-I served nine years in prison.

The judge told me, "I'm under no illusion that sending you to prison will help."

I think we ask the wrong questions.

We ask, "How do we feel about violent crimes and nonviolent crimes?"

as opposed to, "How do we feel about the fact that we have a system where a judge sends a 16-year-old kid to prison and says, "I am under no illusion that sending you to prison will help"?

♪♪ ♪♪ -Your writing and legal work is obviously deeply informed by your family and community.

How would you describe the Maryland of your youth?

-[ Laughs ] Oh, man, I grew up in a Black Belt.

You know, it's so interesting to think about Suitland, Maryland and PG County, Maryland, and what it meant for me to be a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old, particularly because this is, you know, pre-Internet era.

And this is really, you know, I was -- my whole life was circumscribed by the three, four, five-mile radius between, um, where I grew up at and maybe as far out as, you know, Northern Virginia.

And, um, it was not a landscape where we talked about poetry.

We talked about Tupac and we talked about Biggie and we talked about Nas.

You know, it was a landscape that was dominated by -- by sound and by music.

I mean, I used to -- I used to do backflips as a kid.

I mean, I used to do like five, 10, 15 somersaults in a row.

I think about, um, my childhood landscape, and I know that it was crime and that it was violence.

I know that we're talking about the '80s and the war on drugs.

I remember the moments where we would go outside the next day and see, um, the holes in the -- in the concrete and in the brick because, you know, there was a shooting the night before.

I remember when the whole neighborhood was shut down because, um, it was a hostage situation.

But those aren't the moments that define my childhood.

You know, the moments that define my childhood are, you know, learning what throwback tackle is.

It is -- It is really, um, understanding what it meant to see a whole neighborhood of people who had to, like, carry their clothes to the laundromat, walk five, 10, 15 minutes to the laundromat because the laundry in the neighborhood didn't work.

Um, I learned a lot, you know, from the community where I came from, but maybe the thing that I learned most of all is, now that I think about it, is -- is the world can overwhelm you.

And you can believe that the world is just filled with whatever your troubles are and your sorrows and -- and you remember, children, they live in the same kind of world with those same troubles and those -- those same sorrows, but somehow they're able to move from day to day to day, not holding on to it -- to it the way we do.

And so, um, maybe the best parts of me and the best parts of what I can do and the work that I try to do come from the moments when I remember that.

-What was your family life like?

-My mom was a single mom, so I was an only child.

And, you know, I learned how to be by myself, which is -- which is useful.

You know, my mom was going to work.

I was in the first, second grade, my mom would be gone to work before I woke up in the morning.

She would wake me up and make me, like, take a shower and get dressed and then let me go back to sleep.

And then when she got to work, she would call me and wake me up a second time, and then I would, like, really get ready for school.

I would eat breakfast and then I would go.

I would come home.

She hasn't gotten back from work yet.

Um, so I grew up in a house where I learned what it means to work hard, you know, and I learned what it means to -- actually, like, the duty of a parent almost.

Somebody told me it's not just enough to be successful.

It's you have to be successful and almost look effortless.

This is why we love Roger Federer.

You know, it's just something about the way he plays tennis where it just looks like he's not working hard.

And, um, and my mom, I think she taught me that one of the responsibilities of a parent is to shield your child from -- from whatever suffering you know, that they might be dealing with.

And, um -- and my mom did an amazing job at doing that.

-Um, talk to me a little bit more about that carjacking that you took part in at 16 that sent you to prison.

What was going on in your life then that led to that moment, or is it still a mystery to you now?

-I mean, it's not so much as a mystery.

Uh, but you do have to understand that -- that like anything that anybody does is a -- is a -- is a product of what's in the realm of possibility for them.

And so, you know, we say, "Well, why did you commit a carjacking?"

instead of saying, "How did that become a thing that was actually in the realm of possibility?"

And I could say it was the fact that, like, two of my classmates got murdered and nobody talked about it.

Um, they both got murdered by teenagers who then went to prison and tried as adults and nobody talked about it.

I could say that the first time I heard about a carjacking was when I was 12.

I could say that the second time I heard about a carjacking was when I was in ninth grade and a classmate, you know, and some friends tried to carjack somebody and one of them ended up dead.

But the truth is that those weren't the things that pushed me to do it.

Those just gave me a landscape of what was possible.

And, honestly, up until the moment I picked up a gun and I committed to robbing somebody, I would have said it was an absurd idea.

I would have said it was completely outlandish.

And the rest of the story ultimately doesn't make a lot of sense because most people don't get caught after the first time they committed a crime.

And so I might be telling you a very different story today had I not gotten caught the next day.

But it was happenstance.

It was I'm at a friend's house with my good friend, my man Marcus, and people are broke and somebody's talking about getting some money, "I'm gonna get it the best way I know how."

And somebody says, like, "You ain't gonna do nothing."

"If I had a pistol, I would."

"You wouldn't do nothing."

"You wouldn't do nothing."

I'm out there with you.

None of us have a gun.

So this is all talk.

And then somebody walks in the room.

"Oh, you know, my cousin got a gun.

Y'all ain't trying to do nothing."

And now we in a car driving, you know, to Virginia to do something that's insane.

And -- And, you know, I say all of that not as an excuse, but as -- as -- as how sometimes overwhelming it is to know that you can start a day, a morning thinking that you're gonna end with hopes of being on the basketball team, but you end driving away from a crime scene.

And, um, you know, in some ways it's maybe good fortune that I got picked up the next day, 'cause it is so hard to live in a world when you put those kind of expectations for violence on yourself.

And prison forced me to confront, like, all of the absurdity of it.

You know, if you ever -- I mean, nobody call a parent, call your mom from a jail cell as a child, you know, and, like... And you can't lie.

You know, you can't say you're at your cousin's house.

You know, it's just this one moment where, as much as you want to lie, you got to admit the thing that... ain't nothing gonna make right.

And I remember her coming to see me, actually, one of the first times she came to see me, and I had to tell her I did it.

You know, I had confessed to the police, so it's not as if I could act as if I didn't do it.

Yeah, I mean, you know, you spend your whole life trying to redeem yourself from that moment.

It probably hurt more than -- more than knowing that I hurt this -- this -- this couple I tried to rob, that I put a -- I waved a pistol in this man's face, and I know that devastated him.

He might, like, wake up at night still thinking about that, hoping -- I hope he doesn't.

You know, I hope he, like, sees me on the news and says, "Is that the kid that carjacked me?

I'm glad he's doing something meaningful with his life."

I mean, I hope that's the story, but the truth is, the thing that truly devastates me is, like, everything that those folks felt, I could hear in my mom's voice.

And you just work.

I think, um... Some of us, you know, we spend our whole life trying to work our way away from that moment that you can't rescind.

-Based on your personal experience and scholarship.

What does how we treat incarcerated men and women teach us about our country?

-You know, it's interesting.

I mean, I think it teaches us a lot about our country, but it teaches us a lot about ourselves.

We forget that when we incarcerate somebody, um, the state is doing it in our name.

And I think that what it tells us is that we are willing to abide by all kinds of cruelty.

Um, and we don't have to think it's justified.

If it makes it easier for us to -- to manage the lives that we want to live, if it makes it easier for us not to ask questions about why a particular thing happened, we're willing to -- to not have a voice against the practice.

And so I think what it tells us about our country is we're a country that's still struggling to live up completely to its ideals, and we're a people who are still struggling to live up completely to our own individual ideals of what it means to be a member of a community, what it means to care about those who have hurt each other, um, those who've been hurt, and those who just can't figure things out.

-How do prisons blunt personal identity and creativity?

-I don't think prisons blunt personal identity and creativity at all.

I was in a cell with a dude that made a tattoo gun out of the motor of a Walkman.

Matter of fact, this cat once took two Walkmen, neither of which had the capacity to record.

He built a new Walkman out of those two -- the parts from those two -- that had a hidden compartment where you could turn the switch on and off.

And when you turned the switch on, when you pushed play, it was a recording device.

And you're wondering, "Wait a minute.

Who cares?

You got a recording device, but you don't have a microphone."

But you got headphones.

And those headphones would be the microphone.

I mean, we in a prison cell making mix tapes, you know what I mean?

Like this dude, he had the schematics for every -- every television, every Walkman, every CD player that had been released in prison in the past 20 years.

You know, I knew dudes who were painting murals.

I know a cat who -- who wasn't locked up with me but was locked up somewhere else, who did a 40-by-40 -- a 40-foot-by-40-foot mural, um, a sort of two-by-two-foot square sheet at a time, and he mailed them out.

And then when he came home -- he couldn't see it until he came home.

This cat named Jesse Krimes.

He came home and then put it all together and saw it for the first time with this audience.

You know, I mean, I've seen people do wondrous and miraculous things.

I know people who've written novels in prison.

I mean, you know, so I don't think -- I know people who -- who became somebody in prison, I mean, somebody respected.

So I don't know if I would say that prison blunts creativity.

I would say that prison creates more challenges than you could imagine.

But, um -- but MacGyver is born out of those challenges.

You know, I think that -- that prison has at times -- you know, at times given us an opportunity to be more than we would have ever been without it.

And that is not to say -- that's not an advertisement for prison.

That is -- That is an endorsement of the -- like, the undying spirit of men and women and children who find themselves confronted with this question.

It's like, can I be more than what I was?

And I want to focus on that, because if we focus on the worst of what prison does to people, we might imagine that people who go into those places can only be the worst.

And I don't think that's true.

-What first drew you to poetry as a young man?

What role did it play in your life back then?

-I expected to go home.

It was my first time getting in trouble.

I mean, why wouldn't I get a second chance?

I was a 16-year-old kid who -- who was, you know, in the honor society.

I was a 16-year-old kid who was the class treasurer.

I had braces, right?

I just really expected to go home.

And when the judge sentenced me to nine years in prison, I just remember being in a holding cell asking myself, "What do you become after nine years in a cell?"

I have wanted to be an engineer.

I planned on going to Georgia Tech, being an engineer, and a point guard for the team.

I was gonna have a growth spurt.

[ Chuckles ] That didn't happen.

And, um -- and I knew I wasn't gonna be an engineer now that I had nine years in prison, and I just said, "I'm gonna be a writer."

Had no idea what it meant.

Didn't even tell anybody, 'cause -- 'cause you -- you say something as outlandish as that and you start telling people and they start discouraging you.

So I just carried it around in my head with me, and I started to approach the world as if I was a writer.

You know, I took writing in my journal seriously.

I was like, this is the beginning of some book that'll happen later.

And I wrote and I read and then, um, like two years later, I'm in solitary confinement for six months.

And you know... 17 years old, in prison, in solitary confinement.

There's no air conditioning.

It's so hot back there.

And, um -- and books are contraband.

What am I supposed to do with the hours in a day?

I heard a dude call for a book.

How -- How is he -- who is he asking for a book?

And then I heard the book sliding across the concrete.

I would hear it again a couple days later.

And I realized that they had set up a -- a library.

You know, kind of underground library.

The only rule was that if you had a book and somebody asked for it, you gave it to them.

And so I called for a book, and somebody slides Dudley Randall's "The Black Poets" under my cell.

And at first I'm thinking, "What am I gonna do with poetry?"

I mean, I'm 17, I'm in prison.

Ain't got no love stories to tell.

And I get introduced, though, through that book, to -- to Langston Hughes, to -- to Claude McKay.

I get introduced to -- to Sonia Sanchez, to Lucille Clifton.

And it radically changed my life.

And the reason, honestly -- and I'll tell you this -- the reason is because there was this cat named Etheridge Knight that was in the book too, and Etheridge Knight had did time in prison, and he was writing poems about prison.

And so all of a sudden I had this medium that I could write about a whole world in 15 or 20 lines.

You know, part of the reason why I never told anybody I wanted to be a writer, 'cause I didn't know what that meant.

Does that mean I want to -- like, James Baldwin is writing these brilliant 50-page essays.

It's like, I can't do that.

And what a poem said is that, uh, you could write a whole poem that's just capturing a moment.

And reading Etheridge Knight's poetry, what he said was that the things I was experiencing -- desiring to teach myself Spanish because I heard a brother on the rec yard speak in Spanish, um, watching his kid jump from the top tier 'cause he didn't want to get raped, fights, um, cooking meals together.

The hope, the desperation.

Struggling with what landed us in prison cells.

Like, he was writing poems about all of that, and he was writing poems about this 16-year-old kid that was in prison named Gerald.

It was this piece called "For Freckle-Faced Gerald."

And I'm reading this in the hole and I'm thinking, "Damn.

I'm gonna be a poet."

And it made sense.

And then I-I took to it.

Like I-I got -- I'm obsessive-compulsive.

You know, I wrote a thousand poems over the next six months.

I wrote so many poems, I said, yeah, I'm gonna make a book.

And I folded it all up, and it's a stack like this, and it's sometimes three poems on a page.

I mean, I was getting request forms and writing the poems on request forms.

And I -- I ripped up a sheet and I threaded the book, and I was like, this is my book.

And, um -- I still got it, though.

You know, I still got it.

I still got the poems from -- from that first winter that I said I would be a poet, which -- which in itself is amazing, given how hard it is to keep track of things moving from prison to prison.

-A lot of your work is about the afterlife of prison.

How did the label of "felon" continue to follow you even after your release?

-I mean, all of the obvious ways.

You know, it's hard to get a job.

Sometimes you can't rent an apartment.

Um, they ask you on your college applications.

I got denied a full-tuition academic scholarship to Howard University.

But in other ways too, ways that are harder, really, to talk about.

You know, like the first time you tell somebody that you just met, who you've come to love, or who you think you might come to love.

So it's too early in a relationship for anybody to make a commitment, and yet if you don't say this thing... I remember telling my wife.

I told her on our second date.

We're in the car.

I was such a fool.

You never get in a car with a woman and say, "Look, I gotta tell you something."

I should have did it out in public and been like, "I wanted to talk to you about something."

And I'm like, "I gotta tell you something."

She's probably looking like, "What has this fool gotta say to me?

I liked him, too.

He about to mess everything up."

And, um -- and I told her I, you know, just came home from prison, and I served eight and a half years in prison, and... [ Sighs ] She went on a third date with me, so.

And a fourth.

And I proposed, and she ended up saying yes, so it worked out.

But the thing is, like, it's something that -- that you don't just carry in the world.

It's something that everybody who loves you carries in the world.

And -- And it's easy for me to reduce what it means to carry that in the world to, like, Howard not giving me a scholarship or this organization not giving me a job or that organization not giving me a job or -- or me having to explain myself in front of these admissions officers.

But that's not the thing.

You know, the thing is, like, I know that, um... I made a decision when I was 16 that, like, my children, if I'm fortunate enough to have grandchildren, my wife, my mom, like, everybody who loves me carries that with them.

And there is no amount of success that -- that makes -- you know, you would just give it up.

You would be like, I would rather not carry that thing.

I'm okay with, like, just having a job and not having that particular story and not giving everybody else that particular story.

But that's the story I got, you know?

-In your poem "Essay on Reentry," you recall having to tell your son about your past.

How exactly did you describe it to him?

-Oh, man.

He was -- He was five, actually.

It turns out that... You know, it turns out that simple explanations work for children.

You know, it turns out that -- I mean, first, he was five, so he -- he had no real interest in, like, the details.

And -- And what I could see was that I had to tell him because I already told him, but it's never just one conversation.

You know, it's that first conversation and then it's the second conversation and then it's the third.

And at this point, you know, my children know more about prison than probably most Americans.

They've heard me talk about my experiences more than -- more than really anybody else.

And I think, once you have a child, you carry this understanding that the story never gets told once, and that every time -- like, I heard my kid, man.

I heard my -- my oldest son.

He was -- He was -- They was talking about, um -- they was talking about Ferguson.

And he said something like, "Y'all just don't understand what it means to have a father that's been to jail."

And I realized that he carries around a kind of knowledge that his classmates don't.

And when -- when the issues of the world come into that classroom and it's around, um, police violence and it's around prison and it's around crime, that that's when that other part of what he knows, um, begins to -- to mean something.

And the question is always, will it mean something that -- that he can, um, gain insight from, that -- that he can feel, um, like it is not this burden that he -- that he carries?

But, um -- But that's -- that's on him, you know what I mean?

It's literally not something that I could deal with.

And so when I told his little brother for the first time, um, honestly, he was half sleep.

You know, he just crawled in my arms, wanting to make sure that I was good for the night because I had been out, you know, hanging with friends.

Um, it was -- it was after I got sworn into the bar and we were sort of celebrating, and he just was waiting up because, more than any of those things, you know, more than me being a lawyer, more than me being a poet, he wanted me to be his father.

And that didn't come with the -- with the need even to tell him that piece of myself that we both knew I had to tell him.

-So, alongside your poetry, you somehow found the time to graduate from Yale Law School.

What drew you to law school in the first place, and how did you find life at a place like Yale?

-What -- unemployment.

[ Laughs ] Unemployment drew me to law school.

For real, you can hide from all of your debtors by going back to college again and again.

And, um -- And I couldn't get a job, man.

And I -- I figured if I was gonna be unemployed.

I'd rather be an unemployed Ivy League-trained attorney, you know?

And -- And I had, honestly, like, I had taken a paralegal course while I was in prison.

I had done all of this advocacy work, but I was struggling to find a job that would allow me to really support, um -- help support my family.

And -- And law school just seemed... It just seemed like the right Hail Mary.

And I applied, and I got into a bunch of schools and, um, I chose Yale, um, one, because it was less... [ Chuckles ] I chose Yale because it was less traffic than all the rest of the places.

[ Laughs ] Oh, man, they're gonna hate me when they hear that.

Uh, but -- but I loved the school.

You know, like, um, I got to be in a clinic in my first year.

You know, got to work in the public defender's office.

I had great classmates.

I mean, people that I cared a lot about.

Um, teachers that pushed me.

So, um, I loved my experience.

And it didn't end the way I thought it would.

I thought it would end as me being a public defender.

I thought it would end as me, like, actively practicing law on a regular basis, but... It was hard, you know what I mean?

It's just like, um, watching people, your clients, and watching them go to prison.

I just couldn't deal with it.

I couldn't deal with people on the front end of the system not having the ability, not having an audience for their redemption.

You know, because the only question at the beginning is if you'll go to prison, and, if so, for how long?

And so I ended up not being able to do that, but I've been able to use my law degree in different ways, and I'm really, really happy about that.

Whether it's doing some legal scholarship or doing some research or really representing people on parole and on clemency and using my legal education as a foundation for the way I think about what it means to transform the system.

-What did you learn about our criminal justice system from your work as a public defender?

-[ Sighs ] That it's unforgiving and challenging.

Once had a case where this kid had robbed another kid, and the -- the police had a photo of the kid who did it, and the mom wanted to see it.

And at first she kept saying, "Let me see the photo of that devil.

Let me see the photo of the devil.

I told you about hanging with those devils."

And the cop is like, "I'm gonna go get the photo.

And they go get the photo.

They get it, and they pass it to her.

She says, "He could be my son."

I mean, she said it like so low under her breath that the police didn't even hear it.

They said, "See?

I told you.

That's that devil."

They didn't hear her gasp when she looked at the photo and recognized that he could be her son.

And I think working in the public defender's office reminded me that -- that the system doesn't give most of us the opportunity to have the realization that this woman had.

And I used to call her, you know, she wanted to talk to me.

And we talked a long time, you know, before the case got settled.

And -- And it ended up being settled without my client going to jail.

You know, it ended up being settled with -- with him having a felony conviction, but he didn't go to jail, and he could have easily, you know, got sentenced to five, six, seven years in prison.

And I think part of the reason why -- I know a huge part of the reason why he didn't go to jail was because this woman recognized that he could have been her son, you know?

So the public defender's office taught me that there's not enough space in our system for us all to have that recognition.

-How can we balance our instincts towards vengeance with the need for compassion and the knowledge that prisons are so violent and ineffective?

-And again, it's -- prisons are violent, but it's not that prisons are just violent.

And it's not that prisons are bad because they're violent.

It's prisons deprive you of your ability to thrive in the world.

And the question is, what do you owe?

And what would be a better way for you to pay what you owe to society, to your victim, to your community?

Is it just sitting in a box for five years, for six years, for seven years?

I don't know if prison is even motivated by a need for vengeance.

At least that is not what we articulate as the reason for prison.

Like, publicly, I think most people think, when they say, "I'm for incarceration," they're thinking about vengeance.

But the system is thinking about things like deterrence.

They think about things like decapacitation, right?

They're not thinking about vengeance.

A prison sentence is not supposed to be motivated by vengeance.

And so what happens is you got a -- you got a disconnect between what is motivating a lot of the people on the street who call for more people in prison and what is motivating the prosecutors and the judges who make those decisions.

And neither one of those groups is really thinking about, what would it mean for people to actually pay what they owe?

What does it mean to articulate what it is that you owe?

I mean, that's a profoundly, profoundly difficult question, and it's more challenging than I think we, um -- it's so challenging, in fact, that we ignore that question for other questions.

And by "we," I also mean "me."

You know, it is -- it is a much more difficult question.

-Do you believe that the institution of the prison can be reformed?

Is it redeemable?

-Do I believe the institution of the prison can be reformed?

Look, man, I know people in prison for murder.

I know a lot of people in prison for murder.

Um, if I believe that those people are redeemable, I think that any institution must have something of value that could be salvaged, right?

I think that, you know, when you talk to somebody who -- who has caused a community, who has caused somebody they love profound pain, you know, who has committed the kinds of crimes that I was locked up for -- I went to prison for carjacking -- um, I think that, you know, we struggle to live in a world that believes that we could be redeemed.

And I think we recognize -- at least I recognize -- the need for some kind of system that's, um, a counterbalance that could be not a factory of despair and sorrow but a place where you could go to to create that pathway towards redemption.

-Are you able to envision a world without prisons?

-[ Sighs ] You know, I know a lot of people who have been shot, so I don't know.

I think I would first want to envision a world without violence.

You know, I wonder if we're asking the right question.

Um, one of my favorite rappers got this -- got this line.

He says, "They want peace?

Tell them dudes to bring my homie back."

You know, like -- like, I just think there's some other really difficult questions.

There's this book I thought was deeply powerful.

It's called "LaRose," by Louise Erdrich.

This man, he kills his, um -- he accidentally shoots the son of his -- of his sister-in-law.

And what do you do after that happens?

And everybody -- some people are saying he did it on purpose, it wasn't an accident, that he was drunk, that, you know, it was negligent, that he should go to prison.

And some people saying, no, of course it was an accident.

But it doesn't matter.

Like, what do you do?

And -- And, like, the next scene in the book, him and his wife are taking their son to his sister-in-law.

And it's like, yo, he's your son now.

And -- And maybe I just think that, um, the world without prisons is not as interesting a question, 'cause -- 'cause that question doesn't make me weep, right?

But reading "LaRose" and thinking about what it means to have, like, accidentally murdered a child, and then -- and then your response is to give your son to this family.

And your son is not...two.

You know, your son is old enough to understand what's going on, right?

I think that, um, I want to ask different questions, like, what does it mean to live in a world that lacks violence, and what does it mean to profoundly figure out how to hold ourselves in account or to account for what we do?

I think that that's a -- for me, that's a more substantial kind of question, and that's the question that keeps me up at night.

'Cause as a person that's representing people I know who've killed people, I mean, we walk into the parole hearing, and that's -- that's really what we're trying to speak to.

And most of what we say feels, like, foolish.

You know, it's like -- it's nothing sometimes that we say that accounts for the dead body that's in the room with us.

And I think that is -- that is what we're trying to deal with.

You know, that is what we're trying to be able to walk into a room and tell somebody, "But wait.

It's not just he's not the worst thing he's ever done in this world.

It's not just that.

It's also this."

And figuring out what that "this" is?

Pffff.

I mean, that's the golden ticket.

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