End the Odds Coalition Blog

Letter from a MA Prisoner to President Obama

April 1st, 2009

Dear Mr. President

Congratulations, and may “hope achieved” spring down to us. Mr. President, as you’ve learned personally, some believe hope is not a strategy. But, today, after 24 years of incarceration (with my innocence maintained and my faith strained, yet still intact), I write you from a state prison facility to let you know that along with the reality of a mass incarceration of Americans (2.3 million United States inmates), primarily Black male, that as of this day “hope” may just be the only strategy left and/or available to save the generation of children I see in here around me today.

Some many years ago, as I sat in a solitary confinement cell, I picked up a Bible and read a verse (in Proverbs) which said, “where there is no vision the people perish”. It is that matter of both “vision” & “perish” that has invited me to write you today.

Mr. President, in the United States Constitution, it begins with a line that says, “We The People”. In the Declaration of Independence, there is also a line which says, “We hold these truths to be self evident that ‘all men’ are created equal.” Yet, the reality of both of the above is that at the time this was being said, they (the drafters), didn’t mean my grandmother, grandfather, mother, nor me. At the time the word “we” was being used, the country was divided into two groups of people. One group who were still, in fact, considered slaves and three fifths of a human being. But, all this I am sure you already know, as does our country. (more…)