Angels with Dirty Faces. Walidah Imarisha
a prison ID number. The images we are given of prisoners are so dark, we can no longer distinguish the features anymore. But each person in prison has a face, a story, and a heart that hurts in the night and has the capacity to expand beyond ribcages.
In the summer of 2004, my sister died after back surgery. The doctors gave her a clean bill of health after the operation and discharged her. While she slept, a blood clot traveled through her body to her brain and killed her. A few months earlier, she and I went to visit my mother, diagnosed with breast cancer. My sister and I did not know if it would be the last time we spent time with her. We wanted to make sure she saw her children all together again before she left this world. Little did we know we would suffer a crippling blow as a family, just not the one we feared then.
When I received the call, I was stunned into immobility. My family was devastated, my mother inconsolable. I was thousands of miles from her and the rest of the family. My friends rained love and support down on me.
But the gentlest care I received came in envelopes stamped “Inmate Mail.” Letters already slit open and read by authoritative eyes, they were sent to me only after being deemed safe. They were not safe, though. The words of support were subversive. They continued the fundamental shift of how I felt about the prison system, and the prisons all of us live under.
This book is my attempt to draw back the faces erased in the flashing red of squad cars, shaded by gun turrets, and stamped out by the letters “DOC.”
If the prison system is a cure worse than the disease, or not even ever intended to be a cure, then what else is there? How do we as communities react when someone harms another? How do we set up systems to make whole what was broken, beyond clanging locks?
There is a growing movement of organizations and communities exploring alternatives to prisons. Alternatives that keep the community safe while recognizing the humanity of those who have done harm. Many of the alternatives to prisons focus on drugs. Drug courts. Addiction treatment services. Counseling. Decriminalization. This is not surprising, given that almost half of all people in federal prisoners are there for nonviolent drug offenses according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ own statistics. The astounding explosion of the prison population, up 700 percent since 1970 says Pew Charitable Trusts, is disproportionately due to the War on Drugs. The American Medical Association argues that drugs and drug addiction should be understood a health crisis, not an invading army.
The majority of people who are in prison are there for nonviolent offenses. In fact in 2006, thirty-five percent of all folks going into state prisons were there on parole violations, not because they had committed new crimes, says the National Conference for State Legislatures. For states like California, that number is closer to two-thirds.
The reality is that the vast majority of people in prison were never tried in front of a judge. Over ninety percent of people in prison took a plea bargain. With harsher sentencing laws and mandatory minimums to wield like flaming swords, prosecutors stand over defendants, who often have not even glimpsed their defense attorney, and offer them the lesser of the most evil. Less than ten percent of prisoners were tried by a “jury of their peers”; the rest had trial by prosecutor, and rather than risk ten, twenty-five, or life in prison, they take a plea. Innocence or guilt did not even enter into this equation.
What the nightly news does not show is that crime rates have steadily declined for decades. We are told by media and law enforcement we are less safe now than we have ever been. The truth is, crime rates are closer to those of the 1950s, according to the FBI’s own statistics, though we definitely are not being shown images of Leave It To Beaver when we turn on news programming.
Prisons are overflowing with folks there for nonviolent drug offenses, who were not convicted in a court of law. That is the reality. But the reality is also that humans do harm one another. This harm is often horizontal violence enacted upon the tender flesh of those who are already marginalized, with the least access to institutional resources. The majority of this harm, against those who are poor, of color, young, women, and trans and queer (and especially those who live at the intersections of these identities), is never reported. It would not be taken seriously by law enforcement if it were. Much of this harm is caused by law enforcement and other agents of the state. For harm done within oppressed communities, convictions would only result in more Black and brown people being stolen from already-destabilized communities.
So sometimes people hurt each other. Horribly. And then what? What of those who have done damage—sometimes unimaginable—to others? When do we stop seeing a human being and see only a monster, only a prisoner?
For this book, I have not chosen stories that fit easily into our preconceived societal notions of “good” and “bad.” I know many innocent prisoners, wrongfully convicted. It would be easier to argue for their release, and to challenge prisons solely based on their experiences. Harder, however, is to take stories of people who are in some way guilty by their own admission.
There is my adopted brother, who denies being responsible for the crime he was convicted of. He does admit to being involved, at the age of sixteen, in a plan to commit murder. There is Mac, who fully admits to engaging in the heinous act of ending another human being’s life (in fact, many human beings) for money. Mac especially is one of the stories that fuels the prison system, what prison abolitionist Ruth Morris called “the terrible few” that politicians reference to push forward more “tough on crime” legislation. Anyone who believes in exploring and creating alternatives to incarceration will eventually be hit in the face with people like Mac, perhaps even with people like my brother. Rather than run from it, these are the stories we have to explore, the transformations and the redemptions, if we are to fundamentally shift how we think about crime and punishment in this country.
I have also included my experiences in this book, experiences of working to build alternatives, specifically around sexual assault, the most common violent harm done and the most underreported. I’ve included my experiences of being wounded by someone I trusted, of attempting to put my politics into practice, and finding out how much messier and more painful real life is on your skin than on paper. I’ve included my struggles with the meaning of redemption, accountability, and forgiveness.
These are the stories of Mac, Kakamia, and myself, but we are characters. In this book, the we I write about is not us; we are not fully ourselves. As much as we try, no writer can ever capture the fullness of complexities that is a human being. These are the Mac and Kakamia I see, the histories I have learned, have imagined based on countless hours of interviews and research. These things I believe to be true, well aware that in reality nothing is true, and even our own memories can be fiction. Any nonfiction book must be read partially as fiction, for we all tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives. And so the same is true for me. For my stories and the people in them. I have tried to be as honest as possible, with myself as much as everyone else.
In the spirit of accountability, I have also changed some names in this book, of people, places, and events. I struggled with this as a writer. Haven’t I, in writing a creation of nonfiction, sworn to “tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth”? But I realized two things finally: sometimes we get shackled by too much fact, unable to break free and see the larger truths. Secondly, our stories are never just our own. I am, through this book, telling dozens of people’s stories tangentially, the majority of whom did not agree to that. In my quest to have difficult, complex, and painful discussions, I do not want to cause more trauma than necessary. Rather than the courtroom oath, I have taken the ethos of the Hippocratic oath: either help, or at least do no harm. In this spirit, I have worked to tell these stories responsibility, while still maintaining honesty and accuracy.
As part of this, I have included myself, which was not the original idea of this narrative. I do not know how to write people not in relation to myself. Every story I was told, every emotion I saw flit across someone’s face, I used myself as a sounding board for human connection. How would I have felt? What would I have done? Who would I have become under different forces of gravity? This is ego most certainly, but also an attempt at honesty. I do not want to knowingly lie. And I believe objectivity to be the worst lie of them all. I am not objective. But I am deeply, completely and wholly invested.
I did not want