‘Our pasts are not easily forgotten’: For people like me who were in prison, coming home can put our lives at risk

In early July, I was taking a walk with my mother in my old neighborhood, the neighborhood that took me away from her and sent me to prison. As our stroll carried us past trees and through the hot afternoon sun, a car that had just passed us came to a screeching halt and began to speed toward us in reverse. After all these years, I thought, someone’s long-held grudge against me was coming home to roost. My mother, I feared, was about to witness my death. But when the car’s window rolled down, I saw my uncle.

After my confusion faded, we laughed and caught up briefly, and he apologized for surprising us. He knew the significance of where we stood. So did my mother.

I remembered that moment of dread when I heard about the death of a friend I met in prison. On Friday, Dec. 16, less than two years after he was released from prison and exonerated of four murders, Christopher Williams was fatally shot at the funeral in North Philadelphia of another freed man, Tyree “Big Hick” Little. Christopher was 62.

Christopher always greeted me with a firm handshake and a kind word, and he was constantly supportive of the paintings that I was trying to perfect. He was one of the best of us. In a rare moment of justice, he was exonerated of four murders and set free in 2021, after nearly three decades in prison.

After all that lost time — including 25 years on death row — Christopher was killed at the funeral of someone else who had also spent years in prison, then died at home.

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Tyree’s tragic death was a shock to us all. As a young man, he’d survived both incarceration and gun violence; last year, he was shot nine times in North Philly. As my comrade Robert Saleem Holbrook, whom I also met in prison, put it at a holiday party we attended the day after Tyree was buried and Christopher was killed, “To be a Black or brown man in Philadelphia means you are being hunted.”

Many of the men and women who’ve returned to this city after incarceration have turned their lives around. I have spent the last three years of my life working with other returning citizens and using my voice as an artist to bring light to social justice causes. Many of us work to give back to the communities we once harmed. But in the broken communities we left and return to, our pasts are not easily forgotten.

That’s why on that day many months ago, as the car reversed toward me, my life flashed before my eyes, and my mind returned to prison. I remembered the words of another dear friend who passed away alone in his prison cell, my brother Zach, who once told me, “They’re trying to kill me.” By the time I met him, Zach had spent decades on death row, barely escaping the state’s attempts to kill him. He accepted this very real vision of his own death and talked openly about fear and his own mortality.

Zach introduced me to Chris. Like many other men sentenced to death, they carried a bright spirit that showed through the darkness of prison.

Now, like Zach, I often think about my mortality — and feel a sense of anxiety about the possibility that an old grudge would come back on me.

Saleem, whom I also met in prison, had asked me to post about the holiday party on my socials, to let people know so they could attend. I never did, out of fear for my safety — I didn’t want the wrong people to know where I was going to be.

That evening, as a group of friends celebrated life and mourned recent losses, Saleem spoke of our right to safety. He explained how he moves, the precautions he takes, and the feeling that his past could wipe out his present and future. I felt his words. We all did, as his partner cried and my mother looked on. We all know that the reunions we’ve had with our families could be only temporary.

We all know that the reunions we’ve had with our families could be only temporary.

My heart goes out to Chris’ fiancée for her loss. And to the reentry community in Philadelphia, we lost two good ones last month.

The judicial system was set up to punish us with more passion than it used to protect us, but we need something different.

There is no easy solution to the problems that face our communities, and as much as I’d like to offer it in the course of this brief essay, I know that addressing the bigger picture is the only way forward.

As it stands, people convicted of a crime are often housed in prisons so far away from home that they lose connections to their family and communities that could help them reintegrate. Divorcing prisoners from their homes places them out of sight and offers some semblance of justice, but victims are never given the opportunity to see the change the offenders make. Furthermore, sentencing a person to years in prison does very little to relieve the pain of victims. We need actual counseling services for victims that follow their grief timeline, for as long as they need to heal their pain. We need to ensure offenders are welcomed and victims are cared for with the empathy we’d give to our own family members.

We need community solutions that are not easy. We need a real effort that heals vendettas and offers love, rather than guns, as the solution.

People released from prison need to be allowed to reenter our communities with more than just freedom, but also with the right and expectation to live that freedom out.

Akeil Robertson-Jowers is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of race and justice. He has been living and working in Philadelphia since his release from prison. @akeil.r