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The first time I got arrested and put into handcuffs I was eight years old.
I grew up in Los Angeles.
I was first-generation Mexican-American.
My parents had just came from Mexico.
Me and two other kids, we were caught with spray cans and they accused us of stealing them from Home Depot.
The people at Home Depot said, no, nobody stole these cans
They still took us to the station, and I remember him saying to us
we’re gonna take you to the station because we’re gonna prepare you for your future.
That really left a mark on me.
When I was thirteen years old I joined a street gang.
I grew up in a community where gang violence existed.
By the age of thirteen it was something that was already normalized.
I started selling weed.
From that, I went to crack.
On my eighteenth birthday I was sent to prison with a sentence of 15 years
and two felonies.
I ended up getting transferred to Pelican Bay SHU.
You’re in your cell 22-and-a-half hours a day.
You can talk to people through the vent, you can talk to people through the toilet
but seeing somebody, that’s very rare.
You’re allowed to come out for an hour and a half.
You come out by yourself
through a small concrete enclosure with the walls about 18 feet high.
The hardest thing was understanding that that place was built to break you.
Mentally, physically, and spiritually.
I started talking to this individual who has been incarcerated since 1977.
We got to share a lot of our ideas.
You know he asked me it is that I like to read, what kind of books I like to read
and I told him I prefer history books and books with facts
and he told me that I should give fiction a try.
And to me that had a very big impact.
The first book I read was Charles Dickens.
Oliver Twist.
And then after that I think I might have read The Grapes of Wrath.
And then Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
And then Candide, which was really my favorite one.
I wanted to take advantage of what was available there in the prison.
And at that point there was a GED program
and then after I received my GED they were offering correspondence courses through a community college.
And I came home with about 48 credits.
Once I started school, I literally told myself, I’m gonna dedicate myself to my education
and that’s it.
I was accepted to UC Berkeley, and then the first day of school
is the day that I met Steven.
I was a 38-year-old junior.
Mostly invisible to my peers, you know?
Cause once you hit like 32 you’re pretty much invisible to
the cool kids, you know what I mean?
I told him something about feeling uncomfortable around all these young people
and he’s like, yeah, me too, man!
And I told him something about, I’ve been away from school for a long time
and he’s like, yeah, me too.
And I told him I was in Pelican Bay SHU.
And he – “Literally? Funny, me too.”
When I got here I was socially isolated.
I didn’t know anything about what this being at UC Berkeley was about,
and so I was looking for a place to find a community
cause I knew the importance of community. It’s what makes us human.
One of the results of incarceration for people that are coming home
is having to live with the stigma
of being the boogeyman, being the bad person
being the animal, right?
It leaves a mark on you, you know what I mean?
Incarceration is a traumatic experience.
You should still seek some type of help to be able to cope with what you went through.
So I want to start this meeting off with a check-in question.
And the question is gonna be,
how is your semester going and what are you looking forward to?
Hi everybody, my name is Liniqa
and this is my first semester here at Cal.
We work to find out those barriers
that are social and cultural
and ameliorate them or eliminate them altogether.
I was resilient enough
to overcome the trauma that solitary confinement imposes on the individual
and use it to my advantage.
I want to be a resource for people.
And be able to put people in positions to be able to excel after incarceration.