From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

Our guest today is Reginald Duane Betts, a published poet, memoirist, and legal scholar who's

currently pursuing a PhD in law at Yale. His accomplishments are noteworthy by any standard,

but the fact that he spent more than eight years of his youth in prison makes his story

exceptional. We'll discuss his journey to the legal profession,

his 360 degree perspective of the criminal justice system, and his art.

Duane Betts, it's a great honor and pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Welcome to At Liberty.

Yeah, my pleasure to be here.

Thanks for having me.

So Duane, as I mentioned, you're currently pursuing a PhD at Yale Law School, but your

path to the legal academy has been anything but typical.

Can you describe your earliest interactions with the criminal justice system?

Yeah, I guess that's a pretty straightforward question, but the answer isn't straightforward

at all because I think everything is about where you start to tell your story.

So one might say my interaction with the legal system started when I first heard stories about friends of mine, peers of mine, getting sent to Boys Village, which was the local Maryland juvenile detention center.

And I might say that one of the things I remember hearing was the way that the place operated like a sort of gladiator school

and that it was premised on like how violent you might be. Or I could say it was high school

and having friends get shot, having friends get murdered,

having friends and classmates get arrested sometimes for those shootings.

I could say it started.

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