The Sunday Read: ‘Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

At 16, Reginald Dwayne Betts was sent to prison for nine years after pleading guilty to a carjacking, to having a gun, and to an attempted robbery. “Because Senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes,” Mr. Betts said in an essay he wrote for The New York Times Magazine. He had hoped that her presidential bid would be an opportunity for the country to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a thoughtful way. Instead, he explained, the basic fact of her profession as a prosecutor was used by many as an indictment against her. On today’s “Sunday Read,” listen to Mr. Betts’s exploration of his experiences with the criminal justice system, Kamala Harris and the conversations that America needs to have about mass incarceration. This story was written and introduced by Reginald Dwayne Betts and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Transcript

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0:25.6	My name is Reginald Duane Betz and I just published a piece with the New York Times magazine
0:38.2	on Senator and now Vice President of the Nominee, Kamala Harris.
0:46.3	When I started working on this profile of the Senator, I imagined that I had something
0:51.3	to say because when I was 16, I was with the prison.
0:55.6	I was with her nine years, came home.
0:57.7	So I thought trying to talk about her work as a prosecutor with her whole career started.
1:02.0	I thought that my experiences gave me an end.
1:05.2	Maybe gave me something different to say about her.
1:07.8	Both about who she is and how her work as a prosecutor might tell us something about
1:13.5	the conversations that we needed to have around criminal justice reform.
1:20.4	The story started out as a traditional profile.
1:26.4	Maybe that ain't even true.
1:28.4	I wanted it to start out as a traditional profile.
1:31.8	Even the first flight I took to see her speak publicly, I had to stop enrichment of
1:36.2	a genuine first because it just coincided with a meet and I had with the Virginia parole
	...

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