THOSE IN PRISON II By: Carlos King Responsibility cannot be gained from irresponsible acts of cruelty, love for some cannot emerge as a lasting and beautiful expression from deprivation and degradation... to castrate a person's physical essence due to his incarceration, truly undermines the meaning of justice, in the form of rehabilitation... Pain is pain no matter the cause, you cannot help the abused when you are the cause, he is a victim of your system so you are the flaw, beating him down with your inhumanity is the reason he's raw... Your life has meant his death right from the very start, you cannot transform his pain when you're the reason he's scared, your TRUTH is a LIE so your facts are disbarred... Your not the innocence you claim, you're the arbiter of the rules that confine his fame, telling him you're doing it in his best interest, when you don't believe in his penitence... You cheat him out of his life for your self interest, because the val...

  TELL YOUR STORY WALKING Carlos King In 2007, I had the pleasure of being at the Ryan Correctional Facility when the Inside/Out prison exchange program was first brought to Michigan prisons. I remember thinking, "how will this work? How would undeveloped men, foreign to textbook language be able to exist in the same space with college students; and what would be the criteria to be accepted in such a program?" I admit, I was a little intimidated back then despite the level of intelligence and skill I had accumulated during those sixteen years of confinement. I wasn't courageous/vulnerable enough to put myself out there, so when the sign up sheet came around, I didn't sign it. I feared I couldn't exist on the same intellectual level as college students, but boy was I wrong! After receiving so much positive feedback from the incarcerated men attending the class, I began to regret my previous decision. They told me I would of fit right in, that the information I poss...

  THE BREAKTHROUGH By: Damani (Carlos King) Being on the cusp of freedom from physical incarceration for the first time in thirty-five years is beautiful and life changing. My emotional jubilation is out of this world since receiving the news of my parole hearing on June 1st. To be honest, I have yet to close my eyes for more than a couple of hours at a time. And as I lay awake pondering the different thoughts and feelings surging through me with great regularity, I can't help but to notice the many tears streaming down my face. I feel elated, my palms are sweaty, throat dry and my mind is traveling in so many directions all at once. Wow! This is an unbelievable moment, and I have yet to fully internalize it. To be truthful, I don't think I will be able to until I have physically past the threshold of my confinement. Because from a thirty-five year prison experience, every minute I remain behind these barbed wire fences and cement block walls, anything can happen. My phys...

  "IF YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED TRAUMA BUT HAVEN'T EXCAVATED IT, THE WOUNDED PARTS OF YOU WILL AFFECT EVERYTHING YOU'VE MANAGED TO BUILD." --What Happened To You? Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry Mentors are: "MEN/WOMEN ENCOURAGING NECESSARY THOUGHTS OF RESPONSIBILITY and SELF DEVELOPMENT" through experience, transformation, positive thinking, patience, and consistency. Our aim is centered around creating a safe space necessary for our Youth In Trauma (YIT) to develop and to feel comfortable enough to allow us to reach the CORE (Conflict Observation & Reoccurring Experiences) of their most traumatic and painful experiences. CORE exploring will give us the opportunity to identify the problematic issues which directly affects the YIT on multiple levels of his/her development. Such as but not limited to, their thoughts and feelings when traumatic experiences manifest in their lives? What conflict is created as a result of those reoccurrences? And what they feel...

It had to be weak chauvinistic men who coined the phrase, "It is weakness for a man to display true feelings and emotions to a woman." I say weak because it represents the lowest and uninformed parts of us, and it makes us believe we are better than or more of someone else. It was in this condition we claimed superiority over the woman and reduced her in nature and importance. We took that weak thinking of superiority over our women and built civilizations on top of it. This is why the woman, despite her perseverance and steady climb out of that inferior ditch in which we placed her in, continues to be abused, disrespected, and disregarded simply for being a woman. This is and has always been malicious behavior on the parts of man, and for us to have perpetuated it for so long speaks to the entitlement, cruelty, and frailty of us as men. We must change the culture of how we treat and engage with our women. And I say ours, not to imply that the woman belongs to man as property...

  We own our lives, we own our dreams, we own our thoughts, we own our hearts, we own our desires, we own our purpose, we own our values, we own our treasures and we own the paths we choose to lead. We own everything pertaining to ourselves, so why are we giving our energy, time and precious gifts to bullies, tyrants, fears, stress, worry, pain, indifferences and chaos??? OUR LIVES IS OUR OWN!! Do you not believe that you were inherently created to not only resist those above impediments, but use every fiber of your being fighting against them? If so, it is paramount that you act now in refashioning yourself into that marvelous thing of beauty in which you were created to be in the first place. We were chosen and endowed by God (And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful and multiply. Genesis 1:28) to stand in our own beauty striving to be good, just and fair while being humane, pose, and without judgment so that we may live long enough to uncover the purpose of our ...