Street Roots • April 1-7, 2016
Commentary
Page 10
Shaka Senghor
Shaka
Senghor
A.W.: You focus a lot on the idea of
atonement and the tools needed to reflect and
think about what led you to do what you did.
What does atonement mean to you?
S.S.: It means working toward being one
with yourself and the community through
real action - like mentoring and working on
gun violence issues and working on prison
reform in a way that honors and respects
victims and families and the communities
that [imprisoned] men and women are
returning to.
After nearly two
decades behind bars,
much of it in solitary
confinement, the
Detroit author has
turned his experience
into a lesson of
redemption
A.W.: You call for a more empathetic
approach to incarceration. You said that
“anybody can have a transformation if we
create the space for that to happen and that
you “envision a world where men and women
aren’t held hostage to their paths. What needs
to change? How is that space created?
BY AMANDA WALDROUPE
STAFF WRITER
haka Senghor describes his younger
self as a “young drug dealer with a
quick temper and a semi-automatic
pistol.”
Senghor grew up inner-city Detroit during
the 1980s and early 1990s. He lived a rough
S
hie as a teenager - he hustled drugs, lived
on the street, was beaten, shot at three
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murdered. When he was 19, in 1991, he shot
and murdered a man. He was convicted of
second-degree murder and sentenced to
spend between 17 and 40 years in prison.
In prison, he continued living the lifestyle
that had gotten him imprisoned in the first
place: he ran a black market, got into fights,
disobeyed numerous prison rules. That
landed him in solitary confinement. Seven of
his years in prison were spent in solitary.
Four of those years were consecutive.
In solitary, he began transforming his life
through reading and writing. He credits
Malcolm X’s biography, Plato’s “Republic”
and other books for helping him reflect on
his life and atone for his crimes.
He was released in 2010, after spending
19 years in prison, when he was 40. He is
now a social activist and works to raise
awareness about prison issues. He has been
a fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and the Kellogg
Foundation and he currently works as the
director of strategy and innovation with
#cut50, an initiative to reduce America’s
prison population in half by 2025. He also
speaks regularly around the country; his
TED talk has been viewed more than 1
million times.
His memoir, “Writing My Wrongs: Life,
Death and Redemption in an American
Prison,” was released earlier this year and
details his time in prison and focus on a
major theme in his work and life - the
capability imprisoned people have to
transform their lives.
Amanda Waldroupe: During your TED
talk, you said that the events that led you to
commit murder as a teenager were “pretty
straightforward” and include events like your
parent’s divorce. People may not appreciate how
significant life-altering things like abuse and
of stuff from political science to world
science to theology. Anything you could
think of I was reading. It helped me deal
with a lot of my personal baggage and gave
me a great way to escape from prison with
words and pages.
parents’ divorce are to a teenager and child.
Shaka Senghor: A lot of times parents
don’t take into account that when they
separate or divorce, it destabilizes thé family
foundation. That has a profound impact on
children, depending on how the parents
handle it. Sometimes it comes from an
unhealthy place. That’s what happened with
me. My parents split, and there was no
longer any stability in the home. My mother
was abusive - emotionally, physically,
mentally. My mother’s reaction to that split
wasn’t healthy. The antagonism and the
abuse became much more pronounced.
That’s when I decided to runaway. I was 14.
I ran away, I was basically in transient
homelessness for a couple weeks. I was
sleeping in garages and basements, hustling
food form the grocery store. Then I was
lured into the drug trade and started selling
drugs at 14.
fullness of everything you’ve just
experienced - this traumatic event, that
you’ve devastated a family, two families.
Yours and the victim’s family.
A.W.: You were in solitary confinement for
nine years. You said in an interview with NPR
that you grew used to the smell of “human
despair.”
S.S.: There’s no physical contact. There’s
no day-to-day interaction at a human level.
Even if you get a visit, it’s behind a glass
window. The only time you get any physical
contact is if you’re being shaken down and
officers transporting you to the yard or the
shower, or anything like that. It wasn’t
healthy contact. It was officers making their
rounds, making sure you’re alive or not
doing anything illegal and you can go to your
recreation,‘which is in a cage,
In solitary confinement, there’s a high
level of mental illness. Guys get into conflict,
they throw feces on each other, they urinate
A.W.: To you, as a child, running away
on each other. [Officers] use pepper spray.
must have seemed like a perfectly reasonable
It smells like desperation.
thing to do.
Solitary confinement is designed to make
S.S.: When you’re a child going through
you worse. In the current model, there are
traumatic experiences, you think you have
no efforts at rehabilitation, no effort to help
everything figured out. In reality, I was naive you transition to become healthy and whole.
and very vulnerable. That’s how many
It’s designed to break your will, break you
people get lured into sex trafficking, human
down, and destroy your humanity.
trafficking, and all the unhealthy experiences
A.W.: How were you not broken down?
that come with street culture.
A lot of research is being done right now
S.S.: Reading and writing, mostly. Asking
in adolescent brain research, to understand
questions to myself, how did I go from being
whether juveniles are able to understand
an honor roll student and wanting to be a
their actions, feel remorse after committing
doctor to shooting someone? Exercising.
a crime, and so on.
Anything I could do to take my mind off of
A.W.: When did you first feel regret for
what you had done?
S.S.: I think the moment the shooting
happened. I felt immediate remorse.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t emotionally evolved
enough to process it on a deeper level and...
[take] full responsibility. ! was still young. I
was 19 years old. It’s hard to take into the
solitary confinement.
A.W.: You credit reading and writing for
changing your life^How?
S.S.: Being able to read was so important
in my life. It allowed me to create a pathway
for myself. Once I read Malcolm X’s
autobiography, I knew that anything was
possible. That inspired me to read all types
S.S.: Our prison is one big warehouse
right now. I believe that we can create
opportunities for people to come home
healthy. We have failed in our efforts to do
that. I think it starts with us being honest
with ourselves. I don’t have much faith that
the politicians will make the change on their
own. Politicians have been great at
convincing the American public that being
tough on crime is the best way to go. Every
citizen in this country has a responsibility to
know what’s happening in our prisons. We’re
paying the taxes and we’re footing that bill.
It’s absolutely crazy that we pay taxes for
something so big and not be aware.
A.W.: What do you hope people learn from
“Writing My Wrongs?”
S.S.: I want people to learn about the
power of forgiveness, the power of
redemption, second chances, what empathy
really looks like. We’ve been sold the idea
that politicians lock people and hide the key
until they’re ready to come home. The
majority of men and women (in prison) will
be getting out Do we want healthy men and
women? We have men and women who are
coming home, who want to do something
meaningful of their lives, and asking
(ourselves) a question: how would I feel if I
was trying to get a job, being constantly
rejected because of my felony, and frying to
get an apartment and I was told that I can’t
because I have this felony?
A.W.: Recently, in Portland, four teenagers,
between the ages of 14 and 16, approached one
of their classmates with a knife and demanded
that he hand over his money. Under Oregon’s
mandatory minimum sentencing law, they
were initially considered as adults and charged
with armed robbery. Do you think that’s an
appropriate way of dealing with teenagers who
commit crimes?
S.S.: Treating juveniles as adults is
absurd. Their brains are still developing.
They’re still kids who don’t fully understand
consequences. Getting them counseling,
vocational training, peer-to-peer mentoring.
Kids don’t do random stuff for nothing. If
you’re bullying somebody, you’ve probably
been bulbed. How do you break that cycle? I
don’t think that school is the only way you
break it