Orlando Mayorga

A: So, first I just wanted to hear a little bit about your background, your story, and why you’re working with Precious Blood.

O: So, my name is Orlando Mayorga. Everyone that I know and that loves me calls me Chilly. I grew up in Little Village [, Chicago]. I was born and raised in Little Village. So, I think a lot of my experiences as a child kind of led to the role that I ended up choosing as an adolescent. I grew up in a single-parent home. My mother is an angel to me; she did everything possible to keep me on the right track. But there were a lot of problems in the home that made me grow up as a scared, angry little boy. That transferred into always getting trouble at school, which further alienated me, and caused me to get in trouble a lot at school. So, it’s not an excuse, but as a child, being able to process everything that was going on was something that I didn’t have the tools to do.

I spent a lot of my time on the streets, and my role models were the people that were actually on the streets because I really didn’t have a positive role model in my life that I could look to, even within my family structure, to give me that guidance. I don’t want to say that the message of education being important and work ethic wasn’t there; it’s just that a lot of the stuff I learned on the streets made me go deaf to a lot of the things that were piercing me at home. Again, I made some very bad decisions leading up to my teenage years, when I decided to join a gang. That’s what I did; I think that choice was more based on the feeling of camaraderie and a brotherhood with other people who were hurting, just like me. We all found a way to feed off each other’s trauma, but in a way that we felt that we were showing each other love—a brotherhood bond.

At the age of 17, I made the choice of carrying a gun around as a safety mechanism. I think that’s really the narrative I hear a lot today with the young people that we [Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation] service: “I don’t feel safe unless I have a gun.” All that is driven by a fear of preserving your own life. Yet the actions that we choose prove our own way of thinking as flawed. At the age of 17, I ended up being put in a situation where I caused the death of another human being. One thing that I always do—and I am intentional about it—is to say his name. His name is Francisco Arellano, and I choose to do that—how do I put it—as a way of honoring him. Everything that I do now stems from being able to—and this is my way of processing guilt and remorse—honor him in that way. So, Francisco is a big component of what I do today because his life should not have been taken away for whatever reason we, as teenagers in the streets, think is a justified action.

So, that led to my incarceration for twenty years, starting at the age of 17. I think what helped me most throughout my incarceration was running into people who truly had my best interests. There’s a narrative out there that society tells itself that people who are in person are devoid of good, that people who are in prison are innately bad. That’s just not a true narrative of who people that are incarcerated are. I made a terrible decision, but it still did not make me an evil person. I just want to make sure that people understand that because if it weren’t for the people that were around while I was in prison who educated me, who took the time to mentor me, and who took me into more of a family-oriented relationship, I don’t think I’d be this version of me today, had it not been for the people that I ran into while I was incarcerated—who educated me in life and who encouraged me to take education seriously.

When I was in jail and prison, I was able to get my GED from Cook County Jail [and then I was] convicted and sentenced. I was able to get into an institution where I was able to get into college. One of the more impactful spaces, when it came to education, was a program called EJP, the Education Justice Project, which really added to the tools that I had when it came to understanding the importance of community building, no matter where you are. Even though I was in prison, I had very good examples of looking at the people around me about what that meant, making sure to honor Black history month, Hispanic heritage month, and creating events that brought people together to do something positive and build people up. EJP provided many different blessings to be able to do that, like volunteerism. One of the best programs that I had been a part of while incarcerated was a group that was formed and created by incarcerated men at Danville [Correctional Center] called Community Anti-Violence Education. The acronym for that is C.A.V.E. It was in that space that I began to learn about trauma and trauma-informed care, and I really started processing a lot of childhood issues that I didn’t know how to, even as an adult. So, being in a space with other men and growing as a result of that—sharing the trauma and sharing our truths and hurts, but also our greatest joys—is what really helped me to become a better version of me.

As a result of everything I learned in that group, along with the education I received through EJP, when I came home, I was able to utilize a lot of those skills and facilitation. I had the background knowledge about ACEs—adverse childhood experiences—and practiced the curriculum of SELF—safety, emotion, loss, and future. It provided me a pathway to be able to share that with—today, my executive director—Father Kelly. It was about a week after I came home that I was able to meet with him and have a conversation with him that ended up becoming a job interview, without me knowing it. That day, I was hired by Precious Blood to start as a mentor coordinator working with seventh through tenth grade young men—doing the peace circles, which we learned how to do in prison, learning about emotional intelligence, learning about social responsibility and all those emotionally-regulating truths that a person needs to make better decisions.

Today, my official title at Precious Blood is Program Manager and Director of Re-Entry, but my passion has always been re-entry, only because I recognize the barriers that are set up for people coming home and how easily people can be directed back to the revolving door, which we call recidivism. So, that’s what I do today. We have a team of re-entry specialists that are also formerly incarcerated. Again, the importance of relationship-building is at the core of everything that we do at Precious Blood. The men on our re-entry team are people that actually mentored me and educated me in life. These are brothers that I’ve known for many years of my incarceration, and they’re my brothers; I’m their brother. Maintaining the connections we made before we came home and making sure we were intentional about maintaining those connections once we all came home is something that we definitely try to model in our everyday service to our community.

So, when you ask the question about the reason why I’m engaged in the work that I do now, I always make sure to let people know that the work I do now is informed by my twenty years of incarceration, which then fuels my passion for the work that I do. It’s not about experience; I share that experience with many people, and out of that experience is the fuel for the passion for the work that I do.

A: Thank you so much for telling me your story. You mentioned that within your gang, you were feeding off of one another’s trauma. What are some of the traumas that other people faced, and why do you think these issues surfaced in Chicago? What support systems were missing or what do you think you guys needed?

O: So, when I was growing up, there were spaces for us to engage in, but there weren’t spaces in our immediate vicinity. In order for me to go to the boy’s club, I would have to walk about 2-3 miles every day to and from my home. When I talk about the resources that were needed in my day and in the day, of the majority of us that did time together, either there were and we didn’t know about it, or there weren’t any spaces or services readily available for us growing up. I see that today. In Back of the Yards [, Chicago], not many people know about Precious Blood, so it’s our job to get out there and actually inform the community about the work that we do.

There are many great organizations doing great work around the Chicago area, but a lot of times, what organizations do is work in silos. There’s a lot of competition around the funding that is made available through grants, so I think that plays a large part in the way that people tend to... silo themselves. Our job is to take a restorative justice approach to this work that we do.

Restorative justice has five components to it. One being radical hospitality—making sure that we never look at a person other than the person they are in the moment and be respectful of who they want to be. No matter what that viewpoint is in that person’s life, our job is to meet them where they’re at and offer a system and place of support where they feel safe enough to begin having those thoughts of wanting to engage in the change process for themselves. Not because it’s something we told them to but because it’s something they’re processing themselves, based on the support and the relationship that we’re building with people.

The second component to that is accompaniment. In order for a person to feel everything that I just said, we have to be willing to walk alongside that person and really be intentional about being there for people. The way that we try to model that is that instead of referring you to a job and telling you where to go, we actually go with you and advocate for you. When you go get your ID, or when you go to court, we’re right there next to you making sure that we hopefully minimize the systems that tend to oppress you, whatever those barriers or oppressive factors may be.

The third component of restorative justice that we practice is making sure that we’re intentional about relationship building with young people and their family. So, when you hear the word holistic approach, that’s what I think encompasses the relationship with young people and with their families, so that not only is the person we’re serving okay, but we’re [also] making sure the supportive systems around them are also well, in order to make that person feel complete.

The fourth component to this restorative justice philosophy is engagement or relentless engagement of systems and stakeholders. That means bringing in community folks. That means bringing in aldermen, local businesses, schools, and also sadly, the police. Whether we like it or not, they’re part of the community. We may not agree with everything they say, and they may not buy into everything that we practice, but we understand that in order for a community to be okay, there has to be some understanding between the police and the community about what it is that we’re trying to do to minimize the impact of what they do, which is surveillance and punishment.

The last component of the restorative justice philosophy that we practice is collaboration—in order for everything to work in unison and make sure that everything is working okay, there has to be collaboration across all those systems, stakeholders, and the participant.

So, that’s restorative justice in a nutshell that we try to model and practice here at Precious Blood, along with the Restorative Justice Health Network that is an operation in Chicago today.

A: I know that one of Precious Blood’s missions or visions is: “a hope-filled restorative justice community.” How do you think that we expand this holistic approach of restorative justice to make sure that the whole community experiences something like this?

O: So, currently Father Kelly, my executive director, and other restorative justice practitioners are in the process of creating a model of turning these measures to community issues. The idea is to build up community people: mothers, fathers, young people that can serve as agents of support within the community. This last week, there was a group of mothers that have been impacted by mass incarceration. The mother had either lost a child to mass incarceration or had lost children to street violence. This group of mothers meets once a month to have this healing space, which is called the mother circle.

They were recently trained in restorative justice peace circles that can then serve as a model to engage people who may have been harmed or may have caused harm in the community. The idea is to offer an alternative to people in the community to be able to call upon and rely on instead of the police. Many of the issues in the community will not require the police, but that is the automatic response that community and society has when any issue arises in neighborhoods. Our plan, or Father Kelly’s plan, is to create this alternative model to community building that relies less on the police and more so on organizations like Precious Blood in the community to be able to be the response team or the response people to a lot of the issues that don’t require police in the neighborhood.

What we’re hoping is that this model can then be able to address the more serious issues in the community when it comes to violence in the neighborhood.

A: I think that that’s a great point. You mentioned the mother circle—I was wondering if you could tell me more about what peace circles, how they’re run, and what their purpose is.

O: The peace circles have many different components to it. We use peace circles to bring information to the community, to bring healing spaces to those who have been impacted by some form of trauma, to learn about trauma and self, and to be able to help people grow in the knowledge of themselves. We also use peace circles to address harm and conflict in the neighborhood. So, again, this practice is not something that Precious Blood has come up with; it’s actually a practice that Indigenous people have used to keep their communities healthy. In the movies—and of course it’s all the time—when you see Native people in circles passing a peace sign, coming together to address concerns that are affecting the community, it also serves as a social gathering. It lets people know that this is where you can come to to find support, to find healing, and to also, if needed, create a harm-repair space to be able to address some of the trauma that may have been caused in the neighborhood.

Specifically for the circles that I’ve been a part of on a regular basis, our restorative justice peace circles take on the form of case circles. People come together, we do a check-in, and we sit in a circle. In the center of the circle, there is a centerpiece in which talking pieces are located. Any object that’s within the centerpiece is a talking piece. The value of respect means that whoever is holding one of the talking pieces is the only person that is speaking. This is the way that we show respect to the process of being able to share someone’s truth and everyone being able to feel validated and affirmed because everyone is listening. So, we pass the talking piece around. The initial opening to the circle is that we read a poem, we play a song, we may share a quote, to be able to put the people in the circle space in a mindset that will support whatever conversation we’re going to be having that day. So, we do an opening reading, we then check in with usually: What is your name? How are you feeling? And a check-in question, which can take the form of: What is one thing that is going on in your mind today? How have you been sleeping? It can also be something like: If there is one place in the world that you would like to go, where would it be? Basically, just like an icebreaker question that puts everyone at ease but also expresses something about the person in that space.

Once we do that, then we go into one form of activity that engages people, that kind of breaks the ice even further. So, we do icebreaker activities. One that we do often is the “Who are you?” ice breaker, where people stand face to face—in this moment, six feet apart. They ask the question, "Who are you?" seven times. For those seven times, the person being asked has to answer the question seven times.

So, if I were to ask you, who are you? What would you respond?

A: I would say that I am a student.

O: And then I would say, who are you?

A: I’m a daughter. I’m a sister.

O: Right, so I would do that seven times, and then we would switch roles. We would come back in a circle and have a discussion about what that activity felt like. A lot of times, people who grow up in communities that are plagued by trauma—and I don’t mean just interpersonal trauma; I’m talking about state-sanctioned trauma—you usually don’t have a true idea of who we are because we’ve been conditioned to think that we are somebody based on a prescribed idea of who we are as opposed to who we are ourselves. So that alone opens the space to dialogue that can take about two hours and continues on to our next circle.

Once again, we have that discussion and we’re able to talk about some of the more emotionally-regulating factors that go into who we are. Then, we do the same thing and we check out with a question of: What’s your name? How are you feeling? What’s one thing that you will take out of circle today? Then we end up closing with another reading pertaining to the topic that we discussed that day.

A: You mentioned this idea of validation when you were talking about the person knowing that everyone is listening to them in the peace circle. How important is this idea of validation when someone is healing?

O: I mean it’s definitely important. You have to be able to feel that someone is there to listen to you and is actually really practicing that value. I, myself, as a young person did not feel like my voice meant anything, so it caused me to be a very introverted person; I felt like whatever I said wasn’t going to be heard. It took many years of really—I don’t want to say re-educating—un-educating myself, but that’s not a process that people can easily learn when you’re faced with so many struggles in the neighborhood. You’re constantly alert, and you’re constantly having to be vigilant to the point where you start seeing yourself as, one, a target, and two, a person that feels the need to protect yourself from being a target.

You really don’t have time to develop these skills that it would take to talk your way out of things. You’re taught more to react off emotion, and that emotion being then carried out in some form of action. So, there is no in-between. There’s only an either or. I think for me, that’s what it was as a teenager. There was no talking my way out of anything because my fear was that the next person is going to act before I can. Then it becomes that lie that we tell ourselves that you may hear every now and then: I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

A: So, peace circles are places where people with trauma are healing. Can you describe what trauma-informed care is and how that informs how you go about healing?

O: So, trauma-informed care means first creating a space where a person or people feel safe enough to be their truest self. That requires vulnerability. In order for somebody to feel secure enough to be vulnerable in the space, you have to feel safe. So, for us as restorative justice practitioners, our first and most important responsibility is to create spaces where people feel that they can be that person. The one thing that I always hear from young people and people that come to our community center is that there’s a different feel when you step into Precious Blood, as opposed to everything else around the neighborhood—whether it be the block, the home. Young people and older people who come to the center say that, including myself! I, myself, have experienced that. It’s just a different thing when you come into that space. It’s not so much the space itself; it’s the people that are in that space. The people that make it easy for you to be comfortable and feel validated and affirmed—really just that somebody’s there that cares about you. Once you’re able to create that space, it lends license to be able to create the additional space like the peace circles for people to come in and talk about how hard it is to go home because, [for example], my father is an alcoholic or my mother is abusing drugs or I’m afraid that I’m going to get shot as soon as I walk out of my door.

When I talk about healing, just being able to express those things that you cannot express on a daily basis with your homies—because you’ll be looked at in a certain way—or at home—because your family is going through their own struggles—is what the healing process is. The more that people engage in these places, the more that they’re able to learn about themselves, not because of what we’re saying as facilitators or guiders of those conversations, but because of what they are themselves expressing through voice and what they themselves are hearing from other people like them or who their friends are in that same space. It’s almost like a reciprocal life learning process that happens in that space.

A: Have you used a peace circle when you were healing from trauma? What are some things that you learned about yourself?

O: So, thankfully I was in a space where there were other people present that really valued the idea of strength through vulnerability. I was in a group of 13-15 men who were all open to talking about their greatest fears, their greatest struggles, but were able to share how they were able to move through that. Out of that, I was able to learn more about myself because in hearing their narratives, it was able to connect with me. It was almost like putting up a mirror to who I was and who I wanted to be.

So, much of the trauma that I had was the fact that I grew up in a very violent, domestic violent, ridden home. I grew up in a home where I began to understand that there was a lot of anger—unprocessed anger—toward the woman who I love the most, my mother. I was really able to start taking those steps to be able to express that not only to myself but to the person that I had so much anger towards. That included having those difficult dialogues with my mother, assuring her that I was no longer in that headspace, but how important it was for both of us to be able to have those conversations, to be able to find healing for each other. It ended up making our relationship that much stronger and better. A lot of times—and I’m just going to speak for my mother and myself—when it comes to those family issues, those are things that you don’t speak about. Those are things we never spoke about in our home because the understanding in the home growing up is that—I’m providing for you. You got a roof over your head. You got clothes on your back. You got food in your belly. That is enough. It took us being able to have those difficult conversations about that not having been enough for us to grow—to be able to be better people, for me and my mother. So, when we talk about the healing, that’s part of the healing that happened with me.

Another is having been able to move past the guilt that I had been carrying regarding the harm that I caused to Francisco, and not only to Francisco but to his family—really having to deal with what that meant emotionally. There’s a lady named Lisa Daniels, and I’m not sure if you’ve heard of her before, but she’s a mother who lost her son in a similar fashion that Francisco did. It was not justifiable in the sense that society looks at it. The way that she expressed it gave me a window into what the mother of Francisco had been going through and may still be going through today. Being able to process it and talk about it, and not only myself, but hearing others talk about issues of victimization and talking through all of the choices that we make—which are not isolated choices; they have consequences beyond our understanding and affect more than just ourselves—is another example of how those spaces aided me in healing.

I think out of that healing, we were all able to—at least I was able to—really be intentional about finding what our mission in life would be. We call it a survivor’s mission—to be able to take, not only the trauma we’ve been through, but also the harm that we, ourselves, have caused, and turn that energy into something that can build up someone else or that can build up a community. A lot of times, people don’t do this. We tend to stay stuck in our trauma and in our hurt, so that when people say, “Hurt people hurt people,” that is constantly perpetuated. For me, and for those I’ve been around, we’ve been able to change the narrative of, “Hurt people hurt people,” into, “Healed people heal people.”

A: I think that’s a really powerful transformation; I like that a lot. If someone commits an act of violence or a crime, what should happen from there instead of a call to the police?

O: For me, ideally, if someone were to steal from me and I had an idea of who the person was that stole from me, if there was an alternative in place that could be the liaison between me and the person that may have done me wrong, I would want to be able to sit and get to know the person. I would want to know not only why they did it but also what the community can do to support both people. I think that is a game changer to me. It doesn’t remove or create the absence of police. It creates an alternative to police. When we hear the term “Defund the Police,” it automatically puts the police on defense, right? The police don’t really understand how disinvested and disenfranchised and marginalized our communities are. A lot of these day-to-day police officers don’t understand how they perpetuate that state-sanctioned violence just with their presence on an everyday basis.

I kind of lost myself in that rant, but being able to have that system where I feel comfortable enough to call Chilly, to call Jojo, to call Father Kelly, to call Sister Donna, or anybody else that’s not the police to hopefully bring some resolution to any “crime” that has been caused is what is needed.

A: I think it’s great that you were going on this rant and talking about how a lot of communities are disenfranchised and disinvested from. What do you think makes areas of Chicago have a higher police presence? Why do you think it’s so prone to gun violence in particular?

O: When you think of mass incarceration and systems of surveillance, they’re doing the job they were intended to do. When we think of police, we don’t understand that the history of police in this country was based not out of community service or “protect and serve,” but it was created to enslave and to keep people enslaved, right? So, hundreds of years later, if you have been practicing punitive measures for all that time and then try to practice a more restorative way of policing, it’s impossible! The culture of policing is not to restore; it’s not to repair. It’s to punish. The lead that police have taken is from the criminal justice system, which, again, is punitive. You break a law, you pay for the crime or the law that you broke by either paying a fine or spending time in prison. That has been the history of criminal justice in the United States since its inception.

So, again, why is policing so heavily relied upon? It’s the only system that people have been offered because everything has been relegated to subjugation. The large society does not know about Indigenous practices because it’s not taught in schools. How would we know about it, right? We don’t know that there are other ways of addressing “laws that are broken” because the only thing that we have been conditioned to think and is there is the criminal justice process. That’s why people in the community rely so heavily on police. That’s why when it comes to crime, the first response by people—and I’m not even going to say his name—is to bring the Feds to Chicago to address the violence. One thing that I know and one thing that I’ve witnessed and experienced is: addressing violence with more violence is going to create more violence.

To address the second part of your question about why the police’s response is the way it is, that is what they have been taught. That’s why there is so much violence in the neighborhoods today. You’re having a lot of young people and a lot of older people walking around with so much pain and trauma, that the only outlet that people know how to express is anger. That anger is, a majority of the time, expressed through violence, not because that’s the person that they are. That’s the person they’ve been instructed to be with everything else that’s bombarding them on a daily basis and throughout their lifetime. So, it’s a little hypocritical for the President or anyone who is in a position of power to question why violence is so rampant in Chicago because that’s everything that you have taught us! That’s everything that the United States has been since it formed itself as the United States! “Might makes right.”

For people to question why there’s so much violence in Chicago… it’s because you don’t offer an alternative! You treat people in communities of Black and Brown folks as if they are themselves weapons, as if the color of our skin is a weapon itself. You approach people in Black and Brown communities as if they are already criminals. So, how do you expect a person to react when you’re constantly having to face that in the community in which you are from? Again, I do not want it to sound like I’m justifying actions of violence; I’m just trying to provide background knowledge about what creates those conditions.

A: What changes do you think need to be made in schools or institutions, or in general, so that we’re separated from this idea of punishment for breaking the law?

O: Yeah… that’s the trillion dollar question! It’s not an either or. It’s not one thing that’s going to be the panacea for everything. It’s going to take an education system that is inclusive of ethnicities, is inclusive of all races, in a way that can educate young people and older people about who they are, as opposed to what people say we are. Right?

Allowing people to learn about their cultures, about our cultures, in the classroom, is the beginning of being able to create that identity that is asset-based instead of deficit-based. What I mean by that is that… I’m in school learning about my ancestors being mathematicians, being philosophers, being all these things that I was never taught, but I was taught to look at my people as savages, as illiterate, as all these different things that current books—at least in my history—taught me. That is one step—being able to instill a sense of pride and esteem in who we are, by [not] having us learn about our ancestors in a way that diminishes them or causes them to be something that they weren’t and they are not.

Another step is going to be to invest in social service programs, mentoring programs, afterschool programs, and spaces where people can come in and play video games and get tutoring for school. People should really be able to have the space to go to afterschool where you feel safe enough to be yourself.

I think another more important component is being able to have families and especially children reconnect in an intentional way with their fathers, brothers, aunts, uncles, who are currently incarcerated. That is another component of being able to build community. Truth be told, the majority of people incarcerated are Black and Brown people, and being able to reunify and reconcile those broken relationships that were caused because of the prison industrial complex is another component.

Another component of that is going to be—How do we keep our community dollars in our communities for as long and as much as possible? How do we create banks that Black and Brown people are welcomed at and maybe they own those banks, so that that money is actually invested in a way that supports Black and Brown communities? How do we create more sustainable gardens and urban farming in our community, so that we don’t rely so much on those larger big corporations: the KMarts, the Targets?

It’s all about community building and community reinvestments. It takes everything—educational, political, economic, spiritual aspects—to instill a sense of belonging and ownership of our communities. I don’t know if that really answers your question, but those are some of the thoughts that I know a lot of people express. It’s not going to be just one thing. It’s not just going to be creating more jobs. It’s not just going to be offering educational advancement money. It’s going to take all those different things, including creating an alternative to policing.

A: That was great. Any one of those would be a big step, but we need more than one thing in order to create safe and sustainable change. You mentioned the idea of community connections and how the prison industrial complex rips these connections apart. While you were incarcerated, were you able to keep any connections with people on the outside? Was community building even an idea in your mind while you were incarcerated?

O: When it came to those I viewed as family—I don’t just mean my kin family; I mean those I consider my brothers prior to incarceration—I would say that 98% of those relationships were cut off due to the time that I was incarcerated. That’s what the system does; you end up incarcerated for long numbers of years. Those friends, those relationships you had are cut off. Our innate human condition to be social and to want to have a support system compels us to want to create relationships—this was my experience; I’m not going to speak for everyone else that was incarcerated. I allowed myself to be open to creating new, meaningful relationships with other incarcerated people. So, again, they became my brothers. They became my father figures, in a way that helped me to grow as a better person.

When it comes to the community building part, I think our human, innate condition wants to build community, wants to be in community, wants to have healthy relationships with other people. Everything that the system of incarceration does breaks all that apart. So, even with my family, I had two little brothers—my two beloved brothers—and my sister. They were very young when I was incarcerated. I was never able to build that strong bond with my baby brothers because I was away from them. The way that systems of prisons are set up is to make people forget about us because of the distance that a lot of these institutions have between where we are from and where those institutions are at. So, after I was convicted and sentenced, I was sent to a prison that is 5 hours away from Chicago. So, even though my bond and my relationship with my mother was strong, I was only able to see her once every two or three months. I was only able to see my brothers maybe once every two or three months. As the years went by, I saw them less and less. So when it comes to connection, that connection is broken because you’re not able to touch the people you love. You’re not able to hug the people that you love. You’re not able to eat at the same table with the people you love. These are all components of being able to build a healthy relationship with someone.

The phone calls at the time were also very expensive, so even making a phone call wasn’t something that I could really do because of not having the means to pay for the phone bill. At the time, I think for 15-minute phone calls, it would be $20-$25—for 15 minutes of being able to speak with family members or friends. Very quickly, people started putting blocks on their phones from receiving my collect calls. My mother never did that, but I also never wanted to burden her with a bill so high that she couldn’t pay because of my calls. At the end of the day, I understood that she had to feed my brothers, my sister, pay for rent, pay for a home. That caused me to call less and less and really to focus on making my time constructive and as smooth as it could be while I was incarcerated.

A: What was re-entry like for you?

O: Re-entry for me was—here’s the thing. I’m at a privileged position for me to say that it was—ideal. What I mean by that is that I had a supportive family structure, who provided for me a living space to come home to. I had connections and maintained connections with other people—who had done time prior to me coming home that were home now—to educate me on what that process would be like—not only providing that emotional and accompaniment support, but also being able to provide some of the resources that I would need to be able to get to and from work, to be able to have people come with me to get my Link card and my Medicaid and to get a license. Again, a lot of what that looked like coming home—that re-entry process for me began long before I came home. The planning had begun years before I came home because that was the mindset that I was instructed to develop by other people around me.

To give you an idea of my first 24 hours when I came home, the first thing I did was get the hell out of the parking lot as soon as I could! I did not want to spend one single moment more on prison grounds than I had to. I told my sister, “Let’s get out of here!” We went to a gas station down the street. I changed into the clothes that they had brought for me. From there, I asked my sister—and it was my sister, my younger brother, Alex, and my mother who picked me up—to go directly to the DMV in Danville, so that I could get my ID. In the process of getting my ID, I said, “What the hell? I might as well try to get my license.” I drove around the parking lot in my parent’s car for about ten minutes and got a feel for the car. I ended up getting my license two hours after I was released from prison.

Again, my intention with getting my ID was to minimize some of the barriers that I would have to deal with once I got to the city. I knew that DMV’s and Secretaries of State in the Chicago area are much busier than those in Danville because of the population that exists in Danville, as opposed to Chicago. The whole license thing—I think it was more of a, “What the hell? I’m here. I might as well try.” I ended up passing my driver’s test!

A: What do you think are some of these barriers that a lot of people who were previously incarcerated face as they go through re-entry?

O: One of the greatest concerns that people are expressing to me that I see on a daily basis is that everything has been slowed down—acquiring a birth certificate, a social security card, or any of those vital documents that are necessary to get a state ID when you come home. [They] are either A. taking too long to process or B. they’re not being processed at all by the staff at these institutions at these prisons. I don’t know if it’s a clerical issue. I don’t know if it’s because a lot of the offices out here are closed. Or because it’s just laziness on the part of the staff at these institutions. But, that is a major concern right now, and that is a barrier that exists in this current climate due to COVID.

Another concern is housing. A lot of brothers that have done long-term sentences—and what I mean by long-term is anything between fifteen to forty years of incarceration—have issues with housing, like where am I going to go? How am I going to live? Even if you have the blessing or the fortunate status of being able to go home to a mother or a sister or family member, a lot of people are coming home to sleeping on the couch, sleeping on the floor. That, in itself, is not conducive to helping re-entry. Eventually, people are going to get tired of having to step over you or having to tell you to sit up on the couch. So, housing is a tremendous need and an integral part of successful, healthy re-entry.

Another is, again, how will I acquire my documents? Work is almost third or fourth on the concerns. Having the reassurance and the constant reassurance through these phone calls, by people being able to call our re-entry team, is something that goes a long way.

Another thing that one of our re-entry team members has expressed to me is that one of the moments that he will never forget that will be the happiest in his life was seeing me when he was released. He says that having me pick him up is something that he never expected and something that made him extremely happy because of not having that expectation. He never would’ve thought that someone—anyone—would have done that for him. Even something as simple as picking somebody up and taking them home is a gesture that can’t be measured by metrics, but based on him expressing that just shows how important it is to have, not only someone pick you up, but someone who’s connected to you in some way. To be that bridge and connection to this newfound freedom is something that goes a long way as well.

A: I was hoping to hear about the first encounters you have with people as they start working with Precious Blood. What is that like?

O: So, initial conversations are more based on—what’s your day like? When it comes to a young person, if I’m introduced to a young person, the first thing I always ask is: Do you want to go get a bite to eat? That alone creates a space of being able to, one, find out, has the person been eating? And two, create the space of care. I care enough to ask you, "Are you hungry? Let’s get something to eat." Because I like to eat myself!

But to be able to provide a meal for somebody that may not have eaten is almost like that icebreaker that breaks down that wall of—I don’t want to say mistrust but—not knowing who this person is. All of the young people that we serve are open and honest about the way they think and the way they feel. About a week after I was hired, all of them told me, “Man bro, when you first came here, we didn’t know you. We didn't care to know. But you were open enough to share with us who you were. Out of you being open and honest with us about that and being able to take us and really listen”—a lot of times, if you’re listening to young people or people in general, they will tell you a lot about themselves. If they’re hungry, they’ll tell each other, “Man, I’m hungry bro. I haven’t eaten in two days.” If you’re really listening, that is a moment that you can act and start building that relationship or create the space to build those relationships. If a person needs to get his ID, and they may not be expressing it to you, you can go, “Hey, we can go tomorrow. You want to go tomorrow?” So, that’s kind of the initial conversation that we tend to have.

The formal assessments or the documentation part—that’s something that we focus on later on. So, I had originally started our conversation with this mantra or with this approach that we have… we are a relationship place; programming second. Anything related to the services that we provide takes a backseat because we want to be able to let the person know that we’re much more interested with getting you a job or getting you to sit in a circle, as opposed to just making sure you’re straight in that moment that we’re initially meeting.

So, that’s what an initial introduction looks like.

A: I think something that’s really great about Precious Blood and something that’s pretty unique is the fact that you provide a lot of jobs to young folks. How important is a job to someone, especially when they’re going through re-entry?

O: For anybody coming home, I think it’s very important because for me and a lot of people I’ve had conversations with in the past, it’s related to minimizing the feeling of being a burden. Just before I came home—and I used to do this regularly before my incarceration—I took a tally of my perceived expenses that my family was accruing over the years that I was incarcerated. I think, in total, and this is a big number to me because I know we don’t have this much money. I think my family had spent upwards of $125,000 on me—that includes lawyer fees, that includes all of the perceived emergency funds that I needed throughout my incarceration, that includes Commissary and any books that I may have wanted to read. So understanding and knowing that made me aware that I needed to get a job as soon as I came home.

Initially, my idea of doing this type of work was to do it on a volunteer basis because I had acquired other skills, working with my hands while I was incarcerated. Coming home, I thought that I would be fixing air conditioners and refrigerators and heaters for a living, but I was introduced to this opportunity, and I’m trying to make the most of it, not for myself alone, but also that whatever I do is understanding that the work that I do and who I am is connected to everything else around. So the people, the community… I understand that part of it. Again, I wanted to be able to contribute to the family as soon as I could. So, jobs are highly important for people who are coming home.

A: I know that at Precious Blood, there are a lot of jobs like carpentry programs or other crafts. Can you tell me about some of the jobs that Precious Blood has?

O: Yeah, so at Precious Blood, we have, what we call, social enterprises. So, these are spaces where we’re able to provide young people and people in the community with jobs doing woodwork or carpentry. That includes making garden beds, benches for our community gardens, that includes any commissioned work for families that may want a gazebo or whatever in their backyards. It’s young people that are learning the skills to make these things without needing to go to vocational school because a lot of the young people that are employed are under 18 anyway. And again, to be able to get a sense of pride out of what it is you’re doing and get paid for it, but also feeling as if they are contributing to the community by creating these gardens that continue to give to the community. This is again one of those examples of taking ownership of spaces within the community and being able to see the work that you do on a day-to-day basis that’s bringing good to the community.

Another is our screen-printing social enterprise, where young people learn the process of making T-shirts for different causes, whether it be for marches that occur, protests that occur, for local businesses, for local community programs and activities we do. So that’s another space where young people are able to learn some professional development skills.

Another is our art—I forget what the space is called—but it’s a space where people can come learn how to paint and use it as a form of trauma therapy, so it’s art that expresses some of the daily struggles but also the greatest joys. It really engages your creative genius when it comes to doing that.

A: I was also watching this interview that Father Kelly did a while ago, and he mentioned that a lot of Precious Blood youth work alongside union workers. What is the importance of pairing these youth with workers?

O: I really don’t understand the union work, but I know that in order for persons to have a career in any of these vocational spaces, you have to be part of a union to earn a livable wage. So working alongside a person that is a unionized employee or worker allows [for] spaces [to be] able to acquire knowledge along somebody who’s had that firsthand knowledge.

A: I also wanted to know—obviously you have a lot of passion for your job—what one day of your job looks like. Or maybe a week, if no one day is the same.

O: Yeah, so honestly the greatest joy that I face is in the day-to-day mentoring moments. Being able to sit down and talk with a young person or a brother coming home is part of my day-to-day. I come in usually around 8:30 or 9 o’clock. I try to take care of all the administrative stuff—the case notes, the follow-up database stuff. Once the young people start coming in, I try to be intentional about connecting with as many people as I can throughout the day. I respond to the needs of re-entry participants, which includes purchasing an air mattress or a bed or clothes or hygiene products. Meetings are something that I’m not yet used to. I’m constantly on these Zoom calls and Webex meetings, so that’s part of it. On some days, like today, we have community events that we organize for the young people in the community, but it’s a little bit difficult to do it in this current climate because we’re not allowed or we’re being intentional about not promoting a lot of our events. We don’t want large gatherings due to COVID. So, the approach that we’ve taken is popping up in spaces where we know a large number of people are gathering. This last week, what we did is create this hoops and hood event, where we set up socially distancing basketball skills challenges, where young people could win gift cards based on the challenges that they won. So, three-point challenges that are individual, dribbling skills that are individual, suicide races that were socially distant. We passed out food that was pre-packaged, that we could hand out. Yeah, we made a day of it.

A: That sounds awesome! I just have a couple more questions. I was wondering… as you continue working with Precious Blood and young folks, what changes do you notice as they keep working in the program?

O: Smiles, man. Those smiles are priceless, man. A lot people in general come into our center, initially, if they haven’t been a part of this center, with this mask—and excuse my language—that speaks, “Get the fuck out my face!” But you know, a lot of them come from the idea that the only reason people are paying attention to you is that they think you’re doing something wrong. That comes walking into a store and being treated as if you’re going to steal something. That’s the initial face, but once you start seeing the young people or older people feel comfortable, those mean mugs turn into smiles. That, to me, is a key change that happens that I love to see, man.

A: That’s beautiful. I think a lot of people, when they hear about this type of work, are hesitant because they’re not really sure—this is something you might hear—which are worthy of a second chance. What is your response to that?

O: I would hope people understand that the degree of harm is subjective. So, I cannot convince a mother who has suffered a recent loss of a child or a young person that’s been shot… I cannot expect them to buy into or to even initially understand this philosophy that we practice. It takes time because people need to see it as opposed to hearing it. Once people are able to see the words that we speak or what we share in action, that’s when people start understanding the work that we do.

So, to someone who suffered a loss, someone who’s been shot, someone who’s been traumatized to a great degree, I would just say that there is a different way of addressing that pain than relying on disappearing people. What I mean by that is—just because we go to prison does not create the actions of our existence. We are still people with feelings, with the capacity to realize our authentic selves—to trust that there is a process that is much more engaging of our humanity than that of what we’ve been conditioned to think is the only option, which is either locking people up for a long time or just, the greatest crime that I believe is, relying on any form of death penalty, which I believe, long-term sentences are as well.

A: What is your opinion about how our country uses the death penalty? What do you think we should do about it?

O: I think it’s a crime against humanity. I don’t see how there is justice in taking a life in this world, man. That feeling shouldn’t even be on the table. It’s sad that it still exists, but in my opinion, and in my perspective, I do see the death penalty as a crime—a state-sanctioned crime.

A: Thank you so, so much for talking with me today. It was incredible. If you had a message or something that you just wanted people to know, what would be your message to people?

O: I would tell people that people who are incarcerated are not cons, are not criminals, are not inmates. I would hope that people understand or hope to understand that we are students, we are fathers, we are mothers, we are sisters, we are brothers, that we are human beings. I would hope that we can move toward creating a language that restores society’s perspective on people who are incarcerated. That’s what I would hope for people to take away from our conversation today. Again, that also includes people that are in communities that are hyper-policed, that are criminalized, just based on the color of our skin.

A: Thank you so much for your time. I know you’re so busy, and I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me for my project.

O: No problem. Thank you!