Prison Survival & Urban Refinement (Book Excerpt)

      
Guerrilla Thinking and Urban Refinement 

​               The main thing about incarceration is you are going to have to make a choice. Are you going to remain the same and study street philosophy and so-call learn a better way to do the same thing or a new hustle from an old fool, who life consist of touring prisons? Or will you be courageous and transform your pre-incarcerated thinking to be the best you? But if you are not dissatisfied in being a half-dead commodity and living with the quasi-dead, as well as being ruled over by mental midgets then you probably are a zombie.

            The catalyst for transformation for me started when the judge slammed that gravel at the conclusion of my guilty verdict. I thought to myself, this is what I get for following the codes of the street and being a stand-up dude.
 Fifty-five years!

          I guess I should have been happy because I was facing life plus 28 years. Reporting this to my father, who already heard, was one of the lowest points in my life. No son should hear that level of hurt transmitted in his father’s voice. I didn’t even use my whole click.[1]I went to my bunk and wrapped up in a sheet forming a cocoon. Why? For I could cry in peace and go to sleep letting the tears wash another layer of who I thought was me away.

              When I awaken I began to question all the ideas and values I was taught in the streets. I would come to learn two powerful key terms and use them like surgical scalpels. They were introspection and retrospection. I realize that I had to fully emerge myself in a soul searching mission. This is when my self-discovery truly began. The transformation of the criminal mentality to one of Righteousness. When I talk about righteousness I am not coming from a religious perspective, but one of self-evaluation, self-mastery, and in tune with Universal Law and Divine Order. The inherent divine compass that exists with inside of you.

             As I became a big brother to those around me, I understood that I had to reflect a model of manhood other than what was expected from being a convict. It is easy to surrender to your lower reptilian brain. But to be a progressive thinker and practice behavioral refinement and adjustment is a challenge. Why? The prison atmosphere, convict mentality of others, and poor character C.O.s (and administration(s)); all summon you to surrender to the animal. You have to exercise supreme discipline or you will become reactionary and a slave to other people’s movement. I had to swallow things that offended my false pride. I never mastered it but became a savant of managing it.

               When you wake out of your illusionary state of being a ‘real nigga’ you become political to what’s happening around you. You know from your first day in prison that it is no such thing as rehabilitation. As you develop your knowledge through studying, you understand the why. At some point, you will ask yourself, how do I break pass the limited expectation of those who benefit from my situation politically or/and economically.

        I will not say that you can practice complete righteousness in a diabolic atmosphere. One time I was faced with a decision to kill another prisoner, because of an act of violence he had done to one of my younger brothers and student at that time. I was 29 years old, had been in prison for nine years at this time, and about to turn into a hypocrite in my mother’s eye. It was the calmest choice I had ever made. I let one tear for my mother drop because I resolved in my mind that the next move automatically made me eligible for the death penalty because I was already locked up on a murder charge. The only thing that interfered with my plan is that I didn’t have a banger. So I requested one from the older brothers I rolled with. They weighed the situation, weighed my character, and weighed our bonds, and made a decision that saved me from a possibly hot shot in the arm. I am usually rational but they saw I wasn't because of my bond with the younger brother. They knew I was serious, extremely discipline, and never talked about my former street life with them; only about progressive thoughts and ideas. So they understood if they would have given me that banger, I would have killed that prisoner, doomed myself with death by the state or had gotten natural life in prison. I am still grateful to those brothers (Life and Atl) to this day.

             Some may question why I didn’t have a banger. The same reason I hung my guns up before I got locked up in 1995. I made a conscious choice not to. When you know you’ll get busy and meet aggression with equal or more aggression and you are striving to change, you have to eliminate factors in your life. I was navigating a path out the streets at 20 years old. I knew other options was out there. And I didn’t like the person I had become. On a very real level the longer you stay in the streets the more you transform into an animal. I knew in my core that wasn’t me.

            One of the hardest things to do is to alter your thinking from your street persona grata to a progressive urban guerrilla thinker. The greatest wars are fought with thoughts and ideas. The first terrain you have to conquer is your own mind. The reason I use guerrilla is my personal nod to intellectual guerrillas like Walter Rodney and George Jackson who represented the same concepts but demonstrated in two different arenas. A guerrilla uses what every resource is available to improve his/her position strategically, knowing they do not have the resources of what their opposition might have. To the powers at be, I am a thought terrorist.         

             


[1] A timed phone call

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