Beginning Of Prison

  BEGINNING OF PRISON

I came to prison as a 19 year old, immature, young black male who was full of anger and pain. I am currently serving a 50 year prison sentence for two (2) counts of Armed Robbery and one (1) count of Felony Firearm. The judge went outside of the recommended guideline range of 3 to 8 years in prison and gave me a 50 to 75 year sentence. He did that based on acquitted charges the jury found me not guilty of. This was a violation of my Constitutional Rights, but it took 28 years before the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for judges to use acquitted charges to enhance a defendant's sentence. So now I sit and wait for the courts to overturn my erroneous sentence and resentence me to time served considering the amount of time I have spent in prison on a Constitutional violation.

It was difficult for me to change when I first came to prison because I still possessed the same destructive traits I displayed in society. The only difference between me in prison and me in society was a barbed wire fence, 50 years didn't change my state of mind or remove the pain inside of me that I felt like I had been carrying all of my life. It wasn't like I came to prison and the MDOC performed a deep psychological analysis of me and said, 'These are the problems we found and this is how we can fix you'. No! That definitely didn't happen when I first came to prison. Matter of fact, it has never happen since I've been in prison. Instead, I was given a Bible, placed in a very small cell, and had to figure it out on my own. So, I bet you can imagine how that went huh? I didn't figure it out early on, and I continued to hate myself and those that stood in opposition of that.

I caught many infractions while entrenched in that self-hate mentality, and instead of fighting to get out of prison I was fighting to stay in prison. I spent countless time in segregation (24 hour lockdown) for fighting and assaulting other prisoners. My behavior got so bad that I was eventually sent to a maximum security prison which was a 23 hour a day lock down. My mental capacity was challenged in the worst way, I almost didn't make it out of those tight spaces with the strength of my mind in tact. I had seen the process of segregation and maximum security prison break the strongest of men and crippled others in some mentally diabolical way. A person never left these places without missing pieces of yourself!

HOW WAS I ABLE TO HOLD ONTO MY MIND DURING THOSE TIMES?

I came to prison in 1992, and as I was causing so much havoc, I met this brother name Mays X that took a liking to me. Mays X was very influential and respected in prison, so when he slid up and started talking to me, I listened intently. Not because I was afraid of him, but because in that moment he represented the father figure that I had never had in my life. His words were full of so much direction and wisdom and I found myself clinging to them as the bee clings to the nectar of the flower. I craved what he was speaking, so I stood there frozen. Mays X would talk to me every single day about responsibility and manhood, two essentials that I had never known. He said that a man's character is defined by the quality of his heart, so if his heart isn't that of love, then his actions would always be reflective of that. He said that in order for me to believe in that, I needed to change my thinking and deal with the pain that led me to prison in the first place. He said that every person has a story, so what's yours?

In the course of many months, I shared things with this brother things that I had never shared with anyone. He told me that I could be better. So he asked me could I read and I said yes. He handed me a book, 'As a Man Thinketh by James Allen'. That was the first book I had read in my entire life that had some real substance to it. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote a book report on it and gave it to Mays X. He was so impressed that he gave me more and more books to read and said that I should always write a book report so that the pertinent information that was gathered would always will stick with me. He told me often that I was something special, that my mind and ability to express myself was rare and most men, especially the ones in prison didn't have what I possessed. I appreciated those sentiments more than anything else because no one had ever said those kind of things to me before.

Although, Mays X taught me a lot of things, once he was transfered to another prison, my mind went back to the streets and I found myself back around the unsavory kind of prisoners, doing all kind of dumb shit. So that was how I found myself in segregation and maximum security prisons. How I held my mind together during those harsh times was because of Mays X and all the books he had me reading. I went to maximum security in 1997, only five years after I came to prison. I didn't leave until 2000, but by then I was a greater version of myself. I knew that I was changed and no longer desired to be the kind of person I was in society, when the victim's words broke me down and made me cry for the first time in my incarceration... Her words were so powerful that I claimed them to memory and allowed for them to not only guide me, but help unearth my empathy, compassion, and accountability as it related to the victim's of my crimes and people in general. I desired for the first time in my life to be better, and I was equipped with the necessary tools to follow those desires through.

MY TRANSFORMATION

Once I started functioning on a consistent level with the things I was learning through reading and talking with men who had evolved beyond what brought them to prison, I desired freedom. It started to mess with me that I had spent eight years in prison without doing anything to get out of prisoners. I mean literally, from 1992 to 2000, I probably had 45 misconducts for bad behavior. But once I changed my thinking, from 2000 to 2021, I had maybe 10.

When I started working on my freedom in 2000, I pulled out all of my transcripts and thoroughly read every page looking for a way out. But what I found brought me a sorrow so deep that it penetrated every nook and cranny inside of me, and broke me down to my lowest denominator. I never even knew that I had those kind of emotions stored inside of me until my face was dripping wet and my heart was beating so hard that I felt like it was going to burst through my chest. I was frightened in that moment because I had never felt such intensity in my life.

When I read the words from the victim of my crime sister, they stung like a million bees and I felt every inch of that pain. She said: 'YOU DON'T EVEN CARE, YOUR MIND IS NOT CAPABLE OF KNOWING THE DAMAGE THAT YOU HAVE DONE TO US. YOU'RE A YOUNG MAN, HOWEVER, YOU ARE SET IN YOUR WAYS AND YOU WILL HAVE A LONG HARD LIFE BECAUSE OF IT'. If only she could see how truly I get it now, how deeply I understand her pain and the pain of her family's. I wish she could see how I am no longer set in my ways; I wish she could see how remorseful and regretful I am for the pain I brought to her life and the lives of her family; I wish she could see my sincerity and feel the deepness of my empathy and sympathy as they relate to the suffering that my actions caused to her and her family.

That experienced brought something from within me that has constantly motivated me to be a better human being. It started off with me looking for my freedom, but it ended up not even being about me. 'Freedom is my Remedy' is not just about freedom from incarceration, but to be free in every sense of the word. Freedom from limits and restrictions; freedom from pain and misery; freedom from violence and irresponsibility, and lastly, freedom from worry and stress. I no longer want to live my life carrying dead weight, nor do I want to live it hurting others. I would like to be altruistic on every level of my life so that I will never disregard or take for granted the value of others.

IN CLOSING

Despite the tragedy and pain I've experienced in my life, I was still able to transform myself into a beautiful and productive human being. I would like to think that through the course of this experience, I have been able to gain access into parts of myself that had never been explored before. I grew even when growing was very difficult and challenging, I stayed the course. I knew that I needed to be in better shape mentally before I returned back home so that I could do some great things for myself and others. I no longer wanted to be the same person that came to prison 30 years ago, so I worked relentlessly to change that.

I received my GED, Paralegal certification, Braille certification, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel certification, Personal Finance certification, and many other accomplishments that has enriched me. I am a published author, my book 'Pain is my Past, Love is my Future' is being sold on amazon.com. I teach a class in prison called: 'Compassion and Accountability' which is geared towards the victims of our crimes and how our actions have impacted and changed their lives. The class is designed to empathize with their pain and suffering in a real and practical way. The class is very successful because once a person can reach the root cause of their previous poor choices, then he can desire to be better going forward. This is who I have worked to become as I have grown in maturity. So follow me on this journey and let me show you who I use to be, and who I am now. Thank you for your time.

Yours Truly,

Carlos