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...

  PART TWO #IREMEMBER We should not be condemning the people in these communities, instead, we should be talking about how we can help these poverty and violently ran communities become thriving and beautiful neighbourhoods. We need meaningful solutions to help these communities combat the destructive norm that has became so pervasive inside of them. These communities need resources and not condemnation because forces more powerful than them is responsible for creating the despair and hopelessness that exist with them. Some of us will make it out of these communities, but the sad fact is, the majority will not. This disadvantage creates the disparity between black people in regards to the haves and have nots, and fuels the tension that breeds not only hateful and deadly thoughts, but deadly actions that causes catastrophic pain within the community. I read and see black people condemning one another because of what's going on in these communities, but I do not see the same black pe...

  I REMEMBER Elijah McClain, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, Clementa Pinckney, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many other Black men and women that was killed by police. I continue to think of you, I continue to mourn you and I continue to miss you. Your murders haunt my days and nights because if this was a just and fair society, you would still be with us. But this society towards you has never been just, it has always been prejudiced. This society has always hated you in very large part because of the color of your skin and they have used that against you at every intricate part when it came to the creation of this country. Your lives were snatched before the totality of your greatness was realized, not because you were committing a crime, or in a war fighting for your country that doesn't love and treat you as you love and treat her, but because you were black and those police officers wanted to kill you for it. They couldn't ...

I Love my women  It  took me a great number of years before I could actually say those words and have my whole heart back them up. I was so indecisive, selfish and ignorant in my thinking, that I actually thought everything was about me. I mean seriously, I had no real care and concern for myself so it was impossible for me to have care and concern for women or anyone for that matter. In my book, 'Pain is my Past, Love is my Future' I speak of how my ignorance and low self worth led to me making horrible choices when it came to women. But after years of reading, writing, researching and dealing with women inside and outside of prison, I have finally figured out that I am capable of not only truly loving a woman, but being completely honest and monogamous in my heart and my actions when it comes to her. Now, I know what you are probably thinking, 'It is easy for me to say that about a woman while I am in prison dependant on her for essentials such as companionship, love, vis...

I wrote this curriculum to give our struggling youth valuable resources that will help give them the power to combat many of the same issues I dealt with in my youth. Self-esteem, peer pressure, lack of a father/mother, bullying, poverty related decision making, and a host of other things that contributes to our youth ending up in gangs, graveyards and the prison system. The effectiveness of this curriculum is based upon our (caregivers, teachers and mentors) willingness to see past our subjective minds and incorrigible thoughts as they relate to our young people. When we see a troubled youth, or they personally seek us out, we must take it as a real opportunity to inspire them and not as another failed attempt to help young people that do not desire to change or to really be helped. We must be mindful that our talking and experiences alone will not automatically change their behaviour  or their conditions. It will take our unconditional love and consistency for the young person to...

This particular post was inspired by a good friend of mine, Eden Seiuli, who asked: 'What Do You Feel Was Missing In Your Life As A Youth That Made You Make Many Bad Decisions That Eventually Landed You In Prison?' WHAT WAS MISSING? My father's absence was the first thing I immediately noticed that upset me and made me feel unloved. So when I asked my mother and she told me that she didn't know where he was, I automatically thought I was the problem. I thought that I wasn't good enough to be loved by my father and that created a constant problem and sore spot in my life. My father's absence made me focus more on the negative that surrounded me and very little on the positive. Not only was my father not in my life, I was poor, I didn't have a consistent and loving male role model, I didn't know the value of myself, and I was insecure and very angry about all of those things. I felt like there was no remedy for the dissatisfaction I felt as a child so I ac...