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Prisoner Exchanges

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Karima Amin taught language arts, drama, social studies and reading in the Buffalo public school system for 24 years. In 1994, she resigned from teaching to pursue her passion for storytelling.

The first year along her new career path, Amin had an unusual invitation to lead a Kwanzaa workshop in Attica Prison. Kwanzaa workshops were one of her specialties, but prison was uncharted territory.

“I did it without hesitation,” she recalls, “because I needed the money. I wasn’t even thinking about how I was going into a prison. I went in thinking of it as merely a job. I never thought that I’d be going into a prison again.”

But word spread fast and, the next thing Amin knew, she was getting invitations to tell stories in prisons all across New York State.

“After a couple years of doing this, only thinking of it as a job, I began to see some of my former students behind bars and my attitude about the work that I was doing changed. My attitude about prisoners changed. My attitude about prisons changed…That was shocking to me. It was devastating to me. It saddened me because these were people I knew. I always thought of them as my children because I was the teacher…I couldn’t have imagined what had happened for them to end up behind bars.”

Amin began intentionally choosing stories with messages about freedom and hope to tell to her incarcerated audiences.

“I began to realize that, yes, we do live in a very racist society. They say justice is blind, but I’ve learned, definitely, that’s not true…seeing them there made me realize that what happened to them could happen to anybody. It could happen to me or my own children.”

In 2002, Amin was doing a Heritage Day program in Wende, a maximum security state prison less than 30 miles from Buffalo, when she met a prisoner named George Baba Eng, who was also speaking that day. Baba made such a powerful impression on her that she started helping him with his efforts to be released on parole.

“I’ve heard a lot of prisoners speak in a lot of prisons,” she says. “He was really clear, he was very direct, he was forthright, he was knowledgeable, and I paid attention. And I looked around the gym and I saw a couple hundred men on the edges of their seats, really listening to him. They were really hanging on to every word, and I was too.”

She learned that Baba had been locked up since 1977 on a 25-year-to-life sentence for killing someone who pulled a gun on his wife. She also learned that he had an associate’s degree in paralegal studies, helped a number of prisoners with their legal cases and had lawsuits against the New York State Department of Corrections that aimed to help make conditions for prisoners more humane. In addition, Baba’s fellow prisoners, as well as doctors, lawyers, teachers, preachers, and everyone Amin met who knew him, held him in the highest regard.

As she looked into his case, Amin found herself believing that Baba never had a fair trial, and that the parole board had paid little attention to his positive work and accomplishments while behind bars. When she met Baba in 2002, he had been denied parole once because of the serious nature of the crime. He has now been denied parole three times for the same reason. He could have been released five years ago.

“I decided that this man should be out. He should have a chance to come back to his community,” she says. “The nature of the crime is never going to change, but people do change.”

When Amin started talking to people on the outside about Baba, a lot of them couldn’t understand why she would become friends with someone who had killed somebody. She was shocked at the attitudes, the bias and the false perceptions many people had about prisoners, so she decided to put her teaching skills back into action.

“People oftentimes demonize, marginalize, criminalize and stigmatize the prisoner…and we often don’t give them a second chance,” she says. “I started Prisoners Are People Too! mainly to educate the community. I figure if you’re giving me attitude because of what I’m doing, it’s because you don’t understand. Naturally, being a teacher, I decided to figure out a way to help them understand.”

Prisoners Are People Too! has been meeting once a month at the Pratt Willert Community Center on Buffalo’s East Side since 2005. Each month focuses on a different topic relating to prisons, and each month Amin shows a film, invites a guest speaker and then opens the floor up for a group discussion. Women behind bars, juvenile justice, the death penalty, mental illness in prison, wrongful convictions and current and historical prison-related events are just a handful of topics that have gotten specific attention at Amin’s monthly events.

One of the most surprising aspects of Prisoners Are People Too! is the people who turn out.

“I expected to get a lot of black people from the East Side,” Amin remembers. “We got some West Side support. There are some people who come from North Buffalo, South Buffalo, Lackawanna, Niagara Falls and West Seneca. Some of them are formerly incarcerated people and some of them are professional people who have an interest in prison issues and criminal justice issues. There are ministers, social workers, educators, and just a wide range of people who come…It’s a real mix because everybody in this community is touched by the criminal justice system in some way.”

Some people have been more than touched. Some have spent the majority of their lives locked up and are looking for assistance adjusting to the outside; others are activists working to change the prison system and improve their communities; and others are family members or loved ones of prisoners who are looking for empathy and comradery. It’s a powerfully diverse atmosphere.

“Sometimes people come because they’re looking for someone to give them an ear, or a shoulder to cry on,” Amin says. “But they come finding like-minded people that they can share this with. I think that’s a good thing too. People need to know that somebody cares and people need to know that they’re not in this situation by themselves.”

Abu Bilal Abdur Rahman heard about Amin’s work while he was in prison. He was still wearing his green jail suit when he showed up at a Prisoner’s Are People Too! meeting just after his release.

Rahman doesn’t consider himself an “ex-offender” or a “person formerly incarcerated.” He prefers the term “successful re-entry candidate,” since he served his time and is now a viable asset to his community.

“Prison,” Rahman explains, “destroys the fiber of the family.” And he would know. When he was in prison, his son spent six years of his childhood fatherless. Ironically, now that Rahman has been released, it is his son who is behind bars.

Evangelist Nora Massey is grateful to have met Karima and shows up at Prisoners Are People Too! every month. Massey’s teenage son, Terrol, was sentenced in 2006 to 20-years-to-life for his involvement in a murder plot for insurance money. Prosecutors alleged that Terrol was offered $5,000 and driven to the scene of the crime by the white, 39-year-old daughter-in-law of the victim. Another white, adult relative of the victim was alleged to have given Terrol a disguise to wear during the murder. Nora Massey doesn’t downplay the seriousness of her son’s crime. She only asks for fair and equal application of justice.

“He received injustice and it had a lot to do with racial profiling,” Massey says. “He’s my only son. It has really, really destroyed my family.”

Massey and her husband are in the process of getting a divorce, influenced by their differences in dealing with their son’s situation, and the legal fees for the case and appeals have financially crippled their family.

“Problems like this are very common for our young black men,” Massey says. “It’s not just my son that’s being affected by this system, there’s a lot of other families being affected as well…and when you come to the Prisoners Are People Too! meetings, you can see what actually happens.”

John Walker is another regular at Prisoners Are People Too!.

“My dealings with the justice system have not been very good,” Walker admits. “I’ve been wrongly convicted of a crime so I have no real faith in the criminal justice system.”

You don’t have to take Walker’s word on his innocence and the innocence of his three codefendants; you can ask Buffalo City Court Judge James A. W. McLeod. Back in 1976, McLeod was an attorney who won an acquittal for one of Walker’s codefendants. Walker and the others weren’t as fortunate in their legal representation.

“They didn’t do it,” Judge McLeod told the Buffalo News in March 2005, “and I say that without hesitation or reservation, based on the evidence.”

Walker was 16 when he was arrested for murder. He served 23 years in prison before being released and will be on parole for the rest of his life. One of Walker’s codefendants is still behind bars.

“Prisoners Are People Too! has alleviated a lot of frustrations I’ve had,” he says. “I wasn’t really able to tell anybody what I was going through, but Prisoners Are People Too! has allowed me to do that.”

“The system is so broken,” Amin laments. “I wish there was just a way to dismantle it and start all over again. Because so many people are being hurt, so many lives are being lost, so much energy is being misspent, so much knowledge is going down the tubes, and those who could make a difference…don’t seem to have the will. Sadly, a lot of people have these attitudes that prisons are these remote places to lock up bad people, unfortunately it does more than lock people up. Prisons destroy lives…to me that’s criminal. In my point of view, that’s criminal.”

For additional information about Prisoners Are People Too! contact Karima Amin at karima@prisonersarepeopletoo.org or 834-8438.