Mark Hopkins
Mark Hopkins experiences with the justice system started when he was a child. He discusses growing up in Camden, as well as the experience of being on parole. He is a dedicated organizer, who is actively involved in the NJ STEP program.
ANNOTATIONS
Learn More [2]: “The Needs of Young Siblings,” Sibs, accessed June 20, 2023.
Learn More [3]: Judy Grossman, “Sibling Relationships and Special Needs,” Parents League of New York, June 5, 2020.
Learn More: “How Grief May Affect Children: Find out More on Grief and Children,” MarieCurie, July 25, 2022.
Learn More [3]: Judith Cohen et al., “Childhood Traumatic Grief: Concepts and Controversies,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 3, no. 4 (October 1, 2002): 307–27.
Learn More [2]: “Improving Educational Opportunities for Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Snapshot*,” National Juvenile Justice Network, March 2016.
Learn More [3]: Susan Frey, “Report: Juvenile Justice System Schools ‘Do More Harm than Good,’” EdSource, April 17, 2004.
Learn More [2]: Vanessa Romo, “New Jersey Governor Signs Bills Restoring Voting Rights To More Than 80,000 People,” NPR, December 18, 2019.
Learn More [3]: “Voting Rights for People with a Felony Conviction,” Nonprofit Vote, August 2021.
Learn More [3]: Joe Hernandez, “N.J. Bill Calls for Treating Criminal Defendants with Mental Illness — Not Jail,” WHYY (blog), May 7, 2018.
Learn More [4]: “Bill S255,” New Jersey Legislature, January 1, 2022.
Learn More [3]: “NJ-STEP: Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons,” accessed June 20, 2023.
Learn More [2]: “Examining Our Harsh Prison Culture” (Ideas for an Open Society, October 2004).
Learn More [3]: Brian Mann, “Reports Of Prison Guard Brutality In New York Draw A Harsh Spotlight,” NPR, October 20, 2016, sec. National.
Learn More [4]: Bruce Gross, “Prison Violence: Does Brutality Come with the Badge?,” Forensic Examiner 17, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 21–27.
TRANCSCRIPT
Interview conducted by Daniel Swern
New Brunswick, New Jersey
March 28, 2019
Transcription by Dave Seamon
Annotations by Joann Gellibert
00:00:00
Um, I’ll start by saying this is Dan Swern on Thursday, March 28th 2019. It’s 12:05 p.m. I'm here interviewing–
Mark. Mark Hopkins.
Okay, so Mark, um, as we talked about, would you mind starting just giving us a little bit of background, um, on what the experience, expectation, and process is of being on parole?
[breathes] Yeah, so on parole, first and foremost it's a mandatory supervision that you have to, um, be a part of if you commit a violent crime of any sort. So it’s part of the NEAR Act, “No Early Release Act,” which basically states that if you can make any violent crime, based on the degree of it, you'll have to serve a mandatory minimum sentence of super– super– mandatory supervision, which would be from three to five years on parole. So I'm on parole. Um, my degree– my charge degree was first degree so I have five years parole. And parole supposed to help you transition, and kind of monitor your behavior, and monitor you transitioning back into society as, um, non–offending, air quotes, “non–offending citizen.” They do that very poorly and they're very burdensome. It’s a, uh, huge waste of taxpayer money, um, and Departmental money. They're just basically an extension of correctional officers.
And what they do is they typically will tell you exactly what you have to do. So you have to have a place to live that is free of all of the things that would be considered, um, harmful to your transition or illegal in any way shape or form. So this obviously makes it very difficult to find housing in the first place when you're coming out of prison. Uh, for me personally, um, I didn't want to be back in my own area, so I ended up coming up here where I'm at school and I have a house that’s, you know, um, free from any illegal activity or anything that’d be disapproved by parole. Um, parole also requires you to have a job and/or to be in school, um, so they want to see– they see– they check out your pay stubs, they check out, um, you know, um, your school, your class schedule things of that nature, and they also require you of course to be free from any, um, use of drugs or intoxicants of any sort. So there's no drinking, there is no, um, you know, smoking of any sort, um, unless it's, you know, tobacco, or whatever the case may be, and of course after that would be like a curfew. They expect you to stay at your house and to be at your house after the day is finished. So that process is extremely difficult and burdensome for quite obvious reasons from the start. First and foremost, even though they may have some programs that assist you, some assisting services, um, typically you won't have full access to those services. Um, you may not fit into the criteria to get full access to those services, or those services may not necessarily cover what you need.
So, um, as long as you can get into housing and try to get a job, you pretty much have to, um, handle transitioning back into society, while at the same time making sure that you're not violating parole by just trying to live. Um, it's something that a lot of people don't understand about parole because they tend to think of it as like, “Oh this is like a cushion blow. You know, people who committed a crime years ago should still be monitored ‘cause maybe they haven't changed.” Um, this is a flawed thinking. Me personally, I have– I haven't committed the crime that I was arrested for– or, I didn't commit the crime I was arrest– I committed the crime I was arrested for– excuse me, um, a decade ago. Um, more than a decade ago. I’m a completely different person in every way shape or form. Even science will tell you that. And at the same time, I'm still under a mandatory supervision for five years, and just like how difficult was me to get to this interview on time, that's pretty much the rest of my life wherever paroles tends to interject. So, like, I work in the f– in, for instance I work my one shift at the gym. I work at 6:45 till around 9:00 a.m. Uh, my parole officer will– uh– usually feels free to come by. He has my schedule so he knows exactly when I’ll work. But he’ll come by around like 6:30 in the morning to my house, even though he knows I have to walk to work. I’m walking from Highland Park to over to New Brunswick. I have to get over to work, get to work, be ready, and start at 6:45. He might want to show up at my house at 6:30. Um, and then when he shows up at my house, he's also going to make sure that he drug tests me. So I have to sit there voiding urine, and then after I void a sample of urine excetera, excetera, I have to wait for the urine sample to be clean or not, and then that will determine our conversation which all has to happen in basically fifteen minutes, then I have to leave and get to work. Um, so many people face that same thing and sometimes it would be– and sometimes I will make the decision of course– and it’s usually up to the parolee– but many people make the decision to just go ahead and go to work because they know that they’ll be fired. Your, uh, supervisor or your manager doesn't want to hear, “I couldn't make it to work ‘cause my parole officer wanted to give me a urine test this morning.” Um, so many people including myself sometimes make the decision to go ahead and go to work, and then hopefully the parole officer will be understanding enough to reschedule or come back and do it later, but this can put you at odds with your parole officer, and, needless to say, they control your freedom. So the processing experiences on parole is, um, for me personally all negative. I've been on probation since I was 10 ‘cause I was the first time I committed– Um, I was– I was an offender, quotation marks, and so I've been under a super– mandatory supervision most of my adult life, most of my childhood life. Um, it has no effect whatsoever in any positive or, um, significant way that it's supposed to, or stands by. Hmm– there’s one more thing about it I wanted to mention– maybe it'll come to me later. It might come to me later, I can't think of it right now. Yeah, I can't think of it right now. We can move on.
00:07:00
Cool. Um, so Mark, uh, you were starting to talk about, um, when you were 10. Why don’t you take it back further and just start from the beginning?
Uh, from when I was 10? Or– I mean– yeah so, I grew up in Camden, New Jersey, um, during a time where it was murder capital of America. Um, poorest city in America. Comparable to third world cities. So, um, growing up included everything that has to do with growing up within poverty in America in the urban community, especially mostly black and Latinx. Uh, my parents, I was fortunate enough to grow up in the household with both of my parents the first five years of my life. Uh, I wasn't, um, a child of poverty when I was growing up with both my parents. My mother was a teacher, but she um, decided to just be a stay–at–home mother and take care of me and my older brother. He was only a few years older than me. He had spina bifida, though. And because of his disabilities he required, of course, much more attention. He couldn't feel anything or walk from his waist down. So me and my mother would mostly spend our attention to making sure that he was good, he was getting around, then my mother of course would be on top of me about things.
Um, but my father, he didn't work either. Well he worked, but he was more of an entrepreneur and he, uh, self–identifies as somebody that lives in the streets. Um, he made most of his money through Street activity. Um, um, and I grew up and kind of in the environment where I was exposed to street life in the most in most, um, in the rawest sense. And so my parents didn't have formal jobs, but they were able to have enough income from the street life to kind of have like, a couple little business ventures, um, like owning the gym. Um I think my dad also owned like a roofing company, like a neighborhood roofing company excetera. So I actually had like a pretty, like, um, decent childhood within Camden. Um, that quickly started to change as, um, I also grew up in that environment, it wasn't without its domestic violence. My mother and father fought a lot. Um, I also began to see the transition from living and not having to worry about anything to having to worry about everything. As my mother and father broke up, I um, my mother's drug habit kind of took her away from me for a couple of years and I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers which was my mom's mother and my dad's mother. They raised me within their– in their household, um, mostly my dad's mother, and I grew up with my cousins. So my grandmother, she actually raised all of her kids’ kids. [laughs] Um, not all of them but most– three of us of the sev– several amounts of us. But she raised us because our parents were– they were in the streets, in the street life. And she was a very hard–working consistent woman. Like, extremely strong, traditional, um, a very good parent in the sense that when it came to us, she must have understood the mistakes she met before to the extent that she made sure we had structure in the house and we also always had a roof over our head, food in our stomachs, and clothes on our backs. She worked for the school and she was actually one of the first women who went through the police academy and she decided not to become a police officer, but she wanted to work for the Department of Education um, making sure that when kids got into fights and things of that nature, she could dissi– um, dissipate the situation. She could always be there, kinda like a security before they start hiring actual cops to come in the school. Um, so, she was a– um, she's actually a huge influence on, um, on me and my first engagement with like education. Because when I first went to school it was kind of easy to just be like, “Oh that's, um, that’s Miss Hopkins grandson.” Um, and a lot of other teachers, because they knew that, kind of gave me like a special attention. And you would think that this kind of play out in like a good way but it didn't. I was, um, very problematic in school because I wasn't, um–I wasn't the um– traditional child. Like, I was never diagnosed, but I’m quite positive it was ADHD [laughs] that was probably my issue and I also was very precocious, so I usually finished all my work before everyone. Um, I really liked school, but I really got bored really, really fast. So, um, most of my teachers of course– I was in Camden schools– all of my teachers, not most– all my teachers that I had were white. Um, the first time I had non–white teachers was the first time I had like a class where I was actually s– I got kicked out of three schools my first kindergarten, two– three months in kindergarten. I finally had a class where the teachers were black and was a larger class but they were also like more community–based and focused. And anyway I kind of stayed in school and found like some sort of community and like, regiment and going to school, doing my work, and come back or whatever the case may be. Eventually the situation where, um, with my mother, her drug addiction start to get under her control again so she was able to get back on her feet. She got an apartment and now this is about– this is from the ages for me going from about age 5 to around 8 to 9, my mother finally got back on her feet and we moved in together.
Um, I skipped the part about um, one of my earlier childhood memories, um, because– cause this greatly affected how I behaved. But it only took until around these days for me to understand that. When I was 5 or 6, my, um, my, uhh–me and my cousins were at my uncle and aunt’s house, um, down the highway, in um, in Pine Hill. Uh, and we were there for the holiday break. It was New Year’s Eve. My uncle and my aunt got into an argument and my uncle came home and shot my aunt 6 times in front of her children, his children, um, and the rest of our cousins that were present. Um, so, kinda quite early we were exposed to a close death and murder in our family, um, within our family, um, and that– that physical violence had a huge impact on all of us and it had a great impact on me that I didn’t necessarily understand at the time.
00:13:50
So moving forward, I was always kinda known in school as a child that had a lot of energy, and I got into fights quite often. Uh, when I moved with my mom, was the first– it was the first time I moved out of a predominantly black neighborhood to a predominantly Latinx neighborhood. So within that neighborhood, I was an outsider. Um, that being said, I was subject to a lot more physical violence, and a lot more exposure to physical and violent interactions and altercations with other people because I wasn’t from that neighborhood, I didn’t fit in, I didn’t speak Spanish, um–there were a lot of different, like, racial contexts that played into um, where we were re– relocated at. That kinda dictated my character over the next few years because then I had to take on more of an aggressive persona, or to kinda maneuver in my little social settings. Um, but, in terms of education, um, I still kinda was um, a bright– I still was a bright child. And that kinda sho– that was shining through my behavior iss– my behavioral issues within school. So eventually my mother was able to get us– to get– to get us to close enough into the suburbs that I could go to a suburban school. So I ended up going to Pennsauken schools in middle school. Um, and Pennsauken schools, when we took the standardized tests, where you take the entrance exams and standardized entrance exams so you can kinda test where you are, I tested in the top fourteenth percentile for math and um, so my princ– well I remember my principal had called my mother into the office to tell her, like, “your son is literally, um, one of the smartest students in the country. So we should send him to, like, you should send him to like, a math camp or some advanced math courses outside of this school to cultivate that he has a bright future, if that can happen.” Um, not surprisingly though, my mother of course didn’t have no financial means to do so, no education to figure out how to follow up on that, and then of course she also had her own things that she had to do with like her addiction, which made that kinda difficult. So on that front, I was kinda like, um, uh–I wasn’t cultivated, and that part of my kinda died for quite a while, which, uh–and then through like being in this suburban middle school environment though kinda shaped my whole worldview because it was the first time I had actual safe spaces besides just like, the ones I was forced to kinda create amongst my peers in our little small, you know, chill areas in the alleyway somewhere. Uh, now it was kinda like everywhere I went I was kinda safe and I was kinda okay and free to kinda express myself and to kinda think about different parts of my identity that weren’t associated with aggression. Um, so that was a really different experience and it really affected me because, uh, I no longer just went– I no longer was able to just be this one dimensional person. I had to kinda expand and that was the first time I started to learn about, like, code–switching. So fitting into other cultures and trying to blend in, you know what I mean? And trying to act “white,” air quotations, and then, you know what I mean, going back to the hood and just being regular street life. I bounced back and forth between that quite a lot, and, um, and as I moved forward in time, that, um, that played a lot into who I started to hang with.
00:17:23
Now I’m gonna rewind it back to when I was 10 years old just to get back on how– my first engagement with the criminal justice system. So remember when I said I grew up in– or I said I moved into that Latinx community and I fought a lot? Well, one year, uh, I remember– so our school, I went to the Sharp school. And our school was predominantly a Latinx community, so much so that once the new principal had to come in, I’ll never forget, her name is Miss Soto– Mrs. Soto. When she came in, she completely, like, embraced the Latinx culture of the school, which was, like, good and bad. So it was good because predominantly, the population of the school was Latinx. So it was only right that their culture be embraced moreso within this school’s curriculum, within how the teachers taught, and the understanding of the community that the school was placed in. However, what ended up happening though was, they started to focus more on that community to the sense that it encouraged other students to be empowered that that was their space, and then the rest of us– or at least me, speaking personally– my space was shrank– kinda shrank smaller and smaller and smaller. So, like, for instance, the teachers would give a lot of the lessons in, um, you know, you’d get a lot of lessons and whatnot, like, it’d be bilingual, so it’d be in Spanish, it would also be in English. Um, most of the lunch ladies spoke Spanish when they came in for lunch, that little hour period, they’d come in, we’d stay in classroom, everything would basically just turn into like [laughs], if you didn’t speak Spanish, you basically were just, like, deaf for an hour. So that forced me to understand Spanish, but it also still, um, made me a target, um, for like, of everybody’s jokes. I still was bullied mostly for being black or “moyo” at the time. So, um, one time, I remember I was standing up– or everyone was standing up and laughing about whatever joke was said in the class. And the one teacher targeted– she pointed to me and she’s like, “Oh, sientate! Sientate!” [laughs]. Like, she started, like, telling me to sit down, and I was trying to figure out why? Like, why I gotta sit down? Everybody else is laughing and standing up too. Why did you just point me out, single me out? So that made me upset. So like a regular third grader– or I was in fourth grade at the time– so like a regular third or fourth grader I sat down at my desk and cried. ‘Cause I was like, “Why was I just targeted? I don’t know.” Of course, um, so when I sat there and cried and put my head down, one of the kids that usually always teased me was like, “Uh–” He said something like, “Oh, we’re gonna beat you up after school. We’re gonna jump you after school.” Just to add insult to injury. So that caused me to tap back into all the anger issues [laughs] that I had been usually bottling up because I was a really shy kid. So I got up, um, and I got– and I basically like, um, bum-rushed him. Um, I hit him a couple of times. He fell and it was one of those heater radiators– remember they used to always be right under the window? I pushed him over to that point and started fighting with him there. But it wasn’t really a fight. I hit him like four or five times, he fell immediately, then I started just kicking him and stomping him. However, when he fell, his head hit that radiator and blood gushed out of his head. And this was the judge’s words, “Because you didn’t stop, we believe something’s severely wrong with you.” So apparently, a 10 year old gets into a fight, that is blind with rage, and happens to kick somebody after his head hits, it’s unfortunate, but that meant that the rest of my character was demonized completely. So anyway, his mother happened to be a lawyer, so they pressed charges. I was also– first, I was arrested that day. So that day they took me to the principal’s office. They put handcuffs on me. Um, it wasn’t until a secretary that was there was like, “Yo, ya’ll need to take handcuffs off his little tiny wrists.” [laughs] So they took the handcuffs off and I sat there. They didn’t tell my mom I was in handcuffs or anything of that nature. And then basically sent me home. Um, and then when I– and then back in the day, you know, when your mom worked 9 to 5 or whatever, you got those couple of hours before she come home and you gotta figure out, “How am I gonna tell my mom what just happened today?” So when she finally came home, you know, I told my mom everything, et cetera. A couple of weeks later we found out they pressing charges. Um, we went to court. Um, the prosecutor was not trying to hear anything, um, other than, “How should we punish this child?” So they gave me two years probation. Um, and after the two years’ probation, they gave me anger management counseling. Um, and– yeah. I had anger management counseling and two years’ probation.
00:22:18
So in anger management counseling they tried to– or what they did was pinpoint most of the causes of my anger and, um, and whatnot from the death of my brother– my older brother that my mom and I lived with and took care of. He had died in my arms when I was 7 from a heart attack. Um, my mom had been fighting back and forth to me to get custody and maintain custody of him, and when she finally got him back when he was 11 and I was 7 years old, he had died of a heart attack based on just chances, like, medication, hereditary, all those things stacked up against him. Um, he was a genius. Um, literally a genius. Like, played piano, like, know everything, like, beyond– how old is an 11 year old? What grade? Like, he knows algebra, and all that stuff. Like, he was literally a genius, like, it was weird [laughs]. And, um, yeah, he died early. So, that had also a big impact on me. Um, those early deaths in my family. And the anger management was, kinda like, focused on trying to, like, break that down and figure that out. But it never worked. It was usually, like, some weird white lady trying to figure out, like, “Oh maybe you should start trying to do these extracurricular activities,” and stuff like that. So I got into sports more. And that, of course, didn’t help.
Um, so I was on probation since I was 10.
So, my mother was still working. I had lived with her now. I’m in the house with her. She still works 9 to 5. She still has her drug addiction. So even though she works 9 to 5, and her paycheck would go to the bills, she’d make sure we have something to eat, whenever she could, you know, based on her paycheck, she still had this– she still spent quite many hours outside the home. So I did learn how to basically take care of myself, um, and kinda build my skills on how to live alone and how to live, like, pretty much as an adult in the house since I was very, very young.
Uh, when we got in the suburbs, we moved in with one of her boyfriends and he was extremely abusive. He wasn’t even her legit boyfriend. He was just– he was the guy that could get us into the suburbs [laughs]. So you know, the woman’s struggle was real because she understood that her son needed to be in the, um, higher education, um, and had to be in the better– under better educational circumstances. And it was only a few pe– few ways that can happen. And my mother would happen to be– um, my mother’s a very attractive woman. And she happened to know that if she needed to use that to make sure that we could get in a better spot, that’s what’s gonna happen. It’s just straight like that. My mother also never lied to me. She’s never told me anything other than what was the truth. She kept it real with me since I was literally like 5 or 6 years old. So, I had never any– any illusions about our situations, our circumstances, why we were where we at, what we were doing there, or how I had to behave. Um, it caused me to be a very untrusting person of course. [laughs]. Because I understood how the world worked and sometimes you had to pull strings to get there. Some people had more privileges and platforms to have things. Even if you thought they didn’t deserve it or even if they weren’t fair to other people. Um, that, my mother’s fake boyfriend was extremely abusive, and many nights they got into fights. Um, he used to have his gun. He’ll load up his gun, put it under his pillow, you know, kinda like, fake little threats of that nature. A couple of times he put his hands on my mother. I, like, had to hit him with a bat, know what I mean? I was fighting him since I was around 12. Eventually my mother was able to get a better job, and then we moved to our own apartment still within the suburbs. So for us, it was like a huge win. That was when I was around 13.
Um, I had gotten another charge within that time for arson. Um, my mother had another boyfriend that we spent a couple months living with that was a little bit further down the highway. So I was exposed to a couple other suburban areas that were starting to take in more inner city community families, et cetera. Um, and, um, it wasn’t domestic between them, but her boyfriend had a secret heroin addiction. So, um, life was, like, good for like six or eight months, and then it slowly deteriorated out of nowhere. [laughs]. Like, three months. And during that time, I got a charge– I got an arson charge for– one of my friends was playing with fire. We all ended up, like, you know what I mean, getting caught and rounded up type of thing about it. And it basically was like, “Okay, well, you were four black kids in the park.” Or three black kids– I don’t remember how many it was. [laughs]. Like, you know what I mean? Two, three black kids in the park in the middle of Lindenwold. “We’re gonna say you all, like [laughs], had some tensions,” et cetera. So I was– so right when my probation ended for the assault, for the aggravated assault from 10-12, it began again literally, like, four months later from 12-14.
00:27:14
Now, going from 12-14, um, uh, I had– I violated probation quite a few times. Um, mostly for assault. Um, it was like another simple assault. I got in trouble, um, I got in trouble before with uh– [sighs] what was it? It was the assault? I was doing pretty good, like, I was almost finished but I know I had something to do with, I had gotten into an assault. It was like a regular fight. Um, and somehow the kid’s mom believed that he was jumped. It was just me fighting him, you know what I mean? It was one of those regular little kid fights. His mom was like, oh, call the police or whatever. And we had to go to court for it. Um, that was a violation, and after that violation, my life kinda just escalated. So when I was 13, my mother’s addiction started to get a little bit more hectic. And she ended up, she stopped working, and she was able to kinda make sure we still had our bills paid and everything of that nature. Um, during that time. But, um, other factors in my life started to play big, big role. Like how I fit in with my peers, ‘cause I was entering high school. So that was around the time that I started selling drugs. Um, I first started selling, like, weed, cloves, gum, things of that nature. Um, I wanted to make sure that I had food in the house and clothes on my back for the new school year or marking period. Um, and it just, kinda like, spiraled really quickly in terms of, like, my understanding of what I needed to do to make sure I was okay. And things that started to shrink from that perspective were my place in school, my place in sports, uh, and my place in home. ‘Cause I didn’t stay in the house at all. [laughs]. Eventually I was arrested again for, uh, robbery, for armed robbery. I wasn’t convicted of it, I wasn’t charged with it, but because I was arrested for it, I was sent to detention center. It was the first time I went to detention center. I was 14. I spend the summer in a detention center and the detention center was horrible. Um, I had usually been able to kinda– avoid situations like that where the judge or the prosecutor would figure out a way to still give me, um, a very unfair sentencing or a very unfair, um, conclusion or decision based on whatever the context– situation was. Like, again, when I was 10 I got into a fight. When I was 12, like, a small fire got lit and they charged arson, put us back on probation, etc. This time, uh, they sent me to the cen– detention center almost immediately.
Uh, when I went there, um, people tend to think that the juvenile detention centers are, you know, places where, you know, where it’s gonna be family-oriented or it’s like the movie where, you know, you play football, summer, then everybody starts off as different gangs, and then we all get along because we realize we got things in common, you know what I mean? It’s like an awesome counselor there that everyone loves or whatever. Um, to that point, there is always an awesome counselor there that everybody loves, but the rest of the facility’s dead ass prison. Excuse my language. The rest of the facility is prison.
Um, everything is just like it is in prison. Um, to the uniformity of the officers and what they wear, their name as being “officers,” they weren’t always officers. Uh, they, um, [laughs] with juveniles that are contained, what they are forced to wear, we’re all forced to wear the same exact khakis now. Um, we also have, you know, just like a detention center, you wake up, three hots and a cot, et cetera. Um, they give us school, which is completely under-funded. Um, all of their assumptions on our school, um, or in our education are horribly off and non encouraging for us to continue education. It’s kinda like, “Where are you supposed to be? Alright, you’re not there. Okay, so we’re gonna give you third grade reading and math material. We’re gonna need you to complete this while you’re here so we can say we did our jobs and make sure that you got this privileges while you’re there.” And then of course that never really translates back into school when you get back into school. You never really can go back into school because now you see what a relationship between you and school can be. And that’s, they assume the least amount from you and require you to do absolutely nothing, only to tell you that you’re gonna end up in prison one day if you keep acting like this. Like, that’s a very common thing that they always say. Um, they’re big on telling you that you’re coming back to prison and how much they think about you and your place within the criminal justice system. So, the school there is horrible. It’s, um, arguably worse than just being detained in there. Because I think it has the biggest impact on people, um, when they’re going to juvenile je– je– detention centers.
00:32:25
Anyway, um, so I was released from there and it was a big impact on my mother, because that was the first time I had been taken away from her and she already lost a child. So, me and her start to, um, not see eye to eye anymore. Um, now I understand because me and her are very much alike. But before, I just assumed, because, I’m like, “Alright, she’s buggin.” I mean– I’ma be– I’ma keep it honest with you. In my head, she was like a drug user, and I sold drugs. So to me, she was like a customer just like anyone else was a customer. And it caused me to compartmentalize my relationship with my mother. To think of her as somebody else. Um, I had come really close to putting my hands on her after she was, um, um, she was doing her little corporal punishments of some sort, you know what I mean? Um, ‘cause we did have– we did have those situations. Um, and basically I ended up leaving the house, and the people I looked up to at the time were people who were already in the streets and who were self-identified as people who were in the streets. So that introduced me to a couple of my cousins and older people that I was selling drugs for that were already in gang– that were already in a gang or in gangs. Um, so that’s how I kinda got into the world of gangbanging to the fullest extent. So I started gangbanging, and that kinda took me completely out of the house because now I had a place to sleep when I wasn’t at my house. I had, um, I had a source of income. Uh, the only thing required, though, of me by my gang now was somewhat reminiscent of a childhood or what I should have been doing as a teenager was making sure I still went to school. That was like a big thing for the person that had took me into the gang. That was my big homie. Um, he was also my cousin. So I listened to him pretty much, like, without question. Like, I pretty much never doubted him at all. I believed completely in him ‘cause I felt like he believed in me. So at the, um, so that pushed me into more, um– It pushed me more into street life where I embraced what I needed to do to make sure I survived and was valued in the streets of Camden. Which is of course, um– what’s valued is your survival skills and– and how not fragile your body is. Everybody’s fear in the hood is the fragility of their bodies. Um, that’s why we react so severely to different situations that other people would think is irrational. It’s not irrational when your body is fragile. When you know that you can die, like, regardless of the situation, no one would care at all. No one would blink twice. They’re gonna pour a little bit of alcohol out on the floor for you, they’re gonna set up some balloons and teddy bears, it’s gonna blow over in two days. No one’s gonna care, the candles are gonna burn out. So that’s kinda pretty much on the mind of every teenager in Camden on a given day at this time. And so, that kinda pushed me to be one of those people who– I’m extremist about my personality [laughs]. That’s something I know about myself. So I can’t say if it’s for everybody, but anything I do I wanna do it to the max. Like, I wanna go one hundred percent unti– until I burn out from it. That’s how I get satisfaction from things in life. And so I was in the streets one hundred percent and I embraced it and I took it in as something that’s gonna define who I am. And this is how I’m defining, you know, my circumstances. And now I was a gangbanger in the streets hustling. Trying to make it, trying to survive, trying to make it to the next step.
I started to value school more because I started to be afraid of getting trap into the trap I was seeing, like [laughs], like I realized what they meant by the trap. And it was so apparent to me. Every day dragging closer and closer to the moment that I was actually arrested for the crime that sent me to adult prison. And everybody, even– even my big homie just seemed to be, like, barely making it. Barely trying to figure out what was tomorrow gonna look like. Um, the only thing that the rest of my friends were doing at that time were, like, trying to quell their depression from whatever they was going through at home. Um, only thing we ended up– only thing we could do with each other was smoke weed and hustle all day for money to make sure we could eat and could have clothes. Um, it was– everything was just based on survival, and sometimes we had to get entertainment from those things. Um, it’s a interesting– it was an interesting dynamic that plays into it.
Anyway, so we, uh– we eventually– I eventually became well known for gangbanging. Well known for my aggression. Uh, well known for, um, for explosive violence really fast. So that kinda put me in the position with a lot of respect. Um, people might say fear, but it’s absolutely respect because nobody’s scared of me, because my body still is fragile. And anyone else’s body. It’s just that people respected that I knew how to pick and choose when I was gonna be extremely violent. And if you deserved my extreme violence you were gonna get it. Um, that’s just the mindset at the time and that’s exactly how I functioned. Uh, eventually I was starting to take care of other of my peers because I was making more money from, um, I was selling drugs a lot more. Uh, I was going to school but I was standing in the streets a lot more. So I mean, like, six my school started, on the bus– comes the bus stop maybe 6:30, 6:45. We’ll get out prolly around 2:30. I’m on the block around three o’clock and I’m not leaving the block till around one in the morning. Know what I mean? I’ma get prolly like five hours of sleep wherever. Uh, there was a period before I got my own apartment– I got it illegally of course, but before I got my own apartment, um, I was sleeping on, like, benches every now and then. Sometimes I sleep in, like, the stairway of my grandmother’s apartment building or something of that nature. Or wherever I was selling drugs, I would kinda sleep there or stay at a cousin’s house, or stay at one of my homie’s house. And so I was homeless and I was hungry, but I was hustling and that started– I started to give me an avenue to build money and build finances to get my own spot.
00:38:54
Um, so anyway eventually I got my own spot. Um, two– two of my friends that were, like, basically runaways and couldn’t really do anything in a legal aspect whatsoever– couldn’t go to school, couldn’t get no job, or any of that– they were literally, their status just as human beings just was off the map. And they had run away already from home. Like, they were under 18 or under 21, they weren’t trying to be around anybody that could put them in a position where they were basically in carceral state. So I was taking care of my godsister, my cousin, um, you know what I mean, a couple other people that were close to– my close friends. We all basically were selling drugs together and pooling our resources so we could stay at this one spot. So we can eat and then we can kinda build from there. About two of us were going to school on, like, a consistent basis. But about five of us altogether were usually, like, taking care of each other, spending money to stay in that apartment or whatever.
Anyway, the night came when I was 15– when I was, uh, yeah when I was 15, um, I was coming back– me and my– those group of friends I was telling you– we were coming back from, like, a party. Now I’m gonna give you some context. Usually, so Camden is right on the borderline of Pennsauken. They’re right next to each other. Camden is of course one of the poorest cities in the world, where Pennsauken is pretty decent middle class, upper middle class, suburbia, blue ribbon school, like, um, everything about Pennsauken is what anybody from Camden would love to have. So occasionally, because that’s where my peers were from school, I would go over back into Pennsauken and spend time there because that’s where I felt safe at. I didn’t have to carry a gun on me. Um, and I didn’t have to expect violence. And if I did it was like a fist fight. And I’m like [sighs] [laughs] relief, like, alright, This has to be a fist fight? That’s it. And everybody’s gonna argue, they’re gonna bump shoulders, or whatever, throw a couple punches and it’s over. That’s the most type of physical violence that I’ll have to see or be involved with. Um, and I also didn’t have to do that because I was pretty well known. I was pretty– I’m not an aggressive, like, violent person. It’s just that I had the capacity for it. So a lot of people like– um, and I saw anyway anytime there was, like, a party or something of that nature I would try to get my friends and encourage them to come with me or, they were all– half of them already lived in Pennsau– were from Pennsauken. So we would, like, kinda link up and then we go to, like, a party or, like, a chill spot or whatever the case may be. And then we’ll, like, reconvene before we go back home or go in that house or whatever. This was one of those nights. We had, like, a regular little party we’re going to and we were on our way walking back across town. We had stopped at the park because we were tired of walking. Um, my Godsister that I was with had sat next to someone, um, it was a drunk old guy laying down. He wasn’t even really that old after I found out later, but he was just drunk and he looked like a drunk regular old guy. I mean, two o’clock in the morning, you can smell beer and alcohol on his body. So she sat down next to him, she was like, “Oh, I’m tired,” and just plopped right down. Um, so she must– she got up– I wasn’t paying attention, I don’t know why I was– I don’t know what I was doing, but I wasn’t on my phone ‘cause it didn’t exist like that [laughs]. Like, people wasn’t distracted by their phones, so I don’t know what I was doing. I had to be talking to somebody. But I remember not paying attention for a certain amount of time, and then she came over to me and she was like, “Yo, he just grabbed me.” Et cetera, et cetera. Now again, these are my friends, I am in a gang. They all aspire to be in a gang or they are already in a gang. I am a person that has been a leader in the gang for a couple of years now. So, they basically looked to me as like, “Yo, what we about to do?” So I’m like, which for me, it’s like, it’s gotta be– you know what I mean? The only answer to that is retaliation. Somebody grabs your sister, I don’t think anybody would think that would be– wow, like, if somebody inappropriately grabs your 13-year-old sister, you’re gonna wanna punch them in their face. So that’s exactly what happened. Um, so, after– after, you know, the altercation happened, we went on about our ways. About two weeks later, it was in the paper that he had died in the hospital due to his injuries. A man in a park died, they gave his body over. He wasn’t, like, some regular old guy. He had worked across the street at the local butcher thing, got drunk that night, and then just didn’t come in the house. Like, he’d hang out there in the summer. It was warm, so he’d just drink there and then go to sleep or whatever the case may be. In the paper though, they framed it as if it was like a homeless guy that was just jumped by random gang members, like, gang members– you remember, um, those years when they started showcasing like “knockout” and things of that nature? So they start, like, that was like an early prerequisite to when they start talking about those stories. Um, don’t get it twisted. In our hood we did play knockout [laughs]. But, but, this was not that time at all. This was a retaliation because someone thought somebody’s body was, um– their personal space was transgressed.
So we went, um, after we saw the news or whatever the case may be, you know, it was like, you know, alright? Um, eventually investigation, pursuit, et cetera, et cetera, about a month later they rounded us up. I was arrested for first degree murder. Um, when I was arrested for first degree murder, that was the most stressful, scary time in my life. Um, original offers from the prosecutor was like sixty years whi– this is while I’m in the detention center now. When I went back to detention center, they treat you different when they know that you’re about to face a lot more time. They start to be nice to you, try to, you know, make everything more comfortable, because they know, [laughs] like, this right here, is easy [laughs]. Like, you still at the easy part. I was naïve because I was under the impression, I’m like, there’s no way I’m about to do sixty years for this. Like, or, there’s no way that, like, they can say that I actually did this type of thing. Um, and that kind of kept me afloat. That kept me mentally afloat for quite some time.
00:45:08
Um, about a year later, or not a year later– about nine months later as I was approaching 16, I had went to court, and when I went to court the judge was like– uh, not the judge. The prosecutor. The prosecutor met with my lawyer, and they were like– he was like, “Listen, um, you’re the last person holding out. You’re one of the last. Your co–defendants,” there were four of us that was convicted– I was the last person to basically just say anything besides trial. So they were like, he was like, “Listen, if you don’t comply with this in any way shape or form, what we’re gonna do is push this court date back. We’re gonna push it back about three weeks.” It was May 4 or May 3, ‘cause I remember my birthday was coming up. So it was like, “We’re gonna push this court date about three weeks. Once it's May 31, you’re gonna be 16. We’ll see you probably June 6, something like that. Once you’re 16 we can legally waive you up without your consent. If you force us to do that, we will not come down at all with the deals. We will stay in the upper sixty, upper forty limit, um, you will do life in prison. Um, we will eventually get the rest of your co-defendants to cop out to a deal, and they will testify against you in court. And three testimonies with two other witness testimonies that we have on the side will pretty much put you under the jail. The choice is yours.” [laughs]. Basically. So my lawyer was like, um, look, they’re not trying to move, et cetera, et cetera, if we wanna take it to trial, whatever. Um, he was ineffectively counseling me, because in all actuality I had, um, full reign to maintain my juvenile status and kinda continue to fight. Um, or– and then just maintaining the family court. But my lawyer suggested that if I work with him, duh duh duh, you’re not gonna be trial, et cetera, et cetera, so they basically coerced me into waiving my rights as an– a– as a teacher and then sign on as an adult and then therefore be treated as an adult for the rest of this entire legal situation. So, and that also meant me going to county.
Now this is how they used to get you. They’d be like, “Look, if you waive up and then you go to county, then you can bail out!” [laughs] It was like, yeah, you can just bail out ‘cause you’ll be an adult but you– your parents can just bail you out and now you can go home. And I was like, “Oh what?! Word! That sounds amazing! Yeah, let me get out of this juvenile family court and go to adult court, work with the prosecutor,” they were willing to bring this time down to about twenty years, like, twenty– twenty years was the next, like, the lowest they was gonna start talking to me about. Um, my lowest they got to me while I was in juvenile was thirty years they were like, “I don’t care what happens, we’re trying to give you thirty years more.” Which, at the time, again, I didn’t know they weren’t gonna be able to do, but they were just lying to me. Um, so, basically it was like, “Yeah, you know, you go to the adult court, you can just bail out, we can just fight the case from home, whatever,” et cetera, et cetera. My lawyer made it sound real good. Um, real cool guy [laughs]. So we went, um, I waived my rights. Um, my parents were in– so my mom wasn’t asked about it, my dad had dropped out of my life, too. Um, I hadn’t speaking or saw him or did anything near him or with him since I was around 10. Um, he just for whatever reason, he had another family he started. He moved to the suburbs, he stopped selling drugs, like, he was legit now, he got a whole job, decent, South Jersey family suburbia whatever. Um, he got a daughter, his girlfriend cut me and my mother out of his life. He paid child support I heard, um, that doesn’t mean squat to somebody in poverty though. Two hundred dollars of child support every seven months just so they don’t send you to jail? No one cares. Um, so [laughs], so he was completely out of the picture. Um, my mother was my only real supporter, and then I had my cousin who was also supporting a couple of other family– my grandmothers of course, but they were distraught. My mother was distraught. Um, she wasn’t consulted about it and I felt I was at the point where I had to make an adult decision about moving forward and I didn’t wanna burden anyone else. So I’m like you know what, let me just go ahead, go into the adult court, and then I’ll see if I can bail out, et cetera.
So I’m moving onto adult court, waived my rights. Um, so they’re like, ‘Okay, now we’ll offer you twenty and then we’ll issue a bail.” I’m like alright, what’s the bail–
Five hundred thousand dollars.
[laughs]
I’m like, “What?” They’re like, “Yeah, $500,000.” They broke it down to me real quick, like, you can just come up with 10% and then have a lien on your house, on your property– what property? I don’t know. They just was like that property, you can just– you know what I mean? You can just mortgage the property and then after you just mortgage the property you can make a 10% down payment in cash, which would be good. I’m like okay, 10% of 500,000, $50,000 cash, okay, everybody got that. That’s why I’m in the streets now because I have $50,000 to pay cash. [laughs]. It was ridiculous. I remember how foolish it sounded while I was 16 in prison, in adult county. Like, yo, they got me. They funny– they really just say that? Um, yes they did. And they did not bring the bail down either. They did not waive the bail. They said $500,000 for each of you. None of us could leave. All of us were just stuck in there with this extremely large amount of bail money we had to pay. Um, and, um, we were placed in county.
So when we were in county, the county jail, being a juvenile in an adult facility back then was interesting. Because what happened was, they were like, it was contradictory. Right? Like, you’re a child, you technically can’t be here, like, they understand that. Um, it’s inherent in the system. They literally– they have to separate you, they have to isolate you. They can’t have you in an adult population, your at-risk population. You’re literally a child, like, with child meat and bones on you with child strength. They feed you double portions when you come in there because they’re like, “You don’t have enough nutrients. What we feed regular adult, dehumanized humans–” Um, so they give us double portions to, like, help us grow ‘cause they know that they don’t even give enough food for the regular human body to grow– only to be sustained. So they treat you different. The system inherently understands that you should not be in prison as a child. However, they still, um, they still have to proceed [laughs]. You know what I mean? They have to proceed forward with– as if you were a convicted felon or a detained adult. So, um, in the county it was still early stages of Camden, when it was like, when gangs were coming into Camden. Gang activity wasn’t heavy in Camden at this time at all. Camden is not known for gangs. It’s not the place, like– it’s different now– but back then, it wasn’t nobody named Crip, there wasn’t no Blood, there wasn’t no– none of that. It was people who hustled to survive, and then like, you know, all your little certain neighborhoods were just certain neighborhoods. It wasn’t no gang activity.
00:52:23
I had, like, been one of the first people that was gangbangin’ and then that came into the county, and by the time I was in the county it had started to become a bigger and bigger thing. Needless to say, the violence pursued right behind that. Um, it was fighting every single day. And I was in a juvenile block with about twelve other people, twelve other juveniles. We fought literally every single day. Every day was fighting. Every day was fighting. Even, like, our fun, our behavior just to entertain ourselves was pretty close to fighting. It was one of those– yeah– it was one of those type environments. But we also, lowkey or, I guess the undertone of the situation was, we understood that we were about to be amongst adults. So if we didn’t toughen ourselves up enough on our own, we knew that we were going to be subject to wolves as soon as we got put in, um, um, into adult population.
Into– Beyond this, like, what it really boils down to, nobody really wants to say this but you’re really just, you’re like, “I don’t wanna get raped.” ‘Cause that’s really what’s gonna happen. Um, juveniles or somebody at an at risk population are more likely to be raped, and after you’re raped, everything else happens that– I don’t know how many people that’s in the general society know about, like, the other things that pursue just after rape. Like, rape is the physical violence that happens in that one moment, or that can consistently happen in a moment, and it’s horrible already. But you have so many other things in the context of a prison society that plays into that that are even worse to a lot of other people. For instance, being labeled, or like in– in terms of people know you were a victim, um, it don’t matter what you were a victim of. You could have been raped, you could have just been beat up and didn’t do anything to defend your own honor, you could have been robbed and didn’t do anything to defend your own honor, you coulda just been like, um, chumped or something and didn’t do anything to defend your own– anytime you were a vic– a victim, and you didn’t retaliate by showing your own dignity, you were subject to more victimization from other different types of crimes or other different types of violations to your body, your property. So, we knew inherently that because we were smaller, the first thing we were gonna get was probably rape. Um, they’re gonna get that out of a teenager before they get, like, you know, someone that doesn’t fight back. Like, a teenager’s gonna fight back of course, you got energy. But, like, they’re more likely to rape you, um, everybody in there was like, “Let’s just get tougher and bigger and stronger and whatnot before we get raped.” Um, that was the undertone of it. So even though we were all pretty much knew each other, like, we all grew up together. I knew everybody in there. I grew up with them, went to school with them, sold drugs with them, fought other people with them, fought them, but now we were here, we just was like turning into something that just needed to be basically like a school for gladiators.
Um, anyway, the officers, in turn, always came in to beat us up. Um, sometimes they’d walk by, they’ll be doing something in another block that we thought was, um, that we just was like, that’s unfair, like [laughs]. Whatever they were doing, we just thought it was just, like, oppressive. So we’d call them on it, you know what I mean? Because that’s also the undertone of being in a gang, right? You’re supposed to be anti-oppression. So every time we see the cops, we’d be like, “Oh they’re doing something like running down on the whole tier, making everybody strip naked,” et cetera, et cetera.We’ll talk a bunch of crap when they walk by, and after we talked a bunch of crap they walk by, because it’s fully within their power, they’ll just come back. And they’ll come on our block and beat us up. We had, like, full fights, full fights with the grown officers, like– I remember one time they came in just to do one-on-one’s with us. Like, one-on-one fights. We’re teenagers! [laughs] Yeah they’ll come in, and literally sit in the cell with us. They’ll come in, they’ll all come in, deep in their squad, SWAT uniforms or whatever the case may be. They’ll be fighting the biggest one of us or whatever the case may be until the rest of us start fighting ‘cause we’re in a gang, so we’re not gonna let just one person get beat up by cops. So then everything– so then we start by, um, we would basically go back and forth with the officers. Many times they come in and run down on us. I remember one time, they, um, we were talkin’ crap to them or something, they had just got into a fight with us. They felt a little bad about the fight. And of course they don’t put it on paperwork. So now they’re like, alright, now we gotta retaliate ‘cause we took a loss and we can’t, like, take a loss, ‘cause you’re inmates. So they came in, and, um, they came to our door, surprised us, like they’ll put– they’ll cover your window. The little small window you have. And then they’ll knock on it. So you can’t have your window blocked, because when they’re doing count, they gotta count your body and physically see you and see you move and thus you’re alive. So, they came in and actually blocked our side of the window from their side and then knocked on it, you know what I mean? And so, that forces you to go to the window, like yo, to try and figure out what was going on. They did that, I remember, I went to the window, they pulled the paper down– a can of mace. PSSSSSSHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
Right in my face like this. They opened the door, came in, dunked me, BOOM! Threw me on the bed and then started punching me in the back of the head shouting, “Stop resisting!” I’m like man, my head hurts! This is the back of my– I found out we– he was trying to say that he was saying, um, “Stop resisting” and something else, but I had knew to put my hands were already up like this because I’m like, my face is maced, I don’t want you to do anything else. The mace is supposed to take the fight out of you. So I put my hands over my head and he was trying to have my hands, like, down here or something. But that was his excuse to say I was resisting. So he was punching me in the back of my little head [laughs] you know what I mean? Um, this is a grown man. This is the sarge, too. This was the sergeant. He had came in, started punching on me, um, they had beat, um, one of my people– one of my co-defendants that I had came in– they beat him to a pulp. And he’s like 6’2”, um, two hundred and something pounds. They beat him into a pulp. I remember his face looked crazy. They had hid him from his family for about two weeks. Um, they punched on me, um, blacked my eye, I got a scar on my shoulder still from that day, you know what I mean? Put their knee in my back. They could have broke my spine. They did all type of things to us that day.
00:58:26
Um, later that day– um, or, uh, later the next week, later that week when they was finally able to bring us out– ‘cause they would lock you down until your he– wounds heal a little bit so you don’t look as bad and as fresh. Um, so they took us to court line where we basically see, like, the internal courting system, and I remember the sarge came in and I was like, um, she was like, I was like, “Yo, I don’t know why I’m here.” They came in, maced my face, and then beat me to death, and now you’re telling me that I have some sort of charge. I forgot what charge it was. But it was like some sort of charge or whatever, institutional charge, you know what I mean? And the sarge was like, “No, that wasn’t me. I came in there and you were resisting because you weren’t putting your hands where I told you to put your hands.” I’m like, “But my hands, were pacified!” Like, my fingers were interlocked. You’re– your purpose of telling me to do what my hands were done were already finished for you. All you had to do was subdue me however you needed to after that. Like, you punched me in my head and they just ignored it after ages and admitted it like, “Alright.” And then they was just, like, threw us back in. So those instances happened quite often.
Um, the county was a wild ride. A wild ride.
Um, and then of course, I went– so I went to adult prison. And from the adult prison they put me into another, uh, um– like juvenile, juvenile space. So an adult– so once you get to prison after the county, it’s less restrictions on having you in the adult population. So now they’ll have you in an adult population, but they’ll have you in the at-risk or protected-class adult population. So they literally– this is– every time I think about it, I think like, yo, [laughs], I don’t know what goes on through their mind, but it just shows how they categorize, um, people they don’t think are human as just like, “Alright, we’ll just put the others right here, and we’ll just put like everybody else over here.” So the others is where I would fit into it– juvenile. So this is a small tier– it’s not a small tier, but it’s a tier about two or three tiers, you know what I mean. Um, usually in any given prison setting where people who wanna protect their custody will go, of some sort. So, because I was a juvenile, I wasn’t on, like, intense protective custody, so they didn’t have to watch me, only have me in a room, in basically solitary confinement sort of situation. They would just put me in a tier with other people they’d rather not have in the general population because they were at risk. So the rest of the people in this tier were people who had severe mental issues. Um, and had to have medication constantly, um, so that was like schizophrenia, bi polar, like, if they needed meds, they basically make them sit there like this all day, like they put them there. Um, they have, um, people who have severe, um, health issues. So everyone there I knew had cancer or seizures on a regular basis. That– the whole– [laughs] that’s one hell of a thing to see. Um, and, um, um–child molesters. Anybody with, um, a pedophile charge or sexual assault, or anything, so those are mostly like old creepy white guys to be quite honest. Um, and then they make you– and then they put you in there with anybody who identifies openly as homosexual. So, um, so the queer community’s also in this population. So, then they put juveniles in there. [laughs]. Um, they put children. Um, my biggest grievance has always been, why did you put me, a child, in here, with a pedophile? I’m not into business of criminalizing anybody’s body. I do not think any human deserves to be incarcerated, even a child of– child molester. That should be on the record. I am a very staunchly prison abolitionist. However, why am I in the same housing unit as somebody who enjoys touching people’s bodies like mine? Like, I just never understood that. I’m a trigger for them. Like [laughs] I could be somebody that could potentially be their next victim. Um, however it changes in prison though. Um, I don’t know how familiar you are with this, but many roles out here that usually play out out here in certain ways change drastically in prison.
Um, so in prison, the child offend– molesters and people who have sexual assault and anything like that are typically the victims and at risk population because everyone else has a complete negative view on it. But it is not just like, “Okay, you’re a child molester, you get under my skin, how disgusting.” It’s, “No. I’m gonna beat you up. I’m gonna put my hands on you. Um, you’re a child molester. I have a daughter.” And people can just funnel their anger into you. Um, so our situation was a little different where– so we interacted with them more regular, but we heavily oppressed them. Um, it’s just as simple as that.
I was in a gang. Gangbanging in an adult prison is a whole ‘nother world. It was on steroids at this time. Like, everybody in New Jersey prison was Blood. I mean, it felt like every single person was Blood. And if not, everybody pretty much half of us, like, solidly fifty percent, it felt like, at any given moment, was Blood. Um, so for me that was a benefit. And it also was a curse. Because then I was always obligated to be, you know, a part of whatever group activity was going to be done or whatever movement was done. You know, it was a gang. Um, so anyway, we oppress people that we just disagree with, their politics, or whatever they did. So if you’re, like, a sex offender or stuff like that–
Um, so what would happen would be I still had communication and I still would go to, like, school. So they have, um, you know, they have a law, they have a law now that one of my personal friends I know helped right from Trenton state prison, um, wrote, you know what I mean, that people who are under 25 or under 21 who don’t have their high school diploma or a GED has to be in school and be educated by the state so that they can get that, um, especially upon leaving here. Leaving– uh, especially upon leaving prison. So I was going to school, and in school, that’s where I would interact with the general population. It wouldn’t be any, you know, separation or nothing. I wouldn’t be in any way a protected custody person. Um, so I went in there with other people, you know, a lot of people from my area, a lot of people from the gang. That’s where I kinda fit into the community. So school was the first place I could go that actually was, like, somewhat pulling me away from, like, the mindset of being just like a chaotic environment where I was kinda stuck in. Um, consequently though, um, because of the power of other people in the gangs that I had not known before, so– when your home– your big homie or whoever is the most powerful gang member in that area is the most powerful gang member ever. Just that person. Um, and if they have the care in the world to pay attention to specifically you or whatever the case may be, then you’ll be– you’ll have obligation pretty much to just that person. In prison it changes because now you might be part of the same gang, but that person is also a part of the same gang, but they have more clout than your big homie or whatever the case may be. So whatever they say to you still gotta go. But it’s still hierarchy, military, you know, chain of command, just like anything else. Um, so they would always send out commands to us because we were still just little homies. Like, we’re still just teenagers. Um, so we would always be tasked with like, of course, like the dirty work of doing anything. Um so that was the direct oppression of people that wouldn’t agree with their politics, et cetera, et cetera. Um, extorting them. Um, fighting anything of that nature. So basically in the hood– in the street, we call it stunt dummy, and it should be an academic term because, I don’t know no other term in academia that quite captures who a stunt dummy is. [laughs] And the stunt dummy is just like the thing in the car, you know what I mean, that they crash when they testing it. Um, they’re testing something out and they put you in there and see what happens [laughs]. You know what I mean? And there’s lowkey entertainment, and there’s also get some sort of job done because they effectively did something. Um, a lot of times things are just done in there just to exercise power because people have no other source of it or no other way to exercise it.
01:06:46
Um, anyway, education started to play a big role for me. Um, because eventually having one of those situations where I engaged in violent activity and, you know, institutional violence, um, and I was reprimanded, et cetera, I was sent to solitary confinement. And in solitary confinement, uh, I lost my mind.
I had to be in a room by myself because I was a juvenile. So I had true isolated confinement for about a good six months. Um, because I was manipul– we were– me and a couple other individuals were actually manipulated by an officer to attack another inmate– air quotations– and that led to– that person was severely injured. Um, you know, the investigation, whatever the case may be, I was sent to ASEG– administrative segregation unit. Which is basically solitary confinement or isolated confinement. Um, and I was supposed to be there much longer. I was supposed to be there I think for about a year. Um, I ended up being there for six months because It was such a, um, so many illegal practices that were done by the officers, um, in the rest of the community. Coincidentally, the people that were at the at-risk and most protected classes that we were oppressing all the time, they actually liked us, too. ‘Cause we were just kids. So most of the time, everyone got along. Um, some of the people that I talked to every day, they were like pedophile Satanists with an “FU” tattoo on the back of his neck. But we both read fantasy fiction, like, dungeon and dragons books galore. So we both reading like twenty volumes of the same book. Like, you gotta be friends with that person [laughs]. Like, ya’ll both know the Legend of Drizzt, stuff like that. Anyway, those people end up organizing, um, um, a grievance against the officer that manipulated us to do that. And IA or internal affairs ended up getting involved and they basically had to try and hurry and cover it all up. So to cover it up they were like, “Oh, well, you know, well,” to cover it all up they’re like, “um, we can get you guys out of here early. We need you to sign some statements.” I never signed a statement ‘cause I was still anti-cop. Um, anti-statement. So I’m like, “No I’m not signing a statement. You can leave me here.” I also had lost my mind already at that point in terms of like, I didn’t wanna be bothered. I just wanted to stay in there. I just wanted to rot and die and just think about rotting and dying. And then eat when I got hungry and then sleep and then read and then whatever else, just rot and die. ‘Cause I was still looking at the rest of my sentence. I was sentenced to 12 years with a mandatory minimum term of 10 years and 6 months. Um, which is also part of the NEAR act– the No Early Release Act.
So, um, this was only like year two. And I was like, yo. It just was hard. It was tough. Um, every day was just like, waking up just like, crying, and then just sitting there and then going to sleep, and then trying to get up a little bit, and then thinking about if I was gonna be able to make the shower. I never made the shower– I made the shower a few times. I apologize I didn’t mean to say it like that. I made the showers a couple of times during those six months. And that’s no exaggeration. I really mean a couple. Like one and two. And, um, then, uh, like, so my hygiene was deteriorated. I had locks at the time. My locks and my hair was, like, really thin and brittle and, like, falling out. Um, I was completely malnourished ‘cause I was only eating, like, what they gave me. I didn’t have any money. My family at that time were extremely poor. My mother, her addiction had gotten worse. She moved to Florida in an abusive relationship. She didn’t even have control of her own finances to send me on a regular basis. I haven’t even heard from her after that for a couple of years. Um, my grandmothers were still struggling, um, dealing with their issues. My father was still completely absent. So I was pretty much alone. Um, the one type of contacts that you usually try to build when you’re in prison or either when you’re about to go in or when you’re already in or you just got in, is you try to have some sort of like, support team or system. I had, like, a girlfriend that I was talking to. Um, of course she left and everything. So it was like, in every true sense of the word, isolated confinement. Um, I don’t know how I broke out of that. Um, I won’t say it was– it had nothing to do with just being– it wasn’t helpful to be in prison breaking out of that. But something in my mind was fortunately enough there to be like alright. I gotta figure out a way to, like, take my mind off this. Um, I did that reading and watching, like, some documentaries that made me feel, like, empathy for other people. That helped. Like, empathy was like the way that helped me out of that. Just to look at other people’s suffering and then being like, “Damn. I know how you feel son.” That was really what, like, brought me out of that mental state I was in. I was extremely depressed. Like, I can’t emphasize that more. Like, I don’t even know how I would have even conceptualized like the different type of things that I was feeling and going through mentally. I think that’s one of the most important things I like to tell people that solitary confinement is actual human torture for a reason. Like, the human mind can’t conceive it.
Anyway, I was end up released. Once I was released I come in focused on, like, my body, like, rebuilding my body. So just working out, reading, um, I just wanted to not think about locked up again. ‘Cause in there, when you in isolated confinement, because it’s so drastically different from just being in general population, general population feels like freedom again. Like, when you come out of that state, you’re like, [exhales] “I feel like I just came home!” Know what I mean? So once I had that feeling again, I kinda wanted to stay in general population. So like I stopped gangbanging as hardcore. Like, I no longer wanted to just aspire just to be like I gotta make sure I’m just the toughest gangbanger ever so that now I can just do whatever I want and just be cool. And now I just was like– I’m just gonna be cool and then just fly under the radar. Uh, which is what I did.
01:13:15
Eventually I was switched over to another prison called, nicknamed Gladiator School. Um, that is no misnomer [laughs] That is a properly termed school. It– it was in Bordentown. RC Wagner. They used to call it Gladiator School. When I got there it wasn’t even as Gladiator School as it was a couple of years ago but it was still pretty bad. They put– that was the first time I was in the dormitory environment. And I was a juvenile so– Bordentown, because it was usually– the age population was usually 18–25, they actually had less discriminatory practices against people who were under 18. So I pretty much was in general population just straight in general population and I was 16, 17. I can’t remember the exact age right now, but I’m pretty sure it was like 16, 17, it was under 18 at the time still. Um, every day, again, fighting. There was a fight every day. Because then it was just always people that just was challenging me because I was a teenager. I was also from Camden. Um, Most people that was gangbangin and what not was from North Jersey, and then, a lot of people was from North Jersey. So I just was like, just me being an outsider in that way caused me to be a target from other people who may have been, like, weaker in their own, like, contexts, their situations. So then I was like, the person they could use as, like, a stepping stool. I mean, that’s what they thought until it just started getting real. So I fought a lot. Um, I gained my respect, had to do it all over again. Um, I didn’t just fight. I got into, like, some real violent altercations. Like, that’s when I started stabbing more, stuff like that, started getting to play– um, things just got really deep there. Um, it really– it really was the point that, um, for the lack of a better word, people would say like, “It turns you into an animal.” But they didn’t turn me into an animal, I just had less empathy for people, because now I had to fight people more often. I didn’t have no room to care about somebody else’s feelings or their physical body or their health or none of that because I had to worry about mine constantly. And a dormitory environment is like ground zero for being raped.
So, um, anyway, um, eventually I was moved to a tier with other people, um, other brothers that were, um, that were having like a long time to do, that had like ten years, twenty years, thirty years to do. Um, they were more mature, and I was able to isolate myself when I was in the room. And when I had a room to myself, I had my own room. And I was able to come and read more, just trying to stay out the way. And I spent a lot of the years just basically focusing on education. Um, during those years, those early years of me getting back into education, I started to expand more on what I possibly can know. ‘Cause I just wanted to know more stuff. I just, I don’t know how or when I realized I didn’t know that much, but I was like, “I need to know more stuff.” So I started reading more, I started studying, um, languages. So the first, like, the second language I had understood was Spanish, but the first language I started to understand besides English was Japanese. So I started studying Japanese. I started studying Arabic. Um, I got really involved in the Muslim community because I, uh, I was raised Muslim, born and raised Muslim. But I ended up, like, embracing the religion and the practices when I was in prison, like many people that’s Muslim in prison and from the urban area. And, um, I took it really seriously. So I was really well known in that community because I was pretty much like a teenager that was a scholar. Um, and I knew a lot of cred, I knew a lot of Hadif, I knew a lot of history. Arabia was getting better. I was able to teach classes. And I started taking on, like, leadership positions in that community, and that kinda translated into education as well. Eventually I got my high school diploma. Pretty quickly I scored, like, super above average on everything on the HSPA thing or the high school thing. They made me teacher’s assistant for the staff, for the educational staff teacher there. Um, and then I started sneaking into the college classes. ‘Cause I was still like 17. So then the college teachers that was coming in sporadically teaching their little one class or whatever because, you know, their white savior complex. They’ll come in, they’ll teach you a class, and then they’ll just leave. I was still going in there because I was like– I still want in, like I wanted to be in creative writing class and talk about what I wanted to talk about and express myself because it’s still helpful. But at the same time it’s not effective in changing anything whatsoever if people are coming in there at their own whim. Which would then cause the birth of NJ STEP. Which is New Jersey Transformative Secondary– Transformative Education Program. So I was part of the original student advisory board. And that was a liaison between the students and the teachers. I was able to then train the teachers, counter training from the training they got from DOC coming in as professors. Um, so I don’t know how much you know about NJ STEP, but it’s built upon the premise that a student should have a voice in making decisions and about the operations, so both the horizontal and vertical powers of the program, they should be involved in. And they all should have a say in their curriculum and they should have a curriculum geared toward getting them an actual degree. Associate’s degree. And at the time the best idea ever of course is a– is just liberal arts. Because most people will gotta do the same two years anyway for your, um– you know, your pre-reqs. Um, so that wasn’t my first– that started to push me into organizing and being more conscious of my community and I really started to build, like, a philosophical and political worldview going into those classes, doing reading, doing my own reading, um, trying to have a counter-culture to the culture I was already in. I started to really loathe being in prison. Like, I really really hated it more and more. Like the more I understood about it, the more it just really made my skin crawl. So, I really wanted to know as much as I possibly could to reverse whatever was the process that put me here. Uh, and I think a lot of– a lot of the energy within the school environment and her education classrooms and those spaces were fertile to continue to encourage that.
01:19:58
Now, the organizing didn’t come from me just being able to get students together, recruit them for the program, um, train teachers to make them prepared for the population that they’re about to teach and engage with. It came mostly through the fact that officers started to hate that students were in college. And so many of were starting to go to college. So of course I was one of the main targets because I was, like, one of the main recruiters for college people. Like, I was already a TA, so I knew all the high school students, and I knew who was about to graduate, and when they were about to get their credits, and as soon as they were about to graduate I’d be like yo, you might as well sign up for this college program. Um, and I had a conversation with them about the benefits. Because in prison what they try to push on you is like, “Go home, start your own business or get a vocational trade and then work there. And then you’ll get a job. Nobody’s gonna hire you with a college degree. There’s nothin you can do with a college degree. No skills you’ll have from having a college degree. No skills you can prove you have with a college degree.” They hit you with the whole anti-college argument. Pushed you into vocational trade, but then make it difficult to get into vocational trade programs. And then they push you into starting your own business but they don’t offer any financial literacy class, they don’t offer any business, um, programs, or resources to actually start a business. So they’ll be like, “Starting a business is easy. You just need to know marketing, and you need to know a little finance, a little business writing, have an idea, have some product, have some inventory, have some customers, you’re good. Like, most likely you’re gonna be good. You should never have to come back to prison. Look good, accelerate A, B, C, D.” They’ll name three people out of thousands and millions of people that have been to prison, they name three people that went home and started their business that are wildly successful and say, “Psh, they did it. Why can’t you? Marky Mark, Mark Wahlberg was in prison, why can’t you?” [laughs]. Um, that’s their argument all the time. So when we started to build a school and take it seriously, the officers were pissed. And then when they found out that we were going to school and we didn’t have to pay for it, then they were even more pissed. And then they started to conceptualize and make up lies in their own head about us going to school and how we were doing it. So now they’re like, “Yeah I don’t know why I gotta pay for you to go to school, and my kid– and then pay for my kid to go to school. And you’re an inmate, like, you committed a crime, you don’t deserve to go to college, etc. etc.” Like, first and foremost sir, this is a privately funded program. You do not pay for this [laughs]. Second of all, um, this is my– this is how I engage with officers. So when they brought that up, this is what they’d do a lot of times. I’d be like, “Well listen, you gotta have two choices. I could go to school, go to these classes now, when I go home, I can matriculate to a four-year university, um, and I could come back into the community and I could go to college which you can’t in class. They might not like some things I say in the classroom, you know, I may do a little scenario that sounds pretty innocuous.” I’m like, or, “I could not go to college, go home, go to the college campus, go in a class with your kid, rob him, and then figure out, you know what I mean, how I could get you next. Or figure out how I can get their friends next because I’m gonna be going home, still regular person in the community, I’m still gonna go to the college community ‘cause that’s where I know he’s gonna be at, and I’m gonna go there and I’m gonna make,” know what I mean? Exactly. So once you frame it like that, then they always get the– they always get the– and then, you know, they realize in their head, and you can see the gears turning like yeah that makes sense. Like I know it makes sense because your argument is flawed. They hated me. They knocked my books down. They knocked my books down, kicked my pens, like, when they pass. They started to break down on the– they started to bust down on us about the writing utensils. So you were supposed to be institutional– air quotations– institutional rules, you’re only supposed to have, like, golf pencils. Um, that’s it. But no one in the institution respects that unless it’s like an officer that’s really really really, like, sadistic. Who will come in your room and then take your pens and pencils and what not, and whatever marker you have, and then they’ll be like, “Oh it’s a security threat.” ‘Cause yeah, I got a pencil. That’s what people stabbin’ each other with. They’re not making shanks of metal from the metal shop you work us like slaves in, they’ll find ways to stab each other. It’s the pens that they’re using to write their life stories. Like [laughs].
01:24:26
So, so we, um, so we had to fight for like our utensils we had in there, they come run down and only college people with rooms because, um, the way it works in prison is, when they did their random searches, they really kinda do it more like, “Who’s in the room right now, who’s not in the room right now?” Um, if you’re not in the room right now because you’re at work or you’re at college, they’ll go in your room. And then when they go in your room, they’ll tear your room up. Rip up essays, do whatever they do, spread food, you know what I mean, damage your property, etc. Um, basically we were targeted. We weren’t able to get showers because we had to go to work and go to school at night. There was no time in the day for us to get showers. And then they weren’t trying to be lenient. Or, they weren’t trying to work with us and make sure that we could get in the shower when we came back from school, which usually gave us, like, another, like, thirty– thirty minutes of free five minutes to get into a community shower. So you can shove like twenty people in there at a time. And of course it’s inhumane, but we were willing to do that as long as we could go to school. They weren’t willing to let that be a part of the process. So they were making it extremely difficult for us to be in school, so people started dropping out at one point.
So we had to start to organize mass movement stoppages, work stoppages, mess stoppages, um, um, you know, cause, like, chaos to get the sergeant– to get the sarge– the chain of command just to start showing up. And then refuse to speak to that until we started seeing, like, administration. Until eventually we had conversation with administration. They start to, um, adjust the officers’ behaviors around the college community. Um, based on our recommendations of what could work and what they were willing to do. But they had no actual reasons to they had no reasons to dissent anything– or any of our demands. It was nothing we were asking that was an actual security threat, that was unfair in any way, like, nothing we asked was not– was unreasonable. It was all, can I have a shower today ‘cause I had to work for you and if I don’t go to work you know I get charged– institutional charge which could make me not go to parole or not go home, or I have to go to ASEG, or solitary confinement, or whatever, etc. So I have to do mandatory labor, um, slave labor, ‘cause you know I only make a dollar, you know what I mean, a day. So I have to do mandatory slave labor, I’m just asking if I can get a shower while I’m trying to better myself when I’m in college. Why are you saying no to that? Why is it a no for us to have a pencil six inches longer than the pencil that we already have? Like, it makes no sense. Um, so– eventually we were able to beat into administration’s head enough where, like, maybe it’s more beneficial for us to work with this population than not. And that kinda just transformed my entire, uh, life, because then I know what I wanted to– like what I wanted to do. I know I just wanted to be involved in anti-oppression work. But I really start to think about, like, how I wanted to abolish prisons. And how I wanted to, um, before that happens, make sure that I could empower the community that were affected directly by, um, criminal justice system. And affected directly by, um, you know, other issues in the neighborhood that all rela– relates to my larger political worldview of being anti-capitalist. So, it just was, um, moving through those last few years in prison was, um, probably much more difficult to do because things began to change within the higher education system and how they dealt with us transitioning out and how they dealt with, um you know, the greed. Like it started expanding. There were things that were better, it’s more inclusive, um, and it’s more legit now. But, those were like, uh, it’s just– the time in prison was pretty– my time in prison at least was pretty much, um, um–I’ll say common for somebody that was arrested as a juvenile or waived up. Um, I don’t really have anything or any experiences that, that were radically different from anyone else’s. But I do wanna say though that, um, the education aspect of it was really transformative for me. And it wasn’t because I was in prison. So prison wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t because I was locked up and then got out of jail. Like, that wasn’t the answer to it all. It just was that because it was a tool that could have been used there, it was a catalyst to change things and make things transformative for me at least. Um– yeah.
[long pause]
Oh, um, I did wanna say also about halfway house, because that’s where I spent, like, the last year or so after prison. Um, so after having done a long time in prison, finishing up like the ten year bid, um, I had some pretty, um, solid plans about what I wanted to do. And, um, eventually, uh, I was put into a halfway house which is, you know, the, um– When you have community– well you’re in “community release,” they called it. So that means you require the minimum security by DOC to the point where you don’t have to be around officers anymore. You can just be around counselors or resident supervisors who can’t legally put their hands on you. They can’t touch you, they can’t strip search you. They can only pat you down. Um, and they put you in there, you know, still like the dormitory environment. Your rooms, your bunks, um, there’s no locked doors, uh, for the most part. Besides like in and out of the facility. But there’s no, like, locked doors in between, like, going in and out of a room. You can wear, like, own clothes and everything. And going into that environment after coming from prison was a shock for me. Um, I was already heavily institutionalized obviously. But it was one of the– it was one of the, um, one of those experiences I think at the end of this prison experience that really affected me because it throws you into a world where you’re now obligated to operate on a new financial standard that no way realistic coming from prison. So, many people, when they come from the halfway house, whether they have family support or not, they were probably only making at the most, the very most, um, about a hundred and fifty dollars a month in prison. Um, and then because cantine and commissary cost so high, you probably only having afterwards, like, fifty, forty dollars after giving everything you needed, having already been in prison and having things you already needed. Uh, so I went there and I finally was able to, like, reconnect with my family again. Like, my family slowly started to come back into my life after graduating from– with my associates in prison, I graduated with my Associates in liberal arts. Um, I got a couple other, like, vocational things. I got my high school diploma, I was the Valedictorian but they took away visits for uh– that day, for our high school graduation. So my family, they get to see me give the speech, my Valedictorian speech or, you know, graduate high school. Even if it was in prison, I had a cap and gown, but they didn’t get to see. Um, it was like, completely institutional. Um, they did get to see my graduation from, um, for my associate’s. And I gave the Valedictorian speech there too. So that was, like, transformative. But. So that had brought everyone back into my life, and then going into the halfway house it was like I’m finally about to go out into the rest of the world.
01:32:53
Um, halfway house– um, even though like, um, that re-entry and transitioning needs to have a catalyst that is similar to a halfway house or community program that has people in a position where they’re not incarcerated in it or they’re not in a acarceral position in the same way as they are in like a torturous prison, but, um, but it– but at the same time, it allows you to start to kinda get prepared for the things you will need moving forward into society and feeling society. It’s just like a huge scheme. Like you get in there and they start to basically tell you, like, you’re just a number. Soon as you hit this bed, like, we will send you back for any reason. And when you come back in, we’re gonna register you again and then get the same tax benefits, same kickback, pay, benefit for having you again. So they can make like a bunch of money on you based on the beds you hit. And the crazy part about it is, when they send you back, you have to go back through the entire process. So you go back through the entire reception process. Um, at the very very beginning before you even get to prison, they get to mark you on their taxes and as a bed. Then you go to they maintain their budget, then they hiss the actual prison, they can do the same thing. Then they’ll knock you and send you to another prison and that prison gets to do the same thing ‘cause it’s in another county, and then they’ll send you finally to, like, the reception for a halfway house, and they’ll do the same thing. And if you can make it past there, they’ll send you to another halfway house or like an official halfway house within the community. And then of course that system, and then of course you can be tossed back and forth, you know what I mean, within a year, which I was. I was tossed back and forth within the year, um, I got sent back. Um, so going there I was able to, though, meet with– I felt like, I felt like we were people again because it was the first time when we weren’t under, like, the constant threat of violence. We weren’t just like all just looking around wondering which one of us was gonna punch the next one. Everyone was right about to go home and I really started to kinda see, um, what services were set up for people to come out. And they’re very far and few in between.
Um, everyone’s issue was housing and employment. Like, the only way to get out of the halfway house is to be employed or to go to school. They made each of those things difficult. And then they have, like, a facade, like, these programs where they try to brainwash you. So the only way for you to move forward in the halfway house is by taking the standardized personality test. And this personal test is literally just to check your worldview which they then will say is your psychological state as a person– in their program– as a resident in their program. ‘Cause all these programs were technically drug and addiction programs. They add behavioral as a component for people who don’t have drug issues. But they say you’re addicted to behaviors of a violent person or a person who sells drugs. So regardless, you’re treated as, like, a full blown drug addict. Which you can– I don’t know if you can imagine this, but that’s extremely offensive to people who haven’t been doing drugs. Like, me personally, I wasn’t doing drugs. I wasn’t a drug addict. I didn’t have a problem. Do I think that weed is self medication? Yes. Do I think that drugs are self medication? Yes. Did I have any problem, have I tried all those thing? That’s irrelevant. But what they do is, they treat you like you’ve been basically selling your soul to, you know what I mean, whatever drug of choice, you know what I mean, was your thing. Um, and if you wanna, then they say– so my issue was I worked. Like, I never gave a dirty urine, I have no record of, like, drug use, none of that. And then when I come in there, like, I was locked up when I was 14 or 15, I’m like I don’t know how you think I had some wild raging drug addiction [laughs]. I’m like, it’s pretty clear I didn’t. Didn’t went to prison for ten years and now I’m here. And they talk to you like you just smoked weed or crack or dope or whatever you did. They talk to you like you did it yesterday. Like, oh well, you know, because you have this prior or duh duh duh– well me, they were like, “Well your behavior issues are something we should probably work on. Like your anger management.” Like I didn’t spend ten years working on my anger management. Like I had to spend exactly the amount of time you just to me to my face, you know, I did developing myself and having to handle that and proving and demonstrating through my behavior that that’s no longer an issue for me. You have to have really good behavior to even make it to the halfway house. Not anymore because they make so much money off you. But you know what I mean? You have to have pretty decent conforming behavior to even tet there. Um, so they make you take a test. And in the test it says things like, there’s questions like “Oh, um, if, if, the judge, um, I wasn’t target or– I’m not a target,” it says, “true or false: I’m not targeted or the judge was biased against me because of myr ace or class or gender.” And if you say, yes? It was ‘cause of that. That is no. Now they’re saying that you still have “stinkin’ thinkin,” quotations. Which is like a criminal behavior thinking or mindset. Then they ask you, uh, people with money, do, uh– “People with money have more influence in the court? And if you have enough money, you don’t necessarily have to go to jail? True or False?” So if you answer the obvious true, you’re gonna be looked at as a radical. They actually frame the question as if they’re asking like a sixties Panther member. Questions about America in American society. And if you answer any of those things even no matter how true they may be, if you answer them contrary to what they should be ideally, you are now like not a 00 they score you on your chances of returning. Like, your recidivism rate. They score you on– they think that the only reason why you committed a crime or done anything is ‘cause you are mentally flawed. Um, it’s called, um, you – I don’t know if– are– you probably already familiar with it, but they used rational emotive behavioral therapy. So that's making rational decisions, approaching your rationality by assuming that you’re irrational, and then trying to force rational thinking patterns on you. And how to think rationally about situations. The emotive behaviors– the emotive behavioral therapy is then, like, addressing anger issues, addressing, um, other issues that, um, like I address issues that are the hint– the sources of anger. Like anger is obviously a reaction. Um, anger is not a mood, you know what I mean? It’s like a quick emotion. It’s a secondary emotion to something else. So they don’t say like, “Let’s find out why you’re depressed.” Let’s say like– you know what I mean– “Let’s find out what triggered you to be this.” They’re like, “You’re angered and irrational and you’re obviously flawed in your thinking, so we’re gonna try to fix that while you’re here.” But they only just get paid to do those workshops. They don’t actually do that. They just go in there, give you a packet, make you read over it, you gotta sit and write answers, and then boom.
So, um, it was, yeah. It was like seeing the scam of the system all right there in your face. And it was like probably one of the more– it was– it was definitely the guiding thing that led me to think like, alright, now I know I’m gonna be in this for afterwards. Like, I know now I have do something because this is what they’re doing afterwards. They’re– mm– Yeah it’s disgusting. It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting.
Yeah that’s all I got for right there. [laughs] What’s the next question?
01:40:37
Um, so just, uh, piggybacking off of where you stopped, where do– where does voting rights restoration fit into that work?
So, uh, most of– most of the programs I named, especially the halfway housing, the halfway house, and most of the policies, um, that are– most of the policies that are put in place are through, um, state legislation. Um, and a lot of things that can be undone or counter-acted is only going to be through legislation, etc. Um, not to say anything of all the other important reasons why electoral power is extremely important to constituents who are affected by it, but it’s something– it’s something they say that if the most oppressed communities are able to make decisions, um, and de– and decide the outcomes of decisions legislatively, they are more likely to be empowered to give themselves working solutions that otherwise wouldn’t be given to them. So first and foremost, um, solitary confinement should be completely abolished– yesterday. [laughs] That will only be done through voting. There is no way in– in– in DOC history that they’re going to simply just take it away without the electoral power. Without the constituents of politicians forcing that on them because, um, mass incarceration has been, um, has been constantly fueled by legislation. And by different policies that has made it to be the monster that it is today. Um, so the way to start to reverse that and then crack back down on that is to organize the people who are affected most by that. And they can only do that on, um– they can only organize effectively at the very nail in the coffin stage of it through electoral power or through voting. Voting is extremely important. Just from the sheer fact that it empowers communities to have actual democratic voices in their neighborhood.
Second, voting rights are voting rights. Once you take a right away from a person, you no longer recognize them as a person. Um, it’s, um, it’– it’s Draconian and it’s– it’s– it’s– it’s Draconian and it’s, um, it’s old. It’s Elizabethan. It’s– we’re taking philosophies when, um, when it was a time where you could say that someone wasn’t another human and therefore you could give them a civic death. So these civic deaths are important because not only do we kill, um, civically, citizens. But because we put them back into their community, we are creating dead spaces in the community. So you have entire communities that are literally civically dead. They can’t engage civically to make their own changes they need or build solutions they need within their community. Um, they have no civic power as citizens. Yet, they are still affected. They still pay money into the system that makes decisions about them. This is true from everybody from the person who was incarcerated and who was in solitary confinement, to the actual assemblywoman or person, um, et cetera. So, um, voting rights just like in a raw power sense of it is extremely important for the simple fact that it can empower people who are affected by it most the power to create solutions for themselves to build better communities, which everyone wants to be in. Um, in a more broader, psychological sense, and a more of a sense of how people see themselves in this society and how they fit into a society, it’s important because people who now feel responsible– who now have the responsibility to have a voice– they now take on that responsibility on that new level, so they’ll now have behaviors and they’ll, um, they’ll do things to show that they are responsible and they’ll know that their responsibility is to this, this, this, and that, because their voice matters in it.
Um, if you have people who are miles away within a prison who can’t make a decision about their home or their city, and they were gone of the main contributors to their home or their city, when they get back if they are civically dead, they’re gonna be less likely to wanna care about their city because there is nothing they can do. Only thing they can do is yell, cry, complain about it, speak loudly about it. But when they can’t participate in that, it just kills the spirit of people. And we see that all the time in prison. I mean, in prison, you have no power at all. And that’s why mass incarceration is so dangerous inside because, um, the more that they can take away from you, and the least you can say about it, the more they’re gonna take away from you. It doesn’t– it doesn’t change. It doesn’t be like, alright they’ll let you breathe for a minute. No. It’s based on the political climate, and if the political climate is to target this certain people and this population and they don’t have any power whatsoever to respond to that and maintain their own power or identity or civility as human beings, then they’re oppressed and they’ll continue to be oppressed. And it causes the situations we see now in urban communities and what mass incarceration does. We also see that, what it does with detaining people who are innocent. Like people who have undocumented statuses. They’re a similar situation. They are put into places where they’re now treated like non-humans and they have no rights. And now they can’t create communities or civic power to maintain those communities so that now they could be a working part of the solution. Um, so now other people who have that power will make solutions for them and that will be through biases. And in the context of America, where, um, there is an obvious race– racial prece– prece– racial oppression is obviously tied into class oppression and mass incarceration. Um, it is to me, it’s, um, it’s mandatory that people who are affected by, um, this system have at least a democratic voice in the system. At least. It’s just, um, it’s for me, voting rights, um, for– for people who haven’t had them long, to receive– to get them– to receive them again gives us another chance to redeem ourselves within our communities. And to make a more powerful impact than we made before when we’ve been given civic power. We’ve shown that with civic power. With power to make our own worker’s solutions. We probably will do it. We usually do. And without it, things will deteriorate.
01:47:47
Um, yeah so, I mean, my life as an activist and as a, uh, revolutionary, is to make sure that people have as much power as possible to live in a democratic society. Voting rights is literally essential to that. Like for me, it epitomizes everything it means to have a first step toward democratic society. Um, and I just don’t see how we would be able to do much without at least having that as a basis of our electoral power. ‘Cause otherwise we don’t have that and we only got people power to that. And that’s not that strong when you’re already ostracized from the workforce, which will be our labor power, when you’re ostracized from the workforce which should be a financial power, when you’re ostracized from the institution which should be institutional power. So– excuse me– so just as an organizer I understand the importance of voting rights. And I think most people who live in this country and live in this society understand that if you take away the rights of something or someone or a person, and you believe that it’s their right as a human, then you’re literally starting to begin to follow the argument, “Well, some people aren’t human, so–” That right there is just [laughs] it’s disgusting, it’s appalling, and it keeps me up at night. Uh, yeah– that’s– so.
Um, is there anything that you might specifically look at from your time being incarcerated where you had an awareness of what was happening civically and you want to participate to advocate for yourself? Or is it something you just–
Oh
Became aware of or started participating in after you were finished?
No. I wanted to vote for Obama [laughs]. Not because I agree with his politics, but because he was Black. Straight like that. When I– when that– 2008, when I was about– how old was I– 16? 2008, 2009, I was like 16, 17, I wasn’t able to vote just yet. But for the second term I would have been able to vote. I definitely wanted to vote. That was like one of the main things I wanted to do. I wanted to be a part of that history. That’s just me from a personal view of when I realize how serious it was that like, yo, I can’t vote. And then reading and then learning about the civil rights from a new perspective, like, yo. I got– mm, excuse me–
Everything that my ancestors just fought for just like a couple years ago just got taken away from me again. Um, I don’t have it. So now I understand oppression because it’s like I don’t have the power to even say that I’m a human citizen in this country. Um, that means a lot to me. That means a lot to other people. So yea– since I’ve been about 17, like, I understood. I didn’t even know I was gonna lose the voting right. But I realized, like, how important it was like, “Wow, we should have been able to vote while we were in here. What’s wrong with our voice? We couldn't concern with who the president was? We’re not affected by what the president does? We’re not affected by what taxpayers, what tax money does? We get affected by the taxes.” I still gotta go home, live in a community, put my kids through school, pay insurance, health insurance, all types of taxes and whatnot. I don’t have no say so in that at all? Why? Yeah, so I’ma say that was probably the biggest thing then.
Other than that, I’ve always been– I’m very radical in my politics. Like I really don’t– I’m not under any delusion that this is a full democratic society at all. It’s just like a stepping stool. A mere tool to the next step of liberating people truly so they can truly participate in a democratic society.
Um, Mark, do you have any anecdotes from the organizing you did in prison? Any specific experiences?
I mean, I obviously do, but in terms of ones that I could probably illustrate now, I’m not so sure. There were so many it’s– I mean organizing in prison is so much different. So it’s not a– it’s not like out here where you’re part of a union and you gotta figure out like where are the employees? Or, you know what I mean, it’s not like a community organizer where you’re like where’s the community members that I need to talk to that was affected by it most? Like, everybody’s affected. They’ve been there. It’s not hard to agitate people.
Um, one of– yeah I mean– any organizing in prison happens in, like, a day. It has to happen in a day because things happen so quickly and everything will be retaliating again so fast. So it’s literally based on the job you have, how many people you can talk to on that day, who you are, what does your name mean, how much does it carry, and will other people respect you enough to do whatever you needed to do in that short amount of time once you let everybody know. Um, I do have a– okay. I do have an anecdote.
So when I was in prison, there was a time while I was in NJ STEP. I was in a college program toward, like, the end of my bid. I was like, “Why don’t we have a space for us to produce our own literature? Like, why aren’t we producing our own words about what we want to talk about, or what we want to say?” Ah okay, yeah, this is–
01:53:45
What we ended up doing, so– my idea was I was like, well, oh, psh, why not make a newsletter? What’s wrong with a prison newsletter? Wouldn’t that be dope? Like we all write, contribute to a prison newsletter about stuff we care about. Prison legal news, got some business news, got some self help, got some religious stuff, got some current educational stuff, put it all in one spot, pass out to the tiers, people got something to read, they can look through it, they’re interested, they learn knowledge, great.
So, first and foremost, everybody that I ever brought up the idea to was like, “Absolutely not it’s not gonna work.” So I was like, “What? You buggin. I’m doin this newsletter.” They was like, “No, no, no.” They were saying there’s gonna be gang message through it, etcetera, et cetera. Which I knew they were gonna say– everything in prison is a security threat because they think there’s gonna be a threat from a gang that’s gonna organize. Any organizing is literally thought of as a gang activity. They literally don’t discriminate. If you’re doing something to organize other human bodies in prison, it’s called group activity and it can be escalated to security threat group activity. Which means now it’s a gang activity. And as you know, now you can be a Black radical and a gang member and an urban terrorist. You know, all types of labeling that the state can do that gives them basically the power to do whatever they want. To treat you however they want within their prison based on the fact that they’re– they feel as though you may be organizing power which would be dangerous and would threaten the security of the offices and the other people who are incarcerated. For them, air quotes, inmates.
So, creating a newsletter that would basically allow you to have a platform to message to mass amounts of people at once was obviously a no-go to the administration and whatnot. So my first task was trying to figure out who would be my target audience, how much could I produce, how soon could I get it to people, and where could I have conversations about this? So I started meeting with my best friend. My best friend was my roommate for like five years straight. This very simple white guy from like Glassboro, New Jersey that was also a juvenile that was waived up. His story is much harsher than mine in terms of why he was sent to prison.
So, just a small side note, a tangent, I apologize, but I have to say this. Um, he was coerced into giving a for– he was forced into a confession of murdering both his parents and they sentenced him twenty years in prison straight like that. Wasn’t– it was on like 20/20 or one of those things. They had, like, a whole TV special on him because they knew it was a forced confession. They didn’t care. Yeah this is like one of the most normal people I ever met in my life. When I say normal, I mean like nothing stands out pretty much about him except that he’s smart as I don’t know what when it comes to, like, math and science. So that’s where me and him linked at. So yeah, so that’s my best friend.
So I talked to my best friend about it and I’m like, “Yo, I think we should– I think I’m gonna do a newsletter.” So he always would give me a dissenting argument. He don’t know how to do nothing but pick apart something and why it’s wrong. Which is why I love him for it ‘cause he keeps me grounded, ‘cause I’m more of an idealist between the two of us. So while he’s sitting there picking apart anything that could be successful from it– which isn’t always helpful obviously– it’s like, eh, he learned how to work with it. It works. Um, he– I was realizing like okay, if I do this then I’m gonna have to do this under the radar of the administration. So I made an underground newsletter. So he helped me put together an underground newsletter. And what we did was, we started to basically– I started– so org– so organizing in prison is also a lot different, right? Because our approach is different. Like, I’ll hear you wanna be a great listener and you wanna active listen. You wanna agitate people but first you wanna understand what their issues are. But in prison, I know what your issues are 'cause it’s my issues. And I don’t have to agitate you because you’re already agitated. The only thing I gotta get you to do is mobilize. And the only way to get you to mobilize is kinda like force you. Like, not force like, um, you know, like putting a knife to your throat like You gotta do this! But it’s pretty close. It’s pretty close. Like I go to the room and be like, “Bro, you need to be doing this. There’s no other option.” Like, “You need to make sure that you with this movement. And if you not with the movement, we’re gonna shun you in our community.” Which is a community of probably like 150 people at a time, maybe fifty people at a time, but you get shunned by them, you’re gonna be highly upset. That’s not a position you wanna be in prison. You wanna be cool with everybody. So we’ll use that social death as a threat you know what I mean on people. Um, in prison. And it also gets them that quickly because no one wants to be known as– out here we’d call like a “scab.” But in prison we have a whole bunch of array of terms that aren’t appropriate for out here.
So I’m like, so, um, so we talk and whatever, organizing about that. Which is basically like– I was forcing– so people come to me because I had a crazy library. My library was stupid. I read thousands of books in prison. Like, I’m not exaggerating. I read over easily, hard read, 1200 books. So everybody would come to my room and I’d be sending books out. I had boxes of books in, like, the mailroom. That wasn’t supposed to happen there, but whatever. And they’re not just giving books to people. What happened through, giving books to people, I was getting tired of people havin books, being agitated, and then not knowing how to articulate the information they just received from the book. So what I would do is I would make them write essays. “You can’t get the book from me unless you write an essay about the book. And you gotta talk to me about it. That’s my payment.” So then afterwards– so doing so, I start having like a collection of essays from people. So I was like, what we’re gonna do is put them in the newsletter. And we’ll have book reviews in the back of the newsletter. The first part of the newsletter will be information we have for college. So while we’re in college, we’re gonna do, like, quick review of the teacher, how to have success in this class with this teacher. And it would be like– it would not be professional in terms of how we were critiquing teachers. We would critique them exactly how we thought they needed to be critiqued. Our own language that was legit for us. So it’s like, “Yo, this teacher boring as hell. Or this teacher needs to go on trial to tell this joke. Make fun of him twice, he’ll be cool with you.” We know how the weaknesses of teachers, their egos, and their personalities, and we’ll put all of that in the essay. And we’ll allow the students to understand how they can best go through this class. Like, you might be a teacher who might let you slide, so last semester, so you don’t really gotta do nothing. Like, the last week, just be ready to go at it. Last week, just go hard. But you can pretty much just BS through the class.
02:00:12
So we had, like, teacher review, class success tips, math success tips– ‘cause everybody’s issue is in math– so we had a whole section dedicated to math. How to best succeed in a math class. When there’s tutoring. We had tutoring there eventually. So basically, um, I organized a newsletter. It was an underground newsletter. I worked at a spot where I was actually able to, like, move throughout the prison. So I had the newsletter there, I would write the newsletter out, have everybody bring in copies. I would give it to my boy. My boy would go to a law library. My best friend would go to the law library. He’d type it up. He’d type in the law library. I’d take it from the law library to go to the education room– department– to the education school area, make copies. And after making copies I’d hurry up, take them back with me later that day, and then distribute them out through the rest of the tiers or whatever the case may be. And that’s how we organized the newsletter thing.
Um, we also had, like, religious tips, you know what I mean, something from somebody’s religious or spiritual section. ‘Cause it’s– you usually got like everything in there between hardcore atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Christian, and then some denomination of other open spirituality. So I’m like, we need to make sure we address that because that’s huge in prison. And then we also have, like, a business tip section, and what you can do with the education section, which is like personally what I looked over. This is why college can be important. This is the skills you get from having a higher education. This is why vocational trades do not give into statistics and all that stuff. So we organized the newsletter, made that official. Then we organized, I did this with the help of one of the instructors that was coming in from Princeton, and she was in the English department– her name Jessica– Jessica right. So me and Jess, or Jess, so Jess goes in there she’s like, “How about we have, like,” ‘cause I just spoken with poetry, “What if we did like a poetry section, a community section, of the tutoring, so we can have people just like more of a college community. We can express things that’s on our mind.” So we basically organized a space, like, the last hour of tutoring– it was only like two and a half hours– but the last hour or forty-five minutes or so, we’ll organize a space where everybody will come, and, like, do spoken word, present like an essay, do something like that. And from there, I would distribute those newsletters there, too.
What ended up happening was, I started to be like, “Okay what if this wasn’t a newsletter but we can say this was the memorandum from the college program and that would make it legit and have to get to the rest of the student population, but we all know that it’s really not that.” Or whatever. But that’d be passing through administration. And they give us the green light to be able to do this on a more legit and quicker level and then we could distribute all over. So we did that. That was, like, probably the biggest organizing task– I was citing the hard fast work stoppages, food stoppages, not going to mess, not eating, having to feed everybody that wasn’t eating, just like organizing around that. Those things are pretty quick though ‘cause everybody lives right here. It’s not the same, like, organizing out here where it takes two weeks to get fifty people. Like, it takes me five minutes to talk to everybody [laughs]. And it organized. Um, yeah. So that’s probably, yeah that’s– yeah, that’s probably my favorite anecdote though. Organizing that newsletter and organizing that community space for us to do spoken word poetry every night, um, touching other people’s hearts, transform them, and also like, kinda learn something and build a stronger community. Yeah, that’s it with me.
Mark we’re over two hours, I just wanna be mindful of your time.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, so what would be gr–
02:04:00