My journey is one of a transformative educational process that occurred in American prisons. In 1995, I was 21 years-old. I had barely graduated high school two years prior with a 1.75 G.P.A. By the time 1995 came around, I was sitting in the Seminole County Jail in Wewoka, Oklahoma charged with murder. Bored, I was forced to read a book. Little did I realize this would begin my quest for knowledge. Reading kept me off death row! The short of it, I would be acquitted after reading a book on forensic science. Needless to say, this ignited my passion to learn. Thereafter, I moved to Oakland, California where I enrolled in college as a business major. There, I maintained a 3.75 G.P.A. and was awarded a scholarship for real estate development. For the next two years, I immersed myself in my studies. Yet my dope-boy lifestyle would soon find me again charged and this time convicted of first-degree murder. 

Sitting in the Alameda County Jail, I was disgusted with myself. I so desperately needed to not give up on myself or my dreams or studies. Four years, I sat in the county lockup. There, I began reading sun-up, sundown–literally! I read four libraries full of books. However, some of my reads were not in the pages of books, rather the brothers I was locked-up with. They were the children of the Black Panther Party. As time went on, they shared with me their stories of resistance; being educated at the Party’s schools and breakfast programs; and how the black community was flooded with heroin, cocaine, and conflict. They nourished my love for reading, providing me titles to books that began a radical education process. Often, I tell people I became “radicalized” in Santa Rita, which is the name for the Alameda County Jail. There, we had a well-stocked bookshelf sponsored by the public library system. I began studying Paulo Freire, Steve Biko, Amos Wilson, WEB Dubois, Karl Marx, and many others. 

Even more, it was there, in Santa Rita, that I encountered my first incarcerated intellectuals. Ray was in his mid-30s, suffered from heroin addiction and yet was the most beautiful writer of historical fiction I have known. Fred struggled all the same but was a profound spoken word poet. There were days when he would stand up amongst 200 men, noise, shouting, heavy steel doors banging and silence would fall across the pod. He would belt out some of the most prolific stanzas. Of course, there were the countless young rappers too whose lyrics told of the mean streets of Oakland. Eventually, I was transferred to a maximum-security prison. For the next 11 years, I lived in a war zone. Despite the chaos, I continued reading and studying. In time, I would develop a discipline to refrain from spending the money my family sent for commissary and food packages. Instead, I used it to purchase books. 

I vividly recall the conversation we had. In essence, we discussed the fact that, given the likelihood I would spend the next 25 to 30 years fighting for my freedom, it was imperative that I begin studying and learning how to navigate the socioeconomic and political forces that held me captive, both mentally and physically. In time, I came to learn there was a hidden university of prison intellectuals who had accumulated a vast array of knowledge and books about the inner workings of America’s criminal legal system and its socioeconomic and political systems. Some of which they had authored themselves. There were brothers like “Money” from the Bronx, who took me under his tutelage and began teaching me how to litigate civil and criminal law, writing, drafting civil complaints, and how to hold public officials accountable through various legal instruments. Then there was “Poo” from San Diego who introduced me to the brothers who had their own libraries tucked away in boxes under their bunks. There were some 15 or 20 of us on the yard who had accumulated at least 100 books on various subjects ranging from Africana studies to the sociology of formal and informal social networks. Of course, there were the storytellers and writers who assisted me to discover an untapped ability to write and tell stories.

One day, I vividly recall sharing with my cellie, Ameer, one of my escapades growing up in the backwoods of Oklahoma. We laughed and compared life in his hometown of Richmond, California to Wewoka. After a few stories, he began to encourage me to write and share them with others. So in 2006, I signed up for a creative writing class taught by incarcerated author and poet, Spoon Jackson. Spoon was heavy! He had achieved a level of success from prison that most writers, free or incarcerated, could only aspire to achieve. For six years, he taught others and I. We wrote and we shared. At first, I wrote essays and short stories. These essays and stories eventually turned into books. I wrote of my childhood growing up on a 200-acre ranch. I wrote about California’s prison history as told by men who had spent decades in solitary confinement; men who had been incarcerated since the 1970s. I wrote about “Product of the Ghetto” where survival knew no law; the pains of poverty and incarceration; and how to resist the forces of state power. 

I weaponized my words by using my book royalties to establish the UBFSF and create a vision and mission to advance education not in the strict sense of “credentialism,” rather education as it pertains to empowering people to take action to effect political transformation in our communities. One of the first programs we worked to get off the ground was our “100 Prisoner Book Publishing Literacy Program.” Here, the objective is to create counter narratives to combat mainstream media portrayals of crime and punishment. In doing so, we control the narrative as to who we are and more importantly, how it is we came to be America’s incarcerated. In addition, we want to provide the educational experience I benefited from where studying, writing and publishing resulted in not only the formation of the UBFSF, but also in my work “the Zo” being studied by students across the nation and eventually adapted to film by the Marshall Project and nominated for two Emmy Awards. When we began this program, initially we collaborated with Critical Resistance (Oakland) to teach a six month Abolitionist Writing Workshop at Solano State Prison in Vacaville, California. Next, we partnered with lecturer Megan McDrew at UC Santa Cruz to create a “Social Justice Autobiography” essay submission project and writing prompt which would eventually be mailed to over 150 incarcerated intellectuals across the United States. We also collaborated with Underground Scholars Initiative, which is a formerly incarcerated student club on all nine UC campuses. This particular partnership allowed us access to the Martinez County Juvenile Detention Center in Martinez, California to conduct a 12-week “Writers’ Room Workshop” which I designed and taught in prison for years. By now, we had accumulated over 200 incarcerated intellectuals’ work and processed hundreds of inquiries. 

Working with the Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee (IWOC), we selected some 100 of these works and began searching for a university partner to assist in editing, transcribing and digitizing the content. The result would be the “Writing Beyond Prison ‘Living Archive”” developed in partnership with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University. Indeed, it was a proud moment for our organization as the archive bridges the inside/outside; connecting students, academics, and organizations with the voices, ideas, and experiences of our incarcerated brothers and sisters who are working on the inside to dismantle institutions that dehumanize, criminalize, and procure the social death of poor, black, and brown people. In closing, I leave my reader with this to ponder: Somewhere, I recall reading that prisons like any other institution formulates a discipline through the unique experiences of those who dwell and operate within them. 

Historically, society has been placed at a disadvantage because the study and development of penology has been left to the so-called “experts” (i.e., the majority of those in academic and professional circles that exclude the voices and experiences of incarcerated intellectuals). In order to protect their rackets, they go to great extremes to discredit and silence us.  Here, we can no longer afford as a society to allow this one-dimensional approach to monopolize the development of a discipline so critical to the future of our communities. To do so would deprive ourselves of the benefit of lessons and experiences had by countless unsung voices that have arisen from these dungeons to teach us that the failures of the American prison experiment can largely be attributed to society’s unwillingness to listen to reason and question the motives of these so-called “experts”. To this end, at no time in history, as in the present, has the search for truth and solutions to ending mass incarceration and the problems that come of it been so great. That said, will you join and support our effort to build awareness of the unique vision and value that directly-impacted incarcerated citizens bring to the movement to end mass incarceration? Join us as we empower the voice of the unsung and marginalized–that is, the incarcerated man, woman and child whose circumstance we must change.