Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones

by Hill Harper

  I got a feeling you’re about to tell me you don’t trust much shit put out by the government. And I can understand where you’re coming from. Then you might want to get hold of this book Rivers also told me about: Prisoners’ Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs in the United States and Canada, written by Jon Marc Taylor, an incarcerated Brother like you. Taylor seems to know what he’s talking about. He managed to get a BS degree, an MA degree, and a doctorate by mail while still incarcerated.

  According to that book, there are still ways to get free courses in prison, but it’s harder now, since Congress decreased funding for Pell education grants in 2011. I also read that students convicted of a drug infraction while receiving federal student aid could become ineligible for future funds under certain circumstances, but that it’s also sometimes possible to reverse that ineligibility. We need to find out more about it. Just say the word and we can start researching all of these details together.

  I’m gonna need you to stay patient, too. I know the only program in your jail is a mandatory GED course for those who don’t have their high school diplomas, and you already have one. But a lot of the state prisons, where you’re headed next, have courses in basic office skills and computer repair, and some pre-apprenticeship training in plumbing and even electrician’s work. Maybe you can let me know what’s available where you’re locked up when the time comes. Oh, and another thing. I hope you don’t think I believe that becoming a video game designer one day is completely out of the question. Maybe you won’t be transitioning right out of prison into that, but any stable job when you get out can provide the options for more education toward that goal. I couldn’t tell you one way or another for sure, because so much of that depends on you. But if it happens, it won’t just happen—it’ll be because you made it happen due to a detailed plan. I believe that plan has to start with some kind of self-knowledge and understanding. To be sure, in your case it’s important to have an understanding of the game you’ve gotten yourself into, what society’s role in it was, and what part had to do with your decisions. But I think right at this moment it’s more important for you to simply understand you.

  I bet you didn’t know that one of history’s greatest philosophers was in prison and died there: the Greek philosopher Socrates. At his trial, Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I want you to truly examine your life. Ask yourself questions, be willing to honestly answer them, and most important, don’t judge the answers. What impact and legacy do you want to leave behind? What were you afraid of that led you to take actions that landed you in prison? Incarceration does not have to stop you; we are still learning from and quoting that inmate, Socrates, thousands of years later. You, and no one else, determine your legacy. But what really concerns me the most is the part of your last letter where you wrote:

  YOUR PARACHUTE

  I think I understand what you’re trying to say and I got a question. Did you pack your parachute? No, I’m not talking about landing on the roof of the jail with a helicopter and picking you up so you can parachute to freedom. My question has to do with some of what you wrote in your last letter. From what I see, sometimes you feel like you’re falling out of the sky, like you have no control over your life at all. Nothing to grab on to. On a free-fall spiral with no safety net and no one around to help break your fall. You even said that you’ve felt that way most of your life, even before you went to prison.

  All our parachutes are individual. They’re made from our own fabrics of experience, our own unique pattern for the life we are leading.

  I know that feeling. Most of us have experienced that in one point of our lives or another. The key, though, is to make sure it doesn’t last too long. So long that we feel there is no way to stop falling, that we have no control, ever. That’s why I want to tell you that you actually have your own parachute. That’s right, it’s true. You’ve had one all along. The problem is, nobody’s ever taught you how to recognize it, to use it to slow things down and gain some perspective. All our parachutes are individual. They’re made from our own fabrics of experience, our own unique pattern for the life we are leading. Our own ways of breaking falls and holding ourselves up when nothing else seems to work. Our own ways of dealing with our individual missteps and victories.

  So my question is: What unique pattern is yours? Have you learned how to pack it in a way that you can find the rip cord and pull it, after which you’ll suddenly break into a gentle sail? Or do you need to change the fabrics, pattern, or the way you pack your parachute? You were damn right when you said that a lot of the advice you read in Letters to a Young Brother won’t work in this new environment you’re in. Let’s see if we can get you a new parachute that will have you floating down to a different type of territory, with hopefully a little smoother landing. You’ll have plenty of time to devise some options on the trip down. Let me know what you think about all that.

  Peace,

  Hill

  P.S. To raise money for charity, me and some other actors are parachuting out of a plane at eighteen thousand feet tomorrow. Let’s hope my parachute was packed right, the rip cord works, and the chute opens smoothly! If you get another letter from me you know it was all good. If this is the last letter you got, well. . . . Kiss my moms for me! Haha. Peace.

  PROGRESS

  LETTER 6

  Escape Plan

  The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

  —Wendell Berry, author of What Are People For?

  To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: It is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

  —Heraclitus

  Hey, Brotha,

  Let me first say, thank you. The drawing you slipped into your last letter is taped to the mirror of my dressing room at CSI: NY. I check it out every single time I’m about to walk onto the set and I get a little chuckle out of it.

  You’ll never guess what I ended up doing. I guess it’s another example of serendipity. I was in New York for a few days to go to some meetings and see my agent, and one evening I ended up at this wrap party for a show on Broadway that was closing. Well, the set designer, whom I know from this little off-Broadway play I was in a long, long time ago, ended up introducing me to two dudes, Nick Higgins and his coworker, who are both librarians at the New York Public Library.

  Now, here comes the serendipity: Twice a week they, along with their volunteers, go to Rikers Island to run a small permanent library and wheel around four carts of additional books. They call the operation the New York Public Library’s Correctional Services Program. In partnership with the Department of Corrections, they also do a couple of projects based on books. For example, on certain days, incarcerated dads can make a CD of themselves reading a favorite book to their kids. Finally, they also publish an incredible two-books-in-one for the incarcerated: Connections 2012: A Guide for Formerly Incarcerated People to Information Sources in New York City and The Job Search. Hopefully I can find something similar for the state where the prison you’re assigned to will be. I’ll send you information about that search after you’ve settled in.

  Anyway, turns out that the next time these two librarians were going over to Rikers was that very next morning! “Why don’t you come with us?” said Higgins. “It would be very cool for our fund-raising efforts if we could say Hill Harper was passionately interested in this program.”

  So, very early the next morning (I think I still may have been a little hungover), there I was in Queens with a giant duffel bag full of books cutting into my shoulder, waiting for the Q101 bus to Rikers with Higgins. When we got there, I had a taste of some of the red tape you’ve been describing to me in your letters: missing clearance papers that made us wait more than a half hour at the gate, the need for temporary IDs in exchange for our own IDs, h
aving to exchange those temporary IDs for others to change buildings, X-ray machines, pat-downs, and special permission, since I was a last-minute addition. By the end of it, I felt like I myself was being booked. It made me appreciate the loyalty of wives, mothers, and other family members who go through this on a regular basis just to see an incarcerated family member. Maybe it also helps clear up why your aunt can’t visit that often. Job or no job, it’s an exhausting process.

  I was there until late afternoon and must have passed out about twenty-five books. I was so glad to get those tools into the hands of the incarcerated, especially when it had to do with information that could help them form a life plan. But I handed over comic books and thriller novels just as cheerfully. The only thing that really bugged me was when I saw the insecurity or paranoia of a guy being exploited by a scam—when the kinds of books he asked for tended to be about either an unrealistic get-rich-quick scheme, or worse still, one of the many paranoid conspiracy theories. Needless to say, I was a lot happier for a guy when he asked for a book on accounting or even about ways to start your own business. But more on that at another time.

  EXONERATION EFFORTS

  If you’re really serious about devoting all your time to proving your innocence rather than devoting it to acquiring the skills and education to make it when you get out, then it goes like this: There are guidebooks to the process. Apparently, one of the most useful and practical is Freeing the Innocent: How We Did It—A Handbook for the Wrongly Convicted by Michael and Becky Pardue. Michael Pardue was imprisoned for twenty-eight years in an Alabama state prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Working in tandem with his wife, Becky—Michael inside prison walls and Becky outside—the couple meshed information they found and won his exoneration. If you’re really serious about this, your family and friends should read the book, too, and all of you can work together on your goal of being proved innocent.

  About one convicted person a week in this country is able to be exonerated, most of them for rape or murder. Quite often it has to do with the thing we deal with the most on CSI: NY—DNA—but not always. There are national organizations, like the Innocence Project, devoted solely to correcting the problem of wrongful conviction. And there are a lot of serious studies of this issue. In fact, I’ve included a list of some of the most interesting books on the subject with this letter.1 But before you go off on a wild-goose chase, consider how long it took the Pardues to exonerate Michael—twenty-eight years! That’s why people who haven’t been sentenced to life rarely spend much time on research into this subject.

  SOME FIRST STEPS FOR YOUR READING PROGRAM

  If you want my opinion, you should use different kinds of books in a certain order to turn your life around, change its course, and ready yourself for things on the outside. However, before we get to that, I’ve got to tell you about a prison book program I discovered on the Internet. It’s called Books Through Bars, and its main purpose is to send free quality reading material to the incarcerated. Check it out. I know you don’t have access to the Internet, but I also found out how to contact them by mail or phone:

  Books Through Bars

  4722 Baltimore Avenue

  Philadelphia, PA 19143

  www.booksthroughbars.org

  (215) 727-8170

  You might even want to send them a list of the books you’re looking for and see what they come up with. Once you’re in a place without a limit on the number of books you can have, I’ll hook you up with a few books now and then, too. But don’t worry, I won’t overwhelm you and make it feel like homework. I want you to enjoy reading and not dread it.

  The more you read, the better you get at it, and your comprehension will improve as well. Reading even helps you become a better writer.

  Maybe you can organize your reading into these three categories:

  1.Inspiration. Start by reading stories of redemption, change, or transformation, or any inspirational stories in books, magazines, newspapers, or any other publication you can get your hands on. You’ll get inspired by learning how other incarcerated people turned their lives around and what steps they took to escape the prison industrial complex forever.

  Believe me, there is every kind of story. I really like 50 Cent’s take on the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter—a middleweight boxer who was arrested in 1966 at the height of his career and charged with a triple murder. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms. According to 50 Cent in the book he wrote with Robert Greene, The 50th Law, Carter resisted the demoralizing effects of nineteen years of incarceration by means of risky hard-core strategies, some of which involved a kind of civil disobedience. From the beginning, Carter knew he was probably in for the long haul, so he made up his mind to keep the prison industrial complex from destroying his spirit no matter how dangerous it proved to be. His reason was that he thought if he lost his self-respect in prison, he’d end up back there even if he managed to get released.

  Carter figured he could maintain his dignity and self-image as a free man only by refusing to wear a uniform, ID badge, or anything else that made him feel like a number rather than a human being. This, of course, attracted punishment. They put him in solitary confinement, but once there, he refused all television, radio, and girlie magazines—the common accessories most prisoners in the Box beg for to while away their time. Carter told himself that his refusal of these crutches meant there wouldn’t be any pleasures the wardens could take away from him. On the other hand, the only thing he could not do without was his mental freedom. To bolster and expand it, he used all his time in solitary to read every book he could get hold of. He eventually tutored other prisoners and wrote an autobiography that attracted people on the outside to his cause. He learned law with the goal of overturning his conviction.

  Nineteen years passed, and Carter finally trounced his sentence by legal means and was let out. The next logical step might have been to take a civil action against the state for wrongful incarceration and win a lot of money. Carter reasoned, however, that doing so would mean admitting that he’d been in prison, was damaged by it, and was seeking restitution. He didn’t want to think of himself that way. Instead he became an activist for prisoners’ rights. In 1999, Denzel Washington portrayed him in the movie The Hurricane.

  This story also points to the fact that if we could work to overcome racial divisiveness, everyone would benefit. For instance, Bob Dylan (a white singer) wrote the song “Hurricane,” and by bridging racial divides, he brought attention to Hurricane’s plight.

  There are whites and blacks, browns and greens who don’t see race first. Bob Dylan is someone who was willing to bridge the racial gap. It’s not easy to go against the norm and reach out across race lines. But when you do, it can open up opportunities that you never would have thought possible. Racism is an antiquated way of thinking; we need to be bigger than that limited notion.

  Another person who was able to get an abbreviated sentence was Anthony Papa, the author of 15 to Life: How I Painted My Way to Freedom. Papa is mostly a visual artist, but his book is another unusual, inspiring case of incarceration. He said in a lighthearted way, “[I] painted myself out of a prison cell.” Recently, he explained what he meant in an interview:

  While I was in prison, I acquired three college degrees and learned how to paint. Seven years later, my self-portrait wound up at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and at that point, I got a lot of exposure to my case. Two years later, in 1997, I was granted clemency by Gov. George Pataki. I basically painted my way out of prison.2

  Papa spends a lot of his time now fighting the drug laws that led to such a stringent penalty. He feels they’re antiquated and unfair.

  2.Learning Your Rights. Next, learn about the legal aspects of your conviction and the ins and outs of the criminal justice system. I don’t mean that you should spend all your reading time trying to prove that you’re innocent, since, as I pointed out, that usually takes
much, much too long. But you need to understand enough about the law so you’ll know exactly what the prison guards and officials can and can’t do to you. Being educated about the law and the justice system is a valuable asset. It reminds me of one of my favorite Jay-Z lines from “99 Problems,” when he basically rhymes that he didn’t pass the bar but he knows enough that he won’t let the cops illegally search his shit. If you’re denied any rights while locked up, you’ll know who to write in order to complain and how to sound intelligent enough about your complaint to get their attention. Play their game until you’re in position to develop your own game. You’ll also learn about the laws that govern parole, so you can put an immediate stop to any unfair or shady treatment from the parole board.

  3.Learning About Work. Finally, dig into some training books and textbooks that provide the education and training you’ll need to get a stable position in the working world.

  Because of your setback, your training and education need to take into account more than one tier of employment. If you tell me that you’re reading everything you can find about video game design, I certainly won’t say it’s a waste. But it’s unlikely that you can jump into a job doing exactly that as soon as you get out of prison. Anything worth having is worth sweating for. Your first professional tier probably has to be geared purely toward survival—anything from building-construction helper to plumbing assistant to janitorial work. Once you’re solidly set up in work like that, and going back to the street or being sent back to finish your sentence because you’re out of work is a dim prospect, you’ll use the stability (and hopefully, the saved money) you got from these jobs to “buy options” for furthering your education—maybe by going to community college, technical college, or even night school. If you still want to become a video game designer, you’ll be that much closer to it. And just like most things in life, who you know is often as important as what you know. So I want you to begin to think whether you have a relationship with people who can help position you for the type of job you want. If you don’t, then we need to begin making a plan about how you can develop new relationships even while you’re inside. I’m not trying to tell you not to dream big; I’m just trying to tell you that there are many steps up that ladder toward your biggest dreams. Each step you take is progress, so don’t be discouraged. Too many rich minds put affordable dreams on credit. But the harder it gets, the closer you are. Your past cells can’t stop your future sales. Legitimate sales.