Proliferating Sentences: Reginald Dwayne Betts’ <i>Felon</i> (2019)

In Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts prises open the contexts which determine the manifest meaning of prison sentences pronounced in the courtroom and carried out in the American carceral system. His lyrical voice pluralises the subject receiving and experiencing the sentence, and explores the liminal spaces before and after its execution. He thereby prevents its meaning from being limited to individual interlocutors and specific places alone. His ‘redaction poems’ have legal documents circulate outside the courtroom in the poetry book and art gallery, creating critical contexts in which the repetition of legal sentences might speak back to the law. These gestures bring structural social, economic, and racial factors to bear on the interpretation of the prison sentence, radically questioning its justice. Yet they also destabilise any attempt to arrive at conclusive judgements, be they on individuals or systems. Rather, Betts’ poetry suggests that the multiple meanings of a prison sentence, proliferating along individual, institutional, and social lines, must be held in open-ended tension if we are to address the human enigma of harm.