Raphel Jackson

—Due to internet connectivity issues, this transcript has been edited to remove untranslatable words and clarify syntax.—

A: First, I’d love to hear about your background—where you grew up, your upbringing, your childhood.

R: I was born on the South Side of Chicago. I grew up with a single mother, poor—you know when you’re young and you’re poor, you don’t really realize you’re poor. So, Mother took care of everything to a certain point in our lives. Eventually, Mother fell victim to drug use. I moved in with my father, my grandmother. [My father] went to prison a couple of months later. When he came home, he was an alcoholic and addicted to drugs.

From that point, my mother was on the streets, addicted to drugs and alcohol. I went to jail at 16. So, my life on the streets wasn’t a long run, right? I had a short trip. So, I was incarcerated at age 16 for first degree murder and first degree attempted murder. I was found guilty and sentenced to 55 years. I started off at the county section of the temporary juvenile detention center—it was an automatic transfer deck, meaning that the young men held on that deck were being tried as adults, so we would be transferred to Cook County Jail on our 17th birthdays.

On my 17th birthday, I went to the Cook County Jail. By the time I was 18, I went to prison. I started off in Menard [Correctional Center] for about three and a half years, then Stateville for three and a half years, then Pinckneyville, and then Danville, from which I came home.

My connection to Precious Blood [Ministry of Reconciliation] was made in Danville. I knew Orlando [Mayorga]. I knew Elena Quintana. They are my connection to Precious Blood. I came to Precious Blood through them.

A: I was wondering if you would be comfortable with talking about the process of your incarceration. What was that like? What was it like when you first went to jail and when you were moved to prison?

R: So, let’s see… horrible. It depends on how in depth you want me to go. Let’s start at the police station.

So, I have a very specific type of case—I have a murder on a Chicago police officer. So, that was a horrible experience because you think you’re going to die in custody. Most of my time in custody was spent in an area completely by myself in a bullpen, put by myself—ice cold, no other people around—until they came to get me to take me to the county jail for my first court appearance. That was at night. So, I went through my first court appearance, got held over, and I was taken to the audy home—I don’t know why we call it that—which is like a temporary juvenile county jail. There, they put you in solitary confinement. If you have a serious case, like murder, they put you in solitary confinement for the first week until they put you on the regular deck you’re going to be housed on.

So, at that time, solitary confinement was horrible. You have no human contact other than them bringing you [food]. Other than that, that’s the only… it’s confusing. It’s confusing, and there’s nobody to talk to. Nobody’s explaining anything that’s going on. You’re just in this room for seven days. They let you out to take a shower, and when they let you out to take a shower, nobody else can be around. So, everything seems very extreme when you’re that age.

From there, I went to the county section; they had four county sections. These were decks where everybody on the deck was called an AT—automatic transfer. On their 17th birthday, they get transferred to the Cook County Jail. So, I spent approximately ten months there until my 17th birthday, and I was shipped to the County Jail.

My 17th birthday spent at orientation at the County Jail was… very interesting. In retrospect, it looks like—you ever see those movies where they show the slave castles in Western Africa? That’s what it looked like. You just got people in crowds, in different cells, and everybody is strip searched until you have people lined up on the wall naked. You got police beating people. As a matter of fact, the guy that was next to me—they beat him. It was an experience, being introduced to life in the Cook County Jail.

From there, I went to Division 9. Division 9 was one of the maximum security divisions. It becomes typical jail from there—fighting, riots, lockdowns, horrible food, lack of education. At that time, there’s no real—well that’s not true; they did have some type of school program. I was in the school wing, and I went to school, but I don’t think it was taken seriously; it wasn’t taken seriously by the teacher at the time, and it wasn’t taken seriously by the majority of people going to the class at the time. It was just somewhere to go off for the day.

So, we had a riot. That riot—I was kicked out of Division 9, and I was sent to Division 1. And this was, at the time, like the super max for the Cook County Jail. That was a completely different experience because from the optics, the buildings were older, so there were bars. In Division 9, you didn’t see bars, unless you were way down at the base of the bullpen; if I was in the wings, we had doors. In Division 1, everything were bars. Everything was old paint, rust, mice—looks horrible, right?

Then, that became typical jail—same stuff everyday: riots, drugs, everything that you think about prison, that’s what happened in Division 1. From there, I was convicted, went to Joliet orientation. I was convicted again for 55 years. I stayed at Joliet orientation for about a month. I don’t know why—usually you stay a week. I stayed there for about a month, and then I was shipped to Menard. I stayed at Menard from ‘95 to ‘98. At the time, when I got to prison, prison was what they considered to be open—this is when they moved people for inmate control situations. This was before the Richard Speck tape—you know who Richard Speck was? Richard Speck was a serial killer; he killed this apartment full of nursing students. Before then, he had killed people in other states and worked his way to Illinois. So, in the Richard Speck tape, he was on camera doing drugs and having sex with other men. When he gave the tape to his lawyer and when he died, his lawyer put the tape out. This gave the world a view of what was going on inside the Illinois Department of Corrections. So, that’s when all of that came crashing down. Before the Richard Speck tape was made public, the cops had very little control. After the tape went public, the cops gained control; they had complete run and control of the institutions.

After that, I went to segregation. By the time I came out, jails were different. They were ran different; everything was different. In ‘98, April 1st, I went to Stateville from Menard. Well, when I was in Menard, I was in school. I was in ABE—adult basic education—and GED—I didn’t finish my GED while I was in Menard. So, when I went to Stateville, eventually I finished my GED. Other than that, it was like… jail is jail, in that sense—same things every day, mostly the same stories that everybody else can tell you. There’s really no difference, other than my pursuit of academics.

My desire to learn came from… You know, when you’re plugged, you have literature—the governors, the organizations that you belong to. I found myself enjoying studying the literature, but the environment itself wasn’t conducive to that approach to life. You didn’t have a lot of people around you that liked to study, or read, or talk about the subjects. So, you’re limited—your desires are limited—in what you can actually pursue.

I got my GED in Stateville. By the time I left Stateville, I went to Pinckneyville. In Pinckneyville, I ended up in school. Although I had so much time, I made a deal with the director of the school at the time that I would take her horticulture class because she just started horticulture, and she couldn’t fill it. So, if I took her class, she would let me go to academic school. So I took her horticulture class, and she let me enroll in academic school. I stayed in school until I left Pinckneyville, and I went to Danville. So, I [got to] Danville in 2006. So, I stayed in Pinckneyville from 2002 to 2006. In 2006, when I got to Danville, I didn’t go directly to school; I worked. I didn’t start school, I believe, until approximately, around 2009, 2010, 2011—somewhere around there. From that point, I stayed in school until I came home—that’s where I met Chilly, being in school. Once I got into EJP, which is the Education Justice Project, which is a bachelor’s level program, I became a part of CAVE—the community anti-violence education program. That’s when I really started engaging with Orlando (Chilly), and that’s what led me to Precious Blood.

A: I wanted to talk more about the education programs you were in—so you talked about ABE and EJP. What did having education mean to you when you were in prison? And what were the programs like?

R: When I was initially in ABE, to be honest with you, it wasn’t that the program was bad—I wasn’t that interested. It’s adult basic education. It’s basic math, reading, and writing. Well, being young, it gave you a chance—remember I’m in prison, and prisons were open at the time. You got people moving around everywhere. Going to school was not a choice at that time. For people like me, the organization that you belong to, if you were under a certain age, they made you go to school. So, that’s the reason I was actually in ABE. Again, a part of me wanted to go to school. Somebody told me that you get into school faster if you fail your initial test. When I was in Joliet orientation, they gave you a test to see where you are going to be placed in school—the school placement. I failed on purpose so I could get in school faster.

But, when I saw how prison was and how everyone was moving around, you don’t really want to go to school; you want to hang out with everybody else and smoke weed and drink alcohol—just hang out with your buddies. But, I had to go to school—it is what it is. I excelled in school; I always excelled in school. I went, and I passed everything. The only reason I didn’t get my GED in Menard was because I was transferred to Stateville the same day I was supposed to take my GED test. The program was just that—it was a basic education program, but they allowed us to go further. If we would finish all the work that was assigned to us within the scope of those 45 class days, then we could go further, and a few of us did—going to [those other classes] that weren’t specifically for us, but they were happy to be there.

Once I got my ABE, I started going to GED. GED, at the time—most of the information, I knew already. When I stopped going to school—I stopped going to school in 8th grade—I stopped going to school because in the summer between 7th grade and 8th grade, I started selling drugs and different things. I was bored in school—so it wasn’t that I couldn’t keep up academically, but it was because I was bored. I started making money that year, so [those two things] didn’t fit—[they were in] two different spaces [in conflict] with each other. When I was in GED, I had to acclimate to the new information. It was different for me to engage in the information that was in the class. The GED program in Stateville—what I remember the most is the GED program in Stateville and not in Menard. It was a good program. You had good teachers in the Stateville GED program. It was like a real school. You had to get up every morning and go over to the school building. They had some good teachers—had some alright teachers. They did good. Most of the people in my class passed their GED except, like one. I can’t remember the exact numbers they gave me, but there was one person that scored higher than me. I was happy. Then, I started working in dietary and I didn’t go to school until I made it to Pinckneyville. Stateville didn’t have anything higher than GED at the time. They had a paralegal course, but it was cancelled.

For EJP, I think I can narrow it down to this. So, I had experience with two community colleges and one experience with a four-year university. I think my experience with the community colleges was based on intake and regurgitation of information; I’ve never really liked that. I didn’t really understand what I didn’t like about being in a community college, until I started dealing with EJP. I don’t like regurgitation of information; you can’t challenge the information, you can’t build on that information. It’s like, this person is the authority of this subject. Memorize it, tell it back to us, you pass, and you’ll move onto the next class. We had some good instructors, don’t get me wrong. It’s just the process around education in the community college system—I didn’t really like it, although I passed everything I ever took. [For the four-year university in EJP] it required critical thinking. You had to read these very dense people and these very dense subjects, and then you have to assess them according to how you understood what you were reading. You could challenge the author, and you could compare it to other things. The author wasn’t the complete authority on the matter. One of the things it helped me understand is just that—critical thinking, learning how to think outside the box, learning how to think outside of so-called professionals. Not saying that the professionals don’t have any weight in what they specialize in, but there’s other people with other ideas that challenge that, and that’s always the case. So, look for that.

That’s very important for me for the work I do now. The work I do now—you have to be able to challenge different notions, like notions of resiliency and intelligence and what it means to be smart. What does it mean to be considered a problem-child versus a child with problems? These are the things that we’re forced to challenge every day because your received curriculum comes from ideas that paint children that have issues as problem-children, etcetera. But my time spent in EJP, accompanied with different programs I took in community college, [like I took] substance abuse training through Danville community college. All of the training was so I could become a substance abuse counselor. Part of that, we had to deal with trauma—understanding trauma and understanding trauma not just from a book perspective or academic perspective, but what does it look like when you take it off the page and you speak with humans? And then you assess your own life and your own history, according to this different understanding. It changed the way that I approached life. That’s one of the ways I ended up at Precious Blood.

A: Can you talk more about how trauma looks different off of paper? When you’re speaking with someone who has been afflicted with trauma, what are some of the things that you’re thinking about?

R: Number one is individual disposition. You’re in a different emotional space, right? A lot of people can’t deal with the frustration—I’ve seen someone lash out because they’ve learned that the only way they can be heard is if they’re loud or boisterous. They’re seemingly rude, but from their life experiences, they learned that this is a way, a method, of being heard. Then an individual case manager, counselor, teacher, whoever, has to have the personal disposition, not to let their emotional responses dictate how they deal with the situation. They can read it and have a conversation about it, but when they deal with it in their person, and their anger or irritation, or past traumatic events come up in their mind, sometimes they respond with the same negative energy that they’re getting from the participant. So, that’s what I’m saying.

These ideas—it’s easier to read them than to actually deal with the people who are acting them out. Because it happens simultaneously. It’s not one thing and then another. It’s all happening at one time. The individual has to have the personal disposition not to [let their emotions] push the person away. The studying part is the easiest part; the dealing with the person is the hard part.

A: Can you expand on the difference between problem-children and then children with problems?

R: If I go from my own experience, thinking back to grammar school, looking at the science of trauma, when it says how to fix memory... I’m looking at it in the immediate situation. You have kids who are growing up in an environment where they may be repeatedly exposed to different types of trauma. They don’t understand it; they’re children. They don’t understand healthy coping mechanisms; they’re children. So you go to school, and say, it affects his banking method. So, you give a list of spelling words. You have to memorize the spelling words and give them back. But because of the neurological effects of trauma, it may be hard for you to memorize these words, especially without any context, just memorizing these words. You can be treated as a problem-child in that school. A lot of children can’t keep up because of the way trauma affects how they engage information in the school or their energy levels, whatever the case may be. The teacher begins to punish them—they get sent to detention, and they get sent to the principal’s office. They become problem-children, instead of the professionals in the school trying to figure out what’s going on in the child’s life that has motivated this particular behavior. This is a child trying to adjust to realities that this child does not understand. The child is not a problem; they’re having life problems. They don’t understand how to adjust to those problems. [The professionals] begin to criminalize you or place you in a position where you’re the bad child. That’s how we talk to them—they’re the bad child. They continue to lash out more. They don’t know how to deal with the anger, the frustration. They don’t know how to say, “I’m not keeping up in class. I’m trying. I’m at home looking at these words, and I can’t retain them.”

Or when you have some children that are forced to grow up faster than others—[like children who have parents who do drugs and are alcoholics], they are forced to become young mothers in the house. So, in a house, they have to be a literal adult at 11- or 12-years old. But then at school, you’re going to treat them like an 11-year old. There’s a disconnect for this child. Because this child is used to having higher responsibilities and the school tries to put this child in a different place, there’s a disconnect; they don’t understand it. So, there are a lot of different ways that trauma affects a child, and the school or people in the community label that child a problem-child. Nobody understands that this is the way the child is coping with something that they don’t understand.

I think a lot of the young guys that I deal with, we talk about physical fighting and how good it felt. This is out of their mouths—how good it felt and finally getting to that point in life where they had their first fight, their first real fight. It felt good. It’s all of this gunked up, pent up frustration. You’ve been walking around and you don’t know what to do with yourself. The first time you get into a fight, you release all of this energy. They say that it felt good. Those are the results of trauma, and they become problem-children instead of children with problems.

A: For children with problems, what support systems do you think they need? What are some other ways that they can release their energy? When you were experiencing problems as a child, what do you think you needed more of?

R: I remember one time, for me, to be honest, it felt good to shoot guns. So I can relate to them. I remember, one time, I had an uncle that took me camping. It rained the whole time, and we couldn’t do any of the activities that we were supposed to do! But it felt good to get away and just be a kid. At the time, I didn’t really understand that, but when I look back now at those moments, it’s moments like that where I felt like I could just be a kid.

The frustrations that go along with abandonment issues, not having support—although I was living in a house and was living with my grandmother, I’m left to my own vices. My mother took me to live with my grandmother, and I didn’t know her—she took me to live with my father, and my father lives with my grandmother. They knew me, but I didn’t know them. So I felt abandoned at the time.

At that point, I was left to my own vices. There were times where I was sick because I’m asthmatic, and there were times where I was really sick; I couldn't breathe, and I had to call the ambulance for myself, as a kid. There have been times where I was having the flu, and they might give you some peppermints to clear your lungs out. But I had to call the ambulance and go to the hospital myself.

I was always a protector—like for my little cousins, I was always the one doing the fighting for them at school. Going back to live with my mother, who was even younger than that, I was always the one that fought for everybody—had to fight for my sister, had to fight for my little brother. I remember times trying to fight for my mother [in her relationships], and one of my oldest memories is hanging on the back of a leather coat, trying to stop this guy from beating my mother, as a kid. That’s been a repeated cycle. My role in violent situations—there has been a repeated cycle. It’s like you can’t escape. It’s not like I desired these things, but I couldn’t escape. It’s always there; turn around, it’s always there.

So, when I got to the point where I was really involved in real violent situations, I took to them. I took to them, even when I intellectually didn’t agree with those things. A part of me can say, “I don’t like it,” to a certain degree, but to fit into those crowds, I allowed myself to continue to engage in it, and to be honest, it felt like a relief. Every time you pull the trigger, it feels like a release of energy. I think of those people that go to the range, and they shoot. It’s like this release of energy. I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason to target people, but it’s just a moment that allows us to release all of this pent up frustration that you don’t understand. I think that for me, that became a part of my life—this space to release things that I didn’t understand I was carrying with me. You just know that you’re irritated, [and you know that] any circumstances can go from one to one hundred in the blink of an eye. When you have an entourage or a whole group of people who are going through similar things and experiencing similar things, it’s easy for that group of young people to be violent and fight and attack each other, because they have no other outlets that they understand. I think for me, that was my reality.

A: Those releases of energy—do you think that there are any ways that would be productive for young children?

R: I believe that people intervening in their lives at a very early age and them learning healthy coping mechanisms at a young age is vital. We know that all children that grow up in these environments don’t come out the same way. In some households, you have parents that understand healthier coping mechanisms that they teach their children. They have ways of dealing with frustration and peer pressure. You have that in the same community—all of these things exist in the same space. I think that’s what makes it so complicated.

I don’t look at life as absolutes—like if you do this, this is going to change everything. But I do believe in having very strong relationships and bonds with children, and children having very strong relationships and bonds with healthy people—mentally healthy people, socially healthy people. I think this aids in preventing them from falling into certain traps and into certain situations.

Even with just a sense of self-worth, they can learn how to say no. It’s rare to see children that walk against the grain—that say, “No, I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do that”— and deal with the pressures, as a very strong child, that come along with that. And I think a lot of these children [that can do this] may have relationships with mentally and socially healthy adults or peers. I don’t think that there’s just one thing you can do to go into one of those environments.

One of the things that we try to do with people is build relationships. Everything we do here is first built on the idea of building relationships—developing a relationship with the human being. I realized that when you develop a relationship with a human being, they actually begin to tell you things. They begin to tell you what they need and what they want. So, the same person that you thought wouldn’t speak or thought was anti-social or whatever the case may be, they actually begin to open up when they develop relationships. A lot of the anger and the tough talk that you used to see is a little different—they are open to different ideas. A lot of them I’ve dealt with want something different. I think a lot of them want something different; they just don’t know how. They don’t feel supported.

I was talking to one group of young men, and we were having a circle. We were talking about smoking weed, but we were really talking about trauma because it was the anniversary of someone dying. Trauma is a heavy, heavy topic. What I did is I shaped it around the conversation of smoking weed. Why do we smoke weed? That was the subject that just came up, so we went with it. Even they would admit, we don't have anybody to talk to. We don't have anyone to turn to—this is what they’re saying. They will tell you what they need.

Also, speaking from my generation, there is that same lapse. We didn't have people that sheltered us. As kids, you’re going to make bad choices—that’s life. All around the world, teenagers make bad decisions—very impulsive. But there was no one to shelter us from the harsh responses from the world—I couldn't make childish mistakes. My childhood mistakes were criminalized, immediately. If you steal your mother’s car and crash into a mailbox, you’re going to get a slap on the wrist. If I steal my mother’s car and crash into a mailbox, I’m going to jail. That fits into them not having any trustworthy support. When I got caught for this case, [I was already caught for] five juvenile warrants, at the time. Any one of these situations that I got warned for, it wasn’t that the state tried to intervene in my life. Neither of these situations did the state say, “What do we need to do to intervene in this child’s life and stop them from the direction that they’re moving in?” I think those are the perfect opportunities to begin to actually intervene in people’s lives and give them something different, and that can just be taking them to different places and moving them around and allowing them to develop relationships with different types of people. Instead of going on a field trip to the zoo, go on a field trip to the business sector. Start developing relationships and mentoring relationships with people who have been through what they have been through—with people who have moved on from that way of life, that have found ways to cope—and just give them something different. And there’s not one thing that’s going to work for everybody, but that’s where the diversity comes in. You just throw everything at it—every professional, every discipline. You throw everybody at them because you don’t know what’s going to stick.

A: I’m latching onto what you said about how your childhood mistakes were immediately criminalized, so I was hoping you could talk more about that. I was also wondering if you could address how you think we, as a society, handle crime right now and how you think we should handle it instead.

R: Even though these are “criminal behaviors,” according to legislation, the way that we approach young people or adolescents when they engage in these behaviors is different in different communities. In one community, one child is caught stealing at the store or stealing a car; they are given programming. They're trying to figure out—what is it that is taking this child off course? There’s an idea that this child has some type of normative, healthy life going on, and for some reason, they started to slip off. The idea is to put them back on course. Then some children are seen as—the moment you get them, there’s no good anyway. The moment they do something that is very similar to the other kid, it’s—take them to the police station. Take them to the audy home. Take them to the judge. There’s no programming. There is no acknowledgement that this is a teenager or, younger than that, a pre-teen, and that they’re going to act out; this is what they do. I don’t think you can find any society on Earth where teenagers don’t fall into the same category: very impulsive, pleasure-seeking. This is what we do. Based on the environment that you’re in, it determines the way in which you are expressed as.

When I was down in Kentucky when I was little, you had this little girl who lived across the street from my grandparents’ house. She couldn’t be older than us, and she used to ride this big four-wheeler. I used to be so jealous! That’s what she had access to. To satisfy that need, she had access to that. So, when you go back to the city, what do you have to fulfill that need? Whichever ways you seek that out—you had guys jumping off of garages, off of back porches onto mattresses, running across railroads, all of these things needed to feed that excitement, that pleasure-seeking feeling that young people need. There are dangerous ways—this is what they had access to. I don’t look at us as animals, but it’s like a dog that has been bred to burrow; in a house, they’re going to dig. This is what they do. This is a natural inclination. I believe it’s a natural inclination for young adults to seek ways to have fun, to seek adrenaline, to see ways to laugh. All of the avenues that you have break one law or another.

So, when I break that law, even though this young girl operating this motor vehicle may be illegal, that’s not going to be an issue. Whatever ways these teenagers have fun—whether they’re jumping off garages, jumping from building to building or whatever case it may be—it’s breaking one law or another. How they are approached is as criminals, because they were already up to no good anyway. The fact that they are young adults seeking excitement and pleasure is completely ignored. It’s ignored. They are criminals. This is how you deal with them because this is what you do. They are always tearing something up; they are always doing something they shouldn’t be doing. But everywhere you go, you’re finding teenagers doing the same thing. So, I think we start this criminalizing process very early, that it becomes, for a lot of people, it becomes normal.

We don’t have outlets; a lot of us don’t have outlets. We don’t have vacation homes! Well, other than sports. When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of these organizations coming to the communities, but that’s not like that’s a save-all—like if you play basketball, it’s going to save the hood. But, we didn’t even have that. Kids are left to their own vices, and they were immediately incarcerated.

A: You mentioned that lack of access is one of the things that gets in the way of children being able to express their excitement. What are some other systems that you think impede children from being able to just be children?

R: From my experience… families. Families that struggle to survive, that force children to become young adults. They have to take care of the house. And I think this is something that happens throughout society, not just in poor communities. I think it happens more in poor communities, especially in single-parent homes or in homes where both parents have to work. The oldest child usually has to become a surrogate parent. I think that happens a lot. I know a lot of little mans or little moms that take care of their household. Their childhood is taken.

Right now, violence in the community; it’s hard for children to play outside without those stray bullets or whatever else that’s going on out there that you don’t want to expose your children to, so they have to stay inside and play video games or they come to centers like this. [Our center] is not physically designed to run around in—just giving them a space to run around and move in.

I think things like closing the schools in the summer—I think they should leave the gyms open. At least leave the gyms open for space. So you can build little computer labs as well as having basketball courts open on the inside, where it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to be hit by a bullet, and it gives them space to be them. It gives them the time and space, in a safe way, to express themselves and develop the space in a way that's beneficent to them. I don’t think that we have a structure right now that can do that. I don’t think we have the will to actually do that.

A: I was also curious about some of the riots that you mentioned inside of prison. Was the aggression mostly caused by people in prisons being violent toward one another? Or did corrections officers and staff associated with the prison engage in it first? How did they start?

R: All of the riots that I was involved in were gang-related riots. These were incarcerated people versus incarcerated people. Depending on where you’re at, ID homes, for example, you often have nothing else to do? Fight. County jails are basically the same thing on the school wing. On the school wing, you got all these kids. In Division 9, you have approximately one hundred kids and young people on the wing. So, it’s normal for riots to happen because everybody is plugged with one organization or another. Events happen. People gamble. People have bad days and take it out on other people. It’s just things that happen to people, and people respond. You can have one hundred people in one place all fighting—maybe weapons involved, maybe not, depending on the particular area.

Versus being on the adult deck, where people are in their 30’s and 40’s—it just looks different. That’s where you have a lot of knives. Older people just play a different game. It’s less likely that you riot on an older deck because they become very good at negotiating and compromising. They know if something happens, people may die. School wing—you might get a busted head or a busted lip, or something; you might get some stitches. But you’re probably going to survive the situation. On the adult wing, back then in Cook County Jail at the time—Cook County Jail is different now—you might get killed. So, guys that were responsible for other people’s lives—this is one of the things that taught me about leadership, being able to have a front row view of what these negotiations looked like. As a person, you’re responsible for other people’s lives under you, and you negotiated different things. For a while, I had a front row seat to those types of negotiations. It makes you think differently. It made me think differently about people; I learned that in any space you go in, there’s always something happening. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean that something’s not happening. Because of that, I walked into a space not realizing that there’s a lot going on in this space that I don’t understand; always be cautious, and pay attention. And that also works in this work because when you walk in a room with these kids, there’s always something going on with them. Just because you don’t see it at the time doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

In Illinois prisons, from my experience, during the time I was in prison, you don't have the typical TV stuff, where people are just burning stuff and throwing stuff out the room. Don’t get me wrong—when I first went to prison, it was like that. When I got to Menard—the prisons were open—you saw some stuff like that.

…

You were less likely to have real riots in prison because people die. That’s what all the negotiating was for. You had people coming together after negotiating different things because people’s lives are actually on the line. So usually if it’s an inmate-inmate riot, it’s young people. Only y’all are fighting each other. But Illinois prisons look a lot different than other prisons; it was more organized. Guys were more organized about how they approached situations.

A: So, you’re talking about the importance of listening to people and negotiating. I wanted to ask, broadly, what is restorative justice? And what does it mean to you?

R: That’s a very broad term. My understanding of restorative is community. It’s trying to approach people in a way that allows them to be a part of their larger community and be able to see themselves as components of the larger community, not just as an individual. When I think about it, I think about ancient cultures; they were more community-based instead of individual-based. Instead of everybody being celebrated for their individual accomplishments, you always acknowledged your role in the community. I think there’s a resurgence of that. Recognizing that as people, it’s impossible for you to survive without other people. So, you live in this space, and the only thing you care about in that space is you. That space is not going to embrace you, and you’re going to eventually harm that space or harm yourself in the process.

So, how do we integrate people back into the space? How do we take a hood and return it to the idea of community? I think that becomes the baseline to everything, how you approach the situation. Recently, we had a situation where we had two young guys—for whatever reason, they decided to start tearing stuff up in the center for one reason or another. They were flipping over tables and slamming doors because of a grievance they had. How do you deal with this from a restorative standpoint? Do you physically restrain them and drag them out of the building? No, you’re not allowed to do that. Being restorative means that you have to find ways of approaching these young men and let them know that their behavior is not something that’s going to be tolerated, but at the same time, that there is still a community that accepts you.

...

So the conversation is, how do you deal with it? How do you deal with it in the moment? How do you deal with it in the long-term? I have a brother that I work with who is from the military. For guys that I know from the military and from prison, their immediate response is to get control of the threat. So, whether I have to wrestle you down, hold you down, drag you out the building, get control of you—I don’t think the restorative lens allows that, unless people are in danger. Right now, it’s just property; we can buy another table, another bowl. It’s only a table and a bowl. Human life and that relationship are more important than that bowl or that table. This is another example of seeing trauma in action and seeing individuals that believe that this is the best way to be heard in this particular situation. So to help them understand that this behavior will not be tolerated, you have to find a way to pay that back to the system and to the community. You have to find a way to restore that—that injustice or that harm that was created.

But you, as an individual person, are not cut out. You’re still a part of the community, so we’re not going to hurt you as if you’re an enemy. I’m not going to cast you away as if you’re not worthy or you’re not worthy of forgiveness. I think that’s a good example of how we use restorative justice. It doesn’t look the same. I don’t know if it’s a way of creating a restorative justice curriculum, especially when you're dealing with real people in real time. You have to have the ability to be flexible, so I think it looks different in different circumstances with different people. It’s just standing on the principle, allowing the principle itself to shape how you approach the situation. I think it’s a good idea because it’s very complicated when you don’t have people who are used to having to deal with it in the open. Most people look for a curriculum or something that says—this is a restorative-based project. That’s good, but in addition to that, you also need the flexibility to respond in real time, while holding that person accountable. I believe that that value truly helps build community.

A: So you’re talking about how important community is. How do you think Precious Blood embodies this idea of community? I also wanted to ask about peace circles. What part do peace circles play in this building of community and what space does that provide to people?

R: Precious Blood is first and foremost a community center. Although it has different components—case manager, outreach, etc.—the core of that is wrapped around the community center. We have the idea of radical hospitality. That means always being open to people and finding a way to be open to people and to get them to experience Precious Blood in a certain type of way.

Healing circles give people a sanctuary. It’s a space where, once you begin to accept it, you know it’s a space that you’re not going to be judged in. You have the freedom of thought. You have the freedom to speak your truth, in a way that you understand it to be. It’s a good space for negotiation. It’s a good space for finding out where you fit into a space.

From my experience, when I was in prison, we have a tendency of compromising through argument. Everybody’s yelling; the louder you get, the more you think you make your point. The reality is that you’re not coming to a conclusion, and you’re just fighting. Once it gets quiet, it’s just co-existence; you didn’t actually come to a conclusion, and you didn’t solve a problem. So, being in a space where you are heard and knowing that you are heard and knowing that your viewpoint has value in the space—that doesn’t mean you’re going to get your way; things are not always going to end up going your way—you can begin to accept it. To me, it’s like the democratic voting process. Once you buy into the idea that you play a part in deciding who becomes the president for 4 years, no matter how imperfect the system may seem, you still believe that you play a part in that process. You can protest about it, but you still believe, to one degree or another, that the process itself works. So, in order for that to happen, you have to buy into the idea. So, once you come into the circle, you buy into the idea—everyone in the space buys into the idea—that this is a sanctuary, and I can speak my mind. I can also accept other people’s ideas. I don’t have to always be right.

That small circle becomes community. Support is what develops community. Relationships are what develops community. In that space, you’re allowed to foster those things, the best we can; not all circles are going to be perfect, but the idea of going to the circle is that the intent is to foster community. The intent is for everybody to be heard, even if there is no conclusion—it may just be a space for everybody to be heard. Sometimes, there’s a conclusion, and sometimes there’s not.

A: On the Precious Blood website, there’s this little page for Impact Stories. I was wondering what Impact Stories you had on your own through working with Precious Blood?

R: Let me see… I’ve only been here for approximately six months. For me, one of the biggest impacts is our re-entry team. As I told you, Precious Blood does different things, but we have a re-entry team. I was one of the people that was a participant in the re-entry program that they have. Right now, I was incarcerated for 26 and a half years since I was 16 years old, and I’ve been out for six months. In six months, I have complete legit money, with no other side hustles. In six months, I have my own apartment, which I have never had in my life. I can own my first car, which I have never done in my life. I actually have bills now, and I actually feel good to have bills and be able to pay bills. I can invest in other people. I invest in other people coming home from prison and having them restore themselves. I watch guys overcome mental hurdles, where they have financial resources—they didn’t have the mental fortitude to be able to step out.

We have a re-entry house. I watched one guy that had the economic resources, but he didn’t have the mental ability to step out on his own—the fear of renting his own space and having those responsibilities. Watching him overcome those hurdles is a very powerful thing to me. I watched a guy that was a torture victim, that got his case overturned, and I watched how he hit the ground running, as far as the way that he embraces life. It took me a while, being home, to become comfortable going out and doing those sorts of things. He just came out and started running! Every time you see him, he’s outside as a part of something that’s going on. So, I think for me, it’s our re-entry team. But it’s not just that because I watch so many elements of this space doing so many different amazing things.

A: I was hoping you could talk more about your own re-entry. When you first came back… Orlando did this thing where he told me his first 24 hours of what he did when he first came back. Maybe you could also share that story. Also, who are some of the people or things that really helped you with your re-entry?

R: So, 24 hours… that’s not that exciting. The morning I came home—I came home a day early— I didn’t know I was leaving the morning that I left prison. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was going to leave within that week; I thought it was going to be that next week because there was a law that was passed, allowing people like me, who didn’t get good time, to get school good time. Another law passed that said that we could get school good time from [other] stuff. So, this pushed me out the door immediately. It let me come out a year early, but I didn’t know it was going to be that morning.

At that time in prison, I had a lot of assistive jobs—peer educator, teaching substance abuse classes—so I had a good relationship with clinical services; I did a lot of their programs. So, they hurried and got my paperwork in on the first day, so when I thought I was leaving that Monday, I was actually leaving that Friday. That morning, I didn’t know I was leaving that morning. They said, “Pack up; you’re going home.”

So, I’m excited. I’m nervous. I’m scared—all of these things wrapped up in one. So, somebody told me to call Chilly. They said, “You’re not going to call Chilly?” I said, “For what?” They said, “Tell him to come pick you up from the train station or the bus station, whatever.” I said, “Yeah, let me call.”

I let him know that I was going to come home today. What I didn’t know was that when I called him, he got in the car and drove all the way to the prison to get me. That was the starting point. Everything before them was just confusing and not knowing what was going to happen—not knowing anything: where I’m going to go, how to navigate the city. I had some ideas, but it’s not that simple. They put like $12 in your pocket, too, so you’re walking out with $12. With this money, you need to find something to eat, navigate through the city—it was horrible.

When Chilly came and got me, the clothes he gave me were too big. Literally, I got boxes full of books—there were certain books I wasn’t leaving behind—pants too big with no belt, and they’re literally falling. So I’m trying to hold the box and hold the pants, so this is like a horrible day. But Chilly shows up, and my first time in a car—it just felt so good. We stopped in the town and went to Harold's Chicken. Oh my god. I can’t remember exactly what I got—I got a combination of fish and chicken. This is my first meal since I got out of prison. This is the first time I saw a chicken tender. Chilly got chicken tenders, and I’m looking at this big old piece of chicken on his plate. I’m like… what?! I didn’t know what it was! I had no idea what it was. It looked like a lobster tail or something—a deep fried lobster tail. But it was chicken! So I ate half of his stuff, right?

It just felt so good to be on the highway, driving back to the city, calling different people. A lot of places we drove past still looked so horrible. It was like I left there yesterday. Seriously, it felt like I was just here yesterday. That was one of the bad parts, but the rest of the day, we went shopping—I went grocery shopping, and I had no idea what to buy! We went clothes shopping, and I didn't know what to buy. I went to see a few friends. The night I went to the halfway house—because I couldn’t go to the Precious Blood re-entry house—the halfway house was horrible. When I got there at 10 o’clock at night—because we had been driving around and going shopping and everything—they didn’t have room for me, even though they had me scheduled to be there. They didn’t have a physical room for me, so they had to kick a guy out in order for me to come in. I slept on the couch. The beds were horrible; they were infested with bedbugs, I mean, the people that were there—a lot of the guys that were there were hopeless. The halfway house didn’t really provide anything, like you couldn’t eat unless you had your own bowl and spoon—let alone food, cosmetics; I’m glad I went shopping because if I had to whip out that $13, I would have been hungry for the next few days. So, it was a good 24 hours, it just ended in a horrible way.

As far as people that assisted me, it was the guys that I knew from prison—Chilly, Mikey, and the Center. These were the people that aided me the most. Eventually, I left the halfway house and went to the Precious Blood re-entry house. I was able to work at Precious Blood as an intern for the first three months. At that point, I didn’t have any bills, so I had no bills. They helped me get the rent and medical coverage. Everything was the Center. And they didn’t know me, and they just went through Chilly’s and Elena’s word. So, after I interned, I was hired on full staff.

I haven’t had a hard transition, economically or as far as employment goes. Mine has been mainly emotional, trying to readjust; it’s not easy. There are so many emotions that are involved. It’s like… sometimes it feels surreal. It’s not real at all. Sometimes I just stop, and I look around. Yesterday, me and my girl, we were watching Game of Thrones because she has never seen Game of Thrones, right? In jail, I saw all of them. We were watching it, and as I’m sitting there watching it, it hits me that the first time I saw this, I was incarcerated. The actual space just felt so different. It was hard to explain.

Everybody who has come home after a long time in prison—they have moments of burden, where emotionally they just break down. It's not something that’s understood; it just happens. Then, there are moments where you’re just so happy. Everything is new. I love everything. I love going places. I love different types of food—just everything. It’s a beautiful thing. Even though I have family genetically, they are not people that are really in my life. That’s a part that’s hard for me to get over. Even though a lot of them want to be in my life now, I’m thinking—You haven’t been there for me for 26 and a half years. Some of you, I’ve never heard from the whole time I was incarcerated. So, what’s the reason you want to be in my life now? I want to understand. Some days, I really want to start accepting people in my life. Some days, I just let people be.

A: How did you start saving up to rent an apartment? What were some of your feelings and emotions while you were going through that process?

R: During COVID, you had no choice but to save money! I think at the time, my most expensive item was an Xbox. I have probably played that thing 6-7 times since I bought it. At the time, I thought I just needed something to occupy my time, when I was in the re-entry house. The apartment was spur-of-the-moment. I’m very impetuous when it comes to certain things. I went and viewed the apartment, and I rented it. I had the money to rent, so I rented it.

It felt good; it felt good furnishing it. I spent a lot of money furnishing it—everything.

—Raphel takes a phone call—

Even with this phone call [and this phone], it was spur-of-the-moment. I’m also enrolled to finish my bachelor’s degree, and I just enrolled last week. It was also spur-of-the-moment. It wasn’t planned to happen that day at that particular time. It just so happened that I was home, and I was just looking at these advertisements and decided to enroll.

Same thing with my car—I didn't shop around. When I saw the one I liked, I bought it! Don’t get me wrong, I’m learning now—so that when problems present themselves because of my impetuous decisions—to take my time. But it all feels so good. It feels good to have your own space. Even though I still lock myself in one room, it’s complicated. My bedroom is like my cell—it’s a safe space. I spend a lot of time there, so I literally had to set my office up in another room, instead of my bedroom, just so I could force myself to move around the space. It feels good to have the air conditioner on and just be… by yourself.

Driving the car—I bought a 2017 Acura. I love it. I didn’t shop around for any other car. When I saw it, I liked it, and that’s what I got. That’s my first car. So, that’s a test for everything for me. It felt good. It still feels good to be in the car and just drive away. It’s a freedom—transportation is freedom. I don’t want to be here right now, whatever the case may be—I don’t have to worry about you catching up with me! So, it felt great. It still feels good.

For my birthday, although it was COVID, I had everybody over. The idea was for them to get food and leave, but they ended up staying. So, I set up the table. We just enjoyed ourselves. I think I’m one of the lucky stories. So far, I haven’t had a lot of hardships that a lot of people that I work with have had. That’s because of the support network. That’s one of the things that we do now, with our re-entry team. We have been approved to go into prisons, and speak with the population of guys, and what we're trying to do is take that re-entry mindset and extend that into prisons. So, we start the process of helping people who are coming home way before they come home—to develop that process early. From my experience, it works.

A: I saw on the Precious Blood website that you are a Hospitality Manager, so I was wondering what your day-to-day like? Or maybe just a week doing your job—what’s that like?

R: So, it’s not set in stone. It’s a template I’m developing. It's a position that no one’s ever had, so there’s no template to go by. The idea is to make sure that all people who deal with Precious Blood have a certain experience, from this idea of radical hospitality. Finding ways to make that happen for different people is a complicated thing. Right now, I’m trying to put together two workshops—critical thinking and an emotional intelligence workshop—for participants, which is difficult because a lot of them are young people. That’s my basic job, as hospitality in the Precious Blood space; it’s finding things to bring to the space where people can engage and interact, instead of just coming up and sitting around and doing nothing. It’s having things that we offer.

Usually we cook every day so that when people come in, they have something to eat—to make sure that when people come here, they know they can be themselves. Also part of hospitality management is overseeing the hospitality houses. Those are the re-entry houses. Our re-entry house is what we call the hospitality house. So, it’s my job to oversee that and make sure that the people that are going to those spaces—this is where my case management stuff comes in—get all the resources they need and that they feel safe and confident enough to be able to step out on their own. So they can go to work and build a foundation from which they can begin to engage with family members and still feel safe, and they have a space to return to.

So, we have workforce development. One of the things that Precious Blood does is hire some of the young people. Well, workforce development and JRP [Job-Readiness Program] are different. So, JRP—I can’t remember exactly what it stands for—but this is the entity where they hire kids to do different jobs. They have woodshop, silk-screening, garden, pottery, and art. So, one of the things I do is hold a support circle for them. So far, the only guys that I rotate with are the ones in woodshop and silk-screening. It’s a support circle that helps them with their future professional development—helping them understand soft skills and workplace culture. We give them a space for them to talk when they have issues with their house or issues with their job. It’s just a support group; the idea is to help them maintain a healthy emotional state, while they're dealing with the job they have. We understand that a lot of their lives are complicated, and sometimes they bring that complication to work with them. It’s teaching them to code switch, how to understand how you communicate in the home versus how you communicate at work; how to communicate with your boss and your co-workers in ways that are healthy. And we’re still developing it.

Day-to-day… is just about finding ways to do different stuff, finding new resources to bring into the space. After 4 o’clock, that’s when a lot of the kids come in. So, we make sure that, when they come in, they’re safe, that they have something to eat, that they can sit around and use the Wi-Fi, and that they can come in and be themselves without feeling as if they’re being watched, as if they’re under surveillance in one way or another. We make sure that they’re safe in the space and that they’re not going to hurt each other in the space. It’s a community center with the doors open so that people can come in.

So, the position is one that is very flexible because I’m creating the template for it; there is no template to go by. It’s similar to the things I was doing before I left prison. Before I left prison, I used to run, what we call, a building deck. Building Block was a program created by the incarcerated men. It’s like a drug unit without the prerequisite that you have been a drug addict. So they have drug units in different prisons. And if you’re not said to be a drug addict, you can’t go to those units. We created those units without that prerequisite of being a drug addict, and it was more based on trauma-informed care, some behavioral modification stuff—which I really don’t agree with—so I was given the opportunity to run my own deck. It was an education deck. It was partly programming, and it was partly a lot of tutoring and academic work. So, in that space, I learned a lot about program development, as far as dealing with real people and being able to have exchanges with different people that you work with—having a loose structure instead of a tight structure, where it’s allowed to move a little bit to adjust to the people that you’re working with. So, I’m trying to implement a lot of the same things here—allowing people to come in, be themselves, having access to different resources, bringing different programs and workshops to the space, having different ways of challenging them intellectually and having fun, always maintaining the restorative lens in the process and making sure that the guys who work for woodshop are treated in a certain type of way. If there’s ever a conflict, there’s not a punitive approach when we deal with that conflict with that person; we use restorative ways to deal with the conflict, and that’s for all of the Precious Blood projects.

It looks different every day. Most days of the week, something happens that requires a shift that has to have some flexibility in order to make that shift.

A: I also wanted to ask if there were any myths you wanted to dispel about people who were incarcerated and about criminalization in general. Also, what words or phrases should we avoid when we talk about people who have been previously incarcerated?

R: There’s a term used—antisocial. It’s a diagnosis—antisocial personality disorder. According to the DSM, it’s describing a person to have a blatant disregard for the rights of society, for other people, etcetera. I think a lot of people incarcerated are diagnosed with this condition, simply because they broke the law. I think that that should be challenged. A lot of people broke the law out of survival techniques—they were simply trying to survive. It doesn’t make them antisocial or anti-society. They’re not antisocial, as in they don’t talk to anybody. Anti-society… They paint this picture of people incarcerated as being enemies of society. And at any turn they are willing to lash out against society and take from society. If you look at the way that new workers are introduced to the IDOC [Illinois Department of Corrections], the conversation they have with the administration—they paint the picture of those incarcerated as always being up to something negative, always going to try to beat you out of something, always going to try to steal something from you, take advantage of you, etcetera. I acknowledge, for some people, that’s true. But for some people, that’s true everywhere you go. Everywhere you go, there's somebody that may try to take advantage of you. They may try and steal from you, or whatever that case may be; it’s not just people who are in poverty or people who are incarcerated.

We have to recognize that a lot of people, not everybody, who are incarcerated, were simply just trying to survive in the best ways they could. When we look at ferrell children—children raised by animals in the wild—we look at it as being miraculous, that they adapted to the environment and survived. We know the type of realities that people are born into in this society. We know the levels of poverty and what comes along with that, and we know now, how it affects us socially and how it affects us neurologically. With all of this understanding, yet to still see individuals that fell victim to that, as simply being criminal or anti-society, there seems to be some type of disconnect.

I would love to challenge that myth, that we are not anti-society. That the mass majority of people in an environment were simply trying to survive in the best ways they understood how to survive. They weren’t born with a guidebook or some parrot on their shoulder to guide them from left to right. They were born into a family and an environment, where it was acknowledged that it was dysfunctional—not dysfunctional because it is non-normative, as far as being this nuclear family, but—because it was their children that were being raised by other children or people that never found a way out. Then, society has to take the onus to helping this person integrate into society, in one way or another, instead of just these punitive measures of punishment, that only seem to be points at poor people or [people of color].

Words… Instead of using words like: perpetrator, suspect… In human history, the first thing is the language that we use to characterize another person, not the behavior, that dehumanizes a person. If I can give you any term that I can deem that will be less than me, then it justifies what I do to you later. So if you look at any wars, people are called: rats, roaches, evil, the evil empire, the axis of evil. This is the first thing we do. We give them connotations that make them less than human, which justifies how we treat them. So that’s all you are as a criminal, a perpetrator, whatever other terms they use. It justifies the treatment.

I think that you always have to keep in mind that you’re dealing with a human being. The idea of: an incarcerated person, previously incarcerated person, ex-convict, currently incarcerated person. At the very least, you recognize that they made bad choices, and whatever happened happened, but my approach to dealing with them has to meet some type of standard. I can’t just do what I want to do. Tomorrow, when certain tables turn, there’s an old saying—It’s fun until the rabbit gets the gun. The people that you target today—you may be the person that’s targeted tomorrow. The same things that you did today might be the same things that you’re going through tomorrow. Tomorrow, you’re going to want help. Tomorrow, something that you’re doing may be criminalized. It may be because the crime rate is going down and so many corrections officers are going to lose their job—it will probably presently depend on what state they’re in—so they need a way to fuel up. They’re losing money. Something you’re doing tomorrow may be criminalized. These are some of the things that happened with some of the drug laws. It wasn’t until white men—that began to be caught on methamphetamine charges—started to face these harsh sentences in federal custody that people wanted to challenge these sentencing laws. We should use those as examples to say: the way that you treat human beings, you might be the one treated like that tomorrow. I don’t think that should only be determined out of fear of being treated that way, but we should just recognize that as a human being, you don’t want to be tortured. You don’t want to suffer at people’s hands simply because they have the ability to do so, no other reason.

A: My last question for you is: what is your message to people? What is something that you want people to take away from our conversation?

R: My thing is: people are people. Trust me, I have this on a regular basis. I have never met a person—and I’m not saying they don’t exist—who was completely evil. I never met a person that was completely good. I believe that all people and all groups of people have the potential to do the greatest good or greatest evil, the greatest wrong. I believe that people are people. I believe that no matter what organization of people you go to, you find the same stuff. You find the same good stuff and the same bad stuff. No matter what religious ideology you walk into, you find some of the same good stuff and bad stuff.

Human beings are very emotional. We have a lot of greed, selfishness, envy, pride, jealousy, hope, forgiveness, love, compassion—all of these things exist at the same time inside of every human being. You're allowed to see any of it at all times; it depends on the circumstances. There is no one group of people that epitomizes any of it. I don’t believe all white people are evil. I don’t believe that all people who have been incarcerated are anti-society. These become easy phrases to lean on, when I need to make an idea, or when I feel bad, it makes me feel better.

What I would want other people to simply understand is that people are people. Organizations, systems—they are ran by people. Religions—ran by people. Schools—ran by people. Any good or negative trait you find in anybody—not anybody as in any one person, but also any structure—you’re going to find in the next structure.

So, that’s really it.

A: Thank you so much! I loved this conversation so much; there are so many good stories that came out of it. I appreciate the time you took out of your day to speak with me today.

R: Thank you for listening, and thank you for telling my story!