I was stabbed in a gang fight at sixteen. The police arrived on the scene and a witness told them what they saw. The officers approached me and directed me to turn around and lift up my shirt. As I complied, they saw blood running down my back, confirming the witness’s statement. Asked what happened, I refused to cooperate.

Growing up in the street culture and occupying a Black body taught me to never trust people, let alone the police. I knew who had stabbed me but it’s a violation of the street code to report to authorities any violence we survive. I knew the drill: spend a night in juvenile and retaliate when I was released.

Then the officer said something confusing to me. She said I was a victim. No one ever told me I could be a victim. They always told me I was the problem, perpetrator, or offender. My confusion turned into anger because I didn’t understand what the officer was trying to communicate. It was like we weren’t speaking the same language. I spoke street. She spoke cop. I thought she was trying to set me up.

Before I was ten, I witnessed levels of violence that no child should see. My best friend was shot in his head by rival gang members. Although he survived, he left the hospital with a metal plate in his head and he was never the same again. I witnessed a grown man molest my relative. I remember her eyes, filled with tears of pain, despair, and helplessness, when I burst into the room as she was being victimized. I was too young to understand exactly what was happening, but I knew she was hurting and I didn’t have the strength or power to stop it. I didn’t know we were victims. I only knew I was going to hurt whoever tried to hurt me or the people I cared about. I responded to violence with violence.

In my sixteen years, I identified as a victim only once. My mom’s boyfriend asked me in his usual drunken slur if I stole candy from the store. I denied it and he called me a liar as he slapped me. The blow split my lip, knocking me from the hallway back into my room. He stormed down the hall, cussing and yelling about how he was going to beat the truth out of me. When he returned he started beating me with his leather belt. He kicked and punched me between the skin-peeling lashes of his belt.

My mother tried to intervene and I wish she wouldn’t have. I could handle the lashings, but what happened next affected me differently. He started beating her worse than he was beating me. The sting of the belt I knew so well was now aimed at my mother, my protector. I was scared for her as I thought he was going to kill her.

The officer said she wanted to help me. She wanted to notify my mother and make sure I received medical attention. But I am not accustomed to being helped, let alone by cops. I was eventually sent to the hospital and stitched, the word “victim” still ringing in my ears.

I will never forget the images of my mother being hurt. The punch to her face, the sound and sight of her body hitting the floor, the kick to her ribs, her torn shirt, or the blood pouring from her face as Jeff tried to squeeze the oxygen out of her battered body. Seeing my mother so powerless shook my world. I learned that day that I couldn’t rely on anyone else for safety. I didn’t feel safe at home so I went to the streets, eventually joined a gang that led me down a path of violence. I became good at it and thrived in the gang culture. On the surface I was feared, but deep down inside I was afraid. I was afraid of who and what I was becoming.

A few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, I shot and killed Carlos Hernandez Sanchez. Three years later, at twenty-one, I was convicted and sentenced to die in prison. Life without the possibility of parole. LWOP. Life without hope. When I first entered prison I was full of shame, anger, hate, and pain. I was carrying a lot of trauma on my teenage shoulders. I struggled with the moral injury of taking another human’s life. I wrestled with the idea of dying in prison. I tried to cover my shame with a blanket of violence, which led me to spend over a decade in solitary confinement.

Eventually, I came to realize that my capacity for violence did not define my value. I was worth more than spending my life in solitary confinement. If I wanted to be a better man, I needed to change the way I viewed my incarceration and myself.

Over the years of incarceration I had developed a mindset of us vs. the world. If I didn’t know you, you were an “other” — someone different from me. One of the main targets of my exclusionary thinking included the “freaks,” the “dings,” and the “j. cats” — these are the things we prisoners call our fellow prisoners who are living with serious and persistent mental illness.

When I decided to move my life in a different direction, I stood at my cell door in solitary confinement listening to those who were socially outcast — humans who I had “othered.” I began developing empathy and speaking to these men. I talked to them about life and wanting better than what prison offered. These individuals struggled with mental health. I related to their struggle and felt obligated to use my social influence to help in any way possible, even if it meant being disliked by my peers. I didn’t care what they thought of me. I was showing compassion to those who needed compassion.

I had spent the majority of my life doing what the street culture deemed admirable; all it had gotten me was a life behind prison walls, and then a life in solitary confinement. I had to do something different. Now I just cared about helping individuals who were vulnerable, who needed a voice and someone to talk to them.

I asked myself one question: “Theron, would the little boy you once were be proud of the man you have become?” The only thing more difficult than asking that question was dealing with the disappointment of answering it honestly. This caused me to make difficult, life-changing decisions. In 2014, I denounced my gang affiliations.

When I was released from solitary, I was introduced to the principles of restorative justice. I started working with my fellow prisoner Sterling Cunio and Professor Melissa Michaux. Slowly, I started to become someone I was proud to be. Restorative justice empowered me to take a healing path and let go of shame, blame, and excuses for past experiences. I realized my gangster life was little more than an attempt to never again be that little boy who witnessed his mother get hit over and over again. I didn’t want to be a victim again. The healing path required me to deal with my trauma and the times I have been hurt by others; I needed to see hate and unresolved anger as destructive forces. I began forgiving myself and those who had harmed me in my life. I started doing what I could to make amends for the harms I caused. I could never restore Carlos’s life. For me, making amends meant serving and helping others, and doing all I can to make sure the harms I committed are never repeated.

In 2016, I officially began working as a mentor with prisoners diagnosed with severe mental health issues. I helped them write letters to their loved ones. I assisted them with keeping up with their hygiene, making sure they had clean clothes and supplies to clean their cells. I played sports and board games with them.

One afternoon after playing a round of Ping-Pong with one of the guys I mentor, he punched me in the face. He had gone into a psychosis and I had become someone else to him. I was completely blindsided. My brain flooded with adrenaline. It was the most challenging moment I faced in my transformation. It was the moment in which my amends would be tested. And it was a test that I passed. In spite of my long history of violence, I did not respond with violence. My empathy for this man overpowered my trauma-induced inclination toward violence. I had to walk around the prison with a black eye. Doing the right thing gave me more credit than the violence could have ever given me. Staff was proud. My peers were impressed.

I currently work as a certified recovery mentor, peer counselor, and community peace builder. The work I do provides me a sense of purpose. It’s therapeutic, and serves as a motivating factor to keep me pushing for policy changes. I am good at what I do because I relate to the people I counsel. I’ve walked down the path they have walked down. I have hurt in ways that they have hurt. My credibility doesn’t come from surviving all the things that have traumatized me, it comes from all the work I put into healing myself. Part of my healing is staying committed to helping others find a path of healing as well. | TH

THERON HALL HAS BEEN INCARCERATED SINCE HE WAS 18 YEARS OLD, AND HAS BEEN SERVING LIFE WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF PAROLE. HE HAS SERVED AS AN OFFICER ON MY CLUBS AT OSP. HE IS CURRENTLY THE PRESIDENT OF CAPITAL TOASTMASTERS.

Didn't Know I Was A Victim By Theron Hall

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EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS ESSAY ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN PRISONS HAVE A LONG MEMORY: LIFE INSIDE OREGON’S OLDEST PRISON, THE WRITING REFERENCED IN THIS PIECE CAN BE FOUND IN THE ANTHOLOGY.

Sunday morning, crows in the park woke me. They were distant, but noisy. I let my mind wander back to that faraway sound, and it got closer. The key turned and I remembered waking in a field, on an island. I peered out of my sleeping bag. There was dried yellow grass crushed below me, seeds stuck in my hair. Steam rose from the sleeping bag, sun drying the dew. My nose was cold, my legs a sweaty tangle in the bag. I was still far from home. I missed the familiar sound of my life, the carpet underfoot when I walked down the hall. What was more uncomfortable: being hot and bound in this sleeping bag or the homesick weight returning to my chest?

I lifted my head to see the blue-black crows. The field was dotted with brightly colored sleeping bags laid out on orange tarps — the mummified bodies inside were still. I was usually the first awake: morning, the homophone of “mourning.” The crows picked at the butter we’d left out in our makeshift kitchen. We were young girls, careless in our cleanup from the campout the night before. Fat-glazed beaks glinted in the light. They were pecking at our unintentional meal, much like the grief had punctured my sleep.

Forty years later, my girl is in the doghouse. Her first major act as a twelve-year-old involved hurting someone’s feelings. She was immediately sorry. We agreed to stow away her phone until she returned from camp. Apologies were written and we waited until heads and hearts healed.

I look over at her on the couch in our living room. She is curled around a book, a posture as natural as fetal position is to the sleeping. She looks like a teenager, and I flash on myself at her age: “She is biding her time until she is a grown-up.” Like a person waiting for a bus, she is reading until adulthood arrives. I remember looking up from my own book to scan an unchanged world, and then returning to the pages, where things were happening. Nancy Drew drove her roadster through River Heights to solve mysteries. Nancy’s dead mother was the secret to her being a sixteen-year-old sleuth. All the best adventures happen when the adults have gone away. At the very least, this is what I read and believed. And when my daughter looks up from her book, I recognize her look of tired resignation: “I am stuck here for a while longer.”

Many of the men we meet at OSP fell when they were still embroiled in the turmoil of adolescence. They are guilty of having committed very serious offenses. At sentencing they are guaranteed to spend more time in prison than the total years they have lived in freedom. When (or if) they return to our communities, they will be held in a state of suspended animation. While teenage drama was cooking on my home front, we read Peter Pan in Ground Beneath Us to consider adolescent passages and those rites in each of the writers’ histories.

The clinical psychologist and professor Dr. Daniel Siegel draws on research in the field of interpersonal neurobiology as he makes a new picture of the adolescent mind in his book Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. He argues elegantly and humanely for a rite of passage between childhood and adulthood, rather than “getting through” adolescence. He recognizes that this is a time of intense neural remodeling as the child brain becomes the adult brain. By recognizing the processes underway, we adults, as well as adolescents, are able to celebrate the impulses involved in this transition (yes, even some of the riskier ones). He argues: “The ‘work’ of adolescence — the testing of boundaries, the passion to explore what is new and exciting — can lay the stage for the development of core character traits that will enable adolescents to go on to lead lives of adventure and purpose.” ⁴ Our brains are remodeled in adolescence so that we can guide the next generation.

Unlike my blunt theory of the missing parent as a catalyst for adventure, Dr. Siegel’s assessment is more nuanced. He starts with a model of parenting that involves important elements for secure human attachment: “The parent attends to children so that they feel seen, feel safe, soothed, and secure.” ⁵ Once parents have created a launching pad with these elements in place, the child has solid ground from which to try and fail, risk and succeed, risk and screw up as they form their wildly elastic brains into less plastic but strongly integrated adult ones. Risk-taking is a key component in successfully rewiring the brain.

Think of the effort it takes to walk for the first time, those faltering trials to make fat baby thighs hold up the body. The stumbling, and the teetering thumps of falling on a diapered bottom. Equal parts tears and laughter, a toddler finds her way to walk. Then think about the self-consciousness of a teenager. How each trial (walking across the lunchroom) is filled with perplexing social signals and unnerving interactions with members of different tribes. A certain amount of impulsive behavior needs to occur in order to make a move. In some ways, the impulse is the social equivalent of those early lurching steps. And with it comes that reward of propelling oneself — to the bottom of the staircase, or up the staircase! The teenage version of this desire to push away and try things alone is natural and terrifying for parents . . . and I think adults forget that it is equally frightening for the kids. It is a time when most kids wish to escape, to fly out of the nursery window to try out their independence. They need a catalyst — a sprite, a sprinkle of fairy dust, and a destination.

A magical telling of the hero’s journey from child to adult caregiver, Peter Pan centers around the Darling children, who are tucked into the arms of their parents, sleeping in their nursery. The Darlings have laid the groundwork for their children so that when they decide to set out on their adventures, they feel confident that the nursery window will remain open to welcome them home. They will be just as safe whether they grow and thrive or stumble and fail. However, Peter has an uneasy relationship with adults. He feels he has been failed by his mother, for when he returned from his adventure he was barred from the window and replaced by another boy. Peter’s attachment was severed. The hurt and distrust he felt in response to the failure of the adults in his life left him with the task of scooping up other “lost boys” and keeping them from harm — which means holding them in arrested development. To read Peter Pan as an adult is a different experience than reading it as a child.

Cameron Hayes identified the Lost Boys as a street gang and described childhood trauma as a leading factor in the formation of the band. A former gang member, Cameron works at OSP as a peer-to-peer counselor dedicated to helping fellow prisoners redirect their lives. He has studied adolescent psychology to better understand his younger self, and he chose a path forward so that he will be ready to assume his place when he clears the prison gates. Unlike Peter Pan, Cameron models healthy behavior, leads prosocial work, and teaches skills to encourage his peers. In “The Making and the Breaking,” he describes the challenging work of letting go of a strongly established antisocial identity in order to become the man he is meant to be.

We had known Le’Var Howard for over a year when he submitted his autobiography. I read the first passage. And I put it down. I was not prepared. It took me two weeks to carefully make my way through his writing. “I was thrown into that situation with no idea — like a fish in a net, but still in water.” The violence that is enacted upon the four-year-old in the first act will be repeated. Le’Var and I exchanged the piece to sharpen it with editing. I listened to his record on iTunes, G-L the 7 Letters, and we added lyrical passages to his story: “What is life? / But to live and learn / Never forget / Where we came from.”

In the narratives, we see the writers circling intertwined trails as teenagers, young men. They are lost. A pattern emerges. We recognize that they are trying to make connections, find their tribe, but they are missing a safety net, a secure attachment. There is no landing place if they take a fall. In “I Hadn’t Carried a Gun,” Kyle Hedquist writes that by the age of thirteen, he no longer trusted adults. At that time, he was swept away to his grandparents’ farm, a place of unconditional support and love. They created a home with structure and work and animals that required his care. And yet, the powerful experience of early childhood trauma left him disconnected. Almost thirty years later, he recognizes that as a teen he was desperate to win the approval of everyone — and then, through his own actions, he loses everything. There is no question that as an adult, Kyle now wishes he could have been the parent his younger self required. With this wisdom he moves forward, working to serve others.

In his essay “The Path Through the Woods,” Philip Pullman talks about the dark place, the wild place. In a fairy tale, it contains the path, the story line, the possibility for transformation. Pullman sees the storyteller’s role as picking the path and moving through the woods. You may stop along the way to select the right details, but a good storyteller knows to keep moving. Our storytellers have inherited family histories of addiction, violence, and generational incarceration. The only rite of manhood seems to be a passage directly through the heart of the beast. This doesn’t have to be the end point of their lives, and so the men write their lives forward, composing new chapters. They write stories to make the legacy of incarceration stop with them.

Our storytellers know the dark places too well. The weight of the violence. It takes years to learn how to talk about the darkness, but they can chart the course like Joseph Campbell’s hero. Prison is mythical. Prison is real. They are now men, responsible for caring for and learning to love their younger selves. They have to create secure attachments for themselves. Words and prayers and conversations help them pick their way through the thorns, travel out of the labyrinth of punishment. Like Bear, the storyteller at Columbia River Correctional Institution, they must wrap their hands around the knife and cut their own way through the woods.

My girl returns from her Neverland adventure out of the doghouse she was in earlier in the summer. Every year, she spends a month on an island in the north. This is the place where I woke up to the crows pecking at butter. There is a wilding that happens when kids live outside — showers are infrequent and no one harps on toothbrushing. Hairbrushes disappear. Many of the counselors are kids themselves, having left their own homes just a year or two before. Campers and staff come back altered. Shoulders square differently, and they wear light around their heads. Filthy feet have been grounded by rutted trails and chores (cleaning the outhouses is called “Joy!”). Heads are filled with starlight and the dappled sun through tree leaves. Faces and arms are sunburned, covered in scabs from mosquito bites. It is heaven. And it can be hell. When you miss home, it can feel more like you were sent away than you chose to fly. We wrestle with the conundrum: Do we insist she go even though it is hard for her to be away from home?

Reading the narratives for this book, I recognize the difficulty of reconciling the writers’ past actions with who they are now. Threading a needle that provides context for one’s life choices, takes responsibility for one’s mistakes, and makes room for one to atone requires grace. In her newsletter Letters from an American, the historian Heather Cox Richardson makes this observation: “Southern novelist William Faulkner’s famous line saying ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’ is usually interpreted as a reflection on how the evils of our history continue to shape the present. But Faulkner also argued, equally accurately, that the past is ‘not even past’ because what happens in the present changes the way we remember the past.” ⁶

This describes the carceral experience. A person held in a constant state of criminality — frozen as convict in the eyes of the world for ten, twenty, thirty years — can’t shed the skin of their sentence. From that moment forward they wear the label “felon.” The past action shapes their narrative, their sense of self, their place outside society. The person who fell (the shadow self) lives imprisoned by that old identity.

Flight requires practice. A pilot needs to log hours of time before finally taking off alone, and so I suppose this is why I encourage my daughter’s monthlong retreat. It is a chance for her to experience independence with training wheels. Her first week away, I received two letters on the same day: The first reported that camp was fun, and that a “smug” spider was making a web on her jeans. The second note asked if I would bring her home on visitor’s day. She was a thousand times more homesick than she’d been the previous summer. How does she resolve the tension between wanting to be at camp and wanting to be at home?

Humans are expected to hold two or more diametrically opposed emotions in our beating hearts. At times the pain is so acute that we think the muscle will finally squeeze itself into two pieces. During the remodeling of the adolescent brain, areas that are no longer used are rewired. Some of the sharp and intense emotions of this period soften with age. Our memories are linked so that days tie together into years, the way sentences become chapters. This is the kindness of aging: we are better able to hold more. Our relationships (with friends, family, enemies) have this in common: we balance on a pinhead the need for autonomy and for connection. | TDS

4. Daniel Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2013), 312.

5. Siegel, 145.

6. Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American (Substack), February 27, 2022

Most of my childhood memories fill me with adrenaline or shame. I remember being thrown across the kitchen, landing in the dog food bowl. I remember cowering in the corner as an adult hit and kicked me in his drunken stupor. I remember waking in the middle of the night, only to find a man trying to rape my mother. I was powerless. My brain protects me from vague recollections of even worse abuse. As I grew, I did all I could to avoid that powerless feeling.

I first got drunk at eight. I loved the feeling. Fast-forward to the age of thirteen, I was doing ecstasy and cocaine on the weekends, and smoking pot and drinking every day. As a teenager, I used drugs with my mother and other adults and we committed an array of crimes. Two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I tried heroin.

About a year later, I started going to a methadone clinic to get clean. One day, I got into it with the manager and started to walk out. She told me that if I left, I couldn’t come back. I was so upset — filled with emotion I didn’t know how to express. Overwhelmed, I burst into tears. I couldn’t talk. I just cried. She was taken aback and asked, “What do you want?”

I had never been asked that question. I’d gone through my life roaming from one need, one fear to the next. I knew I didn’t want to hurt. I didn’t want to feel. Going through the whole ordeal was too much for me. Soon after that day, I started using again. And a few months later I was in prison for a string of robberies with a sentence that rivaled the amount of time I had been alive. To anyone who has studied trauma, my story seems as sure as 1 + 1 = 2. I grew up in a dysfunctional environment where drug use, abuse, and violence were everywhere. Trauma wires the brain differently as it seeks escape as a form of protection, and it normalizes things like violence.

After I came to prison, my harming others didn’t stop. At nineteen years old, I sought a family and joined a prison gang. Although you may hear a lot about people joining gangs for protection, really gangs are a family for people who never had the sense of security that families should provide. I exchanged drugs for crime and violence. One day a series of events put me in the middle of a fistfight on the recreation yard of the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. In the middle of that fight a correctional officer shot and killed my best friend, Jayson Withers. With an officer sitting on my back, I was handcuffed as I watched Jayson struggle on all fours, gasping for breath. All I could do was watch — powerless.

Over the next few days, I went insane. I couldn’t stand being in my own skin. I couldn’t lie down without reliving every moment. I couldn’t stand still without seeing the look in his eyes as he gasped for breath. I couldn’t move without adrenaline overwhelming me. I asked to speak to a mental health counselor and she came to me with an annoyed attitude and said, “What’s going on?” I don’t remember what I said. I just know I was in crisis, and must have looked like it. I was breaking. I was at the limit of what my brain could handle. Her irritation rose as I couldn’t articulate myself, and she threw up her hands and said, “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

I wanted to go back in time. I wanted to forget. I didn’t want to be me. I wanted to escape from this life that was too much for me to handle. I broke down in tears and said, “Just leave me alone.” I was looking for a lifeline back to sanity, and she wasn’t going to give it to me.

Over the next year in solitary confinement, I slowly came out of it. The guy housed next to me and I talked a lot about philosophy, politics, and a program he had been involved in called Restorative Justice. I was interested in everything he had to say, and I really liked and respected him. Nonetheless, when I got out of solitary confinement, I held onto the gang politic just as tightly. As long as I did, part of me felt like Jayson’s death meant something.

I attended Restorative Justice groups where I was exposed to new ideas and people. I began to feel a sense of community. I met two of the people I call mentors today: a feminist woman professor and a mixed-race revolutionary dedicated to nonviolent practices. They were the very antithesis of the “family” I joined when I came to prison. Every time I walked into a group with them, I felt like I belonged. They showed me a level of understanding I had never experienced. They treated me as a friend, showing me a love and care through my transformation that cannot be understated.

When I found myself in solitary confinement (once again for another fight), I was given the opportunity to participate in a new program to get out of solitary early through group work. I had already been questioning where my life had taken me, and I continued this process. Then the facilitator gave me my final task before graduation. She handed me an index card written with the words: “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

I didn’t want to hurt. I didn’t want to be who I was. I didn’t want to live in the past. The only difference was that I was finally at a place where I was willing to work. I began the endlessly long journey of self-work. I shed countless tears, I went through the pains of self-control, and I discovered some of my triggers.

But this day, thinking about my client’s trauma when I sat down to write about the process of dealing with it, my mind went blank. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to rely on research and scholars’ words to talk about how to build resiliency. Another mentor of mine strongly discouraged me from doing so — and so I was forced to sit with it.

There are a million paths to experience trauma and a million paths to dealing with it — there is no clear space where one can say: “There, that is done.” Which led me to my next realization: I am still dealing with the trauma. I may have found a way to accept it for today, and tomorrow it may come back as strongly as ever. Everyone who has ever dealt with trauma would agree, we are works in process. It was easy for me to tell others it was not their fault, and it was quite another thing for me to internalize the message. I was still working on it.

As I struggled with Jayson’s death, nothing would make me crumble to tears faster than someone saying, “It’s not your fault.” People used to make jokes to me about the movie Good Will Hunting, how the Matt Damon character does therapy and cries when the therapist, Robin Williams, tells him, “It’s not your fault.” I really do love the movie though, because it touches on a very real concept. Many of us who have experienced trauma have a part of us that believes it was our fault. Somehow we deserved it, because if we would have done something differently we could have avoided it. We have internalized this fact and projected it onto others. If I deserved it, if it was my fault, if I could have avoided it — they can too. They brought it on themselves. One falsehood turns into another. We transfer our own trauma onto others — the victim becomes the victimizer. Hurt people hurt people.

In order to become the people we want to be, we have to deal with our pain. In order to fly, we have to deal with the things dragging us down. My work today is one of service. I understand trauma untransformed is transferred. While I stopped being criminally active and made a pledge of nonviolence, I remain in a world where both are the norm. Many people who desist from the criminal lifestyle burn all the bridges as they go. This ensures they will not return; however, it also limits who will be able to follow them. With the path obscured, everyone has to find their own way to transformation.

I have remained connected, showing the path and encouraging all to follow. I work to heal myself, my peers, and those impacted by crime and violence. I now find my sense of power in taking control of my life, being an agent of change and a credible messenger. Today, I often ask myself, “What do I want?” and I have an answer. I want to heal. I want to be a better person, so I help others. I want to bring out the best in people, and so I lead with love. WHAT DO YOU WANT? | CH

CAMERON HAYES IS A PEER TO PEER MENTOR, PUBLISHED WRITER, AND STUDENT. HE IS SERVING TIME AT OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY.

CAMERON HAYES

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WHAT DO YOU WANT?

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I will tell them, 
I survived the hell
of man’s design. A prison for the mind.
I will tell them that most of my
story was told without ever saying a
word.
The stress under my eyes, the wrinkle
in my smile, the tension in my gaze
and the white in my beard.

My carelessness and quick irritation.

I will tell them I played, I will tell
them that I worked, I will tell them
I’ve grown and we have grown apart. | LH

LE’VAR HOWARD IS A MUSICIAN, SONGWRITER, AND PUBLISHED WRITER. HE IS SERVING A LIFE SENTENCE AT OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY.

LE'VAR HOWARD

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ALL WITHOUT SAYING A WORD

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I am a human being. I’m a singer, drummer, dancer, a son, brother, nephew, an uncle, cousin, and a friend. I am a perpetrator who has inflicted detrimental harms on people. I am a victim of detrimental harms inflicted on me. I’m still figuring out who I am. I’m loving, kind, considerate, and spiritual, yet get misled with ideologies filled with toxicity, hypermasculinity, and hurt. I am a human being who has the capacity to grow, heal, and help others. I am a person who understands I cannot take back the harms I’ve done. Moving forward, I can work on the issues that led to them. I am a spiritual being who can transcend even through the darkest and coldest of times. I am a person lost in the confusion of the world, inside and out.

I was around twelve or so when we lived in the duplex at SE 24th and Hawthorne. The phone was black and cordless in the living room next to the kitchen. It was the first cordless thing our family owned. I was home alone. Dad was at work, little brothers were in Utah with their mother, and the phone was ringing. I answered and remember the short pause of the recording: “Do you accept charges . . .” without a thought, I did. Uncle Jimmy (my favorite) with his cool rasp, deep slang of vocals, asked, “Where’s your dad?” It was a brief call, yet it stands out today. When my dad got home, he asked me if I accepted the charges, and I said yes. He was positive. I did good. It was a blessing that Dad never went back to prison during my lifetime. He paroled from OSP in 1982 and he was able to stay out. And yet the tendrils of the iron house stayed in his glorified story line — and they attached to me.

Intergenerational trauma and forced assimilation wreaked havoc among the Native American communities — my family was no exception. My grandma Rose Owlchild was the first of our family to go to boarding school. She was kidnapped from her mom and dad and taken to Chemawa Indian School in Oregon from her home in Montana. She spoke no English and was forced to learn the King’s Tongue. I can look at her and her children (my dad, my uncles, and my aunties) and I understand that this caused so much more hurt. Stuck in a world with forced disconnection from all she knew — imprisoned for being Indigenous. This trauma shows in her grandkids who suffer the effects, including her great-grandkid who is doing life in a Washington prison. I look around me and I see different tribal people at OSP — and I see the same effect that has become almost normalized in Indigenous people. Hopelessness induced from being born into a world where people hurt people.

It is 2008. A phone call from inside county jail to my family home; a different setting, a new character. I had been sentenced to seven and a half years. My mother was heartbroken. Dad hid his feelings with discussions about sports. My little nephew Malique, who was six years old got on the phone. “Uncle, Uncle, when are you coming over so we can play catch?” I felt like crying. I didn’t know how to explain that I wouldn’t be playing with him. How could he understand ninety months?

Once upon a time, I used violence as a means of expression. I thought that it was the only way to get my point across or gain any respect. I conveyed an image that spoke fear. I wanted people to fear me. When really it was my own fear speaking: fear of not being accepted, fear of being hurt physically.

Fast-forward to a year ago, and I am talking to my mom on the phone. “Your nephew said to me after you got locked up, ‘Grandma, I’m gonna be just like Uncle Nolan when I get older.’ ” This time, I cried for the example I set. I cried for being that very same nephew wanting to be just like my big uncles and cousins — for wanting to
be like my dad. I cried because I packed on so much hurt. It is my story, which in part captured my nephew. I idolized the prison pictures of my loved one in the “big yard.” And now my nephew idolizes me. He sits serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence at MacLaren, the youth correctional facility. I feel disquieted in the face of my
nephew’s incarceration.

I see the generational repeat of prison doors closing on my family. I like to think that having an incarcerated loved one would work in opposition to this cycle of dysfunction in families (even though I have yet to see it done). I now have a great-nephew, and I can’t imagine him being swallowed by the system. And I think of my very own future. I want a family, kids, maybe grandkids. So today, I have become a Toastmaster, a certified personal trainer, and a restorative justice facilitator. I want to stop the glorified prison story line; I want to break the cycle for the next generation.

I have aged and see the impact of my choices. This shift in my thought makes me who I am inside the prison system. Me — not my homeboys, friends, the authority figurehead. Me, and the direction I’m choosing to travel in life. I can trust in myself to take “the road less traveled” and challenge myself to step out; to foster growth in my community behind these walls; and to practice for when I get released to foster growth outside the walls. | NJB

NOLAN JAMES BRIDEN IS A PUBLISHED WRITER AND SUB-CHIEF OF THE LAKOTA OYATE-KI CLUB. HE IS SERVING TIME AT OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY.

NOLAN JAMES BRIDEN

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BOARDING SCHOOL INHERITANCE

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On my scavenger hunt, I find small patches of moss and numerous little flowers, and I feel I have found buried treasure. These small seeds were probably carried by winds and wings that crossed over a twenty-five-foot wall and found lodging in offset bricks and crumbling mortar. Prison is brutal. I am almost always cold and hungry. The building’s structure with its cold steel bars and locks are callous. As if they can separate the body from the soul. Surrounded by loss, pain, and misery, life prevails.

While separated from the ones I love, I can still see beauty all around me. Even the menacing high concrete walls are no match for Mother Nature. Moss turns golden brown along its top and droops down the walls like worn curtains. Rain falls and makes patterns like mountainscapes. Every crack in the wall hides leaves and petals from windblown fields. The moss lying in the crevices smells of the forest I once ran through as a child. I secretly pick blackberries growing in a long-abandoned hitching post from centuries past. Life prevails all around me and new beginnings welcome me, call me, to find them on the Big Yard of OSP. | KH

KYLE HEDQUIST WORKS FOR THE OREGON JUSTICE RESOURCE CENTER AS A REGISTERED LOBBYIST. HE WAS GRANTED CLEMENCY BY GOVERNOR KATE BROWN — PREVIOUSLY HE WAS SERVING A LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE SENTENCE AT OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY.

KYLE HEDQUIST

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Life Prevails

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I struggle with my mother’s mortality

I struggle for my mother who puts on a brave face,
who hopes not to die till her son is free.
But with forty-one to life that seems like blasphemy
(I hope better judgment takes a hold of me).
Every day I hope no harm comes to me,
so I don’t have to stress my mom about me.

I struggle for freedom.

I struggle every day, trapped behind a concrete wall
with iron bars for doors that have no keys.
Not redemption — or good behavior — could set me free.
Until they have that life from me.

I struggle for change.

I’ve struggled for the change I see in me.
Oh, how I wish that they could see
the physical manifestation of the changes in me . . .
like wanting simple things like freedom for you and me.

I struggle to be a father to my daughter
I struggle to provide for and protect her
I’m sorry for the struggle I’ve caused my daughter
I hope she knows that I love her.

I struggle for human connection.

I struggle for that warm embrace.
That passionate kiss and that good-morning face. 
The people who I miss must be on a list.
We have access to corrections, as a means of connection
The Department of Correction must approve my connections?

The struggle is not unique to me.
People in this room now have a face
they see. Will my autobiography
and your physical agency set me free?
This is my Beautiful Struggle. | JK

JIMMY KASHI IS A PUBLISHED WRITER AND PRESIDENT OF THE ASIAN PACIFIC FAMILY CLUB. HE IS SERVING TIME AT OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY.

JIMMY KASHI

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I STRUGGLE

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