From Inmate to Mentor, Through Power of Books

Betts's parents separated when he was a toddler, and he grew up with his mother, a resource specialist with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. They lived in a Suitland neighborhood of apartments that he says was nice but never truly middle class. "Not everybody had a car," he says. "I knew people who sold drugs."

Hill says Betts was her world. But she had to work, and he was home alone a lot. She didn't date, so he had few adult men in his life. In eighth grade, Betts was suspended four times for being a smart mouth. "What are you worried about?" Betts asked his mother after he was suspended a fifth time for setting off a stink bomb. "Malcolm X had to go to prison to become the man he was meant to be."

Hill says her son thought he could talk his way out of anything.

In ninth grade, Betts entered the gifted program at Suitland High School and did just enough to maintain his 3.0 grade-point average, telling himself, I could always get A's if I wanted.

Instead he was getting high with neighborhood friends after classes. They played ball, cracked jokes, smoked weed. "I lived in a couple of different worlds," Betts says -- his books and his boys. "I wasn't comfortable in my space."

Betts had never been in trouble with police, "but I wasn't fully law-abiding, either." He'd never stolen a car, but he'd ridden in stolen cars. He was an honors student who hung out with guys who made nearly all F's. One friend was shot to death because of a drug rivalry. Betts thought some of his friends might go to prison. "I aspired to college even though I didn't act like it," he says.

Betts says he didn't turn bad suddenly, didn't make some Bigger Thomas, "Native Son," black-boy-got-the-inner-city-blues lurch toward violence and nihilism. No, he just veered off, and nobody caught him. "I guess I didn't set off any alarms in anybody's head," he says.

"We really didn't know that side of him that was slipping away," says Evelyn Carter, Betts's high school literature teacher. "He was too smart, too sharp, too articulate."

Early in his junior year, a favorite teacher went on maternity leave, and then another teacher declined to let him compete on the school's It's Academic team, citing Betts's bad attitude. He spent long days in a reefer cloud and cut his afternoon classes.

In December of that year, he and a friend drove a neighborhood junkie's stolen car to Springfield Mall. They found a man asleep in a car. Betts pointed a borrowed pistol at the window. They took the man's wallet and drove off with his car. The next day, Betts and his friend tried to buy $300 worth of clothes at the Pentagon City mall with the man's stolen credit card. A clerk called security. Police caught them near the Pentagon.

Betts cried after his first court appearance. He was going to miss Christmas. At 16, he was charged as an adult with carjacking, use of a firearm during a felony and attempted robbery. He was the first of his neighborhood friends to go to prison.

For years, he struggled to make sense of how he got where he was, moving between denial and acceptance. Carjacking was simply "in my realm of possible things to do," he says. "It's not like we had this plethora of options, not like I could have gone boating."