As a 16 year-old, Reginald Dwayne Betts was a good student in a magnet school. However, he veered off-course when he and a friend carjacked a man at gunpoint who had fallen asleep in his car. Betts was charged as an adult and spent more than eight years in prison, where he completed high school and began reading and writing poetry. After his release he attended Prince George's Community College in Largo, Maryland and currently is a student at Yale Law School.
Betts, has published a memoir, A Question of Freedom, and a book of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era. His powerful, cautionary and inspirational story was featured by Terri Gross’s on Fresh Air, December 8, 2015.
A corollary story is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. (A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time.) If Betts had had Stevenson as a lawyer, he may not have been sentenced as an adult.