Black or White

by | Oct 1, 2020 | Detention Center Writing Contests, Poetry

Black or White

by Walter D. Kissee

Heard/Arlington County Detention Center/OAR writing contest, August 2020

It’s bigger than black or white

Its a problem with the hole world.

Cant go to deep because they might get me a long road to healing.

Is our America at a point of reckoning.

The fight for Black Lives Matter Covid-19

what happen to that the fight for racial justice,

while we have police burtaitily

all of Americains from the death of George Floyd has sparked protestesting

while in police custody and with the many others we have lost this year and years befor.

A lot 21-21 Savage.

2020 has been a hellai of year

A lot of what is going on is Social InJustice which has made it to the top.

STOP KILLING US

Its not hard due to video that are captured for the world to see of the wongful things done where you get a immedite rection.

Frist we need to stop RACISM

STOP SOCIAL INJUSTICE

STOP KILLING US

We need to change this direction

There is nothing wrong with Change or Being different

2 Chainz said it best Yea Im differents

This brings high alert cause black lives do matter more in the black community

We are a major relfection in America and we are a problem

together we have a slow world history close nothing.

But repeat itself this has been going on decades now

Im facing a decad something I throught would never happen in the land of the free.

A now Im just a son to a bastad child,

antoher Black male lost to the prison system.

Of the Black America just a product of the envermont.

More kids growing up without a father.

Unable to explain how to be a man teach them right from wrong.

At this time its been so long my son explade he dosnt know how to talk to me any more

When I left he was 4.

Now 8.

When I come home if I make it he will be.

24.

The system and systemic justice system has found mondern Day Slaver.

And with being African being our accsiter where in slaved and white suprmacy always profiting George Whasington and Andrew Jackson both notably slave owners who are framed on our money.

The Red and Blue are to Serve and to Protect.

And Im not talking bout the Crip and Bloods

Im talking bout the Biggest Gang in the USA

Who is to protect

when you see the police you run cause you dont want to get attacked or terroized.

Now the non Black Barriey and Being the Public Horrors

Due to the Network and Techonology

Finally the world is standing with us.

Black Lives Matter.

Beyond These Walls

by | Oct 1, 2020 | Detention Center Writing Contests, Poetry

Beyond These Walls

by VE

 Heard/Arlington County Detention Center/OAR writing contest, August 2020

Beyond these walls lies love that envigerates the soul and peace that surpasses all understanding.

Second chances to the once broken and incarcerated men an opportunity at redemption,

another chance to choose right from wrong in the midst of temptation

desperately urning for instant gratification.

Beyond these walls millions of people are held captive,

metaphorically they are prisoners like us but yet free without these walls.

Though we are trapped physically they are prisoners

psychologically, emotionally and spiritually to

circumstances, society’s standards, family expectations, relationships that clearly states red flags DNR, do not resistate, greed, narsacism, materialistic objects.

The need to out do others, living above their means to keep up the Joneses,

spending money that they haven’t yet earned,

perpetually cycling this vicious cycle of accumulating debt.

Addition to social media likes masking pain entertwined with pleasure and reciprocity,

fear to take risks, working jobs that they are overworked under appreciated and underpaid.

Systematically we are programed to spend one third of our lives working for different companies investing in acquiring capital gain for the companies,

thus we are restricted or time to work on creating our own businesses or companies to gain fanancial freedom.

Give them just enough to survive, but not enough to prosper,

so they’d live paycheck to paycheck and acrude debt.

So theoretically were all doing time

weather it be psycially, pschologically, emotionally or spiritually.

Beyond these walls comparison is the thief of joy and the cousin to misery.

Beyond these walls achieving anything you want is 99% intentional and 1% mythology.

The greatest moment of achieving success most would think it is the actual moment of attaining success

but in all actuality the greatest moment is when we decide.

Every Fortune 500 company or wealthy individual all began with an idea which ultimately transmutated to financial independence.

Beyond these walls if you don’t plan appropriately your asking for a disaster.

Be willing to allow changes to occur that are not what you invisioned your exact finish to look like.

Beyond these walls you don’t have to get it perfect, you just have to get it started.

Beyond these walls choose the habits of successful people if you want to be successful and choose the habits of happy people if you want to be happy.

The only things that satisfies the soul are gratitude and love.

Beyond these walls your destiny awaits you, the impossible is obselite,

their are 24 hours in a day which equals 86,400 seconds,

a week equates 168 hours the eqivilant of 604,800 seconds,

one month equals 2,419,200 seconds and

31,536,000 seconds in a year

but it all starts from within these walls.

Make every second count and what we do with it within these walls

will determine what and whom we become beyond these walls

Drawing by Herman McDonald, inspired by VE’s poem “Beyond These Walls”

Clean, Laugh, and Pray

by | Oct 1, 2020 | Detention Center Writing Contests, Poetry

Clean, Laugh, and Pray

by Aaron Bunche

Heard/Arlington County Detention Center/OAR writing contest, August 2020

I am convinced, with a zeal of a crusader, that I’m in the safest place, a twelve by four cell. I’m a recovering addict addicted to Fox News, and I fear knowone but God. For I have with me the whole armor for germs. I have on my gloves of laytex, my mask which is the preparation for the virus, and a bar of soap and water which is sharper than any two-edge sword; may you find yours today.

I have my own swag, I wear nothing but clean. If you want what I got on then you gotta pick it up at the showers. I’m a year sober from narcotics but I picked up a mean habit of washing my hands. I told the nurse my issue, she showed me tough love, she said “you’ll live.”

My hobbies are mopping my cell and scrubbing down my toilet and sink, but on the seventh day I rest. I can say then that my quarters were pleasing in my sight.

For sport I watch Trump reflect and dodge questions during briefings; if you say he won’t make the championship then you decieve yourself and reality may have passed you by.

On my shelf I keep many books. I have literature on the respiratory system to pass the time. I read articiles about how the Caronavirus swept Rome. I practice distance-learning, I stand exactly six feet away from the television as I watch the forcast’s temperatures decline like our stock market.

I look out not only for my own interests, but also for the interests of my mother. She would always tell me “submit to God, resist the devil and he will flee. I’ll tell her “commit to using hand sanitizer, resist touching your face and you will live.” For this is the victory that will overcome the virus—stay home.

Also, bless those who are not cautious like you, and pray for those who spitefully go out and about. What profit is it to man if he goes out to gain income, and looses his health and dies.

I have no vociferous rebellion to the state law anymore. When I leave this safe place, I press on towards the next safe haven, my home. Once I make it there I can truly say, I have fought the good fight, I am home and safe, I have kept the faith.

I Am

by | Oct 1, 2020 | Detention Center Writing Contests, Poetry

I Am

by Derrick Barnes

 Heard/Arlington County Detention Center/OAR writing contest, August, 2020

I am a colorful bowl of experiences and

A mosh pit of circumstances

A cosmic collission of parents and a micro drop

Of seemen defined

I feel no one should be able to judge me because

I’ve walked alone through time

I have been shown that remnants of ancestors

Coated the pedals of eternity on this earthly

Plane

My existential knowledge has many of those

Who don’t understand me thinking I’m completely

Insane

But I would venture that none would be willing

To carry the water of my life’s pain

I was never alone in the realm of physical

Space

But my deamons were real and shielded me from

God’s grace

I am a firing of synapses that have awaken

Electrons trapped in my mind

A simple realization of abandonment in hopes

Of the sublime

I’m a singular organism bound by my environmental

Conditions

Filtered by worldly renditions guided by

DNA preminition

My so called memory of ideals that are

Encased in predetermined events as destiny

Had molded me

I am a zygote by identity, an embryo by

Determination, a fetus by choice, a boy

By birth, and a prisoner by a mistake

But yet I am still Human

A Face of the Epidemic

by | Sep 29, 2020 | Creative Writing, Detention Center Writing Contests, Non-fiction, non-fiction

A FACE OF THE EPIDEMIC

by Ebonie Warren

 First place winner, nonfiction, Heard/Arlington County Detention Center/OAR writing contest, August 2020

I remember walking home from school by myself on one of the rare occasions that I went. My mother had not showed up and I was 6.

I can see the house up ahead. Maybe she’s not home as usual but as I approach I somehow know that something is wrong.

See I took care of her and my sisters and I hated at 6 that I couldn’t stop the insanity that was my life.

When I walked into the basement which was part shooting gallery and part our living space, I immediately start looking for my twin sisters and when I find them in a corner rocking back and forth I know that today will change my life.

Then I heard a man’s voice and I followed it to the back and there on her knees was my mother and 3 men standing in front of her and one of them had a gun.

I knew in that moment I could deny her nothing.

I took care of her when she was drunk or when she nodded out with a needle in her arm. I pulled it out.

So when she looked at me and said “Mommy needs a big favor” I somehow knew that my needs didn’t matter. Everyone else came first and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the survival of everyone involved even at the expense of your very existence.

So that day I traded my innocence for her life while she held my hand through it all. See I’ve lived in an epidemic long before the world acknowledged it.

I am a 5th generation addict. Addicts are beautiful, misunderstood people who just want a break sometimes because life can be cruel. We assume our realities are all consuming and our feelings will strangle us.

Jail gave me the opportunity to be clear headed long enough to see that my life can change. I don’t have to die a statistic and my mother’s life was not a prophecy for my future.

I almost turned it into one and only I can do that. I am not evil, evil was just done to me. I am not my mother, I just came from her and life is bearable.

Being in recovery is only one dimension of the many that make up me. I am an intergration of all my experiences, failures, and successes. I am a mother, a sister, a good friend and a fragile women. I mess up sometimes, but that only makes me human.

Get to know the stories behind this epidemic because that’s where the healing starts. Every one of us has a story to tell.

We are more than numbers in statistics.

We want help managing our disease.

How It Happened

by | Sep 29, 2020 | Creative Writing, Detention Center Writing Contests, Non-fiction, non-fiction

How It Happened

by Deonte Johnson

Second place, nonfiction, Heard/Arlington County Detention Center/OAR writing contest, August 2020

I loved fentanyl and heroine more than anybody or anything else I stole from my kids and mother to get high and didn’t feel bad about it.

As intelligent and goal oriented as I am I hung around all crooks and low life people twice my age who lived like I was getting high day in and day out, manipulating others, committing crime and living in the streets. Our way of living was the total opposite of the average law abiding citizens.

When everybody was up getting ready for work and going about their day productive I would be somewhere sleep and when everyone winding down for bed I’m just getting up running the streets looking for a way to get my first fix. It got to the point where I started staying up for days so I wouldn’t wake up sick from not having my fix when I woke up.

I would go hard in the streets to get money to stay high this lifestyle and my way of thinking at the time caused me to be arrested over 30 times. I didn’t learn my lesson from none of those arrests because either I got out the same day or wouldn’t serve no more than 90 days in jail.

Every time I got out the first thing on my mind was getting me some dope once I made it home to my neighborhood in no time I was welcomed back with my first high for free then before you know it I as back in the swing of things running the streets, committing crimes, and within my first month of being home a warrant would be issued for my arrest.

I was always placed on probation I would never report due to my continued drug use. Everybody I surrounded myself with pretty much conducted themselves the same as I did so none of us seen nothing wrong that’s why why we hung out together. When the police wanted to make an easy arrest they would just roll up on me and run my name because most likely they knew I had a warrant.

While living like this I never went home for two reasons one being my family didn’t tolerate my behavior and two because I had to travel too far to cop so I rather stay in the streets where I had easy access to everything I need.

Besides I was ashamed of my physical appearance and my family was speaking a bunch of stuff at the time I didn’t wanna hear about going to a program and getting clean how they always praying for me and I need to stop running the streets, stay out of jail, get a job and take care of my kids.

I use to be so high and use to doing what I wanted to do at times I forgot I had kids it’s sad but true. Even when I decided to give them a call I would make them a bunch of promises I couldn’t keep. For special moments such as Birthdays, and Holidays I wouldn’t show up because I looked bad and the dope man had all my money and full attention.

I didn’t even attend my grandmother funeral and help comfort my dad in a time he needed me most that was his mother and he loved her to death. I didn’t have my fix the morning of her funeral so I didn’t go.

Although I never tried to get clean I was scared to because of all the stories I heard I heard about how bad it would be withdrawing off heroine also I never thought I had a problem.

However on August 10th 2019 all that changed my addictive behavior caused me to cross the bridge in Arlington Virginia and commit a crime I was held without bond and been here in the ACDF since.

Being here in the ACDF I have been able to accomplish things I couldn’t accomplish on my own in society such as physically winging myself off heroine with the help of Dr. Ashby and the medical personel I was able to.

The ACDF has provided a safe and secure environment that has allowed me the opportunity began my recovery from from addiction process.

I don’t think anybody ever got more out of coming to jail than I did. In fact this jail enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently. Where else but in the ACDF could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely.

I’m in treatment today privaleged to be a part of the ACT unit I’ve had the opportunity to learn all about addiction how it affected myself and others. Also I learned how to begin dealing with life on life terms without being intoxicated.

Now today I’m comfortable with communicating and asking for help! Clinically I’ve allowed my brain enough time to transition from the addictive state back to a normal functioning brain.

Also I’ve managed to begin rebuilding broken relationships with family and love ones mainly my children and their mom! Today I’m much better than I was when I came to this facility.

Honestly I needed this experience being confined to one place for a period of time to get a grip on my life before it was to late. This facility saved my life since being here I’ve been able to set goals for myself now I have more than enough tools in my tool box to stay clean and sober be a great dad and successful upon leaving this facility.

Thanks to the ACT unit staff, some of the deputy’s I’ve conversed with over the past year and Ms. Watkins for all of the information, words of encouragement, and positivity y’all surrounded me with has helped me in my recovery process and has also helped me to think the way and become the man I am today!!