I spent the better part of my day yesterday at the police station.  I got a call in the morning from a friend who is a school counselor at our local elementary school.  She needed my help.  A young man who is a student at  the school had been arrested in the night before.  His parents speak no English.  They are African refugees.  I won’t go into why this 13  year old was arrested at 10 p.m. the night before.  Because that is not the point of this post.

I went to the police station because he had been held overnight.  He is 13 years old.  His parents were called but no one in the house could understand what was going on.  They called the school counselor to let her know what was happening.

So I went to the police station yesterday morning along with the parents to find out what was happening to this young man.  As I sat there waiting to talk to the youth officer, I was struck by the other people who were also there waiting.  The officers were white and the people waiting were black and brown.  It encapsulates the tragedy of what is happening in our criminal legal system every day every place.  I started to think about how many times this scene is being played out in police stations, courtrooms, probation & parole departments in Compton, the Bronx, Englewood, Gary, Atlanta….

I watched the parents of this young man sitting stoically alongside me, their faces impassive.  I wondered what was going on in their minds as they thought about having left the Congo to be sitting in a police station in Chicago.  A foreign place even to those of us who are born and raised in the U.S.  I am a native french speaker and it is in these times that I am grateful for being multi-lingual.  I was able to communicate with the family in a language familiar to them and yet I found that my words could not convey the magnitude of the journey that their son is about to embark upon.  Words cannot do that at least the words in my toolkit cannot.

So I sat there with them.  I translated for them.  Now I have to advocate for that young man.  He needs a chance.  A second chance and a third one if need be.  In these moments, I am always reminded that the neatness of abstract theory always gives way to the messiness of real life.  So there it is.  I am trying to reconcile the two.

Below is a print created by Colin Matthes, an artist I admire.  I purchased this some time ago through the Just Seeds Artists’ Cooperative.  It seems relevant to this post.

Here is what Colin wrote about this print:

This print was inspired by visiting my cousin (who is like a brother to me) at Cook County Jail and Dixon Prison in Dixon, Illinios.

This is one of two prints about sitting in the waiting room for hours on end before finding out if I will be able to see my cousin or not. The waiting room seemed so routine, the hope, the sadness, the desperation, the determined faces, the babies crawling across the floor, the young ladies putting on makeup, and the mothers looking strong….while everyone bullshits together trying to knock down a few more minutes.

The second of the two prints is a part of the Justseeds prison portfolio project, which is currently being used to raise funds for prisoners rights and prison abolition groups.