Dear friends of The Beat Within! First off we want to send our love and respect to you all during this time of uncertainty. We want you to know The Beat staff is working from home, while trying to stay healthy and we hope you are taking care of yourselves too. Please know that despite the Shelter in Place mandate, we are still here for you! We know that taking all the necessary precautions is important and we hope that you are practicing social distancing and following guidelines around hand washing and disinfecting. Every precaution each of us takes helps curb the virus and we invite you to join us in doing your part to keep our community, our world, safe and healthy. Â
We are working hard to continue providing our vital services in new and innovative ways, as we work closely with our many partners around the state and beyond. Since March 17, 2020 we have all been working remotely to ensure that partners, colleague, friends and clients still have access to our services, as we continue to publish our one of a kind publication, The Beat Within, which is needed now, more than ever before. In addition we are working with some sites to conduct virtual workshops. We will also be sure to share and post relevant information with you in each publication. Together, we will get through this.
As resilient people, we know how to make things work and we will thrive! We are working with and trusting the process while learning new ways to take care of ourselves and each other. If you need us, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We are here and we want to hear from you!!
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation as we continue to navigate this new path together. Enjoy the latest issue of The Beat Within.
Let’s pass the keyboard to our high school interns from Urban High School who deliver some powerful reflective essays…!
Reading Your Stories
Before working with The Beat Within I had little knowledge of the justice system and it played no role in my day to day life. I knew facts about the issues and I had seen the numbers and statistics about incarcerated individuals but had no personal human experiences. It became easy for me to not see each individual in the justice system as a person and a personality simply because it played no role in my life. I was fully aware that I have been given a privileged life, but this gave me more perspective on how lucky I was.
The Beat Within allowed me to look at individual people and get a piece of the story that they wanted to tell. A few of my classmates and I had the wonderful opportunity to read the writing of incarcerated people. We got to hear the stories and writing of a group of people that have very little voice and influence in our lives. I felt very lucky for the experience.
Every piece that I read over my trimester of working with The Beat Within came from an interesting and intelligent voice. I immediately started thinking about how each person who is incarcerated has their own interesting stories to tell. In my life, I just never get the chance to hear them. All of the writings that I got to read were very well written and worded. All of the notes written to The Beat Within were very kind and thoughtful and in many of the letters from the writers, they thanked the organization. I tried not to do this before but my experience confirmed that you cannot know anything about a person’s personality based on one mistake that they have made in their lives. I read stories of people who had no choice but to steal even when they wanted to live a better life. I read stories from people who feel that they are serving punishment that does not fit the crime. There is always more to a person than a mistake that they made.
When given the option to study any social issue in America I chose to look more at the issue of incarceration at a prosecutor level because of the interest that each writer gave me. I learned more about how right from the start of a person’s life they can be set up to fail. My studies and The Beat Within experience gave me a level of sympathy and respect that I should have always had for incarcerated people in America. There are experience and knowledge that is told in incarcerated people’s stories that can’t be found anywhere else. I learned how thankful I should be for the situation that I am in and the loved one I have around. Most of all, this trimester I learned how fascinating and important it is to give everyone a voice. Thank you to The Beat Within for giving me this amazing opportunity.
-Dominic L., Urban High School, San Francisco, CA
An Eye Opening Experience
Working with The Beat Within has been one of the most eye opening experiences of my life. I have learned so much through this experience. I’m not someone who has a close friend or family member who has been incarcerated, so many of my preconceived notions about prison came from the media. Watching the news, television, and movies made me very judgmental of incarcerated people; the bad guys always went to jail. Before working with The Beat Within, I saw prisoners as people who make bad choices. I knew that most were not necessarily bad people with bad intent, but the decisions they made were harmful which is why they end up incarcerated. I looked down on them, and believed that had I been in their situation, I would have acted differently. I felt very removed from the whole concept of prison, which is why I was so interested in working with The Beat Within this term. I knew close to nothing, and I wanted to learn.
One of my first letters was from someone who transcribed his entire life story from birth to being in prison today. As I read my heart ached for him. The hardships he faced were nothing like I had ever experienced myself. His older brother brought him into gang related activities when he was only eleven and he knew nothing else. Many of his decisions weren’t decisions at all; they were things he had to do or he would be ostracized by his community, his family, his friends. He was trying to survive and he turned to crime because there was nowhere else to go. As I read, everything I seemingly knew about why prisoners go to prison changed. I felt like had I been put in his situation, I definitely would have made at least similar decisions. Before this letter, because my life is so drastically different than gang members or criminals, I didn’t think I could ever put myself in the shoes of someone so different. And while I’ll never truly know what it’s like to experience these a life like his, every decision he made seemed justified, at least to me.
This term I also happened to be doing a research project about mass incarceration. The part of mass incarceration that affects me the most is the cycle of re-entry. It’s so hard for people to leave prison and lead a prosperous, ‘normal’ life because of the way our justice system works. Even if you’re supposedly “rehabilitated,†you’re still treated like a criminal. I read statistics like, “A criminal record can reduce the likelihood of a callback or job offer by nearly 50 percent. The negative impact of a criminal record is twice as large for African American applicants.†Knowing this, it’s understandable why so many criminals return to a life of crime; they don’t have any other way to survive.
Reading these stories and knowing that so many just like these exist really inspired me to want to take action. The Beat Within has been such an incredible experience for me that I hope to carry with me for a long time.
– Ava W. Urban High School, San Francisco, CA
A big salute to Ava and Daniel for writing their powerful essays for The Beat Within. We also want to take this moment to thank you – our dearest friends and followers – for taking the time to read this editorial note. We certainly hope to hear from you when the time is right. We send you our best! Stay well. We are thinking of you all. All the best to you and your families!Â