The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me’

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

At 16, Reginald Dwayne Betts was sent to prison for nine years after pleading guilty to a carjacking, to having a gun, and to an attempted robbery.“Because Senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes,” Mr. Betts said in an essay he wrote for The New York Times Magazine.He had hoped that her presidential bid would be an opportunity for the country to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a thoughtful way. Instead, he explained, the basic fact of her profession as a prosecutor was used by many as an indictment against her.On today’s “Sunday Read,” listen to Mr. Betts’s exploration of his experiences with the criminal justice system, Kamala Harris and the conversations that America needs to have about mass incarceration.This story was written and introduced by Reginald Dwayne Betts and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

My name is Reginald Dwayne Betts, and I just published a piece with the New York Times Magazine on Senator and now Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris. When I started working on this profile of the Senator, I imagined that I had something to say because when I was 16, I went to prison. I had something to say because when I was 16, I went to prison. Did nine years, came home. So I thought trying to talk about her work as a prosecutor, where her whole career started, I thought that my experiences gave me an in. You know, maybe gave me something different to say about her. Both about who she is and how her work as a prosecutor might tell us something about the conversations that we needed to have around criminal justice reform.

The story started out as a traditional profile. Nah, nah, maybe that ain't even true. I mean, I wanted it to start out as a traditional profile. But even the first flight I took to see her speak publicly, I had to stop in Richmond, Virginia first because it just coincided with a meeting I had with the Virginia parole board where I was arguing for the freedom of a friend of mine who was doing life or was doing life for robbery. And around that same time, I was talking to my mom about this violent, violent crime that she'd been a victim of. And so for me, very early, I recognized that whatever I wanted to say about Harris was just intertwined with these things that I was trying to figure out about my friends and my mom. And for me, a story about Harris ended up being a story about all of that.

a story about Harris ended up being a story about all of that. I am grateful for you taking the time to listen to it. And I hope you enjoy it being read to you by J.D. Jackson. So here it is, Kamala, my mother, and me. Because Senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry 3's. Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors, my friends and I were exchanging tales of being railroaded by them.

Shackled in oversized green jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax County, Virginia courtroom tell a judge that in one night, I'd single-handedly changed suburban shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor said I did was true. I carried a pistol, carjacked a man, tried to rob two women. He needs a long penitentiary sentence, the prosecutor told the judge. I faced life in prison for carjacking the man. I pleaded guilty to that, to having a gun, to an attempted robbery. I was 16 years old.

to an attempted robbery. I was 16 years old. The old heads in prison would call me lucky for walking away with only a nine-year sentence. I'd been locked up for about 15 months when I entered Virginia's Southampton Correctional Center in 1998, the year I should have graduated from high school. In that prison, there were probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most of us had lengthy sentences, 30, 40, 50 years, all for violent felonies. Public talk of mass incarceration has centered

on the war on drugs, wrongful convictions, and Kafkaesque sentences for nonviolent charges, while circumventing the robberies, home invasions, murders, and rape cases that brought us to prison. The most difficult discussion to have about criminal justice reform has always been about violence and accountability. justice reform has always been about violence and accountability. You could release everyone from prison who currently has a drug offense, and the United States would still outpace nearly every other country when it comes to incarceration. According to the Prison Policy Institute, of the nearly 1.3 million people incarcerated in state prisons, 183,000 are incarcerated for murder,

17,000 for manslaughter, 165,000 for sexual assault, 169,000 for robbery, and 136,000 for assault. That's more than half of the state prison population. assault. That's more than half of the state prison population. When Harris decided to run for president, I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a way that didn't lose sight of what violence and the sorrow it creates does to families and communities. Instead, many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris's profession into an indictment against her. Shorthand for her career became, she's a cop, meaning her allegiance was with a system that conspires through prison and policing to harm black people in America. In the past decade or so, we have certainly seen ample

evidence of how corrupt the system can be. Michelle Alexander's best-selling book, The New Jim Crow, which argues that the war on drugs marked the return of America's racist system of segregation and legal discrimination, Ava DuVernay's When They See Us, a series about the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, and her documentary Thirteenth, which delves into mass incarceration more broadly, and Just Mercy, a book by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer that has also been made into a film, chronicling his pursuit of justice for a man on death row who was eventually exonerated. All of these describe the destructive force of prosecutors, giving a lot of run to the belief that anyone who works within a system responsible for such carnage warrants public shame.

My mother had an experience that gave her a different perspective on prosecutors, though I didn't know about it until I came home from prison on March 4, 2005, when I was 24. That day, she sat me down and said, I need to tell you something. We were in her bedroom in the townhouse in Suitland, Maryland, that had been my childhood home, where as a kid she'd call me to bring her a glass of water. I expected her to tell me that, despite my years in prison,

everything was good now. But instead, she told me about something that happened nearly a decade earlier, just weeks after my arrest. She left for work before the sun rose, as she always did, heading to the federal agency that had employed her my entire life. She stood at a bus stop 100 feet from my high school, awaiting the bus that would take her to the train that would take her to a stop near her job in the nation's capital. But on that morning, a man yanked her into a secluded space, placed a gun to her head, and raped her. When she could escape, she ran wildly into the 6 a.m. traffic.

When she could escape, she ran wildly into the 6 a.m. traffic. My mother's words turned me into a mumbling and incoherent mess, unable to grasp how this could have happened to her. I knew she kept this secret to protect me. I turned to Google and searched the word rape, along with my hometown, and was wrecked by the violence against women that I found. My mother told me her rapist was a black man, and I thought he should spend the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of prison cells that I knew so well. The prosecutor's job, unlike the defense attorneys or judges, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do? The outrage at this country's criminal justice system is loud today, but it hasn't led us to develop better ways of

confronting my mother's world from nearly a quarter century ago. Weekends, visiting her son in a prison in Virginia. Weekdays, attending the trial of the man who sexually assaulted her. We said goodbye to my grandmother in the same Baptist church that, in June 2019, Senator Kamala Harris, still pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, went to give a major speech about why she became a prosecutor. I hadn't been inside Brooklyn Baptist Church for a decade, and returning reminded me of Grandma Mary and the eight years of letters she mailed to me in prison. The occasion for Harris's speech was the annual Freedom Fund dinner of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.

The evening began with the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing. And at the opening chord, nearly everyone in the room stood. nearly everyone in the room stood. There to write about the senator, I had been standing already and mouthed the words of the first verse before realizing I'd never sung any further. Each table in the banquet hall was filled with folks dressed in their Sunday best.

Servers brought plates of food and pitchers of iced tea to the tables. Nearly everyone was black. The room was too loud for me to do more than crouch beside guests at their tables and scribble notes about why they attended. Speakers talked about the chapter's long history in the civil rights movement. One called for the current generation of young rappers to tell a different story about sacrifice. The youngest speaker of the night said he just wanted to be safe. I didn't hear anyone mention mass incarceration.

And I knew in a different decade, my grandmother might have been in that audience, taking in the same arguments about personal agency and responsibility, all the while wondering why her grandbaby was still locked away. If Harris couldn't persuade that audience that her experiences as a black woman in America justified her decision to become a prosecutor, I knew there were few people in this country who could be moved. Describing her upbringing in a family of civil rights activists, Harris argued that the ongoing struggle for equality needed to include both prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized black people and protecting the rights of black criminal defendants. I was clear-eyed that prosecutors were largely not people who looked like me, she said.

This mattered for Harris because of the prosecutors that refused to seat black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned young black men to death row, and looked the other way in the face of police brutality. When she became a prosecutor in 1990, she was one of only a handful of black people in her office. When she was elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she recalled she was one of just three black DAs nationwide. And when she was elected California Attorney General in 2010, there were no other black attorneys general in the country.

At these words, the crowd around me clapped. I knew the unilateral power that prosecutors had, with the stroke of a pen, to make a decision about someone else's life or death, she said. Harris offered a pair of stories as evidence of the importance of a black woman's doing this work. Once, ear-hustling, she listened to colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal defendants were gang-affiliated. If a racial profiling manual existed, their signals would certainly be included. Baggy pants, the place of arrest, and the rap music blaring from vehicles. She said that she told her colleagues, So, you know that neighborhood you were talking about? Well, I got family members and friends who live in that neighborhood. You know the way you were talking about how folks were dressed? She continued,

The second example was about the mothers of murdered children. She told the audience about the women who had come to her office when she was San Francisco's DA, women who wanted to speak with her and her alone about their sons. The mothers came, I believe, because they knew I would see them, Harris said. And I mean literally see them. See their grief. See their anguish. They complained to Harris that the police were not investigating. My son is being treated like a statistic, they would say. Everyone in that Southern Baptist church knew that the mothers and

their dead sons were black. Harris outlined the classic dilemma of black people in this country, being simultaneously over-policed and under-protected. Harris told the audience that all communities deserved to be safe. Among the guests in the room that night whom I talked to, no one had an issue with her work as a prosecutor. A lot of them seemed to believe that only people doing dirt had issues with prosecutors. I thought of myself and my friends who have served long terms, knowing that in a way, Harris was talking about black peoples needing protection from us,

from the violence we perpetrated to earn those years in a series of cells. Harris came up as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when both the political culture and popular culture were developing a story about crime and violence that made incarceration feel like a moral response. Back then, films by black directors, New Jack City, Ministers Society, Boys in the Hood, turned black violence into a genre where murder and crack dealing were as ever-present as black fathers were absent. Those were the years when Representative Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, argued that we should not allow people to distribute this poison

without fear that they might be arrested and go to jail for the rest of their natural life. Those were the years when President Clinton signed legislation that ended federal parole for people with three violent crime convictions and encouraged states to essentially eliminate parole, made it more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions in court, and made it nearly impossible to challenge prison conditions. Back then, it felt like I was just one of an entire generation of young black men learning the logic of count time and lockdown. With me were Anthony Wynn and Terrell Kelly and a dozen others, all lost to prison during those years. Terrell was sentenced to 33 years for murdering a man when he was 17,

a neighborhood beef turned deadly. Home from college for two weeks, a 19-year-old Anthony robbed four convenience stores. He'd been carrying a pistol during three. After he was sentenced by four judges, he had a total of 36 years. Most of us came into those cells with trauma, having witnessed or experienced brutality before committing our own. Prison, a factory of violence and despair, introduced us to more of the same.

And though there were organizations working to get rid of the death penalty and mandatory minimums, bring back parole, and even abolish prisons, there were few ways for us to know that they existed. We suffered, and we felt alone. Because of this, sometimes I reduce my friends' stories to the cruelty of doing time. to the cruelty of doing time. I forget that Terrell and I walked prison yards as teenagers, discussing Malcolm X and searching for mentors in the men around us. I forget that Anthony and I talked about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, the way others praised DMX. He taught me the meaning of the word patina and introduced me to the music of Bill Withers. There were Luke and Fats and Juvie who could give you the sharpest edge up in America with just a razor and comb.

When I left prison in 2005, they all had decades left. Then I went to law school and believed I owed it to them to work on their cases and help them get out. I've persuaded lawyers to represent friends pro bono, put together parole packets, basically job applications for freedom, letters of recommendation and support from family and friends, copies of certificates attesting to vocational training, the record of college credits. We always return to the crimes to provide explanation and context. We argue that today each one little resembles the teenager who pulled a gun. And I write a letter, which is less from a lawyer and more from a man remembering what it means to want to go home to his mother. I write, struggling to condense

decades of life in prison into a 10-page case for freedom. Then I find my way to the parole board's office in Richmond, Virginia, and try to persuade the members to let my friends see a sunrise for the first time. Juvie and Luke have made parole. Fats, represented by the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, was granted a conditional pardon by Virginia's governor, Ralph Northam. All three are home now,

released just as a pandemic would come to threaten the lives of so many others still inside. Now free. They've sent me text messages with videos of themselves hugging their mothers for the first time in decades, casting fishing lines from boats drifting along rivers they didn't expect to see again, enjoying a cold beer that isn't contraband. enjoying a cold beer that isn't contraband. In February, after 25 years,

Virginia passed a bill making people incarcerated for at least 20 years for crimes they committed before their 18th birthdays eligible for parole. Men who imagined they would die in prison now may see daylight. Terrell will be eligible. These years later, he's the mentor we searched for, helping to organize, from the inside, community events for children. And he's spoken publicly about learning to view his crimes through the eyes of his victim's family. My man Anthony was 19 when he committed his crime. In the last few years, he's organized

poetry readings, book clubs, and fatherhood classes. When Gregory Fairchild, a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, began an entrepreneurship program at Dilwyn Correctional Center. Anthony was among the graduates, earning all three of the certificates that it offered. He worked to have me invited as the commencement speaker, but what I remember most is watching him share a meal with his parents for the first time since his arrest. But he must pray that the governor grants him a conditional pardon, as he did for Fats. I tell myself that my friends are unique, that I wouldn't fight so hard for just anybody, but maybe there is little particularly distinct about any of us, beyond that we'd served enough time in prison.

about any of us, beyond that we'd served enough time in prison. There was a skinny, light-skinned 15-year-old kid who came into prison during the years that we were there. The rumor was that he'd broken into the house of an older woman and sexually assaulted her. We all knew he had three life sentences. Someone stole his shoes. People threatened him. He'd had to break a man's jaw with a lock and a sock to prove he'd fight if pushed. As a teenager, he was experiencing the worst of prison. And I know that had he been my cellmate, had I known him the way I know my friends, if he reached out to me today, I'd probably be arguing that he should be free. But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping.

During the middle of Harris's presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman's sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multi-city search followed. The sister had been murdered. Her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case, a 50-year-old black woman gone missing or found dead,

ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it. They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn't spend the rest of his life in prison. My mother purchased her first single-family home just before I was released from prison.

One version of this story is that she purchased the house so that I wouldn't spend a single night more than necessary in the childhood home I walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account is that by leaving Suitland, my mother meant to burn the place from memory. I imagined that I had singularly introduced my mother to the pain of the courts. I was wrong. The first time she missed work to attend court proceedings was to witness the prosecution of a kid the same age as I was when I robbed a man. He was probably from Suitland, and he'd attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The second time, my mother attended a series of court dates involving me, dressed in her best work clothes,

to remind the prosecutor and judge and those in the courtroom that the child facing a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The third time, my mother took off days from work to go to court alone and witnessed the trial of the man who raped her and two other women. A prosecutor's subpoena forced her to testify, and her solace came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others. Silas came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others. After my mother told me what had happened to her,

we didn't mention it to each other again for more than a decade. But then in 2018, she and I were interviewed on the podcast, Death, Sex and Money. The host asked my mother about going to court for her son's trial when he was facing life. I was raped by gunpoint, my mother said. It happened just before he was sentenced. So when I was going to court for Dwayne, I was also going for a court trial for myself. I hadn't forgotten what happened, but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger made it far more devastating. On the last day of the trial of

the man who raped her, my mother told me the judge accepted his guilty plea. She remembers only that he didn't get enough time. She says her nose began to bleed. When I asked her what she would have wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied that I'd taken the deputy's gun and shot him. Harris has studied crime scene and autopsy photos of the dead. She has confronted men in court who have sexually assaulted their children, sexually assaulted the elderly, scalped their lovers.

In her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, Harris praised the work of Sonny Schwartz, creator of the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, the first restorative justice program in the country to offer services to offenders and victims, which began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims to help inmates who have committed violent crimes by giving them tools to de-escalate confrontations. Harris wrote a bill with a state senator to ensure that children who witness violence can receive mental health treatment. And she argued that safety is a civil right, and that a 60-year-old sentenced for a series of restaurant armed robberies, where some victims were bound or locked in freezers should tell anyone considering viciously preying on citizens and businesses

that they will be caught, convicted, and sent to prison for a very long time. Politicians and the public acknowledge mass incarceration is a problem, but the lengthy prison sentences of men and women incarcerated during the 1990s have largely not been revisited. While the evidence of any prosecutor doing work on this front is slim, as a politician arguing for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted the need to unravel the decades-long effort to make sentencing guidelines excessively harsh to the point of being inhumane, criticized

the bail system, and called for an end to private prisons, and criticized the companies that charge absurd rates for phone calls and electronic monitoring services. In June, months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and before she was tapped as the vice presidential nominee, I had the opportunity to interview Harris by phone. A police officer's knee on the neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him as he called for help, had been captured on video. Each night, thousands around the world protested. During our conversation, Paris told me that as the only Black woman in the United States Senate, in the midst of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, countless people had asked for stories about her experiences with racism. people had asked for stories about her experiences with racism.

Harris said that she was not about to start telling them about my world for a number of reasons, including you should know about the issue that affects this country as part of the greatest stain on this country. Exhausted, she no longer answered the questions. I imagined, she believes, as Toni Morrison once said, that the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. But these days, even in the conversations that I hear my children having, race suffuses so much.

I tell Harris that my 12-year-old son, Makai, told his classmates and teachers, as you all know, my dad went to jail. Shouldn't the police who killed Floyd go to jail? My son wanted to know why prison seemed to be reserved for black people and wondered whose violence demanded a prison cell. for black people and wondered whose violence demanded a prison cell. In the criminal justice system, Harris replied, the irony and frankly the hypocrisy is that whenever we use the words accountability and consequence, it's always about the individual who was arrested. Again, she began to make a case that would be familiar to any progressive about the need to make the system accountable.

And while I found myself agreeing, I began to fear that the point was just to find ways to treat officers in the same brutal way that we treat everyone else. I thought about the men I'd represented in parole hearings and the friends I'd be representing soon and wondered out loud to Harris, how do we get to their freedom? I'd represented in parole hearings and the friends I'd be representing soon, and wondered out loud to Harris, how do we get to their freedom? We need to reimagine what public safety looks like, the senator told me, noting that she would talk about a public health model. Are we looking at the fact that if you focus on issues like

education and preventive things, then you don't have a system that's reactive? The list of those things becomes long. Affordable housing, job skills development, education funding, home ownership. She remembered how during the early 2000s, when she was the San Francisco District attorney and started Back on Track, a re-entry program that sought to reduce future incarceration by building the skills of the men facing drug charges, many people were critical.

You're a DA. You're supposed to be putting people in jail, not letting them out, she said people told her. It always returns to this for me. Who should be in prison, and for how long? I know that American prisons do little to address violence. If anything, they exacerbate it. If my friends walk out of prison changed from the boys who walked in, it will be because they fought with the system, with themselves and sometimes with the men around them, to be different.

Most violent crimes go unsolved, and the pain they cause is nearly always unresolved. And those who are convicted, many, maybe all, do far too much time in prison. And yet, I imagine what I would do if the Maryland Parole Commission contacted my mother, informing her that the man who assaulted her is eligible for parole. I'm certain I'd write a letter explaining how one morning my mother didn't go to work because she was in a hospital,

tell the board that the memory of a gun pointed at her head has never left, explain how when I came home, my mother told me the story. Some violence changes everything. The thing that makes you suited for a conversation in America might be the very thing that precludes you from having it. Terrell, Anthony, Fats, Luke, and Juvie have taught me that the best indicator of whether I believe they should be free is our friendship. Learning that a black man in the city I called home

raped my mother taught me that the pain and anger for a family member can be unfathomable. It makes me wonder if parole agencies should contact me at all, if they should ever contact victims and their families. Perhaps if Harris becomes the vice president, we can have a national conversation about our contradictory impulses around crime and punishment. For three decades, as a line prosecutor, a district attorney, an attorney general, and now a senator, her work has allowed her to witness many of them. Prosecutors make a convenient target, but if the system is broken, it is because our flaws more than our virtues animate it. Confronting why so many of us believe prisons must exist

may force us to admit that we have no adequate response to some violence. Still, I hope that Harris reminds the country that simply acknowledging the problem of mass incarceration does not address it any more than keeping my friends in prison is a solution to the violence and trauma that landed them there. that landed them there. This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories

from publishers such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic.