4/11/2022 COVID Update: The State of Maine no longer requires masking or proof of vaccination to attend any public events, but individual venues are free to do so. For the latest information, visit the Center for Disease Control and Prevention or the State of Maine’s COVID site.
- This event has passed.
Confronting Our Incarceration Epidemic: Race, Mercy, and A Failed Concept of Justice
March 9, 2016, 4:00 PM
Free
Reginald Dwayne Betts will graduate from Yale Law School in May. This is a far cry away from May of 1997, when a sixteen-year-old Dwayne was sentenced to nine years in prison for carjacking. He knows the criminal justice system from both ends of the spectrum and describes his chosen field as “the business of human tragedy.” He’ll talk and answer questions about his own experience and how it’s shaped the way he thinks about education and reform.
Betts has written three books. His latest collection of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era, was published in October 2015 by Four Way Books. He has also published a memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, which won the the NAACP Image Award, and a collection of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm.
Betts has also received fellowships from Soros Justice Foundation, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, and the Poetry Foundation. In 2012, President Barack Obama appointed Betts to the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, where he continues to serve as a practitioner member.
(He will read from Bastards of the Reagan Era in Ostrove Auditorium at 7:00 p.m.)