BREATH OF FRESH AIR David Steece I was in prison when my youngest son was born. I remember how it felt coming home from prison and taking him in my arms: it was like holding a breath of fresh air. I was fascinated by the newness of life, the optimism, the promise of hope in him. He wore hope like a smile, right down to his peanut toes and his Buddha belly. He carried hope like water to a dying man, and I had been dying for a while. But by the time he was eight years old the hope had vanished, and I was off again; this time to serve a life sentence. There is a metric researchers use to predict the likelihood of a child ending up in prison. Children accrue points for factors like witnessing violence, experiencing physical or sexual abuse, or having a parent in prison. The test takes an inventory of a child’s young life, crunches the numbers, and feeds it into an algorithm to determine if they will be a criminal. I first heard about this metric a few years ago, while watching a documentary. I lay on my bunk in the dark as they systematically broke trauma down into categories and subcategories. They showed examples, graphs, charts, and projections while I melted into my bed. They used words like generational and environmental. I held 66
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