The Prison of the Mind [On Kalief Browder]
“You see, mama? This is why, sometimes, I’d rather just be in jail. It’s much easier than this. This is too much.”
Richard had just passed away, a victim of his own addiction. The syringe, found seven stories under his lifeless carcass a few hours afterward, had injected a high-inducing substance mixed with an adulterated chemical that slowly switched his nervous system off. His brother was either speaking jibberish or speaking from his heart depending on the listener’s perspective. I’ve heard it too many times, but this time was particularly poignant.
Richard’s brother preferred the normalcy of the gated cells to the uncertainty of what the rest of us consider real life.
Prior to his passing, I hadn’t seen him in almost a decade. It had been so long that I forgot what he actually went to jail for. We lived a few buildings apart, my building facing the ave and his building facing the river. As youth, I remember him as a young man with ambitions with enough charisma to make us believe he could do anything he put his mind to. As time passed, though, this ambition had him bobbing and weaving the very streets I faced. He landed in jail for a crime we weren’t told about, and he wouldn’t tell us after he got out. Their humanity is erased, and criminality subverts them as human beings.
When they pass, they’re not seen as victims even as the current they’re swimming against needs more than wooden oars and life jackets.
So when I heard of Kalief Browder’s passing, I thought back to my cousins who’d ever done a stint in jail, and the offerings they needed to make to the jail gods to make it to their release date. The justice system doesn’t just fail our system from the point of entry into steel-gated rooms. It starts from birth, and having to swim twice or thrice as hard to meet what the rest of the country considers The Prison of the Mind [On Kalief Browder] | The Jose Vilson:
