super regret this later on. You know what I mean? I might regret it later on, but on the front end, I was like, maybe I'm just gonna trust. I'm gonna trust that what I'm trying to do is create conversations. And I remember telling, and I talk about my mom there, but I only talk about it because she talked about it and I asked if I could talk about it. And I talked about it because I spent, I spent a decade talking about mass incarceration. And then that spent five minutes publicly talking about what it meant to know that the black dude, like that this happens all of the time in our communities. It seemed like a woeful, woeful failure on my part to imagine a system without prisons and not at the same time imagine a world without rape. And we not imagine a world without rape if we can't talk about it. And then if the only way that I could talk about it is to situate it in somebody that we can mutually have discussed for, then they ain't really willing to talk about it. So you know, for like three seconds or when people read the book, I don't know. I mean, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but I think it's more of a... Before I turn it over to audience, I want to, I'm curious about what was the texts and the writers and the books that were most formative to you while you were away? Oh, while I was away. Lucille Clifton, who I wrote a piece about recently in the New York Times. Ethertonite, who I wrote about in my first book, my first line in my memoir comes from Ethertonite poem, Auguste Hedda Lee, which is one of the reasons I really liked the Carolyn crochet, the review that came out in the New York Times. Cause I don't know her either, but she just like peeped the connection between like me and Auguste Hedda Lee because like all of my books have had guzzles in it. Steinbeck, Wadman, August Wilson. But if you don't put up read, man, I've read this dude that wrote this book. Man, what's this doing? And you wrote a book called, Man, read everything, actually. You know, I read all kinds of stuff. I read stuff that I thought was great, stuff that I don't like now. Alba Murray, a trained whistle guitar, was like a fantastic book. It had this line that was like, her problem wasn't, her problem was that she didn't understand it being human. Man, she had to suffer like everybody else. Like that should always stay with me. I don't know, I've read it the past time. I've read it the past time. I've read it to become a better writer, better thinker. At what point did you know when you were inside that you wanted to be a writer? Oh, I'm ignorant. When I found, as soon as I got my sentence, because I was gonna go to school for engineering, I was gonna go to Georgia Tech and play point guard. And I had this shit mapped out completely, right? And I was a lineage, it was Kenny Anderson, it was Travis Best, then it was gonna be me, like great Georgia Tech point guards. And I got locked up and was like, I can't be an engineer from prison. I was like, so fuck, I'm gonna be a writer. And this was at the jail. I was like, fuck, I'm gonna be a writer. Had no clue what that meant. The first book I read cover to cover was A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines. Like did I opened up and didn't finish reading until I was done? That should profoundly change so much about what I think. And now I like profoundly dislike some things. Cause like, how horrible must that be to say that like what you desire is to make a man go to the death to get executed about that book? About that book. Like it's like profoundly disturbing now. Cause I'm like, no, that's not what I'm gonna do. We got to get you off death row. I don't know if I could accept that as my responsibility. So the thing to think about the books that you read that were like, I've recently had some books that I've been thinking about that were incredibly formative to me that now I go back and look at and I'm like, oh no man, that was, that was, I even, even classic tech, like even native son. Look, how are you gonna kill the white lady by accident and kill Betsy on purpose? Like this shit has profoundly bothered me for like decades now, you know? Like I just don't even understand. I don't understand how that worked. Like they turned to do criminal when it came time to commit violence against a black woman. The motherfucker was innocent. Like the shit that happened was an accident, right? He was innocent until it came time to murder a black woman who was riding with him. I don't know what the fuck she was thinking about anyway, but she riding my bed. No, that's, that's the summation of my, my tension with Richard Wright. So let's open it up for folks who have questions. We do have people walking remotely, so please turn your microphone on. Oh, what, we do? Yeah. Aristotle, you gotta catch a microphone. For sure. My name is Aristotle Jones. I work for the Urban Institute in the Justice Policy Center. And I know DeWayn kind of personally now, thank God. But in her novel, Alice Walker, The Color Purple, she writes that time moves slowly, but passes quickly. Can you tell us what have you learned through your time here on earth, not just in prison sentences, but you being a father, being a husband, being a writer, being a poet. What have you learned about yourself? What have I learned about myself? I think, I don't know, I don't know, man. That was like existential. What have I learned about myself? A long time ago, I thought, this is what I've learned about myself actually. I thought that, I thought I had all the answers actually. When I was young, I was convinced that I had all of the answers. And I thought that I was better than everybody else around who I expected to go to prison. And I expected like most of my friends to go to prison because we smoke weed, a lot of us sold drugs, there was guns around, I just expected people to go to prison. And I went to prison before everybody and it devastated me. And the one thing I learned about myself from that experience is, what changed me is that I don't think I cared about people as much before then. And so maybe what I've learned about myself since then is that I care a lot about people and prison made me care a lot about people. Which is strange, because it's like being super vulnerable, you actually shouldn't care that much about other people. You should probably be more concerned with your own safety, but I do think over the time, and then that's the one thing that's followed me throughout my whole life is that I care a lot about other people, or at least I try to. And the other thing I, yeah, I don't know, I think that's it. Or maybe it's also though, what I've learned is that so much of what we expect to be is in my life at least has been premised on what I've been willing to say that I expect to be. So when I decided to be a writer, I had no clue what it meant to be a writer. But it was like, I was in prison and I was so down that I could imagine something that I had no clue of if it was possible. When I came home, I realized that I allowed myself to be constrained to my ambition by my surroundings. Even when my surroundings were academic institutions. So had you talked to me when I was living here in 2010, 2011 about law school? I'd have been like, I got three felonies. What I look like going to law school. Even though I had been working on legal issues, the only thing changed when I ended up going to law school was that I was at Harvard Law School when I made the decision, writing inside the law school. And I find it kind of disturbing because I would think that we could become things without being proximate to them. But it was easy for me to imagine being a student at Harvard Law School. This is when you were on fellowship. This is when I was on fellowship at Harvard's Radcliffe Institution. And me and my man, Uzo O'Waila, used to go to the Harvard Law School's cafeteria to write because we didn't know anybody. And it was there that I decided to go to law school, but it was really only because I was there. And it was actually because somebody else had said that they got it in my fate and then went to law school. And I was like, huh, you could do that? Oh, shit, I'm going to law school. And I'ma go here, because you go here. Which should not be the way, it shouldn't be the thing that we have to see to make a decision. So those are the two things. And in some ways I was more bold about what I was willing to dream when I was in prison than when I was free. I'm Gary Decker. I work for the Alliance for Youth Organizing. And I wanted to have a question for both of you to discuss. Clint, I know you write a lot about imagining a world without prisons and prison abolition. And Duane, you talked a little bit today about the necessity of prisons or that some people should be locked up. And I was wondering if both of you could talk a little bit about if those futures are reconcilable. And if not, why? How much time we got left? I'm sure we have four minutes left. What I'll say, I think something that's helpful to keep in mind is that abolition exists, conceptions of abolition exist on a spectrum as many other things do, right? So even in the era of antebellum slavery, different abolitionists had very different notions of what it meant to get to that point, right? William Lloyd Garrison had his own conception of what it meant. Frederick Douglass had his own conception. Nat Turner for Harriet Tubman, John Brown. John Brown was like, all right, we're going to blow up Harper's Ferry. Frederick Douglass, you're trying to roll. Frederick Douglass was like, you crazy. I'm not going to do that. He asked Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman was like, I don't know you. What are you doing? This is a lot. So even, I think it's important to remember that abolition has different connotations for different folks. And when I think of abolition as a North Star, I think of it as like, what does it mean to build the sort of world in which prisons become increasingly and increasingly less relevant to the society that we live in? What does it look like to provide the types of jobs and social services and resources and health care and the sort of general society that makes it so that so many people's lives are not put on a trajectory in the first place that ultimately would lead them to exist within the carceral state? And so it's more of a sort of paradigm of thinking differently about what type of world we have to build to make prisons less relevant and to diminish the power of prisons. Does that mean I think that there should not be a place where you put some people who represent an immediate threat to people's safety and people who have committed harm and represent continued threats to other people? I do think that I believe that one can be an abolitionist and still believe that there are institutions like that that should exist. But that's not what current prisons do. Current prisons operate very differently. And it's tough, right? Because I think issues of sexual assault, domestic violence. I mean, and part of what also I'm clear about is that I know if somebody ever did something to my kids, somebody ever did something to my family, I would want that person. In that moment, I would want that person to go to prison. I would want them to suffer. I would want them to hurt. I would want them to spend the rest of their life in a cage. I also don't think that my emotional response to harm that has been committed against people I'm proximate to is what should dictate public policy. I think there has to be. I think, and it's complicated, right? Like victims' rights are important. Are also sometimes, depending on the state you're in, I would say disproportionately informing what the sentence of someone will look like. And that's not to say that it shouldn't count at all. But it is to say, how can we think holistically maybe a little bit differently about the sort of entire thing? That's my two-minute answer. No, I think I agree. But also, and I don't think I was making a case for the need for prisons. I think I was hoping that I was making a case for the need for a hard conversation about what we believe should happen in certain situations. I mean, most of the prisons that exist in the United States right now are horrendous. And they are probably criminogenic just because of the conditions, the lack of resources, just because of the lack of resources for those who work in prison institutions. I mean, it's not like anybody goes to college and says, I want to be a prison guard. So I would say that maybe I was just saying a need to have a more complicated conversation. And the other thing though is I'm not sure if like victims drive our responses to homicides. And they drive our responses to sexual assaults. But I'm not sure if, I mean, most of the people that's locked up probably had cases where the victim didn't show up at all. I mean, you've got a burglary case, you're going to jail. And a lot of people that end up going to jail aren't going to jail because they're at one charge. They're going to jail because they had three charges before. And so I also think even though, you know, where has an outside influence? And this was my criticism of like the whole notion of progressive prosecutor. It's like, what has an outside influence isn't necessarily victims, but it's our fucked up statutory schemes. It's our laws. It's like the sentencing guidelines. You know, like if the sentencing guidelines permit you to get 120 days for DUI, then you're going to get 120 days for DUI because you created a structure that says, listen, you could have got three years. I gave you 120 days. It looks like you gave this person a break. So I actually think that we actually should be more thoughtful about reconsidering what we conceptualize punishment as being. And frankly, to say that punishment or culpability shouldn't exist, which is often how we read the abolition conversation, it's like, well, you also can't deny me agents. Like I cajacked somebody. I also want to feel like I paid my due. Now we can have a better and a more adept. We could be more adept at having a conversation about what does it mean to pay what you owe. But we're not even having that. So when we talk about abolition, and I do think it exists on the spectrum, but sadly, when we try to enter it like AOC had a recent tweet and she was like, and don't talk to me about violence. You know, we know violence matters. I was like, get the fuck out of here. You know, you having this whole conversation and I haven't heard yet anybody talk about reform and the sentencing guidelines. I haven't heard anybody yet saying that the most profound problem facing prosecutors in the state of New York is that, say, Louisiana, because we both know a little bit about Louisiana, the most profound problem facing prosecutors in Louisiana is that you could get 95 years for robbery. We don't need to talk about abolition. We need to actually talk about why it's insane that you could catch a robbery beef and get 95 years in prison. And so why isn't the tweet about that? This is why I'm not a politician though. Because I'm thinking, no, because no, because I'm thinking about my man who's doing 37 years because he got four robberies in four different counties and he only got nine years for each robbery and he's still locked up. But Malvo is the case that we're hearing today. Malvo responds for 12 murders, but in the same state of Virginia, a motherfucker that's doing like 60 years who ain't killed, nobody can get the lawyers that represent Malvo to represent him. And I know, because I asked. I know, because I tried, right? And so, you know. Let's do one last short question. Hi, my name's Nina Satija. I'm a reporter for The Washington Post. Oh, wait. I don't disagree with the thing you said earlier. That's all. I totally get it. No offense taken. You mentioned being tired of this conversation happening around mass incarceration and I think progressive prosecutors and I totally identify with that. And I'm just wondering what, but that's really what's dominating the media. I mean, that's what's being talked about in this whole conversation of criminal justice reform is happening now on the presidential candidate level, but it doesn't feel like there's a lot of real like nuance to it or real meaning to it. And I guess I wondering if you can talk about that. And I mean, sort of in a very, yeah. I haven't heard the word. I mean, I've been watching all of the debates. California locks up more people than like any state in the country, maybe Texas rivals California. I'm certain that the sentencing guidelines in California just as atrocious as the sentencing guidelines in every state in the country. I think they just changed them up. They didn't change. I'm certain that they didn't. Cause they've had like a huge drop based on, if there was some Supreme Court case. It was a ninth circuit case that said that they had to reduce their prison population. And I mean, but I would say this though, what California has done now is that California has been the best state on like allowing parole for juveniles, for all of the juvenile life is, and then up in when people could get parole. So first it was like, if you were juvenile, then it was like, if you were 21, and I think now it might be if you were 25. I think California has been great in doing that, but that's not a part of the presidential debate either. So I guess I'm just saying, I don't know if it's a, I don't think it's a national conversation about the fact that we incarcerate too many people. And then even if we say we incarcerate too many people, it's definitely not a national conversation about the fact that it's too many people currently incarcerated. Like we all have a conversation about how one thing that could happen is in 1994 when Bill Clinton passed the crime bill. I mean, one of the things that they did was they linked the funding for building new prisons to truth and sentencing. And so you don't have a single presidential candidate saying, if I'm elected president, I'm gonna find a way to incentivize states to bring back parole because I know one of the things that happened with the 1994 crime bill was that you had a massive amount of states across the country that got rid of parole in response to this nebulous, nebulous thing we call like truth and sentencing. So I just, I don't know if I would, I just don't know if I could honestly say that we're having a national conversation about mass incarceration. And so maybe what I meant is that I'm just frustrated and exhausted with a conversation about incarceration that doesn't seem to touch the lives of people I know. Right, it doesn't seem to touch the lives of dudes I know doing 30 years for robbery, doing 50 years for murder, you know, and all prisons I visit, what guys is doing like just like crazy numbers. It just doesn't seem to revolve around them. And I think what is true is that there is a disconnect between what actually, so the conversation everybody's interested in mass incarceration now. And I think it is true that there is a disconnect between the people's desire to want to end mass incarceration and like the actual, and what that political conversation looks like and the actual like functional ways in which you would actually decarcerate, which means you would have to let out a lot of people who ostensibly have committed real harm against other people. And that looks like a very different conversation, right? Like it's one thing if the mythology of like the nonviolent drug offender and Johnny John on the corner, like getting locked up for 25 years for selling weed, like that's a very easy, palatable political narrative that like everybody can say like this is wrong, we're gonna end mass incarceration, make sure that kids selling weed, aren't locked up for 25 years while medical marijuana is making millions, millions of dollars. That's true. That's also like a very small percentage of the conversation, right? Same thing with private prisons. Everybody's like private prisons, making all this money off of private prison, people making a profit off and incarcerating people's bodies. It's true. It is egregious. It's also only 8% of all prisons in the country, right? So it's part of it. Is that like if you shut down private prisons, they letting them guys go home? Right, no, exactly. I mean, maybe we just didn't have a heard their part. And I think that that, and I resonate with Wayne saying that piece about like the conversation has to be presented in a more complex way. If we are to, if we, if you just want to let out people sentenced to nonviolent drug offenses, that's fine, but that's not ending mass incarceration. So if you want to actually end mass incarceration, if you want to move toward a society in which we don't have 2.2 million people in prison and jail, we don't have 11 million people cycling in and out of jail every year. We have to think very differently about, as Wayne was saying, like what these long sentences are. Like, should somebody, like I've spent the past couple of years with people, a lot of folks who like, when they were 15 years old, they took somebody's life. Should that person spend the rest of their life in prison? And like, that's the real question. Like, should that person spend the rest of their life in prison? Should they spend 20 years in prison, 50 years in prison, five years in prison, 10, I mean, so, and that's the conversation that like is a political landmine. So people don't talk about it, but that's the only way that you actually move toward a decarcerated society. So I think we're all out of time. So thank you all for joining us today. Books are on sale, so if you'd like to come. You can't come and not buy a book. Yeah, and if you decide to burn it, at least buy it first. And so please join me in thanking Dwayne and Kim for having me. Thank you.