In April, the Free Minds Outreach Team took the On the Same Page program to the University of DC David A. Clarke School of Law. There, Free Minds mentor Sherman Justice and Poet Ambassadors Alisha, Eddie, Anthony, Gary, and Delonte met with law students from the Criminal Justice Society and from Professor Andrew Ferguson’s class, “Criminal Justice, Social Justice, and Community Justice Seminar.”  The Poet Ambassadors read their own original poetry as well as the poetry of Free Minds members who are still incarcerated. They spoke about what led to their incarceration and their experiences with Free Minds, and they answered the law students’ insightful questions.

The Free Minds members discussed the factors that led to their incarceration, from family troubles to the pull of the streets.

“Ever since I can remember, I was getting abused by my father…so you might as well say I had no father,” one Poet Ambassador said. “My mom, she was addicted to crack cocaine, and…you know, when I was an adolescent, I can remember jumping in wishing wells and taking money out of the fountains and taking the money home to my mom, and she was taking the money from me and spending it on crack. I had a juvenile attorney as a kid and she brought food to our house and I can remember my mom taking the meat out of the refrigerator and selling it for her addiction.”

Another Poet Ambassador, Delonte, spoke about how incarceration is not a solution to youth crime, and how we can do more to alleviate the circumstances that drive youth to the streets. “You can’t really blame it on the juveniles of today. Yes, they’re kind of messed up…but all you’re doing is criticizing and critiquing the juveniles, but you’re never putting any effort into trying to get involved or doing whatever the case may be for these juveniles. If I had positive role models at the time, who knows?”

“In school, the teachers could have been more active, too,” Gary pointed out in response to a question from the audience about the impact of education on their lives prior to incarceration. “I never had to do homework or none of that in school because I was good in sports. And a lot of the teachers used to just sit back and be like, ‘Well, read pages sixty to this and we’re going to take a test on Friday, so be ready.’ If school had been more active, I think it would have helped out a lot, because now, I have a lot of anxiety with testing and stuff, so it could have been a lot different.”

Bridging the gap between his own challenges and how Free Minds was able to help, Eddie said, “I never had a mother so I really couldn’t tell her nothing…. So I came to Free Minds and they always listened to me. They wrote us on a monthly basis. I felt like I mattered.”

Alisha talked about how she felt when Free Minds helped to publish her poetry in Street Sense. “I think that was the eye-opener for me that, you know, other people believed in me, and it made me believe in myself,” she said. “Kelli and Tara… I felt at the time that these were people who had to tell me all these wonderful, amazing things about myself just because it was their job. But me actually getting my poem published in the newspaper, it made me feel like oh, I am that good, and oh, I can do this. And so that really inspired me.”

The session ended with another question from the students, this time regarding one thing the panelists would say to today’s youth to prevent them from taking the path to violence and incarceration.

“I don’t think it would take once,” Sherman said. “It really has to be like I was talking about, the consistency that Free Minds gives us. It would have to be a mentor, and that’s why I’m real big on mentoring. Someone that would be consistently there with you to work with you, someone that you could call at any time, someone that’d take you to go shoot that basketball, or after that, asking you, ‘Did you get that homework?’ Because for a lot of us, or even me, it would take a lot more than just someone pulling you to the side to talk to you, and then you won’t ever see them again.”

Professor Ferguson, too, had only positive things to say about Free Minds. “I fell in love with the program because when I was a public defender, my clients were a part of the program,” he said, “and they came back to me and told me about this experience of reading and the wonderful people who cared about them as people. In an otherwise dehumanizing legal system where they were a number, a statistic, or not even a real person, here was a group of people who cared about their inner soul, even in a creative sense, and it was a wonderfully moving experience.”

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