William Jelani Cobb My So-Called Life

 

William Jelani Cobb

My So-Called Life

From Essence, June 2004

 

William Jelani Cobb teaches at Spelman College in Atlanta where he is an assistant professor of history.

 

 

What do you know about the experiences of young people in prison?

 

1	The first thing you notice about 19-year-old Lexus Sirmans is his size.  At six feet two inches tall and weighing 200 pounds, he has the imposing build of a heavyweight boxer, with long arms and broad shoulders and skin the color of obsidian.  He would seem brooding were it not for his warm Georgia enunciation and a slightly embarrassed smile.  He has old eyes too, which may be the most obvious mark of the two years he spent in prison, which included one year in Lee Arrendale State Prison, the adult correctional facility in Alto, Georgia.
2	In 2001 Lexus pleaded guilty to armed robbery.  At age 16, he faced a minimum sentence of ten years in prison without parole, and although a plea agreement resulted in his sentence being reduced to five years, he would serve two years, not with other juveniles, but with adults.
3	Young men like Lexus—urban, angry impoverished and unincluded—find themselves at the center of a national debate on how to address juvenile crime.  “The trend has been to abandon the rehabilitative model and embrace a more retributive form of punishment,” explains the Reverend Roslyn Satchel, an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.
4	This often means trying juveniles such as Lexus as adults.  Indeed, under Georgia’s 1994 Sentencing Reform Act, which sets the penalties for trying juveniles, Lexus may actually have received more time than an adult who had committed the same crimes because adults are routinely sentenced with the possibility of parole.  Juveniles are not.  In Lexus’s case, the conditions of his plea arrangement saved him from a possible life sentence.
5	In February 2003 Lexus was released from prison after serving two years and has gone about quietly and diligently making a good life for himself on the outside.  He found a job, went back to church immediately and began searching for a college to attend.
6	“He’s trying really hard,” says Peggy Lieurance, the founder of Starfish Ministry, a correspondence-support ministry for incarcerated youths, and Lexus’s self-appointed mentor and staunch advocate.
7	Lieurance told me about Lexus, how she had come to care about this teenager whose intelligences shone from the first conversation they’d had shortly after he was arrested.  “He’s a wonderful young man, despite all he has been through,” she offered.
8	Every day, thousands of young Black men like Lexus leave correctional institutions with no clear sense of what comes next.  “There are barriers everywhere when these young people reenter society,” says Satchel.  “With a record, they often find it impossible to get jobs and housing.  Many of them have no home to return to.”  What, I wonder, has made the difference for Lexus Sirmans?  He faced the same challenges as other young men who had done time, yet he seemed to be moving consistently forward.  With all we hear about the crimes that Black boys commit, we should also hear the story of one young man who is trying to turn things around.
	Man of the House
9	Following a phone introduction by Peggy Lieurance, Lexus and I met for the first time a month after he was released.  I wanted to know his story, but I also hoped that I could share something with him that would spur him on.  It wasn’t just the similarity of our impoverished, dangerous inner-city childhoods; in fact, we looked as though we could be brothers—two outsized Black men with broad features and reserved demeanors.  On the day of our first meeting, Lexus rolled into the parking lot of a fast-food joint just outside Atlanta.  His car stereo thumped thick, drawling southern hip-hop.  He had been free just over six weeks and was still delighting in things the rest of us take for granted, like being able to eat whenever he wanted to.  Nevertheless, Lexus confesses, “The hardest thing about being out is having to make my own decisions.  In prison they tell you when to eat, when to sleep, when to dress or see your family.  You walk in a line.  The only decision you get to make is whether or not you’re going into the block,” he says, referring to an isolation unit that some juveniles prefer to the more violent general-population cells.
10	As we talked that day, I learned Lexus was the first son in a family of four children.  When he was 7 years old, his parents’ marriage began to unravel.  They divorced shortly after that.  He seemed to be on the right track, excelling in school and sports until he hit adolescence and his easygoing manner began to give way to a simmering anger.  His parents said little to him about the problems that had led to the divorce, but the issue became increasingly more important in his life as he grew older.  He came to resent feeling that he was raising himself because his mother, Josephine Sirmans, worked such long hours as a nurse’s aide.  His father, Gary, contributed financially, but as Lexus recalls, needs often went unmet.  For Lexus, his father’s physical absence also left a void.  As with the finances, Gary showed up when he could, but not necessarily when his children needed him most.  When he did come around, conversations were brief, boiled down, the bare minimum.  “I felt pressured to be the man of the house,” Lexus tells me.  “I was 14, the oldest living male living there.  It was just me and my little brother left in the house—the others had moved out.  My mother wasn’t making enough to take care of us, I didn’t depend on my father back then.”
11	For Lexus’s mother, meeting the needs of her children was difficult and exhausting.  She often worked double shifts at her job and was also studying to become a nurse practitioner so she could make a better life for her family.  “He saw me struggling to work and go to school, and he would tell me that things would be OK and that one day he would buy me a house,” she recalls.  For Lexus, the breaking point came when he and his brother returned from school one day to find that there was nothing in the refrigerator.  He tells me it was then and there that he decided something had to change.
	Boys in the Hood
12	“I started cutting school and began to hustle,” Lexus confesses.  He and his best friend, Skip, hooked up with the neighborhood players and began selling weed.  “I was sick of having nothing,” Lexus says quietly.  “Sick of seeing my family with nothing.”  Sometimes Lexus still attended school, and he did well in his favorite classes.  For a while he made the honor roll and even played linebacker on the football team, but by the time he was 15 he had become a full-time hustler.
13	“I went from being on the honor roll at school to just being about money.”  With his drug earnings, Lexus bought clothes for himself and his brother, convincing his busy mother that the money came from odd neighborhood jobs.
14	His peers regularly indulged in drug use, “but I never even tried any of it,” he tells me.  He was, even then, something of a loner, and not particularly concerned with impressing others.  Instead, he embraced a Darwinist street ethic:  “I felt that if I had to make things bad for someone else because that was the only way to make things good for my family, then that was what was going to happen.”
	Screams in the Night
15	Viewed through the lens of music videos and the nightly news parade of Black offenders that reduce our communities to thug habitats, the image of Black boys as predators-in-waiting has proliferated.  Some experts cite this as a factor in the new, harsher juvenile-crime laws.  But Nina Hickson, chief judge of the Fulton County Juvenile Court in Atlanta, is convinced that the harsher laws do nothing to deter crime.  She’s also troubled by the fact they are most often applied to Black boys.  “I don’t buy the notion that you have more Black boys committing serious acts,” she says.  “What you have is the issue of discretion.  District attorneys decide which cases to pursue in adult court, and it’s easier to prosecute an indigent child than a child of means.”  While youth crime has decreased, Hickson and a number of other advocates are quick to point out that it was declining even before the new laws were enacted.
16	In February 2001, Lexus and one of his crew were charged with committing a car theft at gunpoint.  They were apprehended shortly thereafter and tried separately.  Lexus’s trial ended in a hung jury, a situation his attorney used to negotiate a plea bargain with a maximum sentence of five years.  His friend was sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison.  While Lexus didn’t get the severe mandatory sentence that so many of his peers did, he was ordered to serve his time in an adult facility.
17	By law, juvenile inmates in Georgia are to be separated by “sight and sound” from the adult population.  But a hearing in January 2003 before the Georgia state legislature revealed widespread violations of the age-segregation policy.  In one particularly egregious incident at Alto, a group of minors (not including Lexus) was strip-searched in full view of the jeering adult population—an incident the Georgia Department of Corrections denies.  But as Lexus commented, “You’re not supposed to go across the yard to the adult facility until you’re 18,” he says, “but it didn’t go down like that for me.”  Lexus spent every day of his sentence “across the yard.”
18	Lexus was 17 years old with no prior criminal record when he entered the state prison at Alto.  There he would see things that continue to haunt him.  Almost inaudibly, he recounts the story of a friend of his—also a juvenile—who was invited to gamble with a set of older inmates.  The young man quickly fell into debt, and the older men used this as an excuse to seize any of his belongs they desired.  It didn’t take long for the thefts to escalate into something much worse.  The boy was raped one night, an incident Lexus overheard as he sat locked in his cell across the corridor.  He tells me another story about a fight he witnessed between two adult inmates.  “One guy kept getting stabbed so badly,” Lexus says, his face turned away from mine.
19	What says with him, echoing in his memory are the screams he used to hear in the Alto nights.  “Sometimes, remembering those times still keeps me up at night,” he whispers.  Though his size may have played a role in protecting him from harm, Lexus believes he avoided trouble by keeping to himself, saying his prayers and “staying focused.”  He’s big on this word focus.  To hear him tell it, learning to focus is what got him through his time upstate.  He focused on keeping busy—working out, reading and taking G.E.D. classes.
20	Josephine Sirmans spoke to her son after he was arrested, asking him how he would have felt if someone had robbed her at gunpoint.  The question shook him.  She urged her son to keep praying and to read his Bible every day.  He explains that something clicked for him when he had sat on the witness stand talking about crimes he had committed.  “I realized that being in jail wasn’t me,” he says simply.  “There was too much out there in the world for me to do to be locked up.  I started out wanting to help my family and keep my brother on the right path, but I couldn’t do either one when I got arrested.”
	Father and Son
21	When Lexus was summoned to the visiting room one afternoon two months into his sentence, he thought his mother had left work early to take the long drive upstate for a surprise visit.  He walked into the room to find his father, Gary, seated at a table waiting to speak to him.  They hadn’t seen each other in several months.  Lexus’s mother had called Gary shortly after her son was arrested.  While Lexus’s father didn’t attend the trial, or the hearing in which his son was sentenced, the more he thought about it, the more he blamed himself for his son’s trouble.  “I was never there for him like I should have been,” Gary says.  He came to Alto hoping to rebuild their relationship.  “It was extremely painful seeing my boy locked away like that.”  He believes that his absence from the home had left Lexus with too much time on his hands and too few examples to counter “negative peer pressure.”  He took that first long drive upstate from Decatur to Alto, resolved to reconnect with his son.  “I felt as if I had to let him know that I’m still his father and that I’d be there for him if he needed me,” he says.
22	“I held a grudge against him at first,” Lexus recalls.  But during his father’s biweekly visits, his resistance gradually dissolved.  “We spent more time together when I was locked up than we ever did when I was on the street,” Lexus says.  The renewed relationship with his father, a heating and air-conditioning technician, helped Lexus let go of the anger he’d held inside for so long, the anger of a boy forced to be a man too soon.  “I tried to keep his mind occupied on ways to make money other than selling drugs when he came home,” Gary says.  “I told him that I would have a job lined up for him when he got out.”
23	Over the course of their conversations, a plan unfolded:  Upon his release, Lexus would start out as an apprentice technician and enroll in night classes.  When he had gained enough experience, the two would go into the refrigeration business together.  Lexus soon resolved that when he came home, he would avoid the old crew, with the exception of his friend Skip, who had stopped dealing and returned to both the church and high school almost immediately after Lexus was arrested.  “They call Alto ‘the revolving door,’” Lexus reflects.  “They told me that my chances of coming back to prison were eight out of ten.  But I’ve never been one to fall for the same thing twice.”
	You Can Go Home Again
24	Still, returning home has been a challenge for him.  “Coming home he found that he had changed, but nothing else had,” says Peggy Lieurance.  Many of the old crew were still around, floating from one dead-end hustle to the next.  Lexus learned that he would have to remain focused on the outside as well.  But by far the most difficult thing he had to confront was losing Skip:  The week that Lexus was released, his boyhood friend was murdered, shot seven times on his eighteenth birthday during a dispute.  “Before I even got a chance to say ‘hey,’ he was gone,” Lexus says.
25	But as difficult as it was to come home, Lexus also had some support.  “Unlike many other young people, Lexus has a strong network,” Lieurance says.  “He had a family who stuck by him all the way through this mess.”  And he has Lieurance.  She has remained a presence in his life, calling regularly to check on his progress and to encourage him to keep working hard.  She tells him he has much to offer the world if only he keeps believing in himself.  Josephine Sirmans shifts uncomfortably in her chair when talking about her oldest boy and the page he is trying to turn.  “He has worked very hard to make a life for himself,” she says.  “Thank God he’s putting this behind him at an early age.”  The key has been prayer, she says.  “This was something that God had to help him through.”
26	Three weeks after Lexus was released, Gary Sirmans was able to get his son the job he had promised him as an apprentice repairman for a heating and air-conditioning company.  The hours are long:  He leaves home at 6:30 AM and often doesn’t get back until 7 PM.  But Lexus works in the same unit as his father and notes that the day goes by faster with good company.  In the evenings, Lexus lifts weights on the porch or watches movies.  Most nights, he’s in bed by 11:30 PM.  His rigid devotion to work is not really surprising considering his long-standing concern about being able to contribute financially to his family.  But on another level, it seems that Lexus is trying to distill life on the outside down to its simplest polarities—work and rest—as a means of avoiding the gray areas that could lead to trouble.  “I just want to work,” he says.

 

	College-Bound
27	Less than a month after his release, Lexus returned to the Regional Youth Detention Center to speak to young men who were being sent up to the adult facility.  He talked with them about how to make the time serve them, rather than their serving the time.  “As you get older, seeing young people incarcerated gets to be painful,” he says, sounding aged beyond his years.  “You know they’re gonna wind up having bad memories.”  Going back inside may have been as useful for Lexus as it was for the young men he spoke to:  It was an additional reminder that he didn’t want to be one of the many who will find themselves back behind bars.  Lexus advised his peers to “avoid troublemakers.”  Near the end of his talk, he told them to “stay focused.”
28	Four months after our first meeting, Lexus calls, asking me to help him with his application to a local technical college.  When I pick him up, we slap palms and run through the elaborate Brothers’ Handshake before punctuating it with The One-Armed Hug.  He whips out a picture of his “lady friend,” a young woman who’s going away to college in a few weeks.  We walk across Spelman’s campus where I teach history.  When I show him my office he marvels at the shelves of books I have.  “I read this in prison,” he says, holding a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  I pull several of my favorite Walter Mosley novels off the shelf and give them to him.  A few hours later, we mail off his application.  As we part I tell him that he’s out to do some big things.  Lexus pauses, then cracks that slightly embarrassed smile.