From The Los Angeles Times:
My freshman year at Yale I got a letter from my biological father with unwelcome news. He had a new neighbor, my childhood friend Lorenzo. They were on the same cell block in maximum-security prison. Lorenzo’s imprisonment felt like fate. We came from different worlds: He was poor, black and an immigrant, while I was upper middle class, white and U.S.-born. As a black man, he had a 1 in 3 chance of serving time at some point in his life. What we had in common, however, was a significant risk factor for incarceration: Lorenzo and I became friends over many years of visiting our mothers behind bars. For him the odds played out.
I was luckier, if you can call this luck: Steel gates, correctional officer uniforms, guard towers and razor wire were details I was far too young to remember the first time I navigated them. Prisons have been inscribed in my consciousness like the indelible ink stamped on my hand before entering the visiting room. I’ve always been one of the more than half of Americans with an immediate family member currently or formerly incarcerated.
In 1981, my parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were arrested for their role in a radicals’ plot to rob an armored car. Three men were tragically killed. I was just 14 months old. I had been dropped at the babysitter. My mother and father, who drove a getaway car in the robbery, wrongly assumed no one would get hurt; they planned to return to pick me up in the evening. Eventually, I was adopted into a new family, winning two big brothers in the process. Continue reading >>>
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