“For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
Every time I visit Kakamia, everyone knows him. And I mean everyone: guards, prisoners, other visitors. People walk up to me and say, “Oh you’re New York/Kakamia’s sister, aren’t you? I would have known you anywhere, you look just like him!”
As Kakamia says, that just proves we were meant to be brother and sister and a glitch happened somewhere along the way.
He and I have a number of visiting room rituals. Everyone I know who regularly goes to see a prisoner develops them. Humans are creatures of habit; routine brings control out of chaos.
One particular habit of ours involves singing New York-based rap group Black Sheep’s song “This or That,” specifically the lines, “Engine engine number nine/ On the New York Transit line/ If my train falls off the track/ Pick it up pick it up pick it up!”
One of us will start it off quietly, the other will jump in on the next line, and we will gradually get louder until the others in the visiting room shoot us looks ranging from amusement to irritation. Another ritual we have developed is singing snippets of show tunes. Believe me, you have heard nothing until you hear Kakamia’s falsetto version of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” from Sound of Music.
We were engaged in our Black Sheep ritual one visit when a young Black woman from another table interrupted us.
“I just had to tell you how beautiful that drawing of the elephant you did for my mother is,” she said shifting the packaged chips from the vending machine from hand to hand. “We still have it hanging on the wall and people comment on it all the time.”
My brother reacted with grace and humility. He didn’t say much, just a few stark words of appreciation.
Once she turned to go back to her table, I picked up where we left off: “If my train falls off the…”
Kakamia interrupted me, “Hey, Wa, can I just have a moment? You know how sometimes folks recognize you from your poetry performances, like that woman in Philly in the bodega, and you called those your superstar moments? Well, this is my first superstar moment ever. I kinda wanna savor it.”
So we sat and savored it, until the PA crackled, telling us it was time for count.
* * *
It didn’t start off this way for Kakamia when he was first transferred to prison. Though he has always been charismatic and charming, he came into the California corrections system full of rage at the world, and mostly at himself. He was shipped to Folsom State Prison, the second-oldest prison in California, and one of the most dangerous. It was an all-out war, and Kakamia’s side had already been chosen for him. Because of his affiliation with the Bloods on the street, he mobbed up with Bloodline behind the walls, another Blood set.
The original Bloods formed in the early 1970s to provide protection from the Crips street gang in Los Angeles, California. Both gangs have branched out nationally and even internationally. According to the documentary Bastards of the Party, produced by Blood Cle “Bone” Sloan, the Crips, the most notorious gang in the world, actually began at the Community Revolution in Progress (C.R.I.P.), and became a city-funded community center and organization in South Central in 1969.
The Black youth who founded the Crips saw them as a direct continuation of revolutionary Black organizations like the Black Panther Party, reflecting the unrest and burning desire for change embodied in the 1960s. As first generation Crip Danifu Bey said, this was “the spirit that the Crips were created [in,] the climate of the Watts Riot… Black people being awakened to freedom and tired of being treated like slaves… The Crips and other gangs were being nurtured in that type of environment where Black people were basically rebelling and expressing themselves.”
The original Crips recognized the criminalization and state repression they experienced as Black folks in general, and Black people working to change society specifically. They saw very clearly that the tools used against the Black Panther Party were the same used to control and contain communities of color: police, courts, and prisons. This is echoed by Angela Davis’s analysis of the transition from slavery to prisons, and slave-catchers to police. The war waged on radicals in this country by the U.S. government eliminated—or in the words of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “neutralized”—an entire generation of Black leadership, who could have given guidance to Black youth looking to make a change, but without concrete political strategies. George Percy Bargainer III shows how this deterioration of forms of resistance came from the lack of direction: “With the neutralization of the Black Panther Party, the conceptual framework that they had provided to youth to interpret and understand the multiple streams of domination shaping their lives in Black Los Angeles dissipated.”
Political prisoner, former Black Panther, and scholar Sundiata Acoli wrote that, while the Crips started as a space for community change, because of that lack of guidance and support owning to the arrest, exile and murder of so many Black radicals, “a sinister twist developed…[where Black] people were targets of the young hoodlums.” Without an organized ideology, Bargainer argues, “the essence of Crippen became a rebellious lawlessness rather than collective subversive political activity.” The Crips gang kept growing, expanding territory and ranks, and attacking all who refused to join them. In response, the remaining gangs who wouldn’t join banded together and called themselves the Bloods. Thus did these youth create organizations that are some of the most feared organizations nationally, claiming countless in their ranks as soldiers.
Kakamia didn’t know any of this when he got to Folsom. Before he came to prison, he had been only loosely associated with the gang on the street, more an affiliate than one of the street soldiers. But in prison, gangs became survival—until the day when they invariably became the end of survival.
If he and other gang-affiliated youth had had programs such as CeaseFire while he was on the streets, one wonders how different Kakamia’s life would have been. Started in Chicago, CeaseFire created “violence interrupters” who are themselves former gang members. They work to defuse conflicts and gang violence before it escalates. In 2013, the organization had about three hundred outreach workers and violence interrupters. Despite the fact that the two neighborhoods CeaseFire worked in, in 2012, had a nearly thirty-eight percent drop in shootings, and an almost twenty-nine percent drop in killings, the city of Chicago chose to cut funding to the program, according to a 2013 PBS article. Some say this is because the organization was too effective at stopping gang violence, that the police aren’t interested in the end of the War on Gangs or the War on Drugs, because this has now become an ingrained way that our economy and our society functions.
First used by Richard Nixon in 1971, the phrase “War on Drugs” has become a foundational part of the criminal legal system, not just in this country but globally. Tens of billions of dollars a year are spent on this policy. Scholar Michelle Alexander writes that “millions of dollars in federal aid have been offered to state and local law enforcement agencies willing to wage the war.” Behind bars, the massive increase in prison population over the past few decades is largely due to the War on Drugs. At the end of the day, this war is as much or more about social control than economics, and it is heavily racialized (Alexander shows eighty percent of those in prison from War on Drug-related convictions are people of color). Noam Chomsky in his essay “Drug Policy as Social Control,” writes, “The so-called drug war was started in the 1980s and it was aimed directly at the black population. None of this has anything to do with drugs. It has to do with controlling and criminalizing....”
But on the street, answers aren’t as clean as they are in textbooks. Kakamia had only his family telling him to stay away from gangs and drugs, and no one telling him that inside. So when he first went to prison, he kept his head down and did what he had to do. Using his anger in service of his set, he released his rage on faces that looked too much like his own. Lumberjack from New York was back with a vengeance.
For a while Kakamia embodied the mentality of Sanyika Shakur, formerly “Monster” Kody Scott, once of the most feared Crip leaders: “Certainly I had little respect for life when practically all my life I had seen people assaulted, maimed, and blown away at very young ages, and no one seemed to care. I recognized early that where I lived, we grew and died in dog years. Actually, some dogs outlived us.”
Black life has always been an expendable commodity in this society, a message that has been beaten into DNA.
Kakamia tried not to remember much of anything, and during the day he almost succeeded. He worked to numb his brain, day and night. It was easy enough to do in prison. Alcohol and drugs were available; both made in-house and couriered by guard. You just had to have the money or the connections. As always, Kakamia was dead broke, but he was real good at making friends.
All the running caught up with Kakamia at night. Specters rose, pulling and biting at him. Kakamia tossed and turned in his bunk. He felt the same suffocating feeling. Years streamed by like polluted water. He turned twenty-one and barely noticed. Visits, always in short supply, began to dry up completely. There were bills, there were responsibilities, there were jobs, his family said. But he also knew they felt that since he got himself into this situation, he shouldn’t expect anything from them. We’re not in prison too, their actions screamed at him, we don’t have to do your time. He thought about ending it all. He thought about ending it all every night. The same dark waters he battled his entire life raged into a tsunami inside of him. Why should he continue to fight to keep his head above water? The shore was too far away; he’d never get there. The release of muscle, the quieting of limbs, the soft retreat of light sounded so sweet. It sounded almost like poetry.
Kakamia had to remind himself he already tried that way out twice: once during his trial, and once right after he was sentenced. The burning around his neck, the sudden deprivation of an essential part of life. And he was still here. Nothing changed afterwards, except his back was fucked up and everyone looked at him a little differently.
When he thinks back now to that time, Kakamia can’t believe he made it out. “Everything embedded into my head said, ‘You’re never going home. You’ll never get a date. No one cares. You might as well either do this or do that—either start stabbing, and get a SHU [Special Housing Unit] term and make a name for yourself, or just die.’”
During Kakamia’s three years held in jail waiting for trial and sentencing, the doctors poked and prodded him. They had a psychologist or psychiatrist (he could never remember the difference) examine him to “assess his state of mental health.” The doctor came back with a litany of disorders, from Attention Deficit to medical depression. Kakamia thought it was just being brown and poor in America.
Trapped in prison, gang members’ positions are similar to those Sanyika Shakur describes for those on the street. He compares gang members to military veterans of the Vietnam War, saying that when those soldiers were injured, they were shipped back home. But no option like this exists for those fighting on frontlines in ghetto communities—underresourced and overexploited—or for those fighting in prison. “Where do we go when we’ve been wounded bad, or when our minds have been reduced to mincemeat by years, not months, of constant combat?” asks Shakur, who became a revolutionary organizer while in prisons. He argues gang members like Kakamia should be seen as suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome: “… I contend that gang members who are combat soldiers are subject to the same mind-bend as are veterans of foreign wars.”
After Kakamia went to prison, they felt his behavior was too erratic and unpredictable, and diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. The prison doctor prescribed him a liberal dose of lithium. It quieted everything inside of him when he took it—like a dead sea, the waters became still as glass, and he could see beyond the horizon. But it also made him feel like he was adrift on those waters in a rowboat with no oars: out of control, like he’d been his whole life, floating aimlessly and at the mercy of uncaring and unmovable forces.
Even though he didn’t stay on the lithium for long, the calm he experienced inside gave him hope. He spent nights free from nightmares for once. He remembered what it was like to breathe again. Like tectonic plates shifting under the surface, things began to change. It was not something visible, but a movement shifting the very ground under his feet: a rumbling not heard so much as felt in his bones.
He realized that his life had to change. If he continued like this, in the gang, he would end up either catching another case—one that would keep him in for the rest of his life without a doubt—or bleeding out in the prison yard, his blood smearing the gang’s color over the asphalt. He realized he actually did not want to be dead. He could see hope again, faint but there, like the sun’s weak glow behind storm clouds.
The prison administration regularly pulled in gang-affiliated prisoners for “chats,” to see if they’d be willing to flip and snitch. Because Kakamia was young, newer to the prison and because he had informed on Eric during his trial, they leaned on him more. He resisted; he justified in his head the situation with Eric by saying it was Eric’s fault Kakamia was there anyway. It was just the luck of the draw Eric got away clean and he didn’t: just the case of one boy who could run faster than the other.
Besides, he knew if the gang even thought he was an informant, that would be it. Even if he got through it alive, which was a big if, he would forever be labeled a snitch. There would only be a handful of prisons in California where he would be safe; at the rest he would be killed on sight. Friends he’d known for years in prison, who he fought side-by-side with, who he had been ready to die for, would never speak to him again. Other prisoners who found out would back away from him, the look of disgust emblazoned on their faces. He would become the second-worst thing you could become in prison, right above child molester.
And worst of all, he would always have that feeling of disgust inside himself, for working with the same system that held him caged like an animal.
As the months and years wore on, though, it became less and less of a choice for Kakamia. He felt his mind being reduced, as Sanyika Shakur had written, to mincemeat by the constant reality of living in a warzone. He would either die very soon, by his hand or someone else’s, or he would make this decision to give up the life he had scraped together for himself here. He would burn up Mr. Grim, burn up Lumberjack. If he did that, maybe he could be reborn anew from their ashes. Maybe he would be able to find on his own that sense of peace he had felt through lithium, as more than a fleeting dream.
So he did it: he “debriefed.” He met with the prison officials finally. As they listened intently, he told them where the knives were, where the dope was stashed, who was bringing it into the institution. Kakamia went straight from the office to protective custody, isolated in segregation. He was transferred before anyone knew what he’d done, to one of the few prisons where he’d be safe. There he would soon meet another man struggling with his decision to cooperate, James McElroy.
Kakamia lives with this decision every day. He still questions whether it was the right one. When the Stop Snitching campaign spread throughout the hoods, he watched rappers on BET and MTV wearing the shirts stamped with the saying in bright red. He listened to older prisoners discussing it, saying to cooperate with a system that was oppressing you was to participate not only in your own destruction, but in that of your community as well. And he agreed. It has haunted him ever since.
These issues were brought to the forefront of national consciousness starkly in 2011 and again in 2013 when prisoners across California went on hunger strike. The first time in 2011, twelve thousand prisoners from eleven different prisons participated. The second strike, which started July 8, 2013 and lasted sixty days, involved more than thirty thousand prisoners. The strike was led by the Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective, a multiracial group of prisoners held in the indefinite SHU, in solitary confinement, some of them for decades. They and the majority of prisoners there were thrown in solitary after being “gang-validated,” a label by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for proving someone is in a gang. Many say they are not nor have they ever been in a gang, and that CDCr (which many prisoners write with a lower case “r” to deride “the Orwellian use of the word rehabilitation,” according to Claude Marks) uses the flimsiest of reasons to validate, as a means of control. Many of those who are put in solitary confinement indefinitely are politically active behind the walls, working to ensure their cries for justice are heard.
The demands of the hunger strikers hit at the heart of my brother’s situation: abolishing the debriefing process which, as the strikers said, “is often demanded in return for better food or release from the SHU. Debriefing puts the safety of prisoners and their families at risk, because they are then viewed as ‘snitches.’” Once you have been gang-validated and sent to the hole indefinitely, debriefing is your only way out. Prisoners also demanded major modifications to the gang status criteria, requiring real proof of gang affiliation from CDCr. In addition, the strikers wanted an end to group punishment, compliance with the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement, meals that met nutritional standards, and the end of denial of food as a method of control. They also demanded small things, as sometimes it is the smallest things that can change everything: Allow one photo per year. Allow a weekly phone call. Allow us to be seen. Allow us to be heard.
The striking prisoners suspended their strike (being clear that it was not finished and would not be finished until their demands were met and justice wrangled from the system) after California legislators expressed outrage and committed to hold public hearings.
This incredible feat of organizing required strength, courage, and enormous solidarity, and serves to inspire those of us on the outside. It highlights the fact that, far from being menaces and burdens, some of our best community organizers are locked down, and they have invaluable lessons to teach the movement outside. Kakamia felt the same way, and he also knew that those leading this movement—who had spent decades in solitary confinement, never touching anyone except a guard—were there because they refused to do what he had.
These are the contradictions that populate Kakamia’s heart, because at the same time he knows he would not be alive if he had not debriefed. If he hadn’t died outright, his soul would have continued its deterioration. He might physically be on this earth, but without the space created by the break with the gang, his spirit would have died a slow death years ago. He isn’t proud of informing, but he is proud of surviving: “I made my choice. I live with it every day. But I’m here. I’m here every day.”
His last fight was in 1994.
After getting to the new prison and settling in as much as he could, learning the different rhythms of a new institution, Kakamia tried to find other outlets to channel his energy. He had lifted weights before—if the prison he was at had weights and if they weren’t controlled by a rival gang—but now he began spending hours working out his body, burning off the rage that still lived in him.
He worked in the kitchen, “cooking,” if you can call it that, and it distracted him, and also made him popular since he could give out extra portions of food on the sly. He spent endless hours watching TV and the movies the prison let them have access to. Kakamia would watch anything that was on: any escape into another world outside of his own head. He couldn’t escape into books; most of them were beyond his reading level. He felt embarrassed and frustrated when he picked up a book. It was like a locked vault he never had the combination to.
Kakamia did write well enough to send notes and cards, which he did copiously. Not to his family—that had stopped a long time ago—but to people he met through prisoner ads, dating sites, pen pal exchanges. He knew years stretched in front of him before he’d ever walk beyond these walls, but writing people out there and having relationships (mostly short-lived), made him feel almost normal.
He felt aimless. Of course he couldn’t be with anyone he associated with before. He felt rudderless. Every day was like the next. Always so charismatic, he began to dull and lose his shine.
Then one day, Kakamia was in the dayroom, barely watching a college basketball game that was on. As he stared at the screen, his hand doodled on a scrap of paper he’d found on the table, almost on its own as his mind flew in a thousand different directions.
Kakamia was startled out of his reverie by an older inmate he knew of but had not engaged with before, who came up behind him. He leaned over Kakamia’s shoulder and looked hard at the paper for a few heartbeats. Then the older man looked Kakamia in the eyes and said, “You got some serious talent, young brotha. Don’t let that go to waste,” before he walked away.
Kakamia blinked and stared after the man for a minute. Then he grabbed a full sheet of paper, and began drawing intently. Time flowed around him, people came and went, shows passed. He was aware of none of it. When he finally raised his head hours later, he took a step back to see what he had created. It was a lighthouse, shining a beacon across troubled waters, its glow cutting through the darkness.
When another prisoner offered to buy it from him later, Kakamia knew this was his path. He started taking art seriously. He created paintings and drawings, experimenting with as many different media and styles as he could. He did countless cards the other men bought: birthday and anniversary and Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. It sometimes felt like a production line in his cell. And of course he did tattoos—even though it was technically illegal, most of the guards turned a blind eye—translating his artistic talent to the flesh of those around him.
Kakamia would look forward to the prison art program all week, before it was cut along with almost all of the other programs. One of the paintings he created impressed his instructor so much, it ended up hanging in the prison visiting room. Kakamia and I took pictures in front of it every visit, while he was at that prison. Neither the painting nor he was free, but at least they both weren’t so alone.
His art extended beyond prison walls as well. As I moved through the world, I always made sure Kakamia’s art came along as well. When I edited a national hip hop magazine, both his art and his poetry appeared in it. Soon, it was featured in other magazines without any help from me, including his favorite magazine, Juxtapoz, which focused on graffiti and hip-hop-inspired art. I could hear the pride in his letter when he sent the clipping to me.
Artistic growth is not the only kind Kakamia has been concerned with. Over his years in prison, he tried many different religions. He was a devout Christian, a Muslim, a Five Percenter (a section of Islam born out of the Nation of Islam, popularized through hip hop). Like looking for the perfect dress, he has tried on a number that didn’t fit quite right.
Then he found Buddhism. The stillness he found while on lithium returned while he was chanting. He started attending the Buddhist services the prison allowed once every two weeks. Being still and centered in a roomful of other men was something he hadn’t experienced since he came to prison. It was always noise, movement, chaos. Especially after they converted the gym into a giant dormitory because of overcrowding. Kakamia was one of those moved in, who lived on bunk beds lined up like soldiers in a row. His bed ended one foot from where the next began. Living on top of so many, voices echoed constantly and there was no escape.
Because of Buddhism, Kakamia was able to control his bipolar disorder through chanting and meditation rather than through pills.
Finding calmness allowed Kakamia to face many fears, both internal and external. One day, he asked his cellie if he could borrow one of the books he was always reading. Kakamia struggled with it all that day, and the next, and the next, feeling so close to quitting each day. Then each day he felt a little less frustrated, until he reached the end, and finished the book. He finished reading his first book, sitting on the edge of his bunk in his prison cell.
He continued reading and practiced writing. He started out writing rhymes, hip hop lyrics, because it made sense to him and kept his mind engaged. Then one day he came to realize it had morphed into him writing poems. Shit, he thought to himself, how did I become a poet?
Despite being able to read and write at a college level now after years of struggle, Kakamia still didn’t have a high school diploma. One of the few courses still functioning at the prison was the GED completion course. Everyone told him to do it. His counselor told him the parole board would not look favorably upon him if he didn’t have it. Other prisoners told him he was too smart not to have it. His sister said he needed to take the test, to prove to himself that he could do it.
And yet, for years Kakamia did not take it. The old fears would rear up every time he thought about it. What if he failed? What if he wasn’t smart enough? What if he was just as dumb as his teachers said he was, as everyone said he was? How could he live if he had worked so hard to become a new person, and it all crumbled before him?
Finally, he ran out of excuses. Kakamia didn’t tell anyone outside when he went to take the GED test finally, though, just in case.
He could not remember a prouder day than the day he could call his sister and tell her he had passed finally.
Kakamia still feels the crushing rage, wanting to explode and take out his pain on another’s body. But that is not who he is anymore; it is not the self he strives so hard to hold onto. He has grown beyond his prison numbers, and exists outside of bunks and bars. He has found a self that no guard can touch. He is able to move through the present—through all the disappointment, loss, pain and humiliation—because he knows that he now has a future. He has built a new community of chosen family that supports him, encourages him, and holds him accountable. He knows he is responsible to them, and he wears that responsibility like a medal of honor.
“I was raised in prison, but I was not raised by a prison. I have a family that loves me. I have a family that has stood by me. I am the man they have made me.”
* * *
On a visit, Kakamia and I strolled to the vending machine to get some popcorn, one of the few things I can eat as a vegan in a visiting room. He was teasing me about eating grass like a rabbit, and I teased him back, saying if he didn’t have all day to work out, he’d be so skinny, he could turn sideways and disappear.
Sitting at the table closest to that machine was a light-skinned Black man in a wheelchair and his wife, a full-bodied woman with beautiful dark flesh and a bright smile. After a few exchanges of pleasantries, she left to use the restroom.
Kakamia said, “Hey that’s a great idea, I’m gonna go handle that too, while we wait for the popcorn. I’ll be back. Don’t go nowhere,” he joked as he walked away.
“Your brother is a really beautiful person,” the man in the wheelchair told me.
“Mmm hmmm,” I responded distractedly, only half paying attention because I didn’t want the popcorn to burn. There is nothing like having to smell burnt popcorn in an enclosed visiting room for five hours to make everyone even more on edge.
“You know I wasn’t in this chair when I got here,” the man tapped the handle. “I have this disease, and it’s gotten worse since I’ve been here. Thanks to the joys of prison health care,” he joked bitterly.
“I can only imagine how hard being in prison is period, let alone being in… your condition,” I ended weakly.
“You ain’t lying about that, now,” he shook his head. “A lot of people just stopped talking to me, couldn’t deal with it. I was having a lot of trouble getting used to this chair, getting my routine down, having to navigate everything in it.
“Your brother, who I met through a partner of mine, put in for a transfer to be my cellie. I never asked him for that. I wouldn’t have asked him. That’s a lot to ask someone.
“But he did it on his own. He helped me out. Just little stuff, getting my shirt on when it would get stuck on the hand rail, or in the evenings when I was getting tired and my arms were sore, pushing me back to the cell.
“Obviously he let me have the bottom bunk,” he let out a short laugh.
“Your brother never said anything about it. Me being in the chair, I mean. Never acted like anything was different, was his same loud self with me. Just helped out when he saw I needed it, and when I didn’t, he let me alone. And he did that for about six months, until there was a shake down on our unit because of some drug thing, and a bunch of people got transferred to other units, him included. But by then, I was used to it, and so were other folks, and things got a whole lot easier.
“But you don’t know how much that meant to me, what your brother did. I don’t know if I would have gotten through it without him there. It just reminded me that someone cared, when it felt like nobody, not even God, did, some days,” he finished, staring deep into my eyes. I was a butterfly trapped under the glass of his stare, a breath held too long, a bruise, faded and sore, healing.
“Hey, miss me?” I turned to see Kakamia’s lopsided grin.
I wrapped my arms around his long torso, and hugged him with all my strength, the smell of generic laundry detergent in my nose.
“Always,” I murmured into his perfectly ironed blue prison shirt.