Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison

"We’re going in chronological order with these. Malcolm X’s story centres around the 50s and 60s, he was killed in 1965. Baca’s story is more in the 70s, when he was in prison. That was the beginning era of mass incarceration, when they cut ties to anything rehabilitative. Shaka Senghor grew up in the 80s and 90s. He was a young man when the crack epidemic took the country by storm. He grew up in Detroit and became a dealer pretty young. He was shot at and he shot at people and eventually killed somebody. His story is not a story of macropolitics about the drug business. It’s not a story about discovery of religion or that kind of traditional redemption. His story is about recovering from the traumas that led him into that decision to get into the drug business, and the additional traumas he experienced when he was in prison. It’s a journey from the boy who was basically a teen adrift in Detroit around crazy, violent adults—drug fiends, addicts. He’s 15 and discovers he’s in way over his head. He’s getting robbed, he’s getting beaten. His mother beat him, told him she regretted that he ever lived, his father is kind of gone, his siblings don’t pay attention to him. He’s not really able to get any support. So he wants to die. He wants to kill himself. He tries. He doesn’t succeed. After the suicide attempt, he gets shot. He’s just on his own, trying to figure out life. He never gets any adult saying, ‘It’s going to be alright, you’re going to be fine. Let me take you over here instead.’ He’s surrounded by crackheads and then he becomes a crackhead himself. In prison, he’s contending with the fact that, ‘I’m alone. I have all this negativity in me and I want to kill that guy in the cell next to me, because he keeps doing stupid shit.’ “You find people starting political movements, you find people finding God, you find people discovering their calling as witnesses” And then he has this revelation. He starts writing things down, like ‘I want to kill the guy in the next cell’ and he realizes this is not normal. He reads it the next day and he says, ‘How did I get to be 30 years old and in prison? I’ve already killed somebody and now I want to kill again.’ And then his young son writes him a letter. The letter says, ‘Dad, I feel angry all the time and my Mom says I gotta get over my anger otherwise I might end up in prison like you.’ And he writes back to this little kid and he realizes that if he doesn’t change, his legacy is going to be murder. He also gets a letter from his victim’s godmother. She writes to him asking, ‘Why did you do it?’ He explains everything to her, and she says, ‘You need to ask for forgiveness.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I do.’ Then he puts it all together: I need to write to my victim and ask for forgiveness. He’s dead, but he writes him a letter, and asks, ‘Will you forgive me?’ It’s very moving. Then, when he gets to the turnaround, he says, ‘I can’t just end there. I’ve got to do something about this.’ He’s part of a radical Afrocentric group in prison. They’re saying, ‘Black people have been oppressed. The only way we’re going to seize power is if we get over this oppression.’ Meanwhile, while they’re getting all radical about their political salvation, they’re ordering stabbings of other black people who oppose them. Shaka has this revelation that he can’t be asking for forgiveness and trying to become a part of the solution, while he’s participating in violence against his own people. So he cuts ties with them. That’s one of the interesting transformations that you see in contemporary prison literature. The real hero in the story is the psychology of the writer. It’s the inner drama. His whole story hinges around forgiveness and redemption, not with reference to some higher spiritual power, or a state ideology, or a political movement. It’s all about recovering from your own trauma and being able to survive and pass that on to people in any way you can. The thing we didn’t get at with Senghor’s story is the reason why we have so many people in prison. I mentioned the crack epidemic. We have to go back into history to understand that crack is the same drug as cocaine, in a different form. They add water, baking soda and cook it into a rock and it’s smoked instead of snorted, I’ve heard (I’ve never done it. I have never wanted to do it). But because of the violence associated with the distribution of crack cocaine in the 1980s and into the 1990s, we kept passing laws that would put people into prison for a much longer time if they were caught with crack than if they had powder cocaine. It’s the same drug, but you could get a 100 times greater prison sentence for this form of it. In any event, we can end mass incarceration by ending the racism in our criminal justice system. I say racist because crack cocaine was the preferred form of cocaine in the inner city, ghetto communities. It was the preferred form because it was cheaper. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories—that I’m not going to get into—as to how we got so much cocaine into the country in the first place. I think there’s some validity to them, if you go back to the Reagan years and the Iran-Contra scandal and the drug trade in Nicaragua and freedom fighters. “The biggest group of volunteers in prisons these days are evangelical Christians” It also goes back to the gun laws, which changed in ways that were not beneficial. We have so many new legal guns in the country, you’re going to have people defending drug turf with weapons that they never used in the 60s and 70s. How did we get so many AR-15s on the street? How do gangs get these guns? Mass incarceration is a phenomenon owed in a large part to the diffusion of responsibility. Prosecutors don’t have to be accountable for anything but upholding the law. Lawmakers don’t have to be accountable for anything but making tougher laws that they think their constituents want. We voters don’t have to be accountable to anybody but ourselves and our perceptions of what’s right or wrong. If we think that the crack epidemic has gone too far and those people need to be punished more than rich white people that are snorting the same drug, well then we can go ahead and say that. And that’s what we did. And that’s how people like Shaka Senghor and those communities got incarcerated. We need to end the drug war and we will see less of this problem with mass incarceration. But we also need to understand what does work in terms of reform. It’s not any one system claiming to have the answer and then forcing people through it. It’s treating people like human beings and giving them choices. ‘Oh, you want to practise a religion? Oh you don’t OK, you don’t have to.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But the biggest group of volunteers in prisons these days are evangelical Christians. I’m a Christian. I am not an evangelical Christian. I’m in some ways glad that people have a chance to fellowship but, in other ways, I’m a little discouraged that people are forced into a kind of Christianity that I find a little limiting. I think it’s limiting to teach a woman who has experienced sexual abuse her whole life that her main responsibility as a Christian woman is to stay married, because marriage is sanctified, God-given and divorce is sinful. But this is what I know women are taught in this very conservative Christian programme in Angola. It’s a maximum security prison for women. It’s all in a book by Tanya Erzen called God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration"