On March 28, two days after my 39th birthday, I wrote a post about Darren Rainey’s death in a South Florida correctional facility. As often happens when one transitions from one year into another, I had been contemplating a number of things about life and all the things I have experienced and accomplished— especially this year as I mark the last year of a decade, looking toward the start of my forties and beginning life under what is certainly the most bizarre and whitest political administration I can remember.
Rainey’s story wasn’t new to me, but it was filed away in the recesses of my brain with other unpleasant stories about people of color who have met untimely deaths in police custody or correctional facilities. It reinforced my belief that our prison system is in desperate need of reform. It was then that I started remembering my own brief experience with the system—and since then I’ve been able to think about little else.
I stepped foot inside of a jail for the first time in 2008. I should remember the exact date and time clearly but now, almost a decade later, the event seems jumbled in my brain. Of course, it makes sense that I should want to forget and sometimes I think that it’s almost unbelievable that I actually volunteered to go.
My career in immigrant advocacy and refugee resettlement had offered me the opportunity to volunteer with the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and, one day during the fall of that year, I went to a men’s jail in Virginia to interview immigrant detainees about their cases.
I had never been to jail before so needless to say, I was unprepared for the immediate sense of loss of privacy I felt upon entering the gates.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2nZPRqO
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