Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones

by Hill Harper

  Success isn’t a secret—it’s a system.

  Success isn’t a secret—it’s a system. I’m on the road a lot and have had the privilege of meeting quite a few interesting people from a lot of different backgrounds. The ones who are successful—the people who’ve made it in business, the arts, sports, education, or public service—all share some common traits. And they are not things they’ve been born with or been given. Instead, they are traits they have worked hard to groom and foster in themselves.

  I’ve identified seven of these key traits. They are: courage, curiosity, creativity, collaboration, confidence, character, and completion—I call them the Seven C’s. I’m even gonna throw in a bonus C at the end of this letter. And just like the Seven Seas that cover Earth, these C’s have global significance. They challenge us, they sustain us, and in the end, they help us to bring out the best in ourselves. So, we’re going to build those seven muscles and put you on the way to a fuller, more complete life.

  Remember my mentioning Anthony Papa a few letters ago? He got out of prison by developing his talent as a painter (creativity). Joe Loya, author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber, was able to break the grip of prison and recidivism by changing his mentality, having faith in himself, and rediscovering a talent for writing he’d discovered as a kid and forgotten (confidence). Hurricane Carter, by striving to get an education (curiosity). Wilbert Rideau, by trumpeting his cause and not giving up until he got himself off death row (completion).

  The root of the word courage is the Latin word cor, which means “heart.” How can you be courageous and make decisions from your heart? Well, in some ways you have already shown a lot of courage during your stint in prison. You refused to become a member of a gang, which took a lot of cojones, my man. You wrote to R. J asking for forgiveness, which took guts. Not to mention that you’ve survived behind bars. Now it’s going to require true grit to face a whole new world where almost everything will seem unfamiliar to you. But take heart, my friend. Remind yourself that others have come before you and have successfully navigated the waters of the free world after incarceration.

  We spoke about curiosity in an earlier letter where we talked about reading and continuing to be informed about the world, being curious about the way others navigate their lives, cook, clean, love, play, work. A base level of curiosity is required to be able to ask the right questions—and only if you ask the right questions will you be creative.

  Once you are released, you’ll have an even greater opportunity to stay informed. Use your local library, check out as many books as you can, read several national newspapers, take advantage of the Internet on the library’s computers. Technologically the whole world has opened up since you’ve been incarcerated, and you have a lot of catching up to do. Try to see it as a fascinating avenue to exploration, and it won’t seem so daunting.

  Creativity is another major component of success that’s required to solve complex problems. For instance, the forces at work against you when you get out will be complex and vast—so it will require creativity to beat them. You’ll need to find housing and a job, and overcome the obstacles and roadblocks to those goals.

  And once you get established, I’m going to ask you to come up with an idea for your own business. If you’re going to go into video game design, think about creative ways to use your skills. Everything from menus to billboards to Internet ads to business logos makes use of graphic and video game design, so the world is at your fingertips. Be as creative as possible in coming up with ideas for your business venture. The sky’s the limit.

  Collaboration is key, and later I’m going to devote a whole letter to building your own personal board of directors. They will collaborate with you on your path to success, ensuring that you don’t have to go it alone.

  Confidence is the fifth piece of the pie, and one that you’ll gain over time as you accomplish more of your goals. For the time being, getting a place to stay is priority number one, and after that, finding a job that will cover your basic needs. You’ll start to feel more and more confident as you find yourself integrating into the outside world, and that self-assurance will feed upon itself and blossom.

  Character is one of the most important keystones of success but perhaps the most difficult to define. Martin Luther King Jr. made a famous statement about it: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

  Make sure that from now on, when you are judged by the “content of your character,” it holds up to the high standard set by MLK and our other illustrious ancestors.

  The final C is completion. Complete that correspondence course and go on to the next. When you tell someone you’ll do something, be sure to do it, and do it right. When you begin your new job, complete all your assignments in a timely manner. Finish what you start, and enjoy the sense of accomplishment that this gives you.

  One more C that I’m going to throw into the mix is calm. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary’s definition of calm is: “a period or condition of freedom from storms, high winds, or rough activity of water.” There will always be storms in our lives, but our ability to find “freedom from storms” will dictate whether we consistently experience “good” or “bad” luck. As I said earlier, most people think the storm or obstacle is just that, but instead, it’s how we react to it that determines our “luck” . . . our “fortune” . . . our future. Staying calm, refusing to take things personally, and not reacting with anger is an attitude that will help you immensely as you adapt to the world beyond prison.

  THE SEVEN C’S

  LETTER 25

  Flicking the Switch

  If you live without awareness it is the same as being dead. You cannot call that kind of existence being alive. Many of us live like dead people because we live without awareness. We carry our dead bodies with us and circulate throughout the world. We are pulled into the past or we are pulled forward into the future or we are caught by our projects or our despair and anger. We are not truly alive; we are not inhabited by awareness of the miracle of being alive. . . . You are what you are looking for. You are already what you want to become.1

  —Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear

  My Friend and Brotha,

  Thank you. Thanks for being honest with me. Thanks for choosing to be vulnerable and honest. I was just about to help you finally launch into your plan when I got your note. I feel like framing it, and I’ll treasure it for the rest of my life! I was hoping I could open your eyes a little and get you to take a deeper, more honest look at your life. I underestimated the amount of courage you had.

  Sorry I could only talk a minute when you called a half hour ago, but we are shooting in an area with almost zero reception. I could tell right away you were afraid I’d come down on you for what you’d just written me. Cuss you out or something. Even threaten to break it off between you and me. Excuse me for chuckling. No, no, my man. All I feel is pride in your honesty.

  By finally facing the true facts of your arrest, you flicked a switch onto a new life. Yes, that quickly and unassumingly you glimpsed a view of a better identity. A different self than the one you’d been living.

  When you sat straight up in bed the other night and admitted responsibility, you were having an epiphany. Just as flicking a switch instantly fills a dark room with light, flicking the switch on your state of mind, which once relied on being bitter, inauthentic, defensive, and full of low self-esteem, shifted the focus of your mind from the unresolved hang-ups of the past to a clear view of the future.

  EPIPHANY

  What is an epiphany? It comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “to reveal.” At the birth of Jesus, when the three Wise Men, or Magi, first laid eyes on the infant, the force of what they were gazing upon made them fall to their knees in worship. That moment
of seeing Jesus for the first time is called the Epiphany.

  Nowadays, epiphany stands for any great revelation or sudden understanding, the moment when a switch flicks on in our mind and immediately clears up a source of confusion. Such moments don’t come very often in anybody’s life, and you’ve just had one of them, Brotha. You are, however, only at the gateway of a new life. It’s like starting afresh and being given another chance—almost like being reborn. Beyond that gate revealed by your epiphany stretches a vast, majestic landscape of achievements waiting for you to explore. Now every decision you make starting at this gate that you have reached will be checked against the blueprint you will create for an increasingly successful life. Yes, I know you’re in an environment where everything is programmed to keep you from flicking that switch and to keep you enslaved to the prison mentality. You still have to submit to roll call three times a day, no matter what you’re in the middle of, just as you had to do when you were at the max-security joint, but at least there’s no roll call with a flashlight in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, you’ve explained how hard it is to concentrate on a book you’re trying to read, or even a letter you’re writing, because of the potential threats all around you and the necessity to watch your back. I now understand that you can’t even lower your guard during our phone calls because sometimes they eavesdrop on those calls as a routine way of collecting information about cons. The lousy food doesn’t help much either; it compromises your energy. I can’t, of course, do anything about that, much as I wish I could. But there might be some things dragging you down that I can do something about, such as the guilt you told me you feel about not being able to help your mother when she was abused by your pops, the memories of watching in horror when you were a little kid and asking God to keep her from getting killed. All I can do about that is explain that any child would feel the same way, but it was never your fault, and you have to give that hurt inner child in you permission to move on. Tell yourself it’s okay. You’re an adult now, and the childhood wounds don’t serve you any longer.

  If I can do anything to help, it’s to give you “permission” to let go of the past, to stop finding fault in it and use it instead as an objective basis for understanding yourself. That’s easier said than done, I know. But look at the facts: If I didn’t see great potential in you, an enormous capacity for sensitivity and understanding, you would not be my friend. And you are my friend, Brotha. The other thing that will help you the most is external . . . and that’s positioning yourself to get a job upon your release and then continuing to build your foundation in the areas of your interests. I personally think you should be an entrepreneur and start your own business. I don’t want you ever to have to be beholden to someone else “giving” you a job. But more on that later. Have a great night!

  Warm regards,

  Hill

  EPIPHANY

  LETTER 26

  End Points

  If you have a long-term goal for yourself, one that you have imagined in detail, then you are better able to make the proper decisions in the present. You know which battles or positions to avoid because they don’t advance you towards your goal. With your gaze lifted to the future, you can focus on the dangers looming on the horizon and take proactive measures to avert them. You have a sense of proportion—sometimes the things we fuss over in the present don’t matter in the long run. All of this gives you an increased power to reach your objectives.1

  —50 Cent and Robert Greene, The 50th Law

  Hey, Brotha,

  I was sitting at home yesterday thinking about the life plan you want to build, which is really both a career and style of life designed to bring contentment. Lots of times, starting in our mind at the end point and thinking backward from it makes it easier to build a plan than starting with square one. The place that you want to get to is “Me, living with R. J.,” and a beautiful end point it is. Starting with a goal or end point and reasoning backward to determine the steps necessary to reach it is an example of backward induction.2 That’s the process of reasoning backward in time, starting with the end point and going all the way back to where you are now starting out. Sometimes, backward induction can help determine the very best sequence of decisions. As explained in a Wikipedia article on the subject, backward induction proceeds by first considering the last time a decision might be made and determining the most logical choice for such a decision based on the probability of your desired result. The process continues backward in your mind step by step, until you’ve determined the best decision for every step in the process . . . at every point in time.

  Every action we take has a probability of success or failure, based on the particular life situation we are in at the moment we make the decision. The same decision can be a good one at certain periods in your life and a bad one at others.

  For example, let’s say you got out of prison two months ago and your end point is to form a family with R. J. This end point is all you can think about. You have no savings at all and suddenly have to choose between a steady, low-paying job that would not make enough to support R. J. and a much higher-paying job being offered by a friend of your aunt that would give you enough money to support R. J. but that you aren’t sure you have enough training for.

  In this situation, I’d strongly counsel you to take the “bad job” until you had savings and more experience and had earned the trust of your community. Now, let’s keep the same end point in mind and imagine that you’ve already been out of prison for several years, have been working at the bad job and saving money, and now want to quit that low-paying job in hopes that a better-paying one will work out for you. I might advise you to take such a risk if you have enough savings to fall back on, especially since you need more money to support R. J. So at some point, you’ll need the good job, because the bad job will never make it possible to support R. J. The big question is, when is the optimum moment to switch jobs? We’ll keep talking about this after your release when the job issue is right in front of you.

  Hill

  FINISH TO START

  LETTER 27

  Warm-ups

  If you spend too much time warming up, you’ll miss the race. If you don’t warm up at all, you may not finish the race.

  —Grant Heidrich

  Have a plan. Follow the plan, and you’ll be surprised how successful you can be. Most people don’t have a plan. That’s why it’s easy to beat most folks.

  —Paul “Bear” Bryant, legendary football coach

  Dear Brotha,

  You wouldn’t believe where I am! Remember that gig in Romania shooting a movie I mentioned a while back? It’s a modern-day Western that’s mostly being shot in the Carpathian Mountains (where Dracula supposedly flourished), to save money, of course. So, howdy, cowboy, from the “Wild West” of the InterContinental hotel in Bucharest, Romania’s capital, where they’ve left me on my own for a few days as they finish the location scouting. That gives me time to devote to your plan. Let’s start with some warm-ups.

  WARM-UP 1: SETTING A GOAL

  I think you know the drill at this point. Your goal has to have some kind of appropriate relationship to where you are right now. For example, why would someone who’s designed great furniture for a home-furnishings company be happy mapping out a path that puts him at the head of the accounting department? So, Rule 1 of setting your goal is that it should be well thought out. Now, if someone just starting out wants, for example, a career in sports, he’ll need to create a plan that’s flexible enough to get him into the business without banking on being at the top of it in the beginning, or even on the field. With 450 pro basketball players, 750 Major League Baseball players, and just shy of 1,700 NFL players, the odds of making the pros are slim at best. Most pro players have been training their entire lives—their bodies, minds, and talent—for excellence in these pursuits. Since childhood they’ve put in hours and hours of training. So it would be foolish of me to
say now, “Oh, I want to play pro ball.” But perhaps I could work in the executive offices of the team, if that was my passion. I may have to start washing dirty socks in the locker room, but that would be my first step. That brings us to Rule 2 of setting your goal: You need to be flexible about the outcome.

  If you’re an active participant in your own life, you will lead a life free of regret, no matter where the journey brings you.

  Let me be clear here: I am not telling you that you have to bail on your dreams. Just the opposite! Chase that dream hard, and work your ass off to make it happen. If you’re an active participant in your own life, you will lead a life free of regret, no matter where the journey brings you. Take me, for example; I played football in high school and was pretty good. However, I’m not over six feet and don’t top a hundred eighty-five pounds, so my chances of making the NFL were always pretty slim. But I loved the game, and I played hard, and that effort got me recruited to play at Brown University. If it wasn’t for football, a small Ivy League school in Rhode Island probably wouldn’t have been on the radar for a kid from Iowa. I went to Brown because of football, but once I landed there, I got to know a whole new world—lots of new worlds—including exposure to the theater, acting, politics, and economics. I followed my passion—football—and even though I didn’t get an NFL career, following my passion led me down the right path and exposed me to new doors to walk through. So that’s what I meant by Rule 2 and staying flexible. You need to be adaptable, in other words! We need a foundation that’s wide enough and thick enough to support not only the end goal, but all of the steps needed to achieve the goal and the possible variations that could come during the journey in pursuit of that goal.