“I can’t see ’em coming down my eye
so I had to make this poem cry
this pen bleed
this paper scream with emotions with hopes it
makes
us free . . . ”
—JIMMY MCMILLAN, POET INCARCERATED AT A CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON
A lifer stood up to read his writing after fifteen weeks of sitting in a creative writing class I facilitated at a classroom in a maximum-security yard of Lancaster State Prison (California State Prison, Los Angeles County). It was our last day of that session. I had just passed out completion certificates and was about to share juice and cake the prison kitchen staff had brought us. The forty-something-year-old man hadn’t said much during the previous weeks. He didn’t seem to be writing either. I had noticed this, but it didn’t bother me. The class was lively with a flow of ideas and expressions; most of the guys were serving life sentences, some without the possibility of parole (LWOP).
I always feel people listen in their own way. Seeds were being planted, and if someone kept coming to class, I kept teaching.
But now this man stood up and read, opened up his heart about how, ever since he could remember, he had been abused; how drugs took his parents away from him; how he bounced around in the foster-care system, juvenile detention centers, and prison; and how being callous, a predator, had given him power, identity, a way of getting back. But he also related how lost he had become—detached, not fully human. His words were not a litany of excuses or complaints. They were recognition of terrible choices he’d made in a world of limited choices, of the fears and paralysis that impelled him to diminish his true callings.
This OG, who was African American, didn’t care how he would be perceived at that moment. Tears began to fall from his eyes, even as his voice remained strong. We were all riveted—crying tears inside if not on the outside. The men’s silence was the best mark of respect he could have received. When he was done, the quiet lingered for a beat, then the applause rushed in. The men were visibly moved as this man stood poised, unwavering, in the whirl of dark and convoluted sentiments. This and similar moments have made my work in prisons some of the most healing and sacred anywhere.
I’ve been coming into prisons to lead workshops, healing circles, talks, and poetry readings for forty years. I’ve done this work in prisons all over California (San Quentin, Soledad, New Folsom, Chino, and Lancaster) as well as county and city jails, and juvenile lockups up and down the state. I’ve also entered prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities in Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana, Ohio, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Virginia, Louisiana, and Delaware. I’ve worked with organizations like Barrios Unidos, the William James Foundation, Insight-Out, InsideOUT Writers, and as an employee of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts.
This work has gone global. Over the years, I’ve visited ten adult prisons and a juvenile facility in El Salvador; two prisons in Guatemala; two prisons in Nicaragua; a prison and juvenile hall in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico; five prisons in Argentina; and a young adult lockup in southern England, and met with juvenile offenders in Italy outside of their facility.
Most of these visits were one-time talks or readings, although I did spend three days in that prison in England, several continuous weeks in Chino Prison, and eight months in Lancaster Prison in 2007; and beginning in the fall of 2016, I conducted several thirteen- to seventeen-week classes at the latter.
I see prisons as the shadows of the “normal” world, mirroring the fragile economic, political, and cultural foundations we’ve stood on for over 240 years as a country, based on slavery, inequality, and the interplay between the powerful and powerless. Prisons are also places of light and intelligence within the dark. Any idealization that prisons or the police state are the answers to crime, dysfunction, or “evil” is naïve and strangely cynical. Naïveté and cynicism may seem a dichotomy, but they are also interrelated.
Two dangers in this country are to be naïve about what made us, what we face, and where we’re going and to be cynical—tired, negative, perpetually sabotaging hope with an attitude of “Why bother?” Prisons persist because of the interweaving of the naïve and cynical. But they exist because the people this society cannot feed, house, teach, or incorporate must be put somewhere. If these people won’t go to war, stay employed, or otherwise contribute to the “system,” then dysfunction and crime are inevitable, and prisons are the perfect industry to feed off the “monsters” among us.
They are, however, monsters of our own making.
People aren’t born to steal, lie, hurt, or kill. Yet with enough external and internal pressures, you can mold such a person. Anyone is capable. Just deprive people of basic needs, especially of healthy nurturing—rampant among the poor—and of viable ways to go. Put such persons into an “oven,” as a homie used to say, and you’re more likely to bake a gang member, a thief, a murderer. The point is that our society—our culture and its frazzled webbing—makes crime and criminals not just possible but predictable.
I’m not against personal accountability—I’ve had to address this with countless men, women, and youth over the years, beginning with myself and with my oldest son Ramiro, who is now gang free, drug free, and crime free. But personal accountability works best if we also comprehend the familial, economic, and political forces at play.
Of course, there are people who are more capable of resisting the pressures of duress, depravity, and disinterest with enough soul depth, intelligence, and creativity. It helps if they have strong moral and character development along the way. I witness this in prisons all the time. But, again, the chances are that for most people, certain circumstances will most likely lead to certain results.
Most of our society treats people as if they are static beings—once in trouble, always in trouble. It’s as if we believe that once a person is inclined to pathological levels of lying, manipulating, and cheating, even violence, there is no breaking the mold. Prison’s main premise is punishment. We punish those who have broken the rules, and we believe that doing so will serve as a deterrent to others, who will, as the thinking goes, do whatever they can to avoid such punishment.
But punishment only works up to a certain point, particularly in a child’s development, and only if the punishment fits the “crime.” It doesn’t work for those who’ve been “punished” just for being—in black or brown skins, migrants from other countries, working class, poor, a woman, or LGBTQ. These are circumstances not of one’s choosing. It’s among youth in these circumstances where discrimination and the organized blocking of decent and meaningful work, health care, education, and support in the complete flowering of one’s development and unique contributions can do the most damage.
As my wife Trini says, it’s about “the poverty of access.”
Trini’s words inspired a poem by African American poet and northeast San Fernando Valley resident Jeffery Martin:
It cheats a long line of tired, withered hands
coursing through generation after generation
of veins too weary to imagine
a kinder existence
It cheats brilliant minds
it cheats brilliant minds
it cheats brilliant minds
leaving them suffocating on a frustration
they can no longer define
It cheats limber bodies
that have no idea
they were meant to dance
dance in the four directions of life
meshing with the deities of
wind fire earth and water
creating light bright
and transforming
The poverty of access
closes books before sentences are complete
before action can coincide with thought
before the mind body and spirit
introduce themselves
This poverty is harshest amongst its young
for it starves them intellectually
long before ravaging their stomachs
It says no you can’t and means it
it says you are unworthy
and means it
it says here is where you belong
and means it
The poverty of access
steals souls as well as land
murders ambition as well as men and women
who ask too many questions
it fills prisons and dungeons
with corpses breathing yet
breathless
moving yet motionless
eating yet starved
It gives prostitution its place
then sneers
it gives violence its place
then sneers
it gives homelessness its place
then sneers
it gives crime its place
and then claims prophecy
This poverty of access
does not tell stories
it stunts them
with nasty words like
cannot
will not
must not
It is a poverty that guarantees
an outcome as unfair
as it is unwarranted
Under these realities, there’s little or no deterrence to crime because prisons (or foster care or mental health facilities or you name the institution created to supposedly address the gaps) become a rite of passage, part of the “outlaw” life, the outsider reality, that such people get driven into. The cumulative traumas create a vortex of emotional and pathological anguish that sucks out all the enjoyment and hope one would otherwise have in life. Looking at it this way, going to prison, taking drugs, or being in a gang can be rational decisions.
The same can be said of mass incarceration in the United States, whose net was widened with “three-strikes” laws and the practices of “truth in sentencing,” gang and gun enhancements, trying youth as adults, and more. Of course people driven to the brink will fall through the cracks—maybe not all of them, but enough of them.
We make more laws and end up with more lawlessness.
Mass incarceration is this country’s chief strategy to address poverty, especially targeted against those on the desperate edge of survival and in the grip of the discontent related to poverty. Without ways to get rid of poverty, prison is society’s answer—and as others have pointed out, through prisons we maintain a system of slavery.
In California, the most affected are people of color—African Americans, Mexicans/Central Americans, Asians, and Native Americans. But poor whites are not exempt. In the state of California, with a $12 billion annual budget, prisons have become the largest form of subsidized poor peoples’ housing. The yearly cost per prisoner in the state is $64,000. Disproportionately, those prisoners are black and brown people: more than 70 percent of the state’s prison population is African American or Chicano/Mexican/Central American (42 percent brown people, 29 percent black), although together they are little more than 45 percent of the state’s total population.
It’s time for real freedom in this country—not just the freedom to speak out, to write, or to assemble but ultimately freedom from want, hunger, lack of decent homes, and repression. It’s time to stop making criminals of circumstance.
Humans are capable of great transcendence—able to go beyond material, and often man-made, constraints. We can become vessels for the unseen, with the power to overcome actual prisons but also prisons of mind and soul that chain our capacities. Reconnection, realignment, and rethinking are part of the process, albeit often arduous, long, and full of setbacks. But with this process, success is a likely outcome.
Today most people have forgotten this. We’ve forgotten the process needed whenever anyone or anything goes awry, overcome by social, familial, and personal failings. When people feel these skewed energies running through them, too often they are impelled in their very bones to great destruction, against themselves or others.
Today activists are establishing restorative and transformative justice practices as alternatives to punishment-based models. In such practices, agreements are made between perpetrators and victims to restore whatever was taken, hurt, or damaged. In the process one also gives back from one’s own gifts—that’s real restitution, not cleaning streets or paying into “victim” accounts. Both parties are transformed. Whenever a perpetrator is healed, community is healed, and a new basis is laid for more healing. When enacted comprehensively, rightly resourced, and given enough time and patience, these methods almost always work.
However, today most prisons often end up making sophisticated criminals of these same perpetrators rather than redeeming them—all at taxpayers’ expense.
Of course, there are strong and powerful exceptions. And these men and women prove that change is everywhere; change is the way of spirit and nature. Change is God’s plan—and this has been proven by millions of people.
In the last twenty-six years I’ve entered a number of penales in El Salvador: Mariona, San Vicente, Ciudad Barrios, Zacatecoluca, Chalatenango, Cojutepeque, Quezaltepeque, Izalco, and San Francisco Gotera. This is a country that knows about prisons. As of June 2017, El Salvador had an imprisonment rate of 590 per 100,000. Around 38,410 people were incarcerated (not counting youth or young adults), and 3,000 more were in holding tanks, out of a total population of 6.5 million. The imprisonment rate in the United States, which has the highest rate of all developed countries, is 478 per 100,000.
The facilities I visited were stark and indefensible. Some had no electricity or clean water. Diseases were rampant, with little or no medical care available. In larger facilities that held mostly men, separate cells contained young mothers holding babies, who were also behind bars with them. Housing was extremely overcrowded, with cells built for four men now holding twenty. One facility had layers of dungeons with decreasing sunlight as one continued deeper below ground. There were separate prisons for Mara Salvatrucha-13 and 18th Street members, as well as for prisoners not affiliated with those gangs.
I also visited women-only institutions with cellblocks loaded with beds, clothing, blankets, and whatever possessions they could get a hold of, including chambitas, makeshift housing on the prison yard. In many institutions the only food prisoners had was what their families could bring.
No human being should be treated this way. But the prisoners here are maras (Central American slang for gang members), and the narrative that drives this cruelty asserts they’re nothing more than stone-cold killers, torturers, and extortionists of the poor. It declares they are unredeemable, that they deserve this treatment—or worse.
These maras only exist because of civil wars, driven by money and power, during which the United States, especially in the Reagan years, escalated each conflict by supporting the ruthless families and governments that ran things at the expense of the vast majority of mostly indigenous or campesino people.
Wars to stop “communism,” in the 1950s through the 1980s, claimed a hundred thousand lives in Nicaragua, seventy-five thousand lives in El Salvador, two hundred thousand lives in Guatemala, and thousands more in the Contra War from 1981 to 1990 in Honduras and Nicaragua. In the 1980s, some three million refugees from these countries ended up in the United States, the majority coming to Los Angeles, but also Houston, Washington, DC, Long Island, or San Francisco.
Tragically, in Los Angeles, the trauma of civil war and death squads met the trauma of inner-city Chicano and African American gangs. Many Salvadoran and other Central American children of these refugees joined Chicano gangs that had existed, in some cases, since the turn of the last century—or from the 1960s, like 18th Street.
Mara Salvatrucha, on the other hand, was created by Salvadoran refugee youth in the early 1980s. First they were known as Mara Stoners—a metal-rock loving, long-haired, AC/DC T-shirt–wearing party crew. After some ended up in juvenile hall and LA County youth probation camps, they returned to their homes as cholos and took on the “Salvatrucha” tag. They originally became part of 18th Street, but later broke off and waged war against 18th Street and other gangs in the Pico-Union barrio as well as their Koreatown, East Hollywood, Northeast San Fernando, and South LA neighborhoods.
Street-gang life overall in the United States reached its highest levels of violence during this time. In Los Angeles, one estimate was that more than ten thousand young people were killed from 1980 to 2000, propelled by the drug trade but also by turf battles. The majority of those killed or arrested were Chicanos and African Americans, but Central Americans were also among them.
After the 1992 LA Uprising, which left sixty-three people dead and a billion dollars in property damage, US immigration officials targeted Mexican and Central American gang members for deportation while law enforcement agencies moved to lock up more US-born black and Chicano youth, helping create the largest mass incarceration system in the country.
By 1993, the Mara Salvatrucha—which by then also incorporated Guatemalan, Honduran, and Mexican refugee youth—joined the largely Chicano Sureño gang structure, which was when they added the number 13 to their name. What most news reports fail to point out is that almost all LA-based Latino gangs have “13” after their name, including the gang in my barrio, Lomas 13.
Despite the manufactured notoriety, MS-13 is only one of LA’s five hundred or so Latino gangs. While the federal government claims there are ten thousand MS-13 members in the United States (which I highly doubt), this is still only 1 percent of the million or so gang members around the country. Remember, there are still active super-gang alliances spread around the country—including the LA-based Bloods and Crips (mostly African Americans), Sureños and Norteños (Southern California or Northern California Mexicans), and Chicago-based Folk and People (including the Latin Kings, Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Latin Maniac Disciples, and hundreds more). And there are also white supremacist criminal gangs in the streets and prisons that, per capita, have probably committed more violence than any other group.
And while Trump claims that MS-13 is amassing at the border, in 2018, MS-13 members were only .096 percent of the migrants ICE detained there. MS-13 may be gruesos (hardcore), but they are not the worst or largest US street gang.
All this talk about MS-13 fits into a false narrative—that undocumented criminals are causing most of the terror and violence in the United States. With this deceit as cover, thousands of LA-based gang youth, along with other so-called criminals, were deported. By 1996, under the Clinton administration, a new immigration law targeted convicted people without proper immigration documents, even for minor, nonviolent crimes. Upwards of a million people have been returned to their countries of origin since then. The greatest number of deportees ended up in Mexico and Central America, although other countries like Cambodia and Armenia also saw an influx of sophisticated US-trained criminals.
In Central America, these deportations changed a culture. MS-13 and 18th Street—heavily tattooed like their Chicano counterparts, dressed in cholo attire, and talking in the street lingo of LA’s barrios, but also now trained in urban gang warfare and extortion tactics—brought all their disputes to the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as parts of Mexico. In Belize, gang deportees were mostly Bloods and Crips. This created more violence in these places, which in many cases exceeded that of their civil wars.
People in these countries had long understood class wars—battles between those who owned land and those who didn’t, the Right and the Left—but not this: drive-by or walk-by shootings, whole families targeted just because of which gang one family member belonged to, or didn’t. Nobody understood killing because of letras (letters) such as MS or numeros (numbers) such as 18th Street.
This is the madness of exporting US-based barrio warfare.
The US government delivered these gangs to countries with few or no resources, with slums that crawled up hillsides and in concentric circles around capital cities, without work or opportunities, with gaping gulfs between those who have and those who don’t—countries that for decades suffered through massacres, death squads, beheadings, tortures, and disappearances, layer upon layer of grinding, crushing violence.
The gang violence in these countries can be horrendous: Grenade attacks. Cut-up bodies. Mothers and fathers and siblings slaughtered. Now, some MS-13 and 18th Street members have returned to the United States, most with this degree of violence under their belt, and have spread out to cities across the nation, in a vicious cycle created and perpetuated by the United States government.
Despite this, the United States refuses to take responsibility. Instead, Trump and other Republicans cynically use the mess they set up in the Northern Triangle—as well as the thousands of migrants at the border escaping its violence—to consolidate their power.
Here’s a truth that’s often missed: these gang youth can be helped. I know this based on gang intervention work throughout the United States and across borders, based on my own forty-five years of work in prevention, intervention, and urban peace. I know of transformative and healing work done with MS-13 as well as Chicano gangs to get them out of la vida loca (“the crazy life”) and into treatment, jobs, schooling, and families. Like any gang member, MS-13 and 18th Street members can be rehabilitated, retrained, and reincorporated into society on a positive and healthy basis. Organizations like Homies Unidos, Homeboy Industries, and Barrios Unidos have already proven this for some time. This is what we should have done with MS-13 and 18th Street youth instead of deporting them, wreaking havoc instead of weaving hope.
The mass media, LAPD, and federal authorities instead have focused on MS-13 as if they are an isolate from another planet, another species of gang. MS-13 became the first street gang designated as a transnational terrorist organization. In September 2017, Congress approved a law targeting these so-called “immigrant” gangs as the “worst of the worst.” But those in the street or in prison, and gang interventionists working with them, know they are capable of profound and lasting transformations.
I first visited El Salvador with Donna DeCesare, a New York–based award-winning photojournalist. In 1993, we received a Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to research, do interviews, and photograph maras in Los Angeles and El Salvador.
We also spoke at the Salvadoran Youth Confronting Violence conference in 1996, organized by nongovernmental agencies from Italy and other European countries, which led to perhaps the first MS-13 and 18th Street peace efforts.
Donna and I helped bring members from both gangs to address their concerns, including youth with placasos (gang monikers) such as Diablo, Crazy Eyes, Pelón, Villain, Negro, and Whisper. At the conference, gang leaders, mayors of major cities, and members of the new National Police signed a peace accord. In the end, MS-13 and 18th Street members embraced each other, as did priests and evangelical ministers (who were also in conflict) and National Police officers and community members.
But the political will to sustain the peace was not there. The Salvadoran government, led at the time by the right-wing ARENA party, undermined the peace and, a few years later, instituted “Mano Dura” (“Iron Fist”) and “Super Mano Dura” policies against the maras. The US government provided $3 billion from 2008 to 2017 for these efforts, mostly for the growing private-security industry (with investments from US-based companies) and new policing and prison strategies under the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI).
Despite this, another powerful opportunity surfaced for peace when MS-13 and 18th Street (also known as Barrio 18) in 2012 established a truce in one of the major prisons, which spread out to other prisons and into major areas of the country.
That year, I returned to El Salvador with ten urban peace leaders, advocates, and researchers from LA, San Francisco, New York City, Washington, DC, and London—a team coordinated by Luis Cardona, a Puerto Rican/Guatemalan former Latin King and peace warrior in Montgomery County, Maryland. Known as the Transnational Advisory Group in Support of the Peace Process in El Salvador (TAGSPPES), our main charges were to assess, assist, and advise the growing peace movement.
A Salvadoran priest and an activist aided these efforts: Monsignor Fabio Colindres and former guerilla leader Raúl Mijango. The peace echoed the End Barrio Warfare Coalition and other peace efforts of Chicanos in the 1970s in California as well as Bloods and Crips truces of the 1990s. Necessarily, it also had its own unique Salvadoran qualities, based on the peace accords in 1992 that officially ended twelve years of civil war.
The results were extraordinary. In some places, there was a 70 percent drop in violence; murders declined from fourteen per day to five. The peace included highly publicized turning over of firearms and the end of many extortion rings. Around twelve Peace and Security Zones (Zonas de Paz y Seguridad) were introduced where gang members worked with community members to garden, learn trades, and paint murals without being attacked. I introduced the latter concept from the Peace Zones I worked with in Chicago in the 1990s among the predominantly Mexican and Puerto Rican communities of Humboldt Park, Logan Square, Pilsen, and Little Village.
During this trip, the TAGSPPES team visited six Salvadoran prisons, including one for women and a juvenile detention facility. We met with MS-13 and Barrio 18 peace leaders. We talked to community organizers in various pro-youth organizations and dialogued with government officials. By then, the left-wing FMLN had a president and other officials in public office. Unfortunately, political pressure from the United States, among other internal pressures, ended up again pulling the plug on peace.
In 2013, the Organization of American States (OAS) invited me to San Salvador to speak at a gang conference. However, TAGSPPES members were told not to mention the gang peace or the United States would remove its share of funds, in the millions, from the Washington, DC–based organization. We were able to address best practices in gang prevention and intervention, all of which was valuable. But we were silenced on what was potentially the most powerful path to peace—gang members giving up arms and crime in return for a real process to alleviate job insecurity, derelict housing, and lack of education.
In addition, El Salvador needed strategic structural, economic, and political changes. This peace had to improve life for the whole country, not just for gang members. Providing resources only to gang members wouldn’t work in a place with few or no jobs for most people. A firm economic basis was needed for healthy, stable, and long-range peace for everyone. Yet peace between gangs—as with the earlier truces between Bloods and Crips or between Chicano gangs in California—could have been the catalyst for such structural changes.
That was an objective the Salvadoran government, as well as US hemispheric interests, could have achieved. Instead, in El Salvador and in the United States, such peace was disrupted by government suppression, which inevitably caused gangs to become entrenched and intractable. The government eventually imprisoned Raúl Mijango. Gangs faced more prisons and police, but little aid to end poverty, or for drug treatment, jobs retraining, healthy reentry into communities, and transformative justice.
Even former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani got into the act. In 2015, his private-security firm ended up in El Salvador, and was paid millions of dollars for its services, even though Giuliani oversaw the rise of racial profiling, police abuses, and the increased shootings of unarmed people in the African American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican communities of New York. Invited by the Salvadoran National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP), Giuliani was quoted in news services as saying that MS-13 and Barrio 18 had to be “annihilated.” Lest this be confused as a metaphor, while visiting Guatemala, Giuliani reportedly told his hosts, “You are not going to solve [crime with] schools, libraries, nice neighborhoods, and sports teams. You have to emphasize law enforcement.”
Again, by 2017, President Donald Trump and then–US attorney general Jeff Sessions were throwing around Giuliani’s same language and advocating similar actions against the maras. Giuliani and others benefited financially from the Central American gang crisis while simultaneously making things worse. They also worked to deflect attention from US culpability for the high levels of disarray and disruption in El Salvador—the real source of the violence and crime.
Today killings in the Northern Triangle are more frequent than anywhere in the world: El Salvador has the worst murder rate, while Honduras is second and Guatemala third. Only parts of Mexico caught in drug-cartel wars, and war zones like Syria, have worse levels of violence. This extraordinary violence fueled a new migration crisis between 2013 and 2015, when some one hundred thousand unaccompanied minors fled the Northern Triangle to the United States; their exodus in turn fueled the crisis from 2018 to the present of the appalling treatment of asylum seekers along the border.
I first entered a prison to assist in creative-writing workshops in 1980. The facilitator was the late Manuel “Manazar” Gamboa, a Xicanx poet, formerly incarcerated (seventeen years) ex–heroin addict, former pachuco (from the Bishop barrio of the old Chavez Ravine neighborhood that was razed in the 1950s to build Dodger Stadium), and renowned community activist.
At the time, I was a daily newspaper reporter for the San Bernardino Sun. But I had known Manazar since the late 1970s, when we both took part in the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association. In the early eighties, Manazar and I, along with others in the community, founded Galería Ocaso, a Chicano-oriented art gallery and performance space in the Echo Park barrio. I was its poetry curator.
At Chino Prison’s writing workshops, prisoners came away having created incredible work—poems, essays, and stories. Manazar became my mentor in this area as I watched how the men opened up, dug deep, and shared in his workshops. They even had a feral cat on the main yard they named Chino Louie, supposedly after me.
One dude whose work blew me away was John Dominguez, known as “Bandit,” from Watts. He had done twenty-three years in California prisons, mostly for the sale and use of heroin, and was due to be released. I decided to write a long personal essay on Bandit for the San Bernardino Sun. I entered the prison with permission, accompanied by a photographer, and followed Bandit around.
After his release, I went to the sober-living home he was in and witnessed his struggles to find a job and establish meaningful interactions, and his frustration trying to be a father to a daughter he hardly knew. Bandit ended up sabotaging his time “back in the world” by using heroin again.
The last time I saw Bandit he was in a holding tank at the LA County Men’s Central Jail. It was 1981, and Bandit had only been out of prison for six months. He was now awaiting transfer to state prison for parole violations. Bandit explained how his parole officer, a younger man, disrespected him, even humiliated him, saying he was an ex-con with no future. The only job he could get was cleaning around a machine shop: little pay, little joy.
With calmness in his voice and a resigned expression on his face, Bandit told me, “Free is not free . . . All I know is prison, and in prison the familiar is more comforting and stable than the uncertainties of being ‘free.’”
Bandit explained how in prison he had clear routines, housing, and three meals a day. Even if this existence was limited, back “in the world,” it was one painful battle after another, including facing a cold-hearted parole officer who appeared to do everything in his power to encourage Bandit to fail. He got tired of fighting those battles real quick. Bandit needed help, treatment—but for the poorest people, prison is the only treatment they get.
After more than two decades being institutionalized behind bars, Bandit did what he could to return to the one comfort he understood—a prison cell.
In the summer of 2010, I spent two weeks in Manchester and London, England, speaking at universities, high schools, and community centers, primarily in Afro-Caribbean communities. Josephine Metcalf, a researcher, writer, and university professor, hosted me along with Barbara Becnel, who coauthored several books by former Crips leader Stanley “Tookie” Williams, including Blue Rage, Black Redemption.
Despite an international outcry, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had Tookie executed in 2005, after he spent more than twenty-five years on death row for four murders, although Tookie had renounced his former life and did more to convince youth to leave gangs than Schwarzenegger would ever do.
As for Josephine, she later wrote the 2012 book The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs, which studied the impact of my book Always Running, among others.
My friend Garth Cartwright, a London-based music writer, also showed me around London. Garth’s book More Miles Than Money: Journeys Through American Music had a chapter on East LA that featured an interview with me, along with photos. He arranged a slot on Robert Elms’s BBC Radio London radio show and a poetry reading in the Darbuka Club, a popular London club.
On top of this, Josephine set up three days of workshops at Her Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution in Portland, on the southern coast. This prison housed convicts aged eighteen to twenty-one. I was impressed with the available programming, including a radio station, horses, gardens, and vocational training. But problems have been reported with inmates being locked up for twenty-one hours a day and rampant violence against staff and prisoners.
Before I showed up, prisoners were informed I was “Mexican,” an ethnicity they had never seen before (Colombians, Peruvians, and other Latinx live in England, but few Mexicans). Yet they knew a lot about Mexican drug cartels. At the time, Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán had escaped from prison and become the world’s most wanted fugitive. The first question the prisoners asked me was, “Where’s El Chapo Guzmán?”
We had a great time writing and sharing thoughts on serious topics. The majority of prisoners were Afro-Caribbean, but there were also Pakistani migrant youths and poor whites. I do have to say that in England—the home of the English language, a language I’ve mastered—I had a hard time understanding the prisoners, with their mix of Jamaican Patois and Cockney slang. I told them so. After three days of working together, I learned enough to follow along.
Lancaster State Prison is located in a desert within Los Angeles County, an hour’s drive from my house in the San Fernando Valley. In over ten years of teaching there I’ve worked with a few “stars” of the system. One is Kenneth E. Hartman, doing life without possibility of parole (LWOP) for a murder he committed in 1980 as an alcohol-and-drug-crazed nineteen-year-old. Kenneth later changed his life and helped create the first and only honor yard in the California prison system. His magazine writing and book, Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars, brought him awards and national attention. The governor commuted Kenneth’s LWOP sentence, and in 2017, he was released after thirty-eight years. Then there is Stanley “Spoon” Jackson, another LWOP sentencee, already with over forty years behind bars, who has poetry books, musicals based on his writings, a memoir with my friend and fellow prison writing teacher, Judith Tannenbaum, and a prison production of Waiting for Godot to his credit. Or Tuan Doan, with his own novel about on a mother and son struggling to survive in war-torn Vietnam. And I can’t forget Jimmy McMillan and Samual N. Brown, performance poets supreme, with hip-hop prowess, revolutionary ideas, and transformative visions coming at you from every conceivable angle.
All of these writers are gifted, disciplined, and, when I worked with them, as upstanding as any men I’ve ever known.
In the beginning, most of the men in my classes were African American. Because of prison politics, Chicanos at first were not attending my classes, even though they are the largest ethnic group in state institutions. But when word got out about what I taught—creative writing, but also creative thinking and living—and how I drew from indigenous cosmologies based in Mexico and the United States with a poet’s heart, Chicanos began showing up. Many were already superb artists and wordsmiths. Soon there were waiting lists for those who wanted to take part.
One Chicano from A Yard, a former gang member who had done twenty-eight years, secured parole after letters were written on his behalf, including one from me. He had spent eight months in my class. He was published in the book I coedited with Lucinda Thomas, Honor Comes Hard: Writings from the California Prison System’s Honor Yard, published by Tia Chucha Press. Out of prison now for several years, this vato has helped other formerly incarcerated and gang youth find their way in organizations like the Catalyst Foundation, Homeboy Industries, and Youth Mentoring Connection.
Of course, I’ve also had whites, Asians, and Native Americans in my classes. They all worked hard and produced exceptional work. No matter the issues and themes we explored, everyone respected one another regardless of cultural, political, and religious differences. I’ve had progressives and conservatives. I’ve had Catholics, evangelical Christians, Muslims, Native American spiritual practitioners, Buddhists, and atheists. All were welcome, all ideas were allowed.
There was one incarcerated man who wrote poetry in couplets and interesting turns of phrase. However, he became adamant about his right-wing ideology after Trump won the presidency. I was impressed at how nobody attacked him in class. I knew the majority in the class had political differences with him, but the protocol in the yard took over. People could say what they pleased, without being shouted down or berated. This didn’t mean the dude went unchallenged—the guys were articulate in expressing their disagreements without animus.
One day, this prisoner read a piece that started out praising Trump early on in his presidency and saying the American people should give him a chance. But then he opened up about his own life: growing up dirt poor, his parents on drugs, offered only bad schooling and few opportunities, he felt blocked in, unwanted, unhelped.
When he was done I casually said, “Listen, if you just drop all that Trump stuff and get to your story—the challenges of poverty and closed doors, the barriers you confronted—then you got us. Now we can relate. It’s the commonality of our experiences, regardless of race, that reaches us, not the beliefs or politics we can’t agree on and therefore can’t unite with.”
The others in the class chimed in.
“That’s right, ése, when you opened up about your family and everything taken away from you,” one homie responded, “we were all there with you.”
The dude thought about this. An epiphany seemed to cross his mind. Sure, our differences are real. But there are still things we share, experiences we can connect with—love, loss, joy. And through deep thought and knowledge, we can pinpoint a common cause to what ails all of us.
We may disagree on what’s behind the rain. But if we don’t want to get wet, we’re all going to need umbrellas. On that we can agree. This understanding—about what’s objective and undeniable—becomes the basis for common interests, common aims, common actions.
I’ve also realized how many people not behind bars—out in the world, working, raising families—are caught in their own “prisons”: poverty, addiction, rage, a diminished sense of being, race and gender power trips. I’ve realized how men and women behind razor wire and in cages can be free with intelligence and imagination. I try to help give them those keys to freedom regardless of what holds them. Prisons are compressed and intense microcosms of the world, but they can also be powerful schools on how to live, how to become more human. And we still need actual keys to open up actual prisons, to find cures and changes outside of industrial incarceration.
In February 2010, I was in Chihuahua for a week, during a time when it was the most violent state in Mexico. It was bad in 1999, when I first visited the Rarámuri tribe of Chihuahua’s Copper Canyon. But things had become outrageous by my return.
In December 2006, then–Mexican president Felipe Calderón, with assistance from the George W. Bush administration, declared war on the country’s drug cartels. Deaths attributed to this war have reached horrific proportions. Ciudad Juárez—in the border region where I was born—at the time had the world’s highest murder rate: 330 murders per 100,000 people. In 2010, Ciudad Juárez had 3,100 murders in a city of 1.5 million people. Street massacres that year included 17 slaughtered in one party, 14 in another location, and 13 in still another.
After fourteen years of “war” against the cartels, some two hundred thousand people in Mexico have been killed—many cut up, burned, beheaded, bombed. Another thirty thousand have disappeared. This is more than the deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined during the same period. While drugs inundated the United States to meet the demands of the world’s largest drug market, US-manufactured guns went south. There is only one legal firearms dealer in Mexico; there are 6,700 licensed gun dealers in the United States along the Mexican border. Despite the anticartel war, Mexican cartels in that time period grew to be the most powerful criminal enterprises in the world, with greater inroads into the United States than ever before.
How do you go to war against something and make it bigger and stronger? In fact, the whole war on drugs, starting with President Nixon in the early 1970s, has cost more than $1 trillion in total (around $50 billion a year). This war has put tens of thousands of people behind bars and killed thousands more in Latin America and in US inner cities, only to see drugs become deadlier and more widespread than ever before.
It’s a failure we keep feeding.
I spoke at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua to students studying native peoples. They explained that cartels use Native peoples as runners, and villages have been destroyed for the cultivation of drug crops. I spoke to mothers of some of the hundreds of girls and women killed since 1993—estimates have reached a thousand—in Ciudad Juárez’s highly publicized “feminicide.” They told me the kidnappings and murders have continued, although they’ve been pushed out of the headlines because of the drug war.
I traveled in and around Ciudad Juárez in a bulletproof SUV and stayed in a hotel where I was told not to go out at night. I spoke in the worst slums I’d ever been in (and I’ve been in some doozies): homes made of weathered wood planks held up with chicken wire, cardboard and plastic as walls and roofs. Sections of communities were named for the Mexican states people had migrated from—Veracruz, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and others. I visited libraries, schools, and community centers, and even performed poetry with local poets at the US consul’s home, which was inside a gated community guarded by armed men and surrounded by a razor wire fence.
I entered Ciudad Juárez’s juvenile hall and spoke to the youth, with TV cameras, radio mics, and print journalists on hand. I recall one young man, who had worked with a cartel before his arrest, responding to a reporter’s question about why he did what he did. “Because I will never find a job, and if I do it will barely feed me or my family. That will be my lot till I’m an old man,” he said. “But in the cartel, I can have the fanciest cars, the best clothes, eat at the swankiest restaurants, and be with all kinds of women. This will last, maybe, two years. Then I’ll be killed, and most likely lose my arms, legs, and head. But for two years, man, for two years, I will have lived.”
In Ciudad Juárez, I saw dead bodies on the street, surrounded by armed Mexican federal troops (by then, they had taken over the police department). In my talks, I related information about the urban peace work I did in Chicago, Los Angeles, around the United States, and in Central America. People were skeptical at first, but I presented an effective community-based gang intervention model. I had helped to create this model over a two-year period with around forty gang-intervention experts, truce leaders, and peace advocates.
In 2008, the Los Angeles City Council adopted this model. While the city did little to bring it to life, they did create twelve Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) zones in areas that had 400 percent higher rates of gang-related crime than other parts of the city. Their plan included “Summer Night Lights,” which kept parks in thirty-two locations open late with sports, music, film, and more. Programs like this lowered gang violence in a city once considered the gang capital of America. Other intervention and peace efforts that were not sanctioned played major roles as well.
The response to this model in Ciudad Juárez was positive. Through a friend in the US Consulate’s office, we got the document explaining our model translated into Spanish. A community group even started a book lending library called Mama Juana’s with donated books, emulating the work of Tia Chucha’s Bookstore.
Early in the trip, I entered a CERESO (Centro de Readaptación Social, a “Center for Social Readaptation”) in Chihuahua City. However, before I was allowed to go in I had to convince the warden I was qualified. The US Consulate presented me as someone with years of experience in US prisons. The warden didn’t think this was good enough. Then I mentioned I had worked with the maras of Central America. This convinced him I was worthy, although he emphasized that the prisoners I was going to address were survivors of a massacre of twenty inmates in a riot the year before in a Ciudad Juárez prison.
Since the beginning of Calderón’s “war,” there has been a rise in prison riots throughout Mexico. Many prisons were run by cartels or street gangs; guards guarded the periphery and never entered inside a prison yard. That same prison in Ciudad Juárez had another riot in 2011 that left seventeen dead. Later twenty-eight prisoners were killed in a riot in an Acapulco prison. In 2016, close to fifty people died in a prison battle between the notorious Zetas drug cartel and their rivals in the city of Monterey. Prison breaks also hit extreme levels, with 153 convicts having escaped a prison in Nuevo Laredo.
In the 2009 prison riot in Ciudad Juárez, a gang tied to one cartel battled with another gang linked to another cartel. Both gangs began in Texas prisons and, after their members were deported, combined with cartels to bloodier results. This craziness comes from historical trauma, including the infinitely destructive Spanish conquest; extreme poverty; the highly exploitative working conditions of multinational corporations; Mexican government corruption and neglect; US government impositions and manipulations; and, more recently, the mass deportations of US-based gangs and criminals to Mexico. All violence has roots. All violence, ultimately, makes sense no matter how senseless it may appear.
In the Chihuahua prison, I walked into a cellblock that held the group who had received the brunt of the attack from the year before. We had about two hundred guys in a dark room. At first all was well, as I talked about my books and the work I did turning around gang members and other troubled youth.
Then the warden showed up. All of a sudden, the prisoners’ demeanor shifted. It turned out the warden had never set foot inside the prison walls. Now the men fixed their gazes on him, they stood up, and in bitter tones they complained about the terrible conditions they faced—no work, no training, no basic amenities. A gut feeling overwhelmed me, something I’ve learned to trust in these situations—the prisoners were going to kidnap the warden, and probably me as well. If this happened, we’d very likely be killed. The two guards with the warden were no match for the men. We were fucked.
So I did the only thing I could do. I began reciting a poem of mine in Spanish:
Pedazo a pedazo
te desgarran,
pelandote capas de tu ser,
mintiendo sobre quién eres,
hablando por tus sueños.
En el escualor de sus ojos
eres un criminal—vistiéndote en una chaqueta de men-
tiras—
hecha de acero a la medida,
eres su retrato perfecto.
¡Quítatela! Haz tu propio manto.
Desafía a los interrogadores.
Observa bien la muerte en su mirada.
Dí que no te rendirás.
Dí que no les creerás cuando te nombren de nuevo.
Dí que no aceptarás sus reglas, sus colores, sus morales
depravados.
Aquí tienes un camino.
Aquí puedes cantar la victoria.
Aquí no eres una raza conquistada,
la víctima perpetua,
un rostro sombrío en la tormenta.
Manos y mente están esculpiendo un santuario.
Usa estas armas contra ellos.
Usa tus talentos dados
—no son de piedra.
I walked back and forth across the front of the room with increasing fervor as I recited more poems. At some point the warden left. The men turned slowly toward me, to my onslaught of words in cadence—words to make them think and feel. The cascade of language swam across oceans of neglect, death, and history. I didn’t know if this would work. But it was the only weapon I had, my only defense, my only battle arms—poetry and more poetry. By the end, the men were listening to me again. Soon they relaxed. Everything calmed down. That’s how quickly things can turn in prisons.
When I finished, the prisoners and I walked out into the prison yard. A photographer who had gone into the cellblock with me took photos. The rest of us chatted and laughed, as if we were at a park, taking in the sun, enjoying each other’s company. Poetry and profound ideas still hung in the air, on this special day, a sacred day, a day without violence.