Close your eyes and imagine going to a place where the first thing they striped and tear away is your humanity, where they detach you from every good thing that reminds you of who you were before prison. Your family, friends, and every beautiful memory that ever brought meaning, love and direction to your life, they work to destroy. They do this because without your humanity, they are justified in how they are going to mentally torture, physically deprive, and tediously degrade you to a life that isn't fit for even an animal to live. Once you are inside of THEIR PRISON, they will work tirelessly hard to break everything about you, your mental, physical, and spiritual essence which connects you to the beauty of life will be gone if they have their way. Being a nonhuman to them (a prison number) is the only way they will see you, nothing about you will garner their compassion, empathy or respect. You will be invisible on every level and they will treat you as three-fifth's of a...

There are plethora of men and women who has been in prison longer than they should, men and women who has suffered severely by the hands of an unjust system that has an appetite so voracious, so barbaric and animalistic, that it even locks away children for the rest of their lives. This vehicle (mass incarceration) is one of the most profitable, dehumanizing, debilitating, and unjust institutions since slavery and the Jim Crow era. They (the architects of the prison system) care very little about rehabilitation, penitence, transformative justice, or humanity as long as their bottom line (profit margin, destruction of black and brown families and status quo) is maintained, they will continue locking minorities and people that do not look like them up at alarming and astronomical rates. And as an incarcerated black man of over 30 years, I can tell you first hand that this system does not play fair or based on justice for that matter. In 1992, the honorable judge Michael Callahan violated...