Walidah Imarisha's powerful book

I have mentioned before that I spent 35 years of my life volunteering as a writing teacher in prisons in Louisiana, Massachusetts, South Africa, and Texas. (I offered to do the same in Oregon, but Oregon wasn’t interested. They have other programs.) My work with writers in those prisons was transformative. I bring the respect I gained to my reading, now, of Walidah Imarisha’s Angels with Dirty Faces (AK Press, 2016). Billed as “creative non-fiction,” it is poetic, painfully true, honest, brave. Some of it:

“America used to make cars. Now we make prisoners” (8).

“Many prisoners’ lives were cages before they ever stepped into a prison. Poverty confines, hunger contains, homelessness chokes, powerlessness restricts, and oppression destroys” (13).

“Prison is power: control of the individual, community, people, nation. It is taking from our community and our spirits that which is not given. It is a threat to all of us” (126).

I could open the book anywhere and offer lines that ring true for me, that offer truths that some don’t know. The US leads the world in percentage of people incarcerated. It’s big business here. Privatized. Profit-making. It benefits billionaires and institutionalizes slavery (see the documentary 13th if you haven’t, if you want to). Crime rates are lower now than they have been since the 1950s, and yet the propaganda of the “tough on crime” and "war on drugs" sect convinces white people that they are in danger, that they need more police arresting more dark-skinned people. Rather than eliminate the systemic inequalities that lead to poverty, Americans choose to punish more poor people. 

I am grateful to Walidah for every word. 

*This is a colo(u)r photograph. It has not been converted to B&W.