May 25 marks five years since George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis.
His death sparked worldwide protests, but long before that moment, Floyd’s life told a story that many people in prison recognize.
Floyd had dreams of becoming a football player and musician. He grew up poor in the Third Ward of Houston, faced racism, used and sold drugs to cope, was repeatedly locked up, and tried to rebuild his life despite being ensnared again and again in the criminal legal system. Ultimately, a police officer kneeled on Floyd’s neck for close to 10 minutes and killed him.
Of nearly 2 million Americans locked up in jails and prisons across the country, 41% are Black, despite making up only 14% of the U.S. population.
Almost half of the people imprisoned in this country had a substance use disorder and 37% had a diagnosed mental illness when they entered prison, according to Prison Policy Initiative. Just as many received public assistance before age 18. The vast majority — 68% of the incarcerated population — were 18 years old or younger at the time of their first arrest.
In the essays below, PJP writers reflect on the ways in which their lives were subjected to the same trapdoors that Floyd encountered throughout his life. These stories sketch a portrait of what many people in prison face before, during and after incarceration. It looks a lot like the life of George Floyd.
— PJP Editors
The morning they took George Floyd’s breath away, I sat in my solitary confinement cell listening to count being called. I couldn’t breathe for different reasons. The weight of concrete and steel, of time stretching endlessly before me, pressed against my chest, just as surely as that officer’s knee pressed against Floyd’s neck.
Floyd and I share more than our Blackness. We share the experience of being stripped of our humanity in plain sight. When officers came to rearrest me while I was on bond, they found me wearing only a T-shirt. I remember the cold tile floor against my stomach as they forced me down. I remember the cold metal of an AR-15 pressing against my thigh as they shoved my shirt up, and exposed me from the waist down. I remember their eyes, watching, as I lay there naked and powerless.
In 2020, as protests swept the nation and COVID-19 still threatened the globe, four people of color incarcerated in Texas made simple cloth masks adorned with the words “Black Lives Matter.” They had scrawled the phrase across the front with a stolen marker. A statement. A reminder. A prayer, perhaps. A handful of white women, incarcerated alongside us, complained and said they feared for their lives because of the marked masks. Guards later threw the four mask-makers into solitary confinement, isolating and punishing them for daring to declare our worth.
Floyd called out for his mama as life left his body. I wonder who he saw in those final moments. Perhaps his deceased mother appeared beside him, her familiar hands reaching out to escort him to the afterlife. Or maybe, like so many women I’ve heard in solitary confinement, his cries were a primal plea for protection, for comfort, for someone, anyone, to stop the violence being inflicted upon his body. When the walls close in and breath becomes scarce, “mama” becomes the most honest prayer we know.
From behind these walls, I watched the world respond to Floyd’s death. I witnessed the protests, the outrage, the demands for change — and the backlash.
At times I have wondered if anyone sees the thousands of smaller deaths that happen every day in places like this, the slow, grinding death of dignity, of hope, of the person you might have been. There are no cellphone cameras in here to capture our suffering. No “credible” bystanders to bear witness. Just the cruel presence of a system never designed to see us as fully human.
And yet, we keep breathing. We write our truths on homemade masks and across the pages of journals. In the darkest hours, I’ve watched women fold tiny origami birds from contraband paper, hiding them beneath mattresses like secret talismans. I’ve seen folks press their foreheads to the floor five times a day in prayer, refusing to surrender their faith even when their bodies are caged. I’ve watched as people with nothing left give half their meager state meal to someone who needs it more — a gesture of communion more sacred than any I’ve witnessed beyond these walls.
Floyd and I never met. But we are bound by the same struggle, bound by our resistance against the cops who kneel on our necks, the guards who strip us naked, the judges who hand down decades like candy, and the prison wardens who lock away our bodies in concrete boxes. They see our Black skin as a threat to be controlled rather than a life to be valued. Floyd’s story ended on that street corner in Minneapolis. Mine continues here, behind the walls of a Texas prison. But I want you to know: We are still breathing, still fighting, still human. And one day, perhaps that will be enough.
I was raised in a single-parent home, with my mom, big sister, Kquortney, older brother, Kishon, and little sister, Kia. Because my mom was at work, Kquortney, four years my senior, pretty much raised me. Except I didn’t listen to anything she said; I grew up fast and tough.
The neighborhood drug dealers used to stand on the side of my house, shooting dice and hustling drugs. I admired them.
One night, while everyone in the house was asleep, I looked out the window watching the scene when a car drove by and blasted shots at the guys on the corner. My eyes fastened to the fire blowing out of the pipe. It was the first time I actually saw what I had always heard.
I ran from the window and jumped in bed. My mom had repeatedly warned me about being in the window, and would’ve whipped me had she known where I’d been.
After the commotion settled, we went outside to survey the destruction. The side of our Atlantic City apartment was riddled with bullets. My mom was holding us, crying. The police were abrasive, and treated my mom like she was the shooter.
When I was around 5 or 6 years old, my grandmother brought me a police outfit with a gun and badge. Back then, I dreamed of becoming a police officer. But after the way the officers treated my mother, I knew I could never be a cop. Instead, I ended up on the other side of the law’s gun.
The first time I had a run-in with law enforcement I was in sixth grade. My best friend and I had been throwing rocks at cars when the police arrived. Around the same time, I started smoking weed. A year later, I started selling crack. I wanted money and wanted to follow the lifestyle of my older cousin. Eventually, I landed in a juvenile detention center for robbery.
Many years later, I was in a New Jersey prison when I heard about George Floyd’s death. I remember feeling sad and angry. The protests that followed brought with them a surge of relief. It was motivating to see the masses rally for Floyd and other victims of police violence.
But these days I feel duped. Too many politicians and activists promised change only for similar incidents to occur, like the case of Robert Brooks, an incarcerated man beaten to death in one of New York’s state prisons late last year.
I was raised in a single-parent household. My mother was on welfare and struggled to make ends meet. Luckily I was an only child; I don’t know how we would have managed with another mouth to feed.
Like George Floyd, I had dreams of becoming an athlete and rapper. Instead I became a teenage parent, and parenthood pressured me to seek fast money. I sold drugs to escape poverty and prevent my daughter from experiencing the grips of the ghetto.
But I’d also seen kids from my neighborhood with wads of money and nice clothes and cars they were too young to drive. I was attracted to that lifestyle.
The first time I was arrested, I was 12 years old. I got caught shoplifting in the mall. I was stealing clothes my mother wasn’t able to afford. In my underdeveloped brain, I believed having expensive clothes meant I wasn’t poor.
Eventually, I landed in prison for possession of a controlled substance. I was the breadwinner of the family, stuck in a cell, unable to provide for my loved ones. I was helpless. I felt like a failure.
I first heard about Floyd’s murder on the evening news: another Black man killed by law enforcement. The video enraged me. I watched that cop literally suffocate the life out of Floyd. It was something about the way the officer nonchalantly kneeled on this man’s neck, the way it manifested centuries of racism and the racial indignities we face every day. The symbolism was impossible to ignore: The white man had his foot on the Black man’s neck.
In many ways, what failed Floyd also failed me. My first trip to prison — and the felony conviction that marked me afterward — hampered my ability to find gainful employment. Eventually I used my illegal drug money to start a legit office cleaning business. But then housing became an issue. I was no longer able to be on my mother’s lease because she lived in Section 8 public housing, which is off-limits to convicted felons. And then there was education: I tried my hand at community college but due to my felony conviction I was denied financial aid. Eventually, I landed back in prison.
After Floyd’s murder, officers in this prison were ordered to wear body cameras. But they have not stopped assaults on us. The cameras don’t turn on by themselves.
I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, away from the urban center where I was born and my siblings were raised. On weekends, I visited them and was struck by the differences. The rush of the city and littered streets contrasted with my quaint neighborhood’s boutique shops and hedge-lined lawns. My home had flower boxes in the windows.
I was the first child of a teen mother, so it was decided that I would be raised by my grandmother, who could offer me a better life. Eventually my mother had more children, and as I grew I remember feeling haunted by the question: “What’s so wrong with me that I can’t be raised with my parents and siblings?”
My life in the peaceful suburbs didn’t shield me from encounters with law enforcement. The first time I had a run-in with the police, I was 12 years old. I was caught shoplifting from a toy store, stealing some bicycle parts I had the money for in my pocket. The police came, took me to the station and gave me what you could call a tour before taking me home. The officer did not treat me harshly, perhaps sensing my fear. From the house I called my grandmother, and the officer talked to her. When she got home she took a switch from the hedgerow in the backyard and beat me. Her disappointment hurt worse than the lashes.
More serious problems started in high school, when I began drinking. I didn’t stop until well into my adulthood, after amassing an extensive criminal record. I drank through my military service, facing infractions, demotions and interactions with the military police. The drinking led to cocaine and crack use. Soon after, I landed in prison.
These days, I look back on my substance abuse as the result of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse — a way to medicate painful feelings stemming from insecurity and questions about my identity.
I first heard about Geoge Floyd’s murder on TV in prison, while serving my life sentence. I remember feeling numb, and then ashamed. From inside, it was difficult to understand why Floyd did not comply with the officer to begin with. But it was also difficult to understand why the officer used such force.
Like me, Floyd suffered from a fractured family and a history of drug dependency. I have received treatment while incarcerated, including a couple of 30-day inpatient stints at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. In many ways, what failed Floyd also failed me: We both had a life detached from a stable family dynamic, and we both sought comfort from the pain in drugs and alcohol.
For a good many Black men in this country, George Floyd’s death was a horrific affirmation of what we have always suffered. For everyone else, it was the opportunity to see with their own eyes that police brutality was real.
The media spectacle of Floyd’s murder made folks imagine themselves in his place, or, in a case like mine, compare it to their own experiences with law enforcement.
Back when I was about 22 years old, I worked at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Camp Springs, Maryland, just outside Andrews Air Force Base. It was the first job I’d ever been fired from, and I felt some type of way about it. After I got a beer buzz one night, I went back to the restaurant and let the air out of the manager’s car tires. He saw me and called the cops. When a cruiser showed up, I took off on my bicycle. As I pedaled my way against traffic up the southbound lane of the highway, the officer paced me from the northbound lane, talking calmly across the grassy divider, trying to get me to be reasonable. I shot back with “You’ll never take me alive, copper!” and other alcohol-inspired nonsense.
I thought I could elude my pursuer by bicycling up an exit ramp into oncoming traffic. I was on the shoulder of the interstate for less than a minute before police cruisers converged on me. Another posted up over on the far side, in case I dared try to cross six lanes of rushing nighttime traffic. I was drunk, not crazy. They had me cold.
I complied with the officer who told me to put my hands on the trunk lid of the cruiser and spread my legs. I was still talking smack, as if everything was still a game. Next thing I knew, I got cracked in the back of the head. When I fell down, I started getting kicked. I curled up like a baby shrimp, and thought I might wrap myself around a cop’s leg if one of them tried to boot me into traffic.
The police handcuffed me then folded my body into the back of a patrol car. I was bruised and bleeding, shivering from the physical trauma. I knew they had almost killed me.
The officers who took me to jail asked if I first wanted to go to the hospital to get my head looked at. It was split to the white meat and still bleeding badly. But I was so angry I declined. As a result, I live with a lump and scar on the back of my head I’ll have for the rest of my days.
As I later came to learn was customary in such cases, I was charged with assaulting the police. “For what?” I thought, indignantly. “Aggressively throwing myself at their boots?” Because the cops never showed up to court, the charges were dropped.
That was the first time I was brutalized by the police, but it was not the last. Although other incidents would happen later, with less or even no provocation from me, none of them ever left me like George Floyd, dead but forever alive.
