On Christmas Eve in 2013 my cousin bumped into me next to the dinner table, knocking my plate out of my hand. Then he screamed in my face.
I was 18 years old and a bit of a cry baby (still am). I cried in my room for an hour, and my mom comforted me by saying, “He’s just an asshole.” A few months later I overheard my parents whispering, saying my cousin’s name. They were talking about him stealing something from our house. These stories came together to form a fuller picture years later when my aunt told me my cousin was not coming to Fourth of July because he was sitting in a cell on Rikers Island. My cousin had been dabbling in drugs for a long time before a work injury left him with an opioid addiction. Suddenly the irritability and the stealing made sense.
This was not my first head-on encounter with addiction. My mother is an alcoholic and raised me until I was 12. As a child, I learned to watch her steps when walking down the street to see if she had been drinking. I was placed in situations that taught me to be on constant alert. I felt it was my responsibility to keep her safe. I felt the same way about my cousin. During the approximately three years he was in prison I wrote him letters constantly, I sent him books, and we talked on the phone. As a sociology major I was already interested in the criminal justice system. His imprisonment turned my interest into an obsession. I learned everything I could about prisons and jails. I wrote papers about the origins of jails and prisons.
When he got out and continued his life, not daring to look back, my mind stayed on those who never get out. Those who didn’t get placed in a special fast track recovery program. Those who endure conditions far worse than those my cousin was subjected to, who don’t have family on the outside with enough money to send care packages full of decent food.
Where my family saw luck and blessings in my cousin’s getting put in the program, I saw something else: he had committed several felonies, but he was white from an upper middle class family. Black men were punished harsher for far less, primarily for crimes involving minuscule amounts of weed.
When I applied for journalism school I worried briefly about the concept of objectivity in my own journalism. What would that look like? Could I do it? Then I told myself, I know I can fake it. How absurd is that and how many people out there right now are faking it? Luckily, I was accepted to the Social Journalism program at the CUNY Newmark School of Journalism: a program that has no problem admitting objectivity as traditionally practiced is dead (thank you, Lewis Raven Wallace). During the course of this program each student will choose a community to serve via their journalism. I thought instantly of people that are incarcerated. I want to understand on a deeper level the stories of people who are incarcerated, what they go through and what they’ve been through. I want to understand common ideas and misconceptions about people who are incarcerated.
But still I worry, will I be able to effectively serve a prison community amid a global pandemic? Would I be able to effectively serve them otherwise? What I do know is that I want to give it my all. I want to throw myself into the work of understanding incarcerated people and their lives. I want to be able to share their stories and get them the information they need. From a social journalism perspective, I think that’s a decent starting point.
As a social journalism student, I am hoping to get a sense of the needs of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated community from a journalist’s perspective. I want to do anything I can to be of service to this community- I want to engage in creative ways to make a difference. The stage I am at now is engaging with folks in that community or adjacent to get an idea of what those needs are. This would normally be a difficult process, just having a chat with folks that are incarcerated, but the global pandemic has made it marginally harder. I’ve been doing research and utilizing social media to reach out to people that can help. I’m excited about the progress I’ve made, people I’ve talked to, and what I’ve learned. I can’t wait to keep going.
