by Hill Harper
I think the fear and trembling you’ve been experiencing comes from a similar conflict. Everything about your environment is telling you that the only way to “make it” is by following the prison code of power-mongering, from which all the repressive elements of the prison industrial system draw their strength. You’re on the brink of turning your back on such a mentality in order to have a very different future. It makes sense that part of what you’re feeling is dread and anxiety. All I can do to help is tell you that your intuition about changing your life makes intuitive sense to me, and I want to be there to support your faith in it all the way down the line. Listen, Brother, the greatest goals are never realistic. They come with fear, doubt, and insecurity. But every successful person I know pushed through these moments. They didn’t allow clarity to cloud their vision. They didn’t rely on reality to get by. Every successful person I know foolishly believed they could accomplish their crazy goals, and they did. And so have I. And so will you. Believe without a doubt, and watch what happens.
You know, I’m willing to bet that if you told that dude J. T. you’d given up any attempt to manipulate Cindy or me for short-term material benefits in favor of more lasting rewards, he’d label you a sucker and try to challenge your “manhood.” He’d probably come up with a logical-sounding argument that I couldn’t answer completely. He might even accuse you of giving in to “the system” or “listening to some Harvard actor nigga who knows nothing about this life.”
But in my opinion, J. T.’s the one who has given in to “the system” straight up. He sees his code as the rebel’s, but cons, intimidation, gangs, and all that shit aren’t really rebellious. They’re obeying the oppressive rules of the prison environment. In the end, they’re the tools that the prison industrial system relies upon. As long as you talk and act that way, you remain a pawn in their game. You have no power, being moved here and there. Setting one convict against another in a bid for power is only increasing the power of “the institution,” so that those prison-profit machines get more cheap labor in order to get richer. From the American Revolution to the rebellion of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto against the Nazis to Black civil rights, no attempt to shift the balance of power has ever occurred without solidarity. But prison teaches each man to set himself against every other and sets groups against groups, so no big shift in the balance of power can ever occur.
So yeah, I’m asking you to take a leap of faith into a planned-out, gradually built new life. But it’s a leap into the unknown based on the belief that the universe has much better in store for you. And that better life won’t come knocking on your cell door; instead, it’s up to you to claim it. Remember, it’s a process. Chasing the success before chasing the goal is like a drunken one-night stand. You may get it, but it’ll only last five minutes and won’t even be remembered.
So don’t grow weary, and don’t worry. The fact that I see you poised for that leap of faith—which has to be the reason for all the “fear and trembling” you wrote about in your last letter—fills me with joy, because it’s gonna be the best gamble you ever took.
Gotta go. I’ll be in touch.
Much love,
Hill
FAITH
LETTER 11
Her Point of View
I often hear prisoners’ wives comparing themselves to military spouses. Early on, I too offered this analogy to help explain away the blank stares. In the context of: “My husband is incarcerated, but it’s no different than his being in the military.” Sure, there are similar tenets; partners are away from each other for extended periods; families must figure out how to raise kids, maintain a home, and create intimacy despite distance. Both relationships face difficulty with reintegration. That’s where the similarities end. For obvious reasons, prisoners’ wives do not receive the same respect as military wives and with another public distinction: military wives stand by their partners, prisoners’ wives wait.
—Reesy Floyd-Thompson, wife of a man serving time who maintains a support website for other women in the same position, PWGP.org
Hey, man,
This might be a short one—though I’ve said that before and just kept writing. I’ve got to run out in a minute. I just came back from a quick boxing session at the gym. For me it’s a kind of private time, in between airplanes and sound stages and speech platforms. I sparred with one of the interns from my TV show. He used to box Golden Gloves, amateur. How’d I do? Let’s just say he ran circles around me—I’m starting to feel my age! I’m still in the Big Apple wrapping up those exterior shots. I never get tired of the kaleidoscope of humanity that the streets of NYC represent. That’s what I love most about New York City; every walk of life is represented and if you’re open to it, you will connect with different people of all points of view.
My boy Ryan Holly did eight years a little while back. He told me he felt the same about the city and possibilities for his life. He said, “Coming to New York City for the first time, I experienced things I thought were silly. I saw a play (The Heights), and I have never been so inspired by something I didn’t understand before I saw it. That play and standing next to humongous buildings made me think, ‘Damn, if they can build all this. . . . I should be able to pull a decent chunk of success myself.’ . . . And I took off.”
Your apology about the way you answered Cindy means a lot to me, fam. I spoke to her, and she told me she totally understands the way you reacted to her at first. It didn’t surprise her or turn her off like I thought it would. She’s no stranger to the despair that being locked up can cause and the cynical reactions it can trigger if somebody reaches out to you. She’s still willing to help if you’ll let her, my man.
More important than that, thanks for keeping it 100 with me after I came at you. The next time things get too heavy, get at me, instead of reverting back to that everybody’s-out-to-get-something-so-why-shouldn’t-I gangsta. If you’d clued me in to the fact that you’d just gotten that letter from Yvette—your son’s mom—the very same day you got Cindy’s letter, I would have understood a little better why you answered her the way you did. In fact, I put my phone number at the end of this letter. I think it’s about time we talked on the phone about the situation between you and Yvette, right?
I’m glad you included Yvette’s letter with the one you sent me. It let me see for myself how something like that would put anybody back as much as it did you. I had no idea the mother of your child—your ex—was so deep into cocaine and that you’ve known her to experiment with “Molly” and that “Spider Blue” or that child protection is trying to take your kid, R. J., away from her and put him in a group home. Yet again, we’re seeing somebody who doesn’t want to take any responsibility for the consequences of her actions, blaming her descent into drugs on your being locked up. I don’t buy that because it doesn’t compute.
Sure, your being incarcerated had a strong effect on all your family members, but that doesn’t mean you are completely responsible for Yvette’s drug use. Unless there’s something you’re not telling me. There is no doubt that problems are constant. They are inevitable. I understand the want, need, desire to start handling your life in a way that sets you up to be able to face problems and start living accordingly. You have to understand that you are a leader. And people are going to follow you. The question is, are you going to take responsibility for that leadership? You are somewhat to blame for the totality of what Yvette is going through. You are Yvette and R. J.’s role model and you failed to live up to your position. Taking responsibility for the mistakes you’ve made is the first step toward true manhood.
You have to understand that you are a leader. And people are going to follow you.
It’s easy to see that Yvette’s problems aren’t totally unrelated to your incarceration. As I read that resentful letter she sent you and felt all the rage exploding in it, it almost burned the tips of my fingers. For the first time, I started to think more deeply abo
ut what it might be like to have a family member or loved one locked up. I even went on the Internet to see what I could find out about the experience. Although it doesn’t excuse her drug abuse and parental neglect, spouses and family members of the incarcerated don’t have it easy. I feel for family members and spouses like Yvette, for all they have to go through. If your mom, dad, brother, sister, cousin, son, daughter, niece, nephew, husband, or wife is locked up—damn, it ain’t easy.
HELP ON THE OUTSIDE
Do you know there’s an entire online community of people dealing with the loss of a family member to prison? There’s talk about the situation from every angle—from the practical to the psychological, to the unwitting role played by families of the incarcerated in upholding the functioning of the prison. One website went so far as to compare the grief and confusion of losing a loved one to prison to a death in the family.1 Even though there’s usually a way to keep communicating with somebody who’s incarcerated, there’s the feeling that he disappeared into some other world—another reality—and the fear that he’ll be a different person when he gets out.
The situation of the single mom isn’t at all rare these days. Do you know that about two-thirds of the families in poor neighborhoods are being run by, in most cases, hardworking single moms? Sadly, much of it is the result of a father being locked up. A whopping 8.7 million children have parents under some kind of correctional supervision, men and women who are either locked up or on parole. And, of course, a habit of getting locked up has a strong tendency to be passed down to the next generation. Of all the people incarcerated today in this country, 78 percent of them grew up in a fatherless household. Now they’re bringing it down the line to their children. It’s up to you to break that cycle with R. J.
Some wives and parents posting on these websites touched on the irrational guilt they’re tortured by, the nagging feeling that they could have—should have—done something to keep their mate from getting arrested, despite the fact that, in the majority of cases, there would have been little they could do. The worst of all is that it’s not just the convict who’s stigmatized by being incarcerated; so are all the members of his family. I read stories about families suddenly abandoned by their community, children shunned in school, even in church, and being rejected by formerly close relatives.
Some of the stuff I found was geared toward helping wives, mothers, or siblings on the outside to remedy practical problems caused by the loss of the family’s wage earner, ranging from tips about tightening the family budget to suggestions for moonlighting jobs that would bring in more income. Your ex, Yvette, must be going through some of that. I know you’d already moved out when you got arrested, but you were paying her child support, and that’s obviously on hold now.
What I hadn’t really thought about was the kind of depression that sneaks up on some people when their husband or brother or father begins serving a term in jail. Many times it pains loved ones and family even more than inmates. A friend, Jose Vasquez, recounted a story to me: “I was just with a woman whose two sons, brother, and nephew just got locked up. During a conversation with me, she broke down in tears at the thought of these men she loves being locked up. People have a scary image of prison and because of that they suffer so much more.” I learned about that in detail in a terrific collection of essays by people dealing with the loss of a family member to prison: Counting the Years: Real-Life Stories About Waiting for Loved Ones to Return Home from Prison. One of the editors of that collection, Sheila Rule, traded a thirty-year career as a globetrotting New York Times journalist for the opportunity to devote all her energies to cofounding the organization that published that book. It’s called the Think Outside the Cell Foundation, and its goal is to end the stigma of incarceration and the effect of it on those who care about somebody who is serving time.
Sheila Rule obviously knows what she’s talking about. Through a prison ministry, she met and eventually married Joseph Robinson, a man already incarcerated at Sullivan Correctional Facility. The website they produce together, ThinkOutsidetheCell.org, tries to cover all areas of the incarceration phenomenon for every member of the family; it offers everything from a fledging scholarship program for the children of families dealing with incarceration to the Prison to Prosperity Fair and workshops intended to equip people just released with social, psychological, and financial tools to help them get back on their feet. And if you want me to, I’ll let your ex Yvette know about the book and website as well. Sometimes we all need to hear something more than once to get the message. If she is open to it, I’m going to turn her on to the book and the website when I speak to her.
GOING DEEPER
That book and website aren’t the deepest sources of information about the phenomenon, though. Doing Time on the Outside, by Donald Braman, a professor of law at the George Washington University, tries to unearth some of the more profound issues.2 Not only does Braman tell the stories of actual families smashed to pieces by the incarceration of a male parent, suddenly shifting the role of caretaker and breadwinner to grandparents, aunts, or mothers; he also shows how much more damaging than other types of single-parent households this kind can be.
It really made me wonder why our state governments stand by as prisons milk mostly poor people for money by charging triple the long-distance rate for a phone call with family and friends. But it isn’t just the added burden of those astronomically high phone bills from the collect or prepaid calls from prison, or the transportation costs, lost work time, and humiliation of inconvenient visits to facilities. It’s also the fact that all of it is happening at a time when child welfare programs are being mercilessly slashed. The largest group of people living below the poverty line in this country is its children. That’s a damn shame! The situation has torn apart some of the poorer African-American, Latino, and white neighborhoods, damaging the life of every family member.
Braman also makes a controversial hypothesis about incarceration that might bother you. He says it serves as a kind of alibi for men to give up their parental responsibility, inadvertently punishing innocent family members with the consequences of crimes they had nothing to do with. Wow. What do you think? Fam, I know it’s more complicated than that. But maybe it’s one jumping-off point for thinking about things.
Let me go back to what I said earlier. Obviously, I don’t know Yvette, and I’m just feeling my way along. But I do know that nobody has a right to hold somebody else responsible for their drug use, and that, obviously, includes her. Still, it’s also fairly obvious that once you were locked up, she had to deal not just with her changed financial situation but also with a kid feeling the pain of an absent father. It wasn’t just your options that were narrowed by incarceration. Hers and R. J.’s were, too. So out of the few choices available to her—for example, trying to make it with a minimum-wage job and doing what she could to fill the parental void left by you with other relatives—she chose to cop out completely and get high, and her situation progressively got worse. Yvette certainly made bad decisions, because worse still, now your kid has two strikes against him. Now can you see how their lives were immediately changed by your incarceration?
I’m not claiming there’s much you can do about it. I’m just saying that some kind of positive communication among all three of you could only help. If you can get to the point of seeing your incarceration as something that happened to all three of you, knowing you understand this might help Yvette feel less alone, and that might help her to pull it together. Even if that doesn’t happen, you’ll know you did the right thing. And if neither you nor I can help Yvette, there are definitely things we can do for R. J.
I found another organization that’s a treasure trove of resources for the families of the incarcerated, with an emphasis on the kids. It’s called the Family and Corrections Network (FCN),3 and their website has answers to almost every question you might have about this situation: It has a directory of national and local programs for ki
ds with a parent in jail, news about services and projects designed to help children, and a fact sheet listing all the research being done on the problem. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Just by glancing at the website, I found the “Children of Prisoners Library,” tips for volunteers on mentoring children of the incarcerated.
Since you can’t get online, I’m going to keep feeding you the information I find on it. What would make it easier is if you send me a list of questions about the subject. I’ll try to find answers to them on the website and include them in every letter. It’ll be a good exercise for both of us, as we put our heads together to find out more about the issue. Let’s make delving into it a joint project, okay? I might even be able to get Yvette interested in all of it. The first thing for you to do is to put in effort to find peaceful ground and exchange helpful information with Yvette. All right? Cool?
At any rate, I’ll call Yvette, I promise. And I’ll try to get permission from her to deal with child protection about the issue. Do you think your aunt would take in your little man, at least until you got out? That’s a much better option than a group home, in my opinion. Either that or your ex has got to go into recovery right away and start attending some NA meetings, so she can get back to being a mother. Those are the only two options.
Whatever happens, R. J. is somebody who is obviously going to play a big role in any of your future plans. Group home or no group home, I’m gonna work at finding a way for you to communicate with him—for example, being able to send him a card for his birthday that you told me was coming up. Too bad the New York Public Library program I told you about isn’t available where you are. I’m talking about the one where they record fathers reading storybooks to their kids and then deliver the recording on CD to the kids. Maybe we can jury-rig a homemade version of that process ourselves. I know it’s possible to record a phone conversation because journalists use that method all the time when they interview me. So maybe . . . just maybe, I can rig something up on my own phone—for special occasions—and at least record you wishing R. J. a happy birthday or speaking a greeting for the holidays. And then I’d mail that recording to him wherever he is. The sound of a loved one’s voice has a lot of power, Brotha. It’s healing, and it creates intimacy. I know Yvette won’t accept your collect calls, but maybe I can get a recording to R. J., anyway.
