Survivors Guide to Prison Page #13

for brokering the truce

between the Crips

and the Bloods in 1992.

Then in 2004, he experienced

an unimaginable tragedy.

My oldest son was murdered,

home from winter break, college.

And, yeah,

was shot to death at a party.

You know, so my daughter

called me and was like,

"Hey, you know, dad,

they getting together

over on Sesame Street

in the projects and stuff,

and they talking about going

on a mission for Tyrell."

So I jumped in my car,

and I drove over there

to the projects,

and I jumped out the car,

and I said, "Hey," I said,

"Man, we've played

this eye-for-an-eye,

tooth-for-a tooth game

long enough."

I'm like, "You know,

it's left us all blind

and toothless, you know?"

And I'm like,

"Without anybody here

to provide direction

and guidance for the kids

and the young folks

and the parents

and the loved ones

that are left behind like"...

I'm like,

"Let's do something different."

I've met people who've had

absolutely devastating things

happen to them,

and they're just angry

and bitter.

And I didn't want that to be me.

I'd done that long enough.

And it wasn't working.

And I needed

something different.

Dionne and Aqeela

did something incredible.

They rose to a consciousness

most of us cannot imagine.

They didn't condone

what happened,

but they forgave it.

I believe in the "F" word,

you know, forgiveness.

Because of forgiveness is not,

you know,

something that you do

for the perpetrator.

It's something

that you do for yourself.

There is no cure

to violence in violence.

Violence can never

be a cure for violence.

It's been said

for thousands of years.

You can't fight darkness

with darkness.

You can only bring in the light.

If we're really trying

to deliver public safety,

then we need to start

asking questions.

We need to say why.

What happened

in the personal life

of this young man to cause him

to have this callous heart,

this fear that he would take

another human being's life?

Why is this person

cycling in and out

of jail or prison?

For Dionne, she decided

she wanted the death

of her husband Dan to lead

to something transformative,

something good and the same

for Aqeela and his son, Tyrell.

We're going to harness

the essence of Tyrell,

and we're going to do something

much more profound with this.

The point is to understand

what's happened.

How can we repair the harm

that's been done?

How can we make sure

that it doesn't happen again?

And how can we, you know...

with that individual,

but also with other individuals

coming after them.

When we get the answer

to that question,

we need to actually

do something about it.

Real investment in institutions

that help people

to heal from trauma.

There was an interesting

article

in The New York Times

a few years ago.

It was called

Million Dollar Blocks,

where if you calculated

how many of the residents

of that particular block

were actually incarcerated

and you added up

how much it cost the state

to keep those people

incarcerated,

you would actually come up with

more than $1 million per block.

What I would say is

take those million dollars

that you're spending to put

all those people in prison

and invest them

in the kinds of things

that we know very well

will actually transform

those communities.

My passion is Shakespeare

because it's about words.

And the only way that

you can heal trauma

is to find language for it.

I met my father

when I was like 15.

[Curt] Never met him before?

Never saw him?

There's something strange here.

It's something...

someone with my kind of

background here a little bit.

What they're trying to do

is simply inhabit

that character

as truthfully as they can.

And in analyzing

and digging down deep

into the truth

of that character,

what happens is they begin

to dig into their own lives.

[man] When I was a young man

and I came to prison,

the older convicts taught me how

to hustle at every opportunity

to make money,

how to get over on the police.

And I looked up to them.

They were my mentors.

Through Shakespeare Behind Bars,

I have learned that mentoring...

mentoring is...

it's very important,

but it's also important

to mentor them

in the right direction.

So, our recidivism rate

in Kentucky

for this program,

22 years old, is 5.1%.

Guys that are out on the street.

"Why didn't they go back?"

People ask all the time.

I say, "Don't ask me, ask them."

What'll they tell you?

Here's what I hear them say.

"I take responsibility for

the crime that brought me here.

I now understand where

that behavior came from

because I've gone back

in my life,

and I've looked at all of that.

But I am not

that human being anymore.

That's what arts programming

many times gives prisoners hope,

because arts deal with

the internal essence

of what it means

to be a human being.

[man vocalizing]

Vipassana is an intense program,

a meditative technique.

The inmate has to go through it

24 hours a day

- for a 10-day period of time.

- I spent eight and a half years

on death row,

and this was harder.

All the stuff

that's buried down deep,

they come up gradually.

They want you there long enough

that you actually deal

with your stuff.

[woman] She says...

[Matthew] This is a restorative

justice workshop.

They're very rare,

and they are much harder

on perpetrators of crimes

than sitting in a prison cell.

It puts these guys face to face

with the human consequences

of their actions.

This is Rosa.

Her son was killed

in a drive-by shooting.

And now, she devotes her life

to telling inmates

serving time for murder what

the effect was of their crime

not just for the deceased

but on everyone.

- Thank you. Thank you.

- Thank you.

[applause]

[Rosa] You know what?

Restorative justice programs

and victim/offender

reconciliations can take years.

They require a staff

and resources

and they're incredibly

successful.

Those who go through

these programs

have as low as 10% rates

of reoffending

as opposed to the 80% failure

rates prisons shamefully have.

We sit there perplexed like,

wow, what are we gonna do

about this criminal

justice system?

It's such a mess.

[laughs]

Maybe if we just stopped doing

these things that we're doing

and we try on a whole new set

of other things,

it might turn out to be a little

bit simpler than we thought.

The biggest prison we have

is an invisible prison.

It's the conditioned mind,

and you don't know

you're in the prison because

you can't see bars.

You can't see walls.

And the conditioned mind

is the separate mind.

It doesn't exist.

We are part of

a collective mind,

and if the collective mind

is violent, then we are violent.

And you can change that.

There's an opportunity here

for us to take the wisdom

that we know works,

what we would do

for our own kids if our own kids

were in trouble,

and do it

for everybody's kids.

We need to end the war on drugs.

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