Member-only story
Lived Through This
Abolition Is Personal
I grieve what my life could have been if my family had access to support instead of incarceration
I was in elementary school when my mother told me my father was in prison. I remember a handful of calls and conversations with him that made me feel proud, but I can’t remember how many of those calls were made collect. My mom never let me answer the phone. He’d call and tell me stories about my nana. He’d tell me about her growing up in Belize City; he told me we were special because we had her blood.
I didn’t know how, but I knew he wasn’t in prison because he did something wrong. I knew it wasn’t because he was bad. I knew somehow it was because of circumstance.
He joked once that I had to be careful about what books I checked out from the library because I was likely on an FBI watch list because of him, and he was right. State surveillance often extends beyond offenders. But my dad didn’t commit crimes against the state. He was just poor, Latino, and had developed a drug problem.
His incarceration and those conversations are what I remember of him from my childhood. But it wasn’t really an absence. When my dad was in prison, I knew he was clean and I knew where he was.
