🔵 By Kenneth Zamarron. Photo by lauragrafie.
As a child, I was ordered into a nether world. A world our society deems the worst possible place an individual in this country can find himself: the American penal system. As such to my great consternation, I came to the stark realization I was literally surrounded by the dregs of humanity: murderers, rapists, child molesters, major drug dealers, and armed robbers. Given my circumstances, I like so many other similar situated youthful offenders, had my share of struggles trying to find a way to simply survive in the environs within which I found myself as. At the time It seemed many incarcerated individuals who I had met only respected violence or the threat of violence.
Even so, I soon came to appreciate that some widely held beliefs regarding what is normal in prison are completely unfounded. Among other things, certain of America’s supposedly worst criminals simply made a horrible, one-time decision, often fueled by drugs or alcohol. The consequences of which landed them in prison. Moreover, some of the incarcerated individuals by whom I was surrounded saw me as not that different from one of of their own children they had failed and, as a result, without asking anything in return, often went out of their way to help me learn from the mistakes they had made in their own lives. Not only the mistakes they had made in the free world, but the mistakes they had made shortly after they, themselves, had first landed in prison. Such sage advice helped me mature and avoid what otherwise would have been inevitable physical confrontations. I would respectfully submit such benevolence on the part of certain incarcerated individuals was the very antithesis of what most people would have expected. In fact, I have come to the realization that not only can wayward incarcerated adults change, but that those who were incarcerated as children have the capacity, and often the verve, to change all the more. If our nation’s penal system cannot correct and mold our delinquent children into stable, mature, civic-minded adults, what is the point of plastering the terms “Reformatory” or “Correctional” on the front of our nation’s prisons?
I can state with absolute certitude from both close observation and personal experience that many incarcerated individuals who committed crimes as children are, after decades in prison, no risk whatsoever to any other person or any other person’s property. All of that being the case, it is up to you, the reader, who, through your actions, can ensure that all individuals who are incarcerated pursuant to a crime they committed as a child will one day have a meaningful review regarding a potential release from prison. It is you, the reader who can ensure that every state in our nation bans juvenile life without parole sentences and ensure parole eligibility after fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years for all juvenile offenders who were sentences as adults. It is you, the reader, who can write to or speak to legislators, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, or fellow citizens and implore that they join in the fight against either de jure or de facto life without parole sentences for juvenile sentences as adults.
Ultimately, it is you, the reader, who can fight against the greatest enemy of juvenile lifers – a complete lack of hope they will ever be released from incarceration. As an adult in the nether world, I will always hold on to hope.
(Kenneth Lee Zamarron is an Oakland City University student and certified paralegal. His writing has appeared in the Harbinger, Flash lights-a project of the Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative. Critical Resistance, Prison Express, and Colors On Concrete in Germany. He is also an audio contributor to Prison Radio. Follow him on Instagram @Worst_Artist_91)