Back to reality...

I’ve been back for two weeks now and in just two weeks have managed to be floored again and again by the lives of the youth I work with in prisons. It has been a sobering and heartwarming homecoming to return to the prisons here. I have re-encountered the same youth that I left two months ago, exactly where I left them, with yet more of their young lives swallowed away by the same 4 walls, the same faces, the same mindless routine.

They’ve welcomed me back into their cells and their hearts and have given me an even closer look at the fury, fear, resentment, and longing for love that reside there and struggle for power each long day locked up. The more I work with these young people, especially with incarcerated males (who have much grimmer prospects of “making it” based on the politics of repression and elimination that are practiced by “anti-gang” squads here), the more I am enraged and saddened by the fact that most of them will simply not make it.

The youth who manage to get out of jail whom I’ve kept up with and who have genuine interest in turning their lives around end up simply running for their lives each day. Ironically enough, this is not primarily because rival gang members will kill them (thought that is a very real threat), but because the police force will do so first. If the police do not manage to “disappear” these youth coming out of detention centers, they will detain them upon spotting them in the street (or drag them from their homes in the middle of the night) and pin them with any crime that has happened within a credible radius. These youth will then be sent off (likely without fair trial) to spend 30+ years in the hellholes that are the overflowing adult prisons here.

 I wish I were exaggerating, yet this has been the story of even the most studious and driven young gang members that I have met in this ministry thus far.

 Loving and working with these youth means answering their startled phone calls telling me that the police opened fired on them for no reason at all, and that they barely escaped the bullet-spray. It means listening to their whispered fears that as soon as they get out of jail to finally live with their young wives and infants they are terrified that the police will pull them out of their beds at night and take them far away from the children they’ve so longed to love in a way they were never, ever loved. It means watching them grimace, lost for words, while describing the way they’ve witnessed slow deaths, wishing I could erase it all and rewrite the whole script. It means giving them constant affirmation, because it just might be the first time they’ve ever heard anything of the sort.

Blog entries are probably supposed to end on some upbeat quote like Disney movies, but many of these young lives end on no such note. I just ask that you find them and love them in cities near you and listen to their lessons and longings.