Reclaiming Our Humanity: Community, Culture, and Healing

By Ivan Kilgore

For much of my younger life, I believed crime was primarily the result of individual choices. I accepted the common narrative that if people simply made better decisions, our communities would thrive. While personal accountability remains essential, decades of incarceration, relentless study, and honest self-examination have taught me that this explanation barely scratches the surface. Today, I understand that our choices are often shaped by forces much larger than ourselves—forces rooted in history, culture, public policy, and systems that have influenced generations.

There was a time when concepts like structural racism, institutional oppression, and generational trauma were foreign to me. I heard the words but did not fully grasp their meaning. Prison became an unlikely classroom where I began asking questions I had never asked before. I immersed myself in history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and African American studies. What I discovered forever changed how I understood crime, punishment, and, perhaps most importantly, healing.

When we speak about community, we cannot ignore the culture that shapes it. Culture is more than food, music, or celebrations. Culture carries our stories, values, traditions, resilience, and collective memory. It teaches us who we are and where we belong. When a people are disconnected from their history, stripped of their identity, or denied access to their cultural heritage, entire communities suffer. The wounds become intergenerational, passed from one generation to the next until someone chooses to interrupt the cycle.

I have come to believe that many of the struggles we witness today are connected to communities still carrying the legacy of oppressive institutional policies. Those policies did not simply disappear because laws changed. Their effects continue to influence neighborhoods, educational opportunities, employment, housing, health care, and the criminal legal system. Understanding this reality does not excuse harmful behavior. Rather, it provides the context necessary to address the root causes instead of merely reacting to the symptoms.

At this stage of my life, I believe our greatest challenge is not simply reducing crime. It is creating spaces where healing becomes possible.

That is why I struggle with the notion that prisons are places of rehabilitation. My lived experience tells me otherwise. Prisons are designed first and foremost to punish, isolate, and control. Every aspect of prison life reminds a person that their freedom, dignity, and humanity are subject to someone else’s authority. Even when educational opportunities exist, they often operate within an environment fundamentally built around deprivation rather than restoration.

Yet despite these realities, hope still finds a way.

Hope arrived for me through creative writing.

Writing did far more than teach me grammar or storytelling. It gave me permission to examine my own life honestly. It forced me to confront childhood trauma that I had buried beneath anger and survival. It taught me empathy by requiring me to consider experiences beyond my own. It strengthened my discipline, patience, and time management. More importantly, it helped me discover that healing begins when we are willing to tell ourselves the truth.

Every page I wrote became another step toward understanding the institutions that shaped my beliefs and the choices I once made. Instead of seeing myself only as the worst decision I had ever made, I began recognizing both my responsibility and my capacity for growth. Writing allowed me to reclaim a voice that incarceration had attempted to silence.

Without creative writing, I honestly do not know how I would have survived these many years behind prison walls.

That experience is why I strongly believe nonprofits working inside correctional institutions should expand beyond traditional programming. Education remains essential, but education alone is not enough. We also need culturally responsive healing programs that reconnect people with their heritage, identity, and humanity.

Imagine prisons offering arts programs rooted in cultural history. Imagine creative writing workshops that encourage incarcerated people to explore family histories, community traditions, and personal identity. Imagine partnerships with historians, artists, musicians, elders, and cultural organizations that help individuals understand where they come from while envisioning who they can become.

Healing cannot occur when people are constantly reminded only of what they have done wrong. Healing begins when people are also reminded of what they are capable of becoming.

For African Americans, this conversation carries particular urgency.

Throughout history, access to Black history has often been restricted, distorted, or erased. Within prisons, that reality can become even more pronounced. Books exploring Black liberation, resistance movements, and cultural identity have too often been treated with suspicion or labeled inappropriate. In some instances, materials celebrating Black history have effectively been treated as contraband.

When people are disconnected from their historical inheritance, they lose more than information. They lose agency. They lose connection to those who sacrificed so future generations could experience greater opportunities. They lose the responsibility that comes with understanding both the victories and the unfinished work left before us.

Knowing our history is not about promoting division. It is about cultivating accountability.

When I study the lives of those who endured unimaginable hardship yet continued organizing, educating, and building institutions for future generations, I cannot help but ask myself an important question: What legacy am I leaving behind?

That question has become one of the greatest sources of healing in my own life.

Today, I no longer define success by what I accumulate. I define it by what I contribute. Every article I write, every mentoring conversation I have, every educational initiative our organization creates represents another attempt to transform pain into purpose.

Community, culture, and healing are inseparable.

Healthy communities require people who understand their history. Strong cultures nurture belonging, dignity, and responsibility. Genuine healing requires spaces where truth, creativity, accountability, and compassion can coexist.

This work cannot be left solely to prisons, governments, or nonprofits. It belongs to all of us. Families, educators, faith leaders, artists, community organizers, formerly incarcerated people, and those still incarcerated each have a role to play in rebuilding what generations of trauma have damaged.

Healing is not weakness. It is courage. It takes courage to examine painful histories. It takes courage to confront our own mistakes. It takes courage to forgive, to grow, and to imagine something better than what currently exists.

I remain incarcerated, but my vision of freedom has expanded beyond physical walls. Freedom begins the moment we reclaim our humanity, reconnect with our culture, and commit ourselves to building communities where healing is not the exception but the expectation.

If we truly desire safer communities, then we must invest as much in healing as we do in punishment. We must create opportunities for people to rediscover their identities, tell their stories, embrace their cultural heritage, and believe once again that transformation is possible.

Because when a person heals, a family begins to heal. When families heal, communities begin to heal. And when communities heal, generations are given the opportunity to write an entirely different story.