Читать книгу Angels with Dirty Faces - Walidah Imarisha - Страница 6

“Ma’am, you’re going to have to check the underwire from your bra, or I’m not letting you in.”

She was a squat woman, bleached blonde wisps leaking out from her California Department of Corrections baseball hat. The mud brown uniform drew color from her face. In the unforgiving fluo­rescent lighting of the prison processing center, her features bled away, leaving only razor-edged eyes that bored into me, a mouth twisted with impatience.

The people waiting behind me in line, shoes and belts in hand, shifted irritably. I understood. We had all been on our feet for an hour and a half, up early enough to see the sun crack dawn over the lonely highway that, for us, dead-ended at a wall wrapped in concertina wire.

In the bathroom ten minutes earlier as I hurried into a stall, I passed two women who had the movements of birds, faces heavy with makeup too hastily applied. Using the box cutter with the chipped orange handle given to me by the dour-faced guard, I ripped the seams out of my new black bra, the metal skeleton underneath as exposed as I felt. Meanwhile, the women preened in front of the warped bathroom mirror, one reapplying the dark stain of lipstick every few minutes. The other spoke of her man’s sentence as though it was a communal one they shared: “Girl, we only have 148 days left!” One woman, red-faced from her obvious hangover, laughed too loudly as her friend pointed to the hickie on the side of her neck. She murmured an embarrassed “thank you” and re-adjusted her collar to cover it.

I took in the processing room that never had enough chairs as I walked back towards the counter after the dissection of my bra. White faces dotted the institutional green. Even when it wasn’t their first visit, they always looked like it was. Most faces, however, reflected me back as I met eyes briefly: Black and brown, female. Tired. No men by themselves; only women alone, shifting on swollen ankles they had spent all week on. Many were mothers of the men warehoused here. On their faces was stamped the dogged resignation that comes from going to see your child week in and week out in a place surrounded by razor wire.

Some waiting were like the young woman in line next to me. Her carefully ironed shirt, laid out lovingly the night before, was now creased like the frown on her face as she tried to manage three wild-as-weeds children, who shot questions about seeing daddy in rapid fire succession. The wide-faced baby in her arms shifted fitfully as the mother separated out the six diapers and two clear baby bottles allowed in.

Two bright-faced and dark-skinned boys tumbled past me, giggles streaming in their wake. Before their mothers had a chance to rope them back under control, one of the guards behind the processing desk boomed out, “No running in the waiting area!” The boys’ faces froze more than their bodies—eight-year-old bodies that would soon grow into young Black men bodies: dangerous property, to be handled only by professionals.

As an anti-prison organizer, my work takes me behind the walls, into cages where dignity is stripped and humanity denied, where rehabilitation is nonexistent and abuse is a daily practice. I have spent years visiting political prisoners, which this country denies having. Most of them are from the hopeful, chaotic, and turbulent 1960s and 1970s, when they believed revolution was a single breath away. Now they strain to draw each lungful in the stifling atmosphere of incarceration. Many of them have spent more years in prison than I have on this planet. I have been to the white-hot hell of Texas’s death row, and to the stainless steel brutality of Pennsylvania’s most infamous restricted housing unit. I have gone behind the walls, and I have the heartbreaking privilege to walk out of them every time.

That day’s prison in California looked like so many of the newer institutions: sprawling three-story concrete buildings, windows like slitted eyes squinting in the harsh sunlight. All new prisons look the same from the outside. And thanks to the prison-building boom in the 1980s and 1990s, almost all prisons are relatively new.

California prisons spread faster than a forest fire during a drought and became a symbol for prison growth across the country. 1852 marked the first California state prison, San Quentin. In the first hundred years of California penal institutions, nine new prisons were constructed. That state now operates thirty-three major adult prisons, eight juvenile facilities, and fifty-seven smaller prisons and camps, the majority of which have been built since 1984. The prison-building brushfire of the 1980s often relied on the same corporations and the same plans to build institutions quickly, quietly, and profitably. The corporations profited in dollars, and the state profited from the control of potentially rebellious bodies. There wasn’t time for creativity to grow in the shadow of gun turrets.

Now over 2.3 million are incarcerated across this country. One in one hundred adults are living behind bars, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, and over seven million are in prison or on parole. This means one in thirty-one adults is under some form of state control or supervision, by far the highest rate in the world. American prisons account fully for one-quarter of the entire world prison population. Is this the “number one” people are always shouting about?

At the California prison where I was, there had been an attempt at beautification. Art pieces decorated the sterile visiting room, including a piece from my adopted brother, all flames and burnt black tree limbs. A garden was planted along the walkway to the visiting building. The inmates tended it. It was, my adopted brother told me, a coveted job, because you got to be outside, working with your hands, instead of washing someone’s dirty underwear or scraping meatloaf off 3,769 plates each dinner service. The prison’s designed capacity was seventeen hundred, but three times as many people are crammed in: 7,538 feet in shoes three sizes too small. This meant triple bunking: three prisoners lived in a cell designed for one. The gym was no longer used to release frustration; it was used as dormitory-style sleeping, where two hundred people lived on top of each other. Fifty-four people shared one toilet.

This is not unique to this prison. The majority of prisons across the country are filled until the seams are bursting, but California is an extreme case. The entire system warehouses almost double the number of people it was designed to hold, and the federal government has been forced to intervene. In May 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling: California’s prison system violated the Eighth Amendment, the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, though not so unusual in this nation. The Supreme Court ruled the state must parole or transfer thirty thousand prisoners in the next two years.

Thirty thousand: everyone with a loved one in California began dreaming it would be them. One in five: much better odds than the lottery. We were so busy whooping with cries of celebration, the second word of the ruling was drowned out: transfer. California argued the whole time that it could solve the overcrowding issue by new construction (during an economic collapse) or by transferring prisoners to be held in other states’ prisons. Ultimately they only had the second option. They brokered deals; they sent prisoners to Texas, Arkansas, Missouri. The State of California will still continue to pay for these prisoners, but technically the California prisoner population will be reduced—for now. Yet this is only a stopgap measure.

This is not how we stop the hemorrhaging.

* * *

A visit to a prison requires precise planning and a keen attention to detail. For the honor of standing in the visiting room at that California prison, I had flown from Philadelphia to the Bay Area, rented a car, and driven two hours to stay at the local motel. This trek was not by any means the longest taken—so many drive eight, twelve, or more hours to see their loved ones. These are fraught journeys worthy of immortalization by Homer: millions of epic quests that go uncelebrated, even unnoticed.

In my more dramatic moments, I imagine myself and others challenging the prison system to be Cassandras, cursed by the gods to foretell the future to deaf ears, while our predictions of the destruction of Troy by the Spartans slowly drives us mad. There are thousands of Cassandras waiting in prison processing rooms right now.

I consider our visions of devastation just as dire as Troy’s fate, in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Prisons are this society’s Trojan Horse, proffered as an end to the “war on crime.” We have taken it in and accepted the horrific ramifications that come with it; we are one of the few countries with a death penalty, and one of the few countries that tries juveniles as adults. Our country executes many who are deemed too young to drink, to buy cigarettes, to vote. There has been a continual siege of our senses, the nightly news telling us to be scared in our skin (to be scared of darker skin). This Trojan Horse of more prisons gives a solution to our purported (and mostly fabricated) crime problem and to our perpetual economic crises. It is a solution for which we have flung our gates wide open. But rather than signal the end of a war, it has wreaked destruction we as a society do not acknowledge, do not see. Family members load into cars, climb onto van services while it is still night outside, and make a day’s drive across desolate states to see a glimpse of a loved one. For federal prisoners, this hardship may not even be an option for their families; a federal prisoner can be shipped to any federal prison in the country, and a continent is sometimes too much to cross. In order to raise money for the state budget, Arizona now charges families ­twenty-five dollars to see their loved ones. Families are devastated, communities rendered, and futures without bars are extinguished. Children left behind, growing up in the shadow of walls, are five times more likely to end up in prison themselves.

This cure has proven far more dangerous to the body than the disease, and that is because it was never meant to be a cure. Prisons are not about safety, but about control and containment of potentially rebellious populations. Our current prison system mushroomed after the end of legal slavery. As Angela Davis wrote, at the very time that Black people broke the shackles of slavery, the shackles of prison snapped tight on their wrists. It happened in the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for a crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This exception was coupled with the Black Codes, a set of state crimes that only applied to Black people. Davis explained in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?:

Thus, former slaves, who had recently been extricated from a condition of hard labor for life, could be legally sentenced to penal servitude. In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves. Black people became the prime targets of a developing convict lease system, referred to many as a reincarnation of slavery.

Davis quoted Mary Ellen Curtin’s study of post-emancipation Alabama prisoners to show that before the abolition of the state’s 400,000 enslaved Africans, ninety-nine percent of Alabama’s prison population was white. Scant years after the end of slavery, Alabama prisoners overwhelmingly took on a darker hue. Scholar Michelle Alexander has shown there are now more Black people in prison then there were enslaved at the height of slavery.

The plantation haunts us, as a living specter, not a past dead and buried. The foundations of our justice system are rooted in enslavement, in the concept of white supremacy as law. The template for the modern police force is the slave patrol, as Kristian Williams shows in his book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. The foundation was only to serve and protect those who were white and wealthy. For those who lived in Blackness, the predecessors to the police were there to ensure our obedience to chattel slavery. Slavery to prisons. Slave catchers to police. After Black youth organized and rebelled in the streets to bring attention to it, we heard the names last year of Black people murdered by the police, in rapid fire, with no end in sight: Michael Brown, Taylor Garner, Tamir Rice, Darrien Hunt, Akai Gurley.

There were the names from the same time we did not hear as well—Tanisha Anderson, an unarmed Black woman killed by Cleveland police. Aura Rain Rosser, killed in Ann Arbor. Black women and Black trans people are subject to state and police violence as well as intimate violence in their own homes and communities, and they are often erased from the public outcry. In this way, we lose the connections between state violence and the violence we inflict on one another, which serves to uphold the state.

Another name is added to this litany of death and mourning every twenty-eight hours. Every twenty-eight hours, a Black person is killed by law enforcement or white vigilantes, according to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the extrajudicial killing of 313 Black people by police, security guards and vigilantes. The FBI’s own 2012 data admits that white police killed a Black person almost twice a week for a seven-year period. And during Jim Crow segregation, a Black person was lynched every four days in this country. History is not just the past, but a living legacy, continuing to crush the breath from our lungs.

We say we prepare our children for the future. But really, we lie to our children about the present, shield their eyes from looking directly into the sun. We know they would never willingly emerge from the womb if they knew the truth. And once they learn the truth, it becomes a struggle to keep them here, on this planet. Black children, especially, seem to be born with terminator seeds planted deep in their bellies, seeds activated by lack of resources, decent education, adequate housing, lack of jobs, opportunity, dignity, respect, freedom, self-determination—lack of their faces reflected back at them in anything other than a mug shot shown on the 5 o’clock news. We tear at the faces we are told are the enemy’s. We tear at our own faces.

And while prisoners are overwhelmingly Black and brown, prisons themselves dominate all of our landscapes. Rural white towns devastated by the flight of capital overseas, by a globalization that too often makes the world tight as a noose around working necks, have looked to prison developers as prophets. Blue-collar industrial workers based in U.S. urban settings used to be necessary for the stability of the U.S. economy. But corporations have gone global, exploiting communities of color across continents, enacting a typhoon of monetary destruction that sends waves of economic refugees to our shores. As Chicano emcee Olmeca rapped, “You must be stupid/ No one crosses a desert cause they want to. It’s a necessity/ A sacrifice for the family/ You don’t call ’em illegals/ Call ’em economic refugees.”

The working class here in the U.S. has shifted faces. No longer white male factory machinists with lined faces and heavy gloves; now they are immigrant, brown. Often women. Cleaning the messes we do not see, which we work so hard not to see. Robin D.G. Kelley wrote in his contribution to Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology:

In a world of manufacturing, sweatshops are making a huge comeback, particularly in the garment industry and electronics assembling plants… These workers are more likely to be brown and female than the old blue-collar white boys we are so accustomed to seeing in popular culture.

Communities of color that are not being exploited for their labor are left with double and triple rates of unemployment when compared to the national average. Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote in Golden Gulag, “Convicts are deindustrialized cities’ working or workless poor.” Black unemployment is more than double that of whites. In devastated urban areas, it is much higher. Kelley stated, “The ghetto is the last place to find American workers.” Contrary to the message that things get better for Black and brown, this is the highest rate of unemployment in almost thirty years. As reggae prophet Bob Marley warned us, “A hungry man is an angry man.” So what is to be done with this surplus, unneeded labor, this hunger simmering into rage?

America used to make cars. Now we make prisoners.

“Not in our backyard!” was the past response to the faintest whiff of a prison near rural white town limits. Now towns clamor for an institution, outbidding each other to provide the most enticing package. Prisons mean jobs, economic stimulation, normalcy returned to downsized lives. That’s what the brochures say. They don’t read the fine print. They don’t know the majority of people building the prison will be out-of-area contractors, most of the guards will be hired from surrounding areas, and those who are “lucky” enough to land a job will bring violence home. Prison is not something you clock out of, you cannot hang it up at the end of the night next to your uniform shirt. The increased rates of intimate violence, drug and alcohol addiction, assaults and suicide in prison towns bleed that truth.

There was a time I believed prisons existed to rehabilitate people, to make our communities safer. I thought they might need tweaking now and then, but what system didn’t? I thought bad apples sometimes infiltrated, but there were ways of rooting them out. The prisons I have been to, the hands that have held onto mine a moment longer than necessary, the stacks of prisoner mail that crowd my desk no matter how many I answer, all contradict that belief even more than the books I have read and the lectures I have attended. When I saw for the first time (but not the last) a mother sobbing and clutching her son when visiting hours were up, only to be physically pried off and escorted out by guards, I knew nothing about that made me safer. This is the heart of this country’s prison system. And the prison system has become the heart of America.

* * *

I got to my California small town motel room late the night before my visit. I robotically unpacked my small bag. Though I would be visiting both days it was allowed, I had only brought one pair of pants: my black pinstriped interview pants. They were the only pair of pants I owned that weren’t jeans. At this prison, you weren’t allowed to wear denim. That was what the prisoners wore, and the administration feared—I was told—a clothing swap under the ever-present eyes of the guards and the all-seeing gaze of the surveillance cameras, allowing the prisoner to make a break for freedom. It was a security risk, and the regulation was necessary for the smooth running of the institution, and for the safety of the larger community. But only in Oregon, New Jersey, and California. In New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas, security and safety wore a completely different outfit, so my jeans were regulation approved there.

These arbitrary guidelines, which must be followed to the smallest detail, have all blurred in my mind, until I forgot where I am allowed to wear open-toed shoes and which metal detector was set off by my lip ring. For the sake of my sanity and for simplicity, I developed one outfit that worked at every prison I have visited (so far): black tank top with a red button down long sleeved shirt, the pinstriped pants, black tennis shoes, and no jewelry other than my lip and ear piercings (I found if I don’t add additional metal, the detectors won’t go off). Like the prisoners, I created my own prison uniform; I wear it summer or winter, sun or hail.

At the motel, I finished packing. I lay down in bed, flipping through the endless chatter of cable television, my mind crowded with thoughts of the two disparate individuals I would see the next day: my adopted brother Kakamia Jahad Imarisha, and James McElroy, nicknamed Jimmy Mac, a New York Irish mobster (I will refer to him as Mac in this text, for clarity). I would see Mac first, then my brother.

Mac was a hit man who worked for the Gambino family, a part of the nucleus of what then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudolph Giuliani dubbed “the most savage organization in the long history of New York City gangs.” Mac was a member of the feared Irish Mob, the Westies. The Westies ran Hell’s Kitchen from 1966 until 1988 with a brutal yet simple motto: “No corpus delecti, no investigation.” They cut up the bodies of their victims, stuffed them in plastic black garbage bags and tossed them into the Hudson River on a small island they dubbed “the graveyard.”

This was the man I was interviewing, thanks to Kakamia, who was doing time with Mac in this maximum security institution where Mac, a federal prisoner, had been transferred “for his protection.” Mac was in California rather than closer to his home of New York City because he and the other Westies had worked for the Mafia, specifically for John Gotti, the most powerful don in the underworld at the time. Mac testified against Gotti after his and the other Westies’ convictions. The federal prison system shipped him west to ensure he would not become a body to be hidden, himself.

Mac turned down an interview with 60 Minutes and the New York Times, but agreed to talk to me because I was “almost family,” as he said in his letter letting me know I had been approved for visitation. I was excited to write a piece about him. The idea of being his family made me more than a little uneasy.

* * *

“What did you say?” I said, my embarrassment and exhaustion making me as curt as the blonde guard glowering at me.

“That underwire I made you cut out of your bra when it made the metal detector go off—you can’t just throw it away in the bathroom like you did. I need you to get it, bring it to me. I will give you a slip that shows you checked it in, and when you leave, it will be returned to you.” The guard clipped her words, as if not to waste any more breath on me than was absolutely necessary.

“But I don’t want the underwire back!” My voice peaked with frustration. And it was true: I didn’t. I was angry at myself for forgetting the most basic component of my prison uniform: a sports bra, sans underwire. I had already ripped up a brand new bra to meet regulations. I did not relish the thought of going back into the cramped bathroom, rummaging around in the trash with the used tampons and dirty crumpled tissue paper to pull out two small Us of metal, just so I could get them back at the end of the day. What was I going to do, sew a whole new bra just to put them in?

“This is prison policy.” Her tone, laced with a hint of malice, suggested she was addressing an unruly and slow five-year-old. “If you do not follow procedure, you will not only not be allowed into this facility at this time, I will flag you so that you will not be allowed back in the facility until we know that you will properly follow the rules established for your safety and the security of this institution.”

I swallowed the anger and rebellion that rose up. I reminded myself that every time any prisoner came to the visiting room to see me, they were strip searched and sometimes body cavity searched upon entering and leaving. I’m getting off easy, I told myself.

I marched stiffly to the bathroom, not making eye contact with any of the faces watching. Unlike the guards’ hostility or detachment, the other visitors’ faces showed understanding, fear, and relief—they knew next time it could be them. Setting my mouth in a hard line, I reached into the garbage can, willing myself to actively not think about what my hands might be touching. I finally brushed the thin metal strips, pulled them out. After burning the top layer of skin off my hands with the scalding hot faucet water, I returned to the wooden desk, the underwire from my bra clipped wings digging into my palm, and unceremoniously plunked them down on the table.

The guard swept them into a plastic bag and paper-clipped it to my ID, which went back in a drawer. She took her time writing out a yellow slip that would entitle me to reclaim my valuable property. As she handed it to me, she said, without a trace of a smirk, “Welcome to this correctional institution. Enjoy your visit.”

* * *

After walking through three locked metal doors and showing my ID four times, I entered the prison visiting room. It resembled a school gymnasium with linoleum floors and stucco walls. The room was full of dingy white plastic tables and chairs. Visitors crowded into the space looked like they were on a picnic gone awry. A guard sat lazily at the front desk, elevated so you had to look up as you handed him your paperwork. He assigned me table number six, in the middle of the room, then promptly went back to staring off into nothing.

I sat, nervously smoothing the front of my “uniform.” I tried to look like the professional and experienced journalist I was—not the easiest task, given my multiple piercings and streaks of blue dye crowning my large afro. A punk rocker in my high school days, I had decided there were additional ways to fight the system that ­existed outside of mosh pits, but I still clung stubbornly to my counter­culture roots.

The metallic sound of bolts sliding from the roller pounded like thunder, signifying a prisoner was coming out. From the ugly flaking blue door stepped someone who could only be Mac: late 50s; short but wiry; light, thinning hair combed stylishly. He walked like the former boxer turned enforcer he was, jawline set hard and penetrating baby blues sweeping the room. They fell on me, and his mask melted into a smile.

I stood awkwardly and went for the handshake, which he promptly swept aside in favor of a brief hug. “Ah,” Mac said as he sank into the plastic chair. “I woulda known you anywhere, you look just like your brother.” We get that all the time, which is funny since Kakamia and I aren’t related by blood. Instead of correcting Mac (not the best start to an interview I decided), I offered to buy him something from the vending machines with my plastic bag full of quarters. He accepted a coffee. As I stood up, hefting the baggie, he joked, “I coulda used that real well in my old line of work.” I walked away, gingerly feeling the weight of the makeshift weapon I had unwittingly carried in. Thank goodness they made me check that underwire, or I could have done some real damage.

* * *

We, the general public, take prisons for granted, and at the same time we try our very best not to think too hard about prisons themselves: what happens inside of them, what leads up to someone going into prison. We allow ourselves to be lulled to sleep at night by the fairy tale that only bad people end up in prison: as long as we are good, we don’t have to worry about what goes on behind the walls. In this tale, it is only individual bad decisions that land people in prison; there are no larger forces at work. As Angela Davis wrote, “The prison…functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.”

If we begin to get troublesome thoughts, looking at the statistics that show that seventy percent of those incarcerated are people of color, wondering about communities left with gaping wounds where people once were, we always have the nightly news to comfort us. The news obliterates centuries of inequality and oppression, leaving only Black and brown hands in cuffs, shown at higher rate than whites, despite the fact that whites commit more crimes because they are the majority of the nation’s population. Eighty-one percent of Americans get their understanding of crime from the media, rather than personal experience, according to “The News Media’s Influence on Criminal Justice Policy,” and Americans believe corporate media, especially television news, to be reliable and credible.

Over the past twenty years of doing work around incarceration, I have learned many things first-hand about prisons, things not shown in the news. I have learned rules and regulations. I have learned tension and despair. I have learned brutality and monotony. Most of all, I have learned many prisoners’ lives were cages before they ever stepped into a prison. I have learned that poverty confines, hunger contains, homelessness chokes, powerlessness restricts, and oppression destroys. I have learned we all have prisons in our lives, and most of us are too frightened to look directly at them.

And I have learned people do not stop being people when they are issued a prison ID number. The images we are given of prisoners are so dark, we can no longer distinguish the features anymore. But each person in prison has a face, a story, and a heart that hurts in the night and has the capacity to expand beyond ribcages.

In the summer of 2004, my sister died after back surgery. The doctors gave her a clean bill of health after the operation and discharged her. While she slept, a blood clot traveled through her body to her brain and killed her. A few months earlier, she and I went to visit my mother, diagnosed with breast cancer. My sister and I did not know if it would be the last time we spent time with her. We wanted to make sure she saw her children all together again before she left this world. Little did we know we would suffer a crippling blow as a family, just not the one we feared then.

When I received the call, I was stunned into immobility. My family was devastated, my mother inconsolable. I was thousands of miles from her and the rest of the family. My friends rained love and support down on me.

But the gentlest care I received came in envelopes stamped “Inmate Mail.” Letters already slit open and read by authoritative eyes, they were sent to me only after being deemed safe. They were not safe, though. The words of support were subversive. They continued the fundamental shift of how I felt about the prison system, and the prisons all of us live under.

This book is my attempt to draw back the faces erased in the flashing red of squad cars, shaded by gun turrets, and stamped out by the letters “DOC.”

If the prison system is a cure worse than the disease, or not even ever intended to be a cure, then what else is there? How do we as communities react when someone harms another? How do we set up systems to make whole what was broken, beyond clanging locks?

There is a growing movement of organizations and communities exploring alternatives to prisons. Alternatives that keep the community safe while recognizing the humanity of those who have done harm. Many of the alternatives to prisons focus on drugs. Drug courts. Addiction treatment services. Counseling. Decriminalization. This is not surprising, given that almost half of all people in federal prisoners are there for nonviolent drug offenses according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ own statistics. The astounding explosion of the prison population, up 700 percent since 1970 says Pew Charitable Trusts, is disproportionately due to the War on Drugs. The American Medical Association argues that drugs and drug addiction should be understood a health crisis, not an invading army.

The majority of people who are in prison are there for nonviolent offenses. In fact in 2006, thirty-five percent of all folks going into state prisons were there on parole violations, not because they had committed new crimes, says the National Conference for State Legislatures. For states like California, that number is closer to two-thirds.

The reality is that the vast majority of people in prison were never tried in front of a judge. Over ninety percent of people in prison took a plea bargain. With harsher sentencing laws and mandatory minimums to wield like flaming swords, prosecutors stand over defendants, who often have not even glimpsed their defense attorney, and offer them the lesser of the most evil. Less than ten percent of prisoners were tried by a “jury of their peers”; the rest had trial by prosecutor, and rather than risk ten, twenty-five, or life in prison, they take a plea. Innocence or guilt did not even enter into this equation.

What the nightly news does not show is that crime rates have steadily declined for decades. We are told by media and law enforcement we are less safe now than we have ever been. The truth is, crime rates are closer to those of the 1950s, according to the FBI’s own statistics, though we definitely are not being shown images of Leave It To Beaver when we turn on news programming.

Prisons are overflowing with folks there for nonviolent drug offenses, who were not convicted in a court of law. That is the reality. But the reality is also that humans do harm one another. This harm is often horizontal violence enacted upon the tender flesh of those who are already marginalized, with the least access to institutional resources. The majority of this harm, against those who are poor, of color, young, women, and trans and queer (and especially those who live at the intersections of these identities), is never reported. It would not be taken seriously by law enforcement if it were. Much of this harm is caused by law enforcement and other agents of the state. For harm done within oppressed communities, convictions would only result in more Black and brown people being stolen from already-destabilized communities.

So sometimes people hurt each other. Horribly. And then what? What of those who have done damage—sometimes unimaginable—to others? When do we stop seeing a human being and see only a monster, only a prisoner?

For this book, I have not chosen stories that fit easily into our preconceived societal notions of “good” and “bad.” I know many innocent prisoners, wrongfully convicted. It would be easier to argue for their release, and to challenge prisons solely based on their experiences. Harder, however, is to take stories of people who are in some way guilty by their own admission.

There is my adopted brother, who denies being responsible for the crime he was convicted of. He does admit to being involved, at the age of sixteen, in a plan to commit murder. There is Mac, who fully admits to engaging in the heinous act of ending another human being’s life (in fact, many human beings) for money. Mac especially is one of the stories that fuels the prison system, what prison abolitionist Ruth Morris called “the terrible few” that politicians reference to push forward more “tough on crime” legislation. Anyone who believes in exploring and creating alternatives to incarceration will eventually be hit in the face with people like Mac, perhaps even with people like my brother. Rather than run from it, these are the stories we have to explore, the transformations and the redemptions, if we are to fundamentally shift how we think about crime and punishment in this country.

I have also included my experiences in this book, experiences of working to build alternatives, specifically around sexual assault, the most common violent harm done and the most underreported. I’ve included my experiences of being wounded by someone I trusted, of attempting to put my politics into practice, and finding out how much messier and more painful real life is on your skin than on paper. I’ve included my struggles with the meaning of redemption, accountability, and forgiveness.

These are the stories of Mac, Kakamia, and myself, but we are characters. In this book, the we I write about is not us; we are not fully ourselves. As much as we try, no writer can ever capture the fullness of complexities that is a human being. These are the Mac and Kakamia I see, the histories I have learned, have imagined based on countless hours of interviews and research. These things I believe to be true, well aware that in reality nothing is true, and even our own memories can be fiction. Any nonfiction book must be read partially as fiction, for we all tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives. And so the same is true for me. For my stories and the people in them. I have tried to be as honest as possible, with myself as much as everyone else.

In the spirit of accountability, I have also changed some names in this book, of people, places, and events. I struggled with this as a writer. Haven’t I, in writing a creation of nonfiction, sworn to “tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth”? But I realized two things finally: sometimes we get shackled by too much fact, unable to break free and see the larger truths. Secondly, our stories are never just our own. I am, through this book, telling dozens of people’s stories tangentially, the majority of whom did not agree to that. In my quest to have difficult, complex, and painful discussions, I do not want to cause more trauma than necessary. Rather than the courtroom oath, I have taken the ethos of the Hippocratic oath: either help, or at least do no harm. In this spirit, I have worked to tell these stories responsibility, while still maintaining honesty and accuracy.

As part of this, I have included myself, which was not the original idea of this narrative. I do not know how to write people not in relation to myself. Every story I was told, every emotion I saw flit across someone’s face, I used myself as a sounding board for human connection. How would I have felt? What would I have done? Who would I have become under different forces of gravity? This is ego most certainly, but also an attempt at honesty. I do not want to knowingly lie. And I believe objectivity to be the worst lie of them all. I am not objective. But I am deeply, completely and wholly invested.

I did not want to just recount dry facts from newspaper archives; I wanted to make these stories breathe, and when necessary, bleed. From extensive interviews with Kakamia and Mac, and through mining my own memories, I have reconstructed scenes from all of our lives. And reconstruction is just another way of saying imagining with its foundation in fact. As much as we research and retell history, we imagine it as well. I have tried to imagine with the fewest factual errors possible.

The title of this book, Angels with Dirty Faces, comes from a 1938 James Cagney film. Cagney plays Rocky Sullivan, a young man growing up in early 1900s Hell’s Kitchen. Together with his best friend Jerry Connolly, Rocky got into the kind of trouble poor kids in a city got into. They stole to eat. Then they robbed a railroad car. The police gave chase. Rocky saves Jerry’s life by pulling him out of the way of a steam train. Rocky gets caught by the police. His friend Jerry, who could run faster, does not. Rocky goes to reform school, graduates to more crime, spends more time in prison, and becomes one of the most notorious gangsters. Jerry stays in the neighborhood and becomes a priest.

Eventually, Rocky returns to the old neighborhood. He and Jerry spend time together. Rocky meets a woman. He becomes a hero to a group of young boys. But the life he was dealt pulls him back in. He kills another gangster. He is tried and sentenced to the electric chair.

Jerry comes to visit Rocky before his execution. He asks Rocky for one last favor before he dies: to pretend to die as a “rotten sniveling coward.” Jerry asks for the group of young boys who look up to Rocky, and for the young boys across the country. Jerry asks Rocky to destroy the image of heroic outlaw they have created in their head. He asks Rocky to show himself as human and broken, so that they will not follow in his footsteps.

Rocky refuses. “You’re trying to take away the only thing I have left.” All he has to hold on to is the image of himself he created out of his pain.

And yet, after Rocky is strapped into the chair, he begs. He pleads for his life. He dies crying. Begging. The reporters capture it. Write it in the paper:

At the fatal stroke of eleven p.m. Rocky was led through the little green door of death. No sooner had he entered the death chamber, than he tore himself from the guard’s grasp, flung himself on the floor, screaming for mercy. And as they dragged him to the electric chair, he clawed wildly at the floor with agonized shrieks.

In contrast to his former heroics, Rocky Sullivan died a coward.

The boys are disillusioned. Rocky was not the icon they thought. In the last scene of the film, Jerry reads the account of Rocky’s execution to the young boys. The priest tells them, “Pray with me. Pray with me for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as I could.”

Rocky Sullivan is the most human and complex portrayal of a gangster I have ever seen in popular culture. The character allows nuances to live next to contradictions. The film allows for a priest to love a gangster, and for a gangster to show nobility and sacrifice in his last moments of life. Most importantly, the film tells us no one is born a gangster. It is through circumstances that gangsters are forged. And sometimes the smallest thing, like whether or not you can run faster than your friend, determines the course of your life.

But even more important, no one is beyond a taste of redemption. While some believe Rocky just broke at the end, and was truly pleading for his life, I in my heart know this not to be the case. I know Rocky instead did the bravest thing he had probably ever done in his entire renegade life. He made a decision to tell the truth. To remove the façade. To show the pain he carried, masked as bravado. To beg, not truly for his life, but for the lives of those boys who looked up to him.

That is what this book is about.

Who among us is beyond humanity? Can we hear another’s pain and trauma, and still think of them only as evil? And if not, how will we deal with it, when we learn the monsters are themselves frightened, bruised children?

During Kakamia’s 2008 parole hearing, where he was denied for the fourth time and given a two-year hit after eighteen years in prison, he looked at the parole board and said,

I’m not the best. I’m not going to come in here with this shining record. I’ve been incarcerated over half of my life. I do the best that I can. And every day I strive not to become that individual walking that track.

Every day I strive not to become just another number.