KING Ella Baker’s co -program director shares some hard -won wisdom
It’s good to be
I
2010, my father died. At the time, I was roughly 2,000 miles away, incarcerated at California Men’s Colony East. It had been about six years since my arrest, trial, and sentencing, and six years since we’d last seen each other. It had been more than a year since cancer and chemo had stolen his ability to talk on the phone. And it was two weeks after his death that word arrived to me, thanks to a family member realizing that I was still writing him after his death. n
incarcerated knows that this is far from the most horrible example of impersonal cruelty prisons exact upon families in the name of justice. And no one who has been incarcerated will be surprised at what I experienced next. As word spread on the yard of my father’s passing, multiple older men began reaching out to me. Perhaps I reminded them of the sons and daughters they’d been separated from, or perhaps they felt empathy based upon their own experiences of losing loved ones while incarcerated. Whatever the reason, they began cooking meals for me, stopping by the cell to talk crap about sports, or just to see how I was doing. For not the first time, I was consoled and comforted by people the legal system had decided were irredeemable, and never worthy of freedom again. Like me, these were survivors of America’s devastating tough-on-crime era, a time which saw even shoplifters sentenced to life sentences, and every young Black
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WALL CITY
SPRING 2023
sharing stories ■ inspiring change
Vincent O’Bannon // SQNews
A
nyone reading this who is currently or formerly
