MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Tonight's commencement at the University of Maryland features, as student speaker, a young man who's seen a dramatic reversal of fortunes. At age 16, he was arrested for carjacking in Virginia and tried and convicted as an adult. Each year, an estimated 200,000 minors are classified as adults in U.S. courts. Critics say adult prisons are ill-equipped to protect or rehabilitate youth inmates.
On the day that this one young man graduates, we're going to hear about his past experiences. He told his story for Youth Radio.
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS: My name is Reginald Dwayne Betts. When I was 16 years old, I was certified as an adult and sentenced to nine years in prison. I was certified because I had a robbery charge. And in the state of Virginia, if you have a robbery, murder or rape, you can automatically be certified as an adult. And so I was rubber-stamped and sent into the system.
When they sent me from a juvenile detention center to the Fairfax County Jail, at the time they had a sight and sound policy that meant that juveniles couldn't be within the sight or the sound of adults. Because they didn't have the proper facilities to hold me in the jail, they put me in solitary confinement. I didn't have a mattress, I didn't have a blanket, I didn't have a pillow and I only had the clothes that I wore on my back for seven days.
You know, that sort of prepared me to understand that jail wasn't designed to be in my best interest and there wasn't anybody that I could complain to. The reality is that in prison, people care about your ability to protect yourself or to do whatever you need to do to survive. If you're younger, you aren't prepared physically or emotionally to deal with prison.
It took me seven years in prison before I talked to a mental health worker. And I had spent time in two super-maximum security prisons. I spent over a year in isolation and not once was I asked, you know, how was my mental health?
For my first, you know, four to six years, no matter where I went, I would be the youngest person in the block that I was in. If I marked like an adolescent shift, it was when somebody younger than me asked me for some advice. That's when I realized that, you know, I'm basically growing up in a jail cell.
Like, I have all of these memories in my head that have replaced the adolescent markers. Like, I was in a cell below someone that beat a man to death. And I remember the guards carrying the dead prisoner on a gurney, like the nurses pushing him down the walkway, banging on his chest, trying to revive him.
The thing is, what are you going to do with all the memories that you have when you leave prison? And I mean, that's the question that gets posed to all young people who get in the - who get sent to prison because it's like you will accumulate these memories, and a lot of them won't be good. And the thing becomes what will you do with those memories once you get home?
BLOCK: Reginald Betts left prison in March, 2005. Today he graduates from the University of Maryland. He's the student commencement speaker. His story was produced by Youth Radio.
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