Has it ever been?
Like, let’s get real honest about mental health.
Many folks who deal with mental health issues have trauma from outside sources. We need to start by acknowledging that fact.
The second thing that we need to acknowledge is that in the past our answer to mental health issues was to lock folks up, beat, drug, rape, and torture them while calling it medicine.
The third thing that we need to acknowledge is that prisons have never actually benefitted society.
They are only now starting to have rehabilitation programs that are helping people who are incarcerated, but the number of people in prison who shouldn’t be there is higher than ever.
For many different reasons, people who don’t belong in prison are locked away while many who belong in at the very least, a mental health facility, are walking free. Our system is broken.
It’s not designed to heal it’s designed to punish the sick, the weak, and the slow. It’s designed to ensure that the weakest amongst us have the smallest chance of survival and then when all the dust settles it blames us for its actions.
From Israel to America white supremacy has ensured that those of us who can’t won’t even get the chance to try so we’ll never know that we can.
Then they call us savages for not believing in their violent homicidal incestuous abusive God because we’ve decided to divorce ourselves from an ideology that is used as a weapon against the most innocent among us.
Whew!
Are jails the answer?
Some people who end up in prison find God, they become better people, and they go on to do great things, even though many of them remain behind bars.
Tookie Williams who started the Crips and who was a contributing factor in the creation of the Bloods, two of the most violent but well-known and community-driven organizations in the world.
In his later years and while in prison he became a child’s book author, convincing children to turn away from drugs, gangs, and the lifestyle that comes with both.
He became a wise teacher and a rebel against the violence that his actions helped to inspire. His intention was never to create a gang, he wanted to create an organization that protected the neighborhood from gangs, but in those days violence WAS the answer.
And so the Crips became one of the two most feared gangs in the world. Now they’re more about community outreach, now they try hard to steer away from violence – which isn’t to say they aren’t any less of a gang, but they’re trying.
Some of them at least.
Many Crips are in prison, as are many Bloods, many will stay there for the rest of their lives. What folks don’t tell you about guys who end up in gangs though, is that many of them were abused as children, groomed to become drug dealers for rich guys who sit at home and get to call themselves “Gangsters” without having to ever take any risk themselves.
I know this because I had the haha, privilege (?), of watching more than one gang grow from nothing into a behemoth that the entire country is afraid of, and it’s fucking weird.
It’s a bit like knowing my former football-playing friend is a celebrity, because to me he’s just O. Still, to the rest of the world he’s “Super O, able to throw a thirty-yard touchdown in 2.3 seconds,” I never knew him when he played ball, I only knew him after, when I was already drowning in gang life but not yet ready to admit it.
I don’t know if jails are the answer, I do believe that we need more community outreach. I do know that we need to lean on our community leaders like O who with his wife started Pathfinder Youth Center Society where they help encourage at-risk youth to dream bigger than economically. To find ways to make their dreams pay off, literally and soulfully.
I was a part of that program and I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them leading me and guiding me even all these years later.
I could easily have ended up a pedophile or a rapist, a gang member or a baby mama, but I had community programs and outreach workers to support me, even though they had absolutely no idea what the fuck they were doing, they tried to the best of their abilities to give me options outside of gang life.
As soon as I hit eighteen though I was on my own, and I floundered for a lot of years. I only ended up back in a new church because it was the only place that would have me, and the experience was lacking in the God I was promised.
I had to leave the church and the gangs behind to find my Gods again, and it feels really good, but there’s also a lot to resent about teachers who knew what was happening and chose to say nothing. Or doctors, lawyers, and cops who heard my cries for help and chose to call me a liar in favor of a bribe. Yes, that happened, more than once.
I’m tired. Domestic violence is a bit like domestic terrorism, you never expect it’s going to happen to you, but its also like the lottery because it can happen to anyone at any time in any place for any fucking reason.
The generational curses that come with domestic abuse affect mom, dad, children, and everyone involved, whether they know what’s happening or not, and before you know it your kid is the one going to prison because no one taught them that it was okay to take “No” for an answer.
This and so many reasons more are why I don’t have kids, why women like me don’t want kids, because we’re starting to see that jails, institutions, and systems of justice aren’t benefitting the victims or survivors, but they aren’t also teaching these abusers any lessons because they get out and keep trying to do it.
Six months after I identified one of my abusers, he was arrested only a few blocks from my old apartment, but not one person who knew about our connection thought that was even remotely weird.
I’m tired of fighting alone, but I also know that if I don’t keep asking questions and writing down my thoughts, I won’t get any fucking answers. So I ask again.
Are jails the answer?
I don’t fucking know, for some crimes? For crimes where innocent people are harmed, where children and women are hurt? Where it is a rape or sexual assault crime? What about terrorism? Where do we draw the line?
I think it starts not with abolishing, but instead with premetive strikes, which takes us back to community programs being funded if not more than the police at the very least equally so that kids have other options.
A kid who wants to dance isn’t going to murder someone if they’re given the chance to dance, y’hear me?
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 