INCARCERATED LANGUAGE

3 0 Y I N C A R C E R A T E D L A N G U A G E R E G I N A L D D W A Y N E B E T T S This is a story I tell myself about who I am, a story that, in the nature of all telling, conceals as much as it reveals. I am an exconvict . A felon. Formerly an inmate. When people call me formerly incarcerated or a returning citizen, I do not feel like they are less likely to deny me employment, or housing, or to shake my hand. When the occasion is right, when the need is su≈cient, when it has to come up, there is no sanitized way to tell that story. The crimes I committed, intentionally and with enough blasé to make it all cruel, belong to me. The place that I went to at sixteen, the series of prisons, were as much a part of the fabric of this country as everything else. I guess, in the way that anyone returns to a place after having left, I returned home after having gone to prison – but calling me a returning citizen seems, at best, to be confused about all that I lost in the leaving, particularly major aspects of my citizenship, like voting, that are hard for most to get back and impossible for some. I returned to prison later, after my incarceration, more times than I can remember. And each time, the returning reminded me that who we are, as men and women who have served time in prison, cannot be captured in a word, which is to say, inmate and 3 1 R prisoner, formerly incarcerated and convict all fail at imagining the glimmer and the dimness that I witness on the come back, that I remember, that we all possess, as a quality, I suppose, of being human. On July 30, 2018, I stepped onto a black passenger bus with fifty others before the morning’s light unmasked the French Quarter. I was with a group of Soros Justice Fellows and Open Society Foundation sta√. We were headed to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, called Angola by anyone with reason to name it aloud. I’ve never liked prison tours. While I was incarcerated, the few times wardens came through with guests, most of us felt like we’d become the center of a spectacle. But to call this a tour would be about as accurate as calling prisons institutes of public safety. Led by Norris Henderson and Calvin Duncan, two men who’d each spent more than two decades in Angola before gaining their freedom after long legal battles, we were being reminded of all the ways that the U.S. criminal justice system tries to bury men. The last time I’d gotten up at 3 a.m. to prepare for a bus ride to prison, I’d been shackled and cu√ed, an eighteen-year-old kid being shipped to Red Onion State Prison, the first Virginia Super Maximum-Security Prison. This bus ride was a far cry from that, although as we approached Angola my stomach dropped and my body tightened and my eyes cut into the landscape in the way of animals not certain if they are predator or prey. I returned again, hating the way prisons haunt me. Angola, if measured by land mass, is the largest prison compound in the world. In the West Feliciana Parish, the prison, named after the plantation that once occupied the same land, sits on eighteen thousand acres. Today, prison cells dot a landscape once scarred by slave cabins. So expansive is it that guards, visitors, and prisoners alike use wheels to get around. While we drove, something burned in the distance. And as we rode around, our guide, a retired prison classification o≈cer, gave us facts about the prison. He told us that when inmates first arrive they must work for a single red cent an hour. After a period of time, their pay increases to two pennies. He pointed out the vast landscape of vegetables grown by inmates, the...