by William Curl, Corcoran State Prison in Corcoran, CA
Hey, how’s the people? I realized not too long ago y’all be writing to prompts. I’ve gotten a few in the magazines but I always go on my own lil’ tangent. The other day I received some words from David and he included some prompts wit “HOPE” being a potential subject. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about that! After existing so long without it I have a spiritual appreciation for it.
HOPE is a real deep word. It’s synonymous with love in way of trying to articulate what it means. It covers a broad spectrum of influence as it relates to the “betterment of humanity.” To me, HOPE can be defined as a desire, yearning feeling that regardless how dark the sky becomes there’s always this presence of assurance that light is fighting its way through those shadowy grays and dark black clouds that oppose it.
You can’t see the light but that thing deep inside tells you that it’s always there just waiting to shine through. That righteous always prevails mantra has embedded itself in the force of our momentum, in the strands of our DNA.
When I first arrived in prison, I had very little hope of returning to my family. Back in 1994 Life without parole meant exactly that. Doing the time wasn’t too difficult. I grew up in the Juvenile system. It took minor adjustments to fit into the physical demands of survival. The most difficult change for me was the emotional-Spiritual transformation.
It definitely takes courage to stand on ya’ own two feet to choose right, and remain unwavering in ya’ beliefs. When you decide to accept a prosocial way of thinking, especially when it puts us against them, you’ll see at some point “them” will consist of those who pretended to be part of us. How many switch up just to please them?
For some reason solid finds a way not to mean solid when it’s time to actually be solid. The dictionary is not a living breathing document where meanings get altered according to each individuals mood. Later on in my journey, I read somewhere the constitution was a living breathing document. That’s the only document I know to date, that holds the power of evolution.
Yeah, I had adjusted to confinement just like y’all doing now. Most of y’all will make a few trips through the juvenile system because getting locked up is part of the criminal get down or keeping it gangsta. That’s how it’s romanticized in our dysfunctional thinking. That’s why going back never feels shameful. Another trip to the halls adds to our rep, right!
What the halls didn’t prepare me for is doing time until my soul separated from my body. That’s another level to “keeping it real.” There’s nothing that can possibly prepare a human being for that really.
There’s an automatic appeal that takes place after a murder conviction. One of the older convicts taught me how to lace up my chucks. He noticed I was getting legal mail. He pulled me over one day and asked what I was appealing. After I explained about the public defender who was working on my direct appeal he broke down what I’d need to contribute to the squabble for my life.
He told me, “Just because you got a lawyer don’t mean he gone fight for ya’ life like you will. How you know he doing what he supposed to be doing if you know what he supposed to be doing?”
Made way too much sense to me. He handed me a Georgetown Law Journal and directed me to the sections pertaining to my conviction. Unbeknownst to me he was heavily involved in prison politics and knew how impressionable and prepared I was to lay something down.
He said, “Just because you got LWOP don’t mean you will die in prison. These laws are changing every day. Don’t let cha down-ness be taken advantage of.”
I’d heard similar words of comfort from my family about me not dying prison but they gave me no hope. My mom was supposed to say stuff like that. IT was their blood related duty to ease the obvious stress whether it was true or not. What what this older convict’s obligation to me? For some reason his words carried more weight.
I read that Georgetown Law Journal every single day. The phrase Constitutional rights kept popping up. I have very little understanding what my rights were but knowing I had some put a little bit of life (that my sentence intended to legally take from me) right back into me. While I had and educated myself on the law he always found time to mention how rare reversals were, especially with gang-related murders.
The first denial I got was painful. Not so much because of the denial. He prepared me for that. The court was my only hope of freedom. When they said, “No,” I experienced a deeper hurt. Yes, pain had many different levels. This pain makes you afraid in a way that disturbs the chemistry rhythm in your system. I guess the closest I can get to describe it is severe depression.
I’ll never forget when I questioned my worth as a human being. It’s an ache in your soul that you are afraid of nothing in this existence, will have the power to ease. When the court denied what should’ve easily been construed as my constitutional rights being violated I lost all hope of leaving prison alive.
Even at that emotional all-time low, fundamentally I remained an optimist. I’ve always been able to find calm in the chaos. I see the good in the bad. I can’t say if it’s by nature or nurture, maybe both, but it helped me a great deal. In those early years I did a lot of time in a cage. The more I read the more I compared my situation with situations worse than mine.
I had LWOP but I was better off than the fellas on death row. That become the easing factor. “There’s others in a worst position than you. Why you complaining?” Is some of the stuff I’d say to myself to ease the barbarity of the conditions I existed in (Remember our talk about denial? This was denial used in a good protected way by helping me deal with no HOPE). Understanding the struggles of others began to change my perspective. In some of the most deplorable inhumane conditions people still found love, compassion. People still found ways to trust and empathize.
Mandela helped me in my transformation tremendously! His autobiography is called Long Walk To Freedom. It changed the way I saw myself in relation to humanity. His story literally gave me HOPE. The more I read about history I realized that hope has played a major role in our evolution as human beings.
I mean it was HOPE that got us through Slavery, The Holocaust, World Wars, and The Great Depression. Of course I had to read about those events to understand the connection. That motivated me to study the U.S. constitution and I understood the concept clearly.
The constitution was written by a group of colonizers that felt oppressed by Great Britain. The insatiable desire to be treated fairly as “human beings” formed the “All men are created equal” spiel. Although the ideal back then was focused exclusively on the White Male, it shows how imperfect minds still visualized perfection in our treatment of each other.
Imagine the amount of HOPE that a piece of paper held for those understanding the depth of that statement and devoted their lives to be in service of its most benevolent interpretation. Those were the people giving hope to the hopeless through action. Although it wasn’t inclusive of gender and other races it represented an ideal that would come to represent all of humanity.
Or as we commonly call it, “The American Dream.” It basically lays out how human beings are to be treated at the basic levels of humanity regardless of race, gender, sexual preference. That’s what make the constitution a living breathing document. It has the ability to mature in sync with society’s moral advancements.
That’s why slavery was abolished. Women were allowed to vote, The LGBT community found its identity within the laws that protect the rest of the population. Society had to change its perspective.
Today, because of our deeper understanding of our connection through humanity regardless what we believe, prefer, etc.; the word “Men” in that phrase now includes women, gays, the disabled, the elderly, the young, and old. People actually began to listen with their hearts when Mandela tied his incarceration to those human rights he was being denied and that motivated a surge of HOPE within me.
I felt reconnected to humanity. It was the first time I believed I had a shot at not dying in prison. Now, my life was out of those judges’ hands. They had proven to be hypocritical in oaths they swore to follow the law in impartial rulings. I had issues that clearly pointed to constitutional violations at my trial but they weren’t illegal enough to let me out. I lost HOPE in the court system.
When we can accept that the prison population is a majority of minorities then justice really is blind when it denies who it benefits! Reading about these people helping Mandela just because they believed that human beings had inalienable rights and those rights existed even when we broke the laws established to protect those rights. These people were ordinary people that had extraordinary beliefs.
I could go way back to Harriet Tubman days and talk about ‘Ole Miss Mildred that helped her navigate the underground rail road, or those that helped hide the Anne Franks of a generation to showcase human beings “giving their best” to better the lives of other’s just because it was the right thing to do, but those types exist among us today.
Y’all know one of ‘em as David, Founder of The Beat Within. He’s one of those types. One of the defining qualities of solid human beings is the capacity to put others before themselves. His desire to distribute this publication has nothing to do with material gain, nor fame. He felt the suffering of you young people and embraced that desire to help, the best way he could, to ease it. Look at the beauty created when we simply give our best.
Well that’s how I maintained Hope when I was sentenced to Hopelessness. These types of people fought to make sure criminals were embraced inside that “all men created equal,” ideal and I’d come to admire that. It was huge in changing the way I viewed my death by incarceration. It changed the way I viewed society, the world at large, actually seeing people living according to how they believe gave me HOPE.
It gave me a standard to emulate. It gave me a reason to back away from that cliff of despair-hopelessness and deal wit that dehumanizing sentence behind me. There were some very dark days where I didn’t have the motivation to live.
It’s crazy how unstable the mind becomes to find balance inside that level of emotional chaos. I was completely prepared to die in prison but the more I read Mandela’s Story, and the stories of other people overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds-oppressions, I couldn’t accept the possibility I’d die in a cage.
I mean there is absolutely no Hope in LWOP. It’s a cruel very slow torturous death sentence that not only denies HOPE, that has furthered our humanity but it denies the innate ability for us to completely transform through spiritual-mental-emotional reawakening.
So I guess HOPE can be defined as the possibility inside the impossible that tomorrow will be better than today. People create that HOPE for themselves through the love shown by other people. That’s why caring is so important. It’s that rhythm created through suffering that serenades the souls of those types who sacrifice so much to help ease it. It was in that older convict, in the Humanitarians that helped Free Mandela, in the David’s of our communities that continue to give y’all best to yo’ self and each other to show that although our immature dysfunctional thinking urged us to dance on the devil’s playground, once those perspective change; they can also be used to showcase our ability to persevere, overcome, atone.
To show that those dark stroked of grays-blacks can transform into more gentle blues, pinks, greens, etc. and remain focused. Change produces struggle and remember there’s some who regardless of receptive qualities displayed in our “self-portrait” they still want to hang the painter instead of the painting. LOL.
HOPE is a real deep word. It’s synonymous with love in way of trying to articulate what it means. It covers a broad spectrum of influence as it relates to the “betterment of humanity.” To me, HOPE can be defined as a desire, yearning feeling that regardless how dark the sky becomes there’s always this presence of assurance that light is fighting its way through those shadowy grays and dark black clouds that oppose it.
You can’t see the light but that thing deep inside tells you that it’s always there just waiting to shine through. That righteous always prevails mantra has embedded itself in the force of our momentum, in the strands of our DNA.
When I first arrived in prison, I had very little hope of returning to my family. Back in 1994 Life without parole meant exactly that. Doing the time wasn’t too difficult. I grew up in the Juvenile system. It took minor adjustments to fit into the physical demands of survival. The most difficult change for me was the emotional-Spiritual transformation.
It definitely takes courage to stand on ya’ own two feet to choose right, and remain unwavering in ya’ beliefs. When you decide to accept a prosocial way of thinking, especially when it puts us against them, you’ll see at some point “them” will consist of those who pretended to be part of us. How many switch up just to please them?
For some reason solid finds a way not to mean solid when it’s time to actually be solid. The dictionary is not a living breathing document where meanings get altered according to each individuals mood. Later on in my journey, I read somewhere the constitution was a living breathing document. That’s the only document I know to date, that holds the power of evolution.
Yeah, I had adjusted to confinement just like y’all doing now. Most of y’all will make a few trips through the juvenile system because getting locked up is part of the criminal get down or keeping it gangsta. That’s how it’s romanticized in our dysfunctional thinking. That’s why going back never feels shameful. Another trip to the halls adds to our rep, right!
What the halls didn’t prepare me for is doing time until my soul separated from my body. That’s another level to “keeping it real.” There’s nothing that can possibly prepare a human being for that really.
There’s an automatic appeal that takes place after a murder conviction. One of the older convicts taught me how to lace up my chucks. He noticed I was getting legal mail. He pulled me over one day and asked what I was appealing. After I explained about the public defender who was working on my direct appeal he broke down what I’d need to contribute to the squabble for my life.
He told me, “Just because you got a lawyer don’t mean he gone fight for ya’ life like you will. How you know he doing what he supposed to be doing if you know what he supposed to be doing?”
Made way too much sense to me. He handed me a Georgetown Law Journal and directed me to the sections pertaining to my conviction. Unbeknownst to me he was heavily involved in prison politics and knew how impressionable and prepared I was to lay something down.
He said, “Just because you got LWOP don’t mean you will die in prison. These laws are changing every day. Don’t let cha down-ness be taken advantage of.”
I’d heard similar words of comfort from my family about me not dying prison but they gave me no hope. My mom was supposed to say stuff like that. IT was their blood related duty to ease the obvious stress whether it was true or not. What what this older convict’s obligation to me? For some reason his words carried more weight.
I read that Georgetown Law Journal every single day. The phrase Constitutional rights kept popping up. I have very little understanding what my rights were but knowing I had some put a little bit of life (that my sentence intended to legally take from me) right back into me. While I had and educated myself on the law he always found time to mention how rare reversals were, especially with gang-related murders.
The first denial I got was painful. Not so much because of the denial. He prepared me for that. The court was my only hope of freedom. When they said, “No,” I experienced a deeper hurt. Yes, pain had many different levels. This pain makes you afraid in a way that disturbs the chemistry rhythm in your system. I guess the closest I can get to describe it is severe depression.
I’ll never forget when I questioned my worth as a human being. It’s an ache in your soul that you are afraid of nothing in this existence, will have the power to ease. When the court denied what should’ve easily been construed as my constitutional rights being violated I lost all hope of leaving prison alive.
Even at that emotional all-time low, fundamentally I remained an optimist. I’ve always been able to find calm in the chaos. I see the good in the bad. I can’t say if it’s by nature or nurture, maybe both, but it helped me a great deal. In those early years I did a lot of time in a cage. The more I read the more I compared my situation with situations worse than mine.
I had LWOP but I was better off than the fellas on death row. That become the easing factor. “There’s others in a worst position than you. Why you complaining?” Is some of the stuff I’d say to myself to ease the barbarity of the conditions I existed in (Remember our talk about denial? This was denial used in a good protected way by helping me deal with no HOPE). Understanding the struggles of others began to change my perspective. In some of the most deplorable inhumane conditions people still found love, compassion. People still found ways to trust and empathize.
Mandela helped me in my transformation tremendously! His autobiography is called Long Walk To Freedom. It changed the way I saw myself in relation to humanity. His story literally gave me HOPE. The more I read about history I realized that hope has played a major role in our evolution as human beings.
I mean it was HOPE that got us through Slavery, The Holocaust, World Wars, and The Great Depression. Of course I had to read about those events to understand the connection. That motivated me to study the U.S. constitution and I understood the concept clearly.
The constitution was written by a group of colonizers that felt oppressed by Great Britain. The insatiable desire to be treated fairly as “human beings” formed the “All men are created equal” spiel. Although the ideal back then was focused exclusively on the White Male, it shows how imperfect minds still visualized perfection in our treatment of each other.
Imagine the amount of HOPE that a piece of paper held for those understanding the depth of that statement and devoted their lives to be in service of its most benevolent interpretation. Those were the people giving hope to the hopeless through action. Although it wasn’t inclusive of gender and other races it represented an ideal that would come to represent all of humanity.
Or as we commonly call it, “The American Dream.” It basically lays out how human beings are to be treated at the basic levels of humanity regardless of race, gender, sexual preference. That’s what make the constitution a living breathing document. It has the ability to mature in sync with society’s moral advancements.
That’s why slavery was abolished. Women were allowed to vote, The LGBT community found its identity within the laws that protect the rest of the population. Society had to change its perspective.
Today, because of our deeper understanding of our connection through humanity regardless what we believe, prefer, etc.; the word “Men” in that phrase now includes women, gays, the disabled, the elderly, the young, and old. People actually began to listen with their hearts when Mandela tied his incarceration to those human rights he was being denied and that motivated a surge of HOPE within me.
I felt reconnected to humanity. It was the first time I believed I had a shot at not dying in prison. Now, my life was out of those judges’ hands. They had proven to be hypocritical in oaths they swore to follow the law in impartial rulings. I had issues that clearly pointed to constitutional violations at my trial but they weren’t illegal enough to let me out. I lost HOPE in the court system.
When we can accept that the prison population is a majority of minorities then justice really is blind when it denies who it benefits! Reading about these people helping Mandela just because they believed that human beings had inalienable rights and those rights existed even when we broke the laws established to protect those rights. These people were ordinary people that had extraordinary beliefs.
I could go way back to Harriet Tubman days and talk about ‘Ole Miss Mildred that helped her navigate the underground rail road, or those that helped hide the Anne Franks of a generation to showcase human beings “giving their best” to better the lives of other’s just because it was the right thing to do, but those types exist among us today.
Y’all know one of ‘em as David, Founder of The Beat Within. He’s one of those types. One of the defining qualities of solid human beings is the capacity to put others before themselves. His desire to distribute this publication has nothing to do with material gain, nor fame. He felt the suffering of you young people and embraced that desire to help, the best way he could, to ease it. Look at the beauty created when we simply give our best.
Well that’s how I maintained Hope when I was sentenced to Hopelessness. These types of people fought to make sure criminals were embraced inside that “all men created equal,” ideal and I’d come to admire that. It was huge in changing the way I viewed my death by incarceration. It changed the way I viewed society, the world at large, actually seeing people living according to how they believe gave me HOPE.
It gave me a standard to emulate. It gave me a reason to back away from that cliff of despair-hopelessness and deal wit that dehumanizing sentence behind me. There were some very dark days where I didn’t have the motivation to live.
It’s crazy how unstable the mind becomes to find balance inside that level of emotional chaos. I was completely prepared to die in prison but the more I read Mandela’s Story, and the stories of other people overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds-oppressions, I couldn’t accept the possibility I’d die in a cage.
I mean there is absolutely no Hope in LWOP. It’s a cruel very slow torturous death sentence that not only denies HOPE, that has furthered our humanity but it denies the innate ability for us to completely transform through spiritual-mental-emotional reawakening.
So I guess HOPE can be defined as the possibility inside the impossible that tomorrow will be better than today. People create that HOPE for themselves through the love shown by other people. That’s why caring is so important. It’s that rhythm created through suffering that serenades the souls of those types who sacrifice so much to help ease it. It was in that older convict, in the Humanitarians that helped Free Mandela, in the David’s of our communities that continue to give y’all best to yo’ self and each other to show that although our immature dysfunctional thinking urged us to dance on the devil’s playground, once those perspective change; they can also be used to showcase our ability to persevere, overcome, atone.
To show that those dark stroked of grays-blacks can transform into more gentle blues, pinks, greens, etc. and remain focused. Change produces struggle and remember there’s some who regardless of receptive qualities displayed in our “self-portrait” they still want to hang the painter instead of the painting. LOL.