Prisoners are literally an enslaved workforce, not only to external companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods, but to the state of California itself. The prison provides jobs in the town for guards and nurses, a couple of counselors. But not for janitors, cooks, people who make furniture. These are all parts of America's sprawling slave labor system.

I do not remember ever going to a movie with my mother, window shopping. I do not remember us as relaxed, as humans being. We have always had to be humans doing.

Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to out community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became and institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.

You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn't mean you're not doing life.

We agree there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not live, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, one that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.

Being hungry is the hardest thing, & to this day I have prayers of gratitude for the Black Panthers, who made Breakfast for Children a thing that schools should do. We qualified for free lunch & breakfast, & without them I am almost sure we wouldn't have made it out of childhood alive despite my hardworking parents.

What is the impact of not being valued?How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?

He says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself. We sit with that for a time. What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?That night we speak of prisons and the drug war and how it feels to not seem to matter as a person in the world. He has never been worth saving, never worth treatment.No intervention beyond prison for this Black man from Louisiana.

There is nothing about you I am not willing to know.

We agree that there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not love, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, on that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.