Author: Kristin Henning and Reginald Dwayne Betts in Conversation

Kristin Henning and Reginald Dwayne Betts discuss Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, a brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America. 

Watch on YouTube. 

Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience rep­resenting Black youth in Washington, D.C.’s juve­nile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of these young peo­ple and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children.

Henning is a nationally recognized advocate, author, trainer and consultant on the intersection of race, adolescence and policing. She serves as the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law and was previously the Lead Attorney of the Juvenile Unit at the D.C. Public Defender Service. Henning has been representing children accused of crime for 26 years and is the co-founder of a number of initiatives to combat racial injustice in the juvenile legal system, including the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program and a Racial Justice Toolkit for youth defenders. Her new book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth has received rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post.

Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country.

For more than twenty-years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award-winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post-incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of paper-making. 

In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his NY Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Connect:

Kristin Henning - Website | Kristin Henning - Twitter | Kristin Henning - Instagram  

Reginald Dwayne Betts - Website | Reginald Dwayne Betts - Instagram