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

by Hill Harper

  Now add a single individual to that portrait of discouragement, Leo Hayden, the prison’s director of a recent ten-week reentry plan for inmates leaving prison, who brings busy days of coursework in computer training, money management, résumé writing, job interviewing, and anger management to those same cons who used to sleep all day. Hayden knows what he’s doing, too. He’s a former NFL running back whose interest in drugs sent him up for five years.

  These days there has been a giant shift in the prisons of Louisiana. Inmates leaving all Louisiana state prisons get some version of that ten-week program (even though a large population of those incarcerated in Louisiana’s local prisons are still sleeping all day). But my point is that, if the tectonic plates beneath the prisons in Louisiana are shifting, and more and more of its wardens and state officials are beginning to admit the value of reentry programs, and if Louisiana prisons can begin to change, then just about anything can.

  This is a good time to mention that you’ve got to add a second, parallel branch alongside the one leading to your education as a video game designer. It’s time to show it on your blueprint. Running in the same direction as your plans for getting into college is the technical trade you’re going to begin to learn.

  Didn’t you say the new training courses started in a month? So choose your initial, temporary “first” career path now, whether it be plumber’s assistant, building maintenance, auto mechanic’s assistant, or construction. I’ve included a copy of the blueprint you sent me with this letter, to show you where to draw in your parallel work survival plan.

  And oh, I forgot to mention: It so happened that just when you told me about the Pell disappointment, I was looking into another source for scholarships, and as soon as I have all the info, I’ll send it to you. I was saving that one for last. Stay strong, man. Hold tight to the plan. Keep straight and tall, even if the earth trembles beneath you.

  Peace and love,

  Hill

  GRANT YOURSELF

  P.S. One last thing, fam. I was on the phone with my buddy Enitan Bereola last night. He’s the bestselling author of this contemporary gentleman and etiquette book called Bereolaesque. I’d love for you to meet the guy. He has a heart for Brothas and Sistahs. I told him about you and he insisted on sending you something.

  Dear Brotha,

  It’s a crying shame when we live in a world where some men would rather be blackmailed than be a Black male.

  By the looks of VH1 you’re all dumb. You’re full of cum and only interested in drinking Coke and rum with girls barely twenty-one. And though your woman is the one, you can’t seem to stick with just one—“some” is more of an adequate sum. And it definitely ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none. Your only talent is picking up a football to run or picking up a gun to stun someone, then proceeding to mug someone ’cause that’s what a thug would’ve done. They say women outnumber you in college seats, and you’re so used to hearing the word no that yes sort of sounds like defeat. They’ll keep feeding you this BS as long as you’re willing to eat because that’s what they want you to believe.

  My soul bleeds when they say you just move keys and smoke weed because in reality you sow seeds. They say our women just sew weaves slowly while we sell trees, ducking and dodging the police in our big-rimmed, dark-tinted SUVs. They think you’re dumb thieves so they put you on blast, The First 48—A&E—for all to see and agree. They think you’re illegitimate . . . illiterate, can’t read—wear watches for shine but can’t tell time. That’s what they want you to believe.

  It was said that if you want to see a Black man on TV, you’d have to turn to America’s Most Wanted. No, no—all you have to do is turn to CNN and look into the Oval Office. Though you’re too frequently overlooked, overbooked, and counted out, I see you and I appreciate you.

  I appreciate you for thousands of years of excellence, from pyramids to presidents.

  From effort to excellence, if you don’t hear it from anyone else—Brotha, I appreciate you. Like all men, you were created in the image of God, so appreciate yourself, and learn to appreciate your neighbor. If you don’t give your Brother some time, the system will.

  Your family,

  Enitan Bereola II

  LETTER 30

  True Access to Education

  He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

  —Victor Hugo

  The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

  —Aristotle

  Hey, Brotha,

  What’d I tell you? What seemed hopeless a couple days ago certainly has picked up today. I can’t promise anything yet; I can only tell you that I’m on a mission—to throw as many possibilities in your lap as I can. But it’s up to you to investigate them and see if they pan out.

  I got frustrated surfing the web and looking for education opportunities for incarcerated people. Don’t get me wrong, I found a lot of them. One of them, which was started at Bard College in New York State, is called Bard Prison Initiative (BPI).1 BPI creates the opportunity for incarcerated men and women to earn a Bard College degree while serving their sentences. It’s the largest program of its kind in the United States and enrolls 250 men and women in prison, with choices of over 50 courses each semester. By 2011, Bard had already granted 157 degrees to BPI participants and enrolled a total of nearly 500 students. The degrees they award are full-fledged, with courses taught by the professors who teach on campus.

  In fact, the Bard program has been so successful that it led to the organization of an academic group called the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, designed to support other innovative college-in-prison programs throughout the country.2 Now Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Grinnell College in Iowa have similar programs, and they’re trying to develop the same thing in ten more states within the next five years.

  I looked into those developments and discovered the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project; a literature-study program in Dorchester, Massachusetts; the Prison Outreach Program at Georgetown; the Lipscomb Initiative for Education at the Tennessee Prison for Women; Marymount Manhattan’s Bedford Hills College Program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility; Ohio University’s Correctional Education program;3 and about five other programs in other states—even the Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison program at Sing Sing. But I couldn’t find a damn thing in your state!

  So I went on this website PrisonLinks.com but got frustrated because the links I happened to choose took me to pages that didn’t exist anymore. Then I clicked on “Inmate Educational Programs,” which took me to what seemed like a grab bag of good information and people trying to sell things. But that’s where I also found the Prison University Project, a college made up of a few portable trailers and a laundry facility inside San Quentin State Prison, where about four hundred incarcerated students take twenty different classes as the teacher competes with the noise of dryers and washing machines. And I was thinking, of course, “Damn it, why didn’t he end up in Cali to do his bid?”

  THE PRISON COLLEGE FUND

  Then suddenly—bingo!—my eyes lighted on another link, for the Prison Scholar Fund (facebook.com/PrisonScholarFund). It was their statement of their mission that got me excited: “The Prison Scholar Fund invests in incarcerated students, empowering them to realize their post-secondary educational aspirations, and advocates for correctional reform, bolstering grassroots pressure to amend the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.”

  There we go. There’s always an answer if we stay open and patient and keep searching. It was the list of values I read on that website that really grabbed me. I had no idea what was backing them up, but I loved their attitude.

  Let me list what they believe, ’cause I believe the same things. Then I’ll clue you in to who’s behind some of it.

  Here they are:

  Every inmate has the potential to become a law-ab
iding and contributing member of society.

  Quality education bestows knowledge which unlocks human potential.

  Every inmate should have access to quality education regardless of ability to pay.

  Those most affected by a problem should have the chief hand in its solution.

  We believe in second chances and self-improvement.

  We believe that stripping a person of an education is nothing less than an assault on his or her potential and dignity as a human being, and as a contributing member of society.

  We hope that punishment by educational deprivation will eventually be recognized not only as punishment, but also as a particularly unacceptable form of punishment, one that is literally both cruel and unusual.

  We act on relevant research, we act with common sense, and we act with compassion.

  Here’s the deal. For every dollar you can get from the scholarship, I’ll match it. Then you can take advantage of the correspondence courses that I know are available to anybody with the cash. (Please don’t forget the vow we made on the phone a few months ago: “Anything Hill does for me has to be matched or surpassed by something proactive I do for myself.” We’re in this together 50/50.)

  It wasn’t until I went to a page on the same website called “Prison Scholars” that I discovered the Dirk Van Velzen Scholarship, which can be used at any “accredited two/four-year college or university in the U.S., for any undergraduate study.” To make it more likely to get that scholarship, you need certain personality characteristics: “motivation,” “character,” “leadership,” and “service to others.” Sound familiar? In order to apply, you needed to write three essays; fill out, sign, and date an application; and provide information about your incarceration. All of that was accompanied by a couple paragraphs of application instructions, as well as more tips for success: “The successful candidate will present a well-articulated application and a coherent plan for the use of scholarship funds to further his or her educational goals. This means that you will need to know what college or university you want to attend, which course(s) you want to take, how much it will cost, etc. You will need to research your plan.” You can apply every quarter for this scholarship, and they make their decisions at the end of March, June, September, and December. If they do turn you down, you can apply again and again, quarter after quarter.

  I went right back to Google and found an application for the fund. You’ll find it in the envelope with this letter. But in case any of your homies want to try the same thing, they can ask for an application by mail:

  The Prison Scholar Fund

  23517 Orville Road East

  Orting, WA 98360

  Discovering that scholarship certainly helped my outlook. But I kept wondering who was behind it and where the money for it came from. After some digging, I discovered a lot about it. What I found tells you a lot about not only the person behind this scholarship program but the attitudes of certain people on the outside toward those who’ve been incarcerated.

  The Prison Scholar Fund was started by a prisoner just like you, Dirk Van Velzen, who was in the second year of a ten-year sentence for a series of burglaries. He’d managed to get the money to pay for some college credits from Penn State’s World Campus by selling calendars made by other guys who were locked up. But when his pops started helping him out, he decided to redirect the funds to help other prisoners.

  I don’t know if money is still available from that particular scholarship fund, but it’s good to know that this kind of thing is out there.

  BACKUP PLANS

  We can’t, however, put all our eggs in one basket by hoping that any one scholarship fund is still available and also hoping that there will be non-Internet course offerings. Or that you’ll get moved to a prison that allows access to a computer. We don’t need to rely on a “lucky break.” We need to handle it ourselves. So we’re going to work on that tech training in auto mechanics you’ve decided to add to your blueprint as a parallel, temporary plan, and hopefully that skill will carry you along in your first months, or year, on the outside. I think it was a good choice. Maybe none of those college courses are available to you now, but as we’ve discovered so many times before, lessons in growing new skills are everywhere. No lack of funds or public prejudice can keep us from learning.

  All education, all knowledge, is cumulative and builds personal power.

  For example, the other day, I was reading about Leo Hayden on the website of the New Orleans newspaper The Times-Picayune. I found out he has a maxim he shares with all his incarcerated students: “Living justly in an unjust world.”

  What he means is that, sure, you may have been dealt a shitty hand. But the key is to stop thinking about who to blame for it and figure out what to do about it. One of Hayden’s mantras says that the only way to stay out of prison once you get out is to change “people, places, and things.”

  Finally, keep in mind that education is also a spiritual transformation. You cannot predict all the ramifications of the knowledge you will obtain. What you learn in one area has a tendency to leak into another totally unexpected field and be of help. All education, all knowledge, is cumulative and builds personal power.

  Peace,

  Hill

  SCHOLARSHIPS

  THE LOCKED-UP LIBRARY

  LETTER 31

  Grit and Grind

  If you really want it, you got to work for it and if you work for it, it will work for you, in its own time.

  —Lemon Andersen

  Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

  —Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

  Courage isn’t having the strength to go on-it is going on when you don’t have the strength.

  —Napoléon Bonaparte

  My Miracle Brotha,

  You’re on a roll! Never would it have occurred to me that not only could you organize your own circulating library, you could also organize your own university! That may be a first. I’ve heard of the University of the Streets, but you just founded a self-started and self-run U of P! The University of Prison run by and for cons. Amazing! What’s going to be your mascot? Ha! Progress should be recognized and praised, so great job. Now that you’ve shown me that, though, it’s time to raise the ante a little. I think you’re ready and can handle it. Working in Hollywood for more than twenty years, I’ve realized that so many people want to be on the red carpet at the movie premiere, but they don’t want to be on the carpet in years of acting class. So many want to be “rich,” but they don’t want to do rich work. I don’t want that to ever describe you or me. That’s what this letter is all about.

  Reading your letter describing your own Locked-Up Library reminded me of the incredible Johna Haynes and made me go back and look up that article on him in The Times-Picayune by Cindy Chang that said, “Angola inmates are taught life skills, then spend their lives behind bars.”1

  I picked up a few more of Haynes’s tips for getting your education in prison by any means necessary:

  1.Haynes keeps up with technology without a computer by saving news clippings about social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

  2.He subscribes to a trade magazine for chief financial officers of companies he’s interested in. In your case, you could get ahold of some magazines about computer programming language, graphic design, animation, or video game design. Just say the word and I’ll look into it, get you a subscription to one of them.

  3.He keeps flash cards in all his pockets with the new vocabulary words he wants to learn.

  4.Having decided he’s interested in learning in general, he’s widened his reading tastes enormously. The written
word has become one of his greatest pleasures. About reading the Japanese novel The Makioka Sisters, he said, “I saw the cherry blossoms from Angola; reading is my escape.”2

  There’s another important thing Haynes does, but it doesn’t really have a lot to do with getting an education. I debated with myself about mentioning it, because I know it’s a sensitive subject. But what the hell, we said we’d be honest with each other. Haynes frequently writes letters to his four children full of good, upbeat advice, carefully checked for grammar, spelling, and handwriting. I know we spoke earlier about your corresponding more often with R. J., and I wanted to remind you to do that.

  LOOK, MA, NO COMPUTER!

  Hey, it’s serendipity time again. While you were organizing your Locked-Up Library and university, I started wondering what you could learn about designing games if you don’t have access to a computer. Well, I researched a bit and found a website called StackExchange.com, which bills itself as “a fast-growing network of 105 question and answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming.” On a chat board on that site, some professional computer programmers were discussing the possibilities for learning to program without a computer. It didn’t take long to find somebody taking part in that discussion who began asking exactly what I wanted to know. “I have a friend in prison who wants to learn programming,” the post said. “He’s got no access to a computer, so I was wondering if people could recommend books that would be a good introduction to programming without requiring a computer.”3 Bingo!