Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/category/ideas-and-opinions/the-beat-within/)
The Beat Within, a publication of writing and art from incarcerated youth, was founded by David Inocencio in San Francisco in 1996. Weekly writing and conversation workshops are held in California, six other states and Washington, D.C. Submissions and new partners are welcomed. Write to him at dinocencio@thebeatwithin.org.
Let me start by saying I am a triracial human being with a dark complexion. That was my funny way of saying I’m Black. I embrace my Mexican side. I embrace my Indian side and my Black side but for a while no one else embraced it.
I was bullied a lot growing up. I’m 33 years young, and it was because I didn’t fit the mold the world created for me.
In 2000, I was 14 years old, in Los Angeles' Skid Row. You wouldn't believe such a Third World slum existed within history's richest country; oh, but it did. It does. A section of one of the world's most glamorous cities set aside to hide thousands of homeless people, to hide America's unwillingness to deal with poverty, mental health, drug addiction and homelessness. It’s all swept under the rug, or under the shadow of downtown's skyscrapers from the top of the world, down to a grimy, violent underworld, where you had to fight just to eat and humanity was perverted into its most animalistic tendencies.
Looking back at my youth and trying to pinpoint where did I go wrong and how did I go wrong, I realized that the whole time I was trying to get my basic needs met. Needs such as love and a sense of belonging, survival and freedom. My earliest memory was around the age of 5 that I realized that we didn’t have enough food in our home. My daily meal was a small bowl of dirty brown rice with maybe a small chunk of pork fat because we could not afford meat. Pork fat was cheaper than red meat.
It was an early morning, uncommonly quiet, and with no movement because of a fog alert, yet people were going to different places, to work, to the yard or day room to play cards and chess. My cellie went on a visit.
I’ve been taking all my pain out on this paper
I’m sorry I’m still stuck up in this cell a year later
They are tryin’ to send me to prison like they doin’ me a favor
I was 5 years old in 2007, when my mother left Mazatenango, our small village in southern Guatemala. Gangs run that town and evil runs everywhere.
When I first heard the topic was on guns, my initial response was I have zero experience with guns. Other than using a water gun at the local fair to win a prize, I never held a gun, shot a gun or even seen a real gun in person.
The losses of life, the endless pain and suffering, the thousands of lives sent to prison, fatherless and motherless children and worst of all a parent having to bury their child. Going back into my life I'll never forget the tragedy that came with the first time I heard gunshots and then saw the horrific wreckage. Two people died that night, one a man I didn’t know and the other a best friend of mine. I wasn't shot, I didn’t pull the trigger, but the bullets tore through my heart and soul. I remember sitting next to my best friend who was laying there dead with a bullet in his head.
My name is J for all of you who don’t know me. I’m a transgender male, which means I was born as a female with the female anatomy, but transitioning into a...
As I sat on my bunk — trying to understand why I was denied parole yet again — something in my mind was telling me that the parole board was never going to...
March 7, 2012 my oldest brother was killed. He was killed by the NOPD (New Orleans Police Department). Coming home from school March 7, 2012, my oldest brother and his friend was sitting outside. They were just chilling and talking. Once he saw my siblings and I get off the school bus, he told us not to come outside until we finished our homework.
