On October 20th, 2014, three graduates of Raising My Voice,
a leadership and public speaking training for formerly incarcerated men and
women, shared their story with the Harlem Justice Corps, a community service,
employment, and education program for 18-24 year old men and women with
histories of justice involvement. The
packed room consisted of 21 corps members, staff and interns. When the speakers
entered the room, the anticipation of the youth was felt and verbalized with
statements like, “stop introducing them, and let them talk to us!”
With humility and grace, three graduates shared their life
stories of childhood, gang involvement, robberies, homicide, incarceration and
reentry. All three of these speakers were under the age of twenty when they
committed their crimes. The speakers focused on the effects that their crimes
had on the victims, their families and their lives. When one speaker shared, “I made the choice of
being in the street to get away from a bad home situation,” the silence in the
room was deafening.
Another speaker shared that his loyalty to a gang cost him nineteen
birthdays in prison and in the end that gang showed him not one shred of
loyalty back. The third speaker spoke about poor decision making and the
unintended consequences of shattering his family. One speaker shared that he
created a new life narrative during his incarceration by raising money to
support an injured woman.
All of our speakers talked about the role of education and
how it transformed their world view and self-perception. Each speaker described
the relationship between being uneducated, lacking employment and life skills and
their attraction to “street life”.
In a pivotal moment of the presentation one speaker
remarked: “I knew I needed to change, but didn’t know how. I thought and
thought about what I could do, and it hit me- I need to stop doing crime. Just
that one thing began to change my life.”
At the end of the presentations, we opened the floor for
questions. The first corps member to ask a question, a participant of the Reentry
Family and Faith Circles of Support Program at Harlem Reentry, asked the panel,
“How do you feel now that the holidays are coming?”
“The holidays didn’t mean much to me while in prison for all
of those years- it was just another day. Now that I am home, I am going to have
to get used to customs and spending time with my family. Prison teaches you to
be isolated and alone, to be safe” responded one of the speakers.
Another question asked by a corps member was, “How much
money did you get from these robberies?”
The speakers answered incisively: a very high price was paid, nothing
was gained.
The messages of these three speakers weren’t just heard
today; they were received. This was even clear after the presentation, when the
Justice Corps members approached the speakers to shake their hands and thank
them for coming. Maybe for the first time in their lives, they weren’t being
lectured by someone in power – they were receiving a message from credible and skilled messengers. Maybe the next
time HJC hosts speakers from this training, it will be former HJC members
finding and raising their own voices.
