From Inmate to Mentor, Through Power of Books

"Basically," Betts says, "I did it because I wanted to and because I could and because I didn't think it would define me for the rest of my life."

Serving Time

In his first two years in prison, Betts spent nearly a year in isolation for twice assaulting a guard. He saw a guy who'd been beaten to death. He saw people get stabbed. He was scared all the time.

"There was the very real fear of violence," he says. He stayed alert and watched what people did.

After a while, an initial fear of rape was replaced by a more subtle fear, informed by the slow creep of time. He worried about turning into somebody he didn't want to be. Would he stab somebody who threatened him or flirted with him? He got so used to seeing violence that he wondered whether he'd wind up too hard to ever really go home.

He turned again to books. He read everything he could get his hands on, fantasy and philosophy. He wrote his mother every week. He started writing essays.

For the first time, he decided he could be whomever he wanted. "There is no more fear of failure after you've been to prison," he says.

He made friends -- a skateboarder and a 45-year-old white former Marine who called him "the antithesis" because he worked in the law library -- and always had a book. He had his first serious conversation with a black man older than 35. He got a reputation for being smart, which brought him a measure of respect -- which gave him a space. He taught himself Spanish by studying five hours a day, six days a week.

"I didn't want to sit around and waste eight years," Betts says. He read poetry books and tried his hand at it. "I guess I got good," he says, smiling.

I come from a bullet in an unfired .45, tofu scrambled with garlic and purple onion slices, and every day

the small muscles in my finger threatened to pull

a trigger, slight and curved like my woman's eyelashes

-- Dwayne Betts