Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones
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Sidney calls this period of his life the lowest one of all. But he also calls this same time his “indispensable years.” According to him, “the young man must go ‘down’ in order to find the right path for going ‘up.’ Call it the ‘time of ashes.’ In some African tribes the young boys must cover their faces with ashes before their initiation into manhood. In certain Nordic cultures the young boys used to sit down in the ashes by the fire in the center of the lodge house until they were ready to take on their adult role.”1
Sidney Poitier’s time of ashes taught him to fight for his life. It gave him an opportunity to balance the good and the evil impulses whirling through his mind. He put all of these energies where they fit—into the natural order of things, where they’d work to his advantage. So when a situation demanded aggressive energy, he had it on tap, but when it required calmness, compassion, or reflection, he had a supply of that, too.
I’m hoping that your time inside will turn out to be the same kind of “time of ashes” for you, as you move toward a greater balance of light and shadow. By telling you about Sidney Poitier, I’m trying to tell you that “shit happens” to everybody. We’ve all gone through some hardships in life. We all have a story to tell. Sometimes nobody could have made it happen any differently. Sometimes we play a big role in what happens without even being aware of it. Sometimes we know we’ve made a bad decision, but we follow through with it anyway. Sidney did all those things, but once he’d learned to temper his impulses, he discovered gold among the ashes. Maybe you can, too.
It may not make sense to you now, but I’m asking you to surrender to your own time of ashes. Most people don’t associate manhood and power with the maturity it takes to surrender. But sometimes surrendering can be the most powerful, courageous action you can take. Because when it comes to making big changes, we have to surrender the old, the trite, and the tired to create space for what can be new.
MENTAL FREEDOM
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
—John F. Kennedy
It all boils down to mental freedom. Yes, I know you’re incarcerated; your body is locked up. But does that mean your mind can’t be free? Nelson Mandela inspired and influenced the world from a two-by-two prison cell. We may not have total control over what happens to our physical selves in this life. But no one and nothing can control our minds; no one can stem their freedom unless we let them do it. So the next time you feel the prison walls closing in on you or can’t take another moment of a bitch-made corrections officer, just remind yourself what Mahatma Gandhi said about his jailers: “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”
“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”
Brotha, can you actually push yourself to get to a place where your body is in prison but your mind is free? I think you can. No, that’s bullshit—I know you can. Try repeating to yourself out loud, three times in a row, My body is in prison, but my mind is free. . . . My body is in prison, but my mind is free. . . . My body is in prison, but my mind is free. . . .
Peace,
Hill
P.S. That picture you sent was funny.
MENTAL FREEDOM
LETTER 3
Losing Is Learning
There is no better [thing] than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.
—Malcolm X
Hey, Brotha,
Your letter couldn’t have come at a better time and your opening definitely made me laugh!
From what you said in the rest of your letter, where you’re at now is like being in limbo. Stuck in a general population jail that has every variety of incarcerated person, from murderers and drug kingpins to petty thieves to guys picked up for smoking a joint.
I know there’s hardly any training or recreational programs exist in these temporary joints. I hope your sentencing and assignment to a prison comes up soon, so you have more certainty about where you’re headed. The funny thing about certainty is that even if the answer isn’t always what we want it to be, at least it allows us to make a plan. Waiting around in limbo must be hell. It’s a kind of “bullpen therapy,” a system designed to either wear you down so you cop out and take a plea bargain, or numb you to everything going on around you. But we’re not going to let that happen, are we?
Compared to what’s happening to you, this won’t sound like shit, but I just walked in the door after a bumper-to-bumper rush-hour commute from a location in L.A. where we shoot most of CSI: NY. Don’t ask why we shoot a New York show in L.A. . . . because the reason is, like most things, money. Bottom line, it’s less expensive to shoot our show in Los Angeles. The producers and the network want to make the show for the lowest cost possible.
THE COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF ACQUIRING MONEY
I have a saying: You can’t be free if the cost of being you is too high. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second, but first, let’s talk money, a subject that’s always on a lot of people’s minds. The interesting thing about money is that it influences the choices and decisions we make in so many areas of our lives in profound ways. For example, if you were to ask the vast majority of people who are in prison why they took the actions that led them to be there, most would say, “M-O-N-E-Y.”
You can’t be free if the cost of being you is too high.
It’s true, the vast majority of crimes committed are crimes related to getting money. Drug dealers sell drugs—for what? M-O-N-E-Y. Burglaries and robberies and auto theft are committed for what? M-O-N-E-Y. Most fights, arguments, and even divorces happen over what? M-O-N-E-Y.
It’s often said—and I’m sure you’ve heard this before—that money is the root of all evil. But I think of it very differently. I think it is our perception of and relationship to money that’s the root of most poor choices.
Most of us have been taught the wrong things about money. We’ve been taught that money is a result, so therefore we should chase it. I mean, you can’t even listen to a song these days—“getting paper,” “racks on racks,” “get money,” “got a condo on my wrist”—we hear it all the time. Money is something to chase, to pursue—a result. But what money truly is—and the wealthiest among us know this—is a tool, not a result. Just like a hammer, money is a resource tool that allows us to build the life we want to live. And if we think about money that way, we can use the tool of money to build the most efficient and effective life for ourselves. A hammer is a great tool when it’s used for the purpose for which it was designed. So if you’re pounding a nail, a hammer is perfect. But if you’re cleaning some hardwood floors, a hammer will do more damage than good.
So we have to be smart about using the tool specific to our needs, instead of thinking, “I’m just going to grab this because it’s what I need.” Now, I’m sure you’re sitting there saying, “That’s great, Hill, it’s easy for someone like you who has all the money in the world to tell somebody else money isn’t a result, it’s a tool. . . . Only people with money say this, ’cause broke folks ain’t feeling this.” But I’m not telling you money isn’t important. I’m saying that’s it’s an incredibly important resource tool. And like any other resource—whether it’s time, knowledge, or experience—effectively using money will make the difference between failure and success. I’m not trying to say money isn’t important—it’s vital—but what’s more important is how we pursue it and use it. We can’t just get it by any means necessary. The whole idea of “getting real money” is relative; it’s not absolute. You probably didn’t hear about this, but Drake recently tweeted, “The first million is the hardest.” In response, Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens retweeted that and responded, “The first billion is a helluva lot harder.” Yeah, he did kind of shit on Drake, bu
t that’s the point. In T. Boone’s circle, Drake’s money is “short.” In Drake’s circle, his money is “long.” Yet to people who are homeless on the street, even one thousand dollars could make an immediate impact on the quality of their lives. “Short money,” “long money,” “big money”—all of these are relative.
Rather than focusing on money as a result, our challenge is how we can back into the plan for our life, what resources in education and training we need to execute that plan, and how much acquiring those resources would cost in terms of money. Once we determine all that—find out how much money we need in terms of food, shelter, clothing, and the other basics of life—we need to do a cost-benefit analysis of how much time and what type of activity will be required to acquire that necessary amount. You may be thinking, “What the hell is a cost-benefit analysis?”
So I’m about to blow your mind right now. Remember in one of your earlier letters you told me that you didn’t want to keep working your “stupid minimum-wage job” and that’s why you even got to the point of considering dealing on the corner like your Brother Vernon did? Not taking into account the question of whether dealing poison in our community is the right thing to do or not, let’s do a complete, straight cost-benefit analysis of that “stupid minimum-wage job” you hate versus the possibilities of dealing drugs on the corner. I think you told me Vernon spent up to eight hours a day either on the block or in front of a certain bodega, and you said he was dealing for eight months before he got arrested for the first time. That’s 1,947 hours of dealing. Then you said he also usually got picked to spend a day, sometimes two, in county before he was out . . . and over the past few years Vernon has been out of county several times with stints of a few weeks, and now he’s gonna be upstate for fifteen to thirty. That’s 131,472 hours for the first fifteen years locked up. Adding those hours he spent waiting to deal on the street brings us a grand total of 133,419 hours dedicated to a life as a dealer. Now, what’s the total amount of his so-called earnings during the time he was dealing? For example, let’s make it a big number—$200,000. If we divide the amount he earned by the time he spent “earning” it, it comes out to $1.50. So for all the hours he spent on the block and in and out of the system, based on my calculations, he was earning somewhere around $1.50 an hour. If you were at that so-called dead-end minimum-wage job for the same number of hours, you’d make almost five times that amount at $7.25 an hour. Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh actually gained access to three years of records kept by a Chicago gang lieutenant and in Freakonomics, Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner wrote:
So J. T.[the lieutenant] paid his employees $9,500, a combined monthly salary that was only $1,000 more than his own official salary. J. T.’s hourly wage was $66. His three officers, meanwhile, each took home $700 a month, which works out to about $7 an hour. And the foot soldiers earned just $3.30 an hour, less than the minimum wage. So the answer to the original question—if drug dealers make so much money, why are they still living with their mothers?—is that, except for the top cats, they don’t make much money.
SINGLED OUT
In your letters, you keep insisting to me that there isn’t anybody with worse luck than you. You feel like you’ve been singled out for suffering. You speak as if you’re unique, a rare, tragic case. You say you didn’t do what they’re accusing you of. You were just there when they found the drugs in the car. You can’t stop feeling tortured by the injustice of all of it. You even take that point of view to the max by writing:
Only God could tell me if that’s really the case, but I can’t really buy the “singled out” idea. Sadly, your situation is far from unique. In fact, it’s all too common. I looked up a few figures about our prison system and discovered that it has swollen to such gigantic proportions, it’s larger than the entire university system in this country. Pretty ironic, isn’t it, seeing that it costs $10,000 more to send somebody to prison than it does to send them to an Ivy League college? We’ve outstripped every country in the world in terms of the number of people we incarcerate. At the same time, the quality of our public education lags behind that of other countries more every year. We’re the world champs when it comes to locking people up, yet when it comes to giving people the skills, knowledge, and hope to pursue other alternatives, we seem to suck more each year. Over two million three hundred thousand American citizens call a state or federal prison their home.
Lots of people are making money out of that situation, Brotha, believe you me. You gotta read up on this stuff, bruh, I’m telling you, it’ll blow your mind. You see, in the past, state and federal governments ran all prisons. Now the building and management of quite a few have been turned over to private companies—for profit.
Our prison system has become a runaway perpetual-motion machine that nobody seems to be able to stop.
Locking people up and keeping them there as long and as often as possible has become an industry. Like any corporation, the companies that build and manage prisons only stand to gain by building more lockup facilities. As of December 2010, in this country, almost 130,000 incarcerated people out of a total 2.2 million are being housed in these private for-profit mills. They work for less than one-fifth of the legal minimum wage and also have to deal with foul food, cramped conditions, and medieval medical care. Our prison system has become a runaway perpetual-motion machine that nobody seems to be able to stop. It doesn’t seem to matter how many respected thinkers point out its flaws. Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser and political scholar Angela Davis call the whole exploitive system the “prison industrial complex.” Davis, in fact, put it very bluntly:
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo—obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.1
So, Brotha, the real truth is much sadder than what you’ve been claiming. Instead of being unique, your situation is—in a tragic way—“normal.” Normal, at least, for the majority of Americans who are poor or belong to an ethnic minority, or don’t have a green card.
I know you’ve heard it, but maybe can’t see yourself as being a part of it. Our prison population doesn’t equally represent all American communities. African-Americans are at the top of the list, with a crazy imprisonment rate of more than one out of every twenty-five of us. That’s six times higher than the imprisonment rate for white, non-Hispanic Americans. At this point, this country has locked up a larger percentage of its Black population than South Africa did during the worst years of apartheid. In Washington, DC, three out of every four young Black men at some point in their lives end up behind prison bars or in the penal system. As Michelle Alexander, author of a powerful book on our prison system called The New Jim Crow, has pointed out, when you’re locked up, you’re automatically—and sometimes permanently—locked out of American society. Alexander says that our prison system has put in place legal structures that in many ways create a subclass, a class of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals, just like legal Jim Crow segregation in the South before and during the civil rights movement.
My heart has already been broken in more than two million two hundred pieces—one for every single person incarcerated in this country.
Maybe you understand where I’m coming from now. In all honesty, what has happened to you does break my heart, but my heart has already been broken in more than two million two hundred pieces—one for every single person incarcerated in this country.
PRISON SUCCESS STORIES
Now, I’ll bet you’re asking yourself why I’m being so damn negative in this letter. I just want to make it clear to you that you aren’t being singled out. And in certain ways, looking at the makeup of prisons from the economic and race aspect, you might be thinking that there is no way to win. But the system doesn’t have to beat you. The truth is, plenty of people have conquered this beast we call the system. There are folks everyone has heard of, like 50 Cent, Michael Vick, and Robert Downe
y Jr. And there are many other success stories who are not so-called celebrities. Take Tracey Syphax, who did his time for drug trafficking—today he’s an entrepreneur, CEO of Capitol City Contracting Inc. and Phax Group LLC.
Syphax took risks as a young drug trafficker but realized that the same attraction to risk was what made entrepreneurs succeed. “I spent my entire young adult life taking risk every day standing on that corner,” he said. “In 1995, I took a risk and started my company Capitol City Contracting with my brother-in-law, also an ex-offender, as my first employee.” Jay-Z said, “I sold kilos of coke. I’m guessing I can sell CDs.” The list goes on and on. Kathy Boudin, PhD, was convicted in 1984 of felony murder for participating in an armed robbery motivated by extremist left-wing politics, during which three people were killed. She was finally released in 2003 and received a doctor of education degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Today she’s a professor at Columbia University School of Social Work. And what about Jim Harris, who was an IV drug user who ended up doing time in the Texas Department of Corrections for possession of cocaine? With the aid of a charismatic volunteer chaplain, he managed to turn his life around and is now a drug-free owner of a computer business.
Finally, let’s not leave out Wilbert Rideau, who’s now known in the world of journalism throughout the world. He was a death-row inmate in Louisiana who not only became an award-winning journalist while he was still locked up, but who also received one of journalism’s most prestigious awards, the George Polk Award. Like you, Rideau claimed he was innocent and unjustly convicted. But he also did something about it. He developed the skills of a journalist while he was on death row, spread the word about his innocence to the outside world, and finally got his sentence overturned. When he got out, he started a program called the Innocence Project to help others who’d been falsely accused.