Editor: Marg
Before losing the trial that would put him behind bars, David had a family, a wife and two sons. He had multiple jobs, his own clients, partners, and a good friend who he did construction and electrical work for. David recounted, “I was a good guy. There was nothing about me that ever said I dealt with drugs in any form or fashion. I was a hard-working electrician. Yes, I certainly had my times of adventure in youth and partied, but I was loyal, always have been. I was everybody’s friend, I had purpose, vision”. Yet David also described himself as ignorant– ignorant of what the United States did to people who looked like him. He lived his life carefree, unconcerned, and unaware of the danger he was in at all times. In 2009, David was wrongfully convicted on drug charges and served 10 years in prison.
In the Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn (MCD), David made friends with a man known as “Onie,” who he would play cards and talk late into the night with. One night, around 11:30 pm, Onie collapsed suddenly and began to seize. Quickly, David ran to the unit officer, who then called Medical Response downstairs. Despite the fact that the jail’s handbook mandated medical services be available at all times, there was no one there to help. Instead, the unit officer simply told David and others who were waiting with Onie to go to their bunks and go to sleep.
Around 8:30 am the next morning David awoke, and remembering Onie, ran to his bunk bed. There he found Onie alone, still waiting for the medical team to arrive. Onie said he was doing better, but it was clear that he was shaken, and though having brain cancer was nothing new to him, he felt something was not right. At 10 am the medical team arrived and took Onie to the medical department. He returned to his cell less than 30 minutes later, after being told that he was “fine.” Given his medical history, Onie’s seizure could have been fatal.
While he was recovering, Onie asked David if he would be able to help him write a letter to the judge that had presided over his case about what had just occurred. Without thinking, David immediately reassured Onie and told him that he would be willing to write the entire letter, relying on his own experience of watching it unfold. Withholding nothing, he detailed what he knew and heard, reports from other incarcerated people, the unit officers, and Onie about his experience with medical staff. Most importantly, David stated bluntly the negligence and unabashed cruelty of those involved– David told the truth. To his surprise, the judge held an emergency hearing which included the warden and medical director, and an expensive, complete medical workup was ordered.
After over a year at the facility David qualified to be transferred to an FCI Loretto Camp in Pennsylvania, which was minimally secured, lacked a perimeter fence, and included work-related programs. David didn’t have a chance to appreciate his relative luck because almost as soon as he arrived his entire cell was searched, though only to disguise his being targeted, and he alone was served two Incident Reports; one was for having small sample size butter and a fruit (“unauthorized items”) and one was an essentially redundant write-up for breaking a rule (“disobeying orders”). Normally the punishment associated with infractions of those types would last about a week, but David just had all of his privileges revoked for a full month. The only way David could contact anyone was by sending physical letters through the mail. Out of sheer panic, he called his wife and emailed his lawyer to tell them that they wouldn’t be receiving calls or emails from him, and he was immediately served two more Incident Reports for contacting them. This was not common practice by staff at this institution, one guy warned David, they are targeting you. Once winter hit and he was still living with no phone or email privileges, an instance of frustration over being forced to work long hours in the freezing cold put David in a position to be targeted again, this time placed in the SHU, or solitary confinement. A Discipline Hearing Officer (DHO) found David guilty of the two further infractions–disobeying orders, and being in an unauthorized area, and in further retaliation his Unit Team ordered that he be transferred to a new facility.
One day, after not communicating with his family for two months, David was placed in transit aboard a bus from FCI Loretto in PA, destination unknown, and watched as all of the local landmarks passed by. Arriving at the first holdover, the officers escorting him said nothing. When placed on a plane days later, he overheard another prisoner discussing what he planned to do in Oklahoma City upon his landing. “Okay, so I’m going to Oklahoma,” David thought to himself. In Oklahoma, David was placed on a flight to Texas. Upon arrival, David overheard a man talking on the bus, anxiously awaiting his arrival in Beaumont, TX. So in all, David was taken, shackled, placed on a bus to a holdover, then bused to an airport, filed onto a plane to another holdover, loaded back onto a plane to Texas, and finally transferred to a bus without ever being told where he would end up.
In Texas David met Garry, a ‘prison lawyer’, who was a licensed paralegal who provided legal advice to fellow incarcerated people. Upon hearing David’s experiences, Gary summarized bluntly, “You were attacked.” To Gary, every event in David’s timeline could be traced back to that original letter that he had written for Onie. By effectively initiating a hearing with top officials, he was exposing the treatment that Onie endured and cost the institution an enormous amount of money and effort. “That’s it,” Garry said. “Not only did you make them spend their money, but you embarrassed them in front of the trial judge. They probably didn’t do anything to you in Brooklyn so it wouldn’t look like retaliation.” Gary explained that it was convenient for the retribution to occur at the next physical institution, in Pennsylvania, because if he had received additional Incident Reports and been placed in the SHU immediately, he would have a case for retaliation. Thus, the blows continued as David was flown across the country away from his entire family and moved into a higher security prison without the ability to notify his lawyer or any of his loved ones.
From the moment Garry opened his mouth, he tugged at the small string that held David’s reality together. Now, it was unraveling before his eyes. To Gary, David had not undergone repetitive impersonal injustices but rather the intentional leveraging of carceral tools intended to crush acts of radical solidarity. Gary’s gift of demystification was one David wanted to pass on to other incarcerated people: a refusal to be at the whim of an opaque series of causes and effects. In cutting through the prison’s patterns of abuse, Gary challenged the incident reports using the Administrative Remedy process. Therefore, David also learned how to file administrative remedies, forms that incarcerated people can use to report abuse or neglect, as well as how to avoid the bureaucratic traps that stall remedy processes. David then joined Gary and worked on other incarcerated peoples’ administrative remedies, forming a support network within the prison. David would go on to spend the next 8 years of his prison sentence honing these skills, with nothing except his faith in a Creator and desire to see his case overturned driving him onward– he never lost sight of these two focal points.
Life was far from easy after David was released from prison. At the time, David was living in a halfway house, taking classes at Columbia University through a program he’d heard about in prison. For four and a half months it finally felt like things were going his way. In his “Contemporary Civilizations” course, David met students who expressed an interest in social justice and were proud of what they stood for. One student, Anna, would later become his Co-founder of the Student Justice League.
One day in class, the professor announced a trip sponsored by the Justice Center, so David formally requested time off from the halfway house. Though he was approved, for the times he requested, unknowing to him a staff member changed his return time causing him to arrive 23 minutes after his curfew; there was another complaint already filed against him for being 16 minutes late coming from class because of poor train service. David was sentenced to loss of privileges and unjustly returned to prison for four and a half months in MDC Brooklyn. David knew intuitively that one of the staff members in charge of his time request had changed it without informing him– and he was right. The halfway house administration and BOP official in charge had colluded to send him back to prison because he was writing administrative remedies for himself and others in the halfway house.
David’s time in prison, strengthened by his relationships and experiences with people like Onie and Gary, proved to him that resisting the powers that be, those that trample on a person’s humanity, was a marathon. Therefore, David spent the remainder of his time in MDC planning the creation of the Student Justice League (SJL). The Federal Bureau of Prisons and Probation Department could throw David back in prison for anything, at any time, so he needed students who would do the work of filing administrative remedies to support the rights of incarcerated people. David found students who were willing to learn how to carry the torch Garry had passed on to him.
When David got out of prison for the second time he landed a job as an electrician and took full responsibility for his son's finances. After spending a month in a shelter and several months on his brother’s couch, he rented a room, all the while continuing classes at Columbia University and attending a drug program forced upon him by the court– despite the fact that he had never used drugs or had a drink since his arrest. Throughout such hardship and resilience, David grew the Student Justice League, with Anna and others, into the functional organization it is today. Leveraging the power of the Administrative Remedy process from the outside, SJL works to defend the rights of people on the inside. Therefore, formerly-incarcerated individuals recruit and train students, who embody immense privilege and education, as advocates for currently incarcerated people across the US. However, at its inception, working all day and meeting with SJL members at night wasn't sustainable; the students needed David’s guidance– a transition was overdue. Ultimately, David was forced to choose between remaining at his job, one that promised financial stability, or SJL, a beacon of light if successful but offered virtually no safety net. As history would have it, David chose the latter.
Today, David reflects, “The only reason I am fighting so hard to make the American system humane is because I believe in the students’ well... if it weren’t for their will to make a change, I would not be here. This American crisis continues to have devastating effects on incarcerated citizens– on families, livelihoods, mental and physical health inside and outside prison. Crimes, neglect, and civil rights abuses are committed on a daily basis in prisons. Prison staff take away women's ability to give birth, men and women are raped, people lose body parts or are permanently physically harmed under the umbrella of “Justice.” The evil must stop. It is our responsibility as fellow human beings not to only address inhumane acts served by fellow regular human beings, but also to address inhumane acts being served by those hired to be Just. Will you have the courage to assist us in addressing inhumanity in the Prisons, or will you continue to look away? I am with you and those you recruit to help in putting an end to this. I believe that the Student Justice League can severely damage the prison industrial complex, changing it forever, if not destroy it.”
David survived one of America’s greatest ongoing human rights crises. Everyday, alongside other incarcerated people in what has been rebranded as The Remedy Project, David continues to put himself in harm's way full time now without a salary yet in the hopes that we might rise to the occasion and put a halt to the systematic violence committed against incarcerated community members.
The Remedy Project is always looking for additional support, whether through writing or advocacy, or via donations that allow this organization to grow and evolve. We must defend the human rights and dignity of all.
Editor: Marg
Before losing the trial that would put him behind bars, David had a family, a wife and two sons. He had multiple jobs, his own clients, partners, and a good friend who he did construction and electrical work for. David recounted, “I was a good guy. There was nothing about me that ever said I dealt with drugs in any form or fashion. I was a hard-working electrician. Yes, I certainly had my times of adventure in youth and partied, but I was loyal, always have been. I was everybody’s friend, I had purpose, vision”. Yet David also described himself as ignorant– ignorant of what the United States did to people who looked like him. He lived his life carefree, unconcerned, and unaware of the danger he was in at all times. In 2009, David was wrongfully convicted on drug charges and served 10 years in prison.
In the Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn (MCD), David made friends with a man known as “Onie,” who he would play cards and talk late into the night with. One night, around 11:30 pm, Onie collapsed suddenly and began to seize. Quickly, David ran to the unit officer, who then called Medical Response downstairs. Despite the fact that the jail’s handbook mandated medical services be available at all times, there was no one there to help. Instead, the unit officer simply told David and others who were waiting with Onie to go to their bunks and go to sleep.
Around 8:30 am the next morning David awoke, and remembering Onie, ran to his bunk bed. There he found Onie alone, still waiting for the medical team to arrive. Onie said he was doing better, but it was clear that he was shaken, and though having brain cancer was nothing new to him, he felt something was not right. At 10 am the medical team arrived and took Onie to the medical department. He returned to his cell less than 30 minutes later, after being told that he was “fine.” Given his medical history, Onie’s seizure could have been fatal.
While he was recovering, Onie asked David if he would be able to help him write a letter to the judge that had presided over his case about what had just occurred. Without thinking, David immediately reassured Onie and told him that he would be willing to write the entire letter, relying on his own experience of watching it unfold. Withholding nothing, he detailed what he knew and heard, reports from other incarcerated people, the unit officers, and Onie about his experience with medical staff. Most importantly, David stated bluntly the negligence and unabashed cruelty of those involved– David told the truth. To his surprise, the judge held an emergency hearing which included the warden and medical director, and an expensive, complete medical workup was ordered.
After over a year at the facility David qualified to be transferred to an FCI Loretto Camp in Pennsylvania, which was minimally secured, lacked a perimeter fence, and included work-related programs. David didn’t have a chance to appreciate his relative luck because almost as soon as he arrived his entire cell was searched, though only to disguise his being targeted, and he alone was served two Incident Reports; one was for having small sample size butter and a fruit (“unauthorized items”) and one was an essentially redundant write-up for breaking a rule (“disobeying orders”). Normally the punishment associated with infractions of those types would last about a week, but David just had all of his privileges revoked for a full month. The only way David could contact anyone was by sending physical letters through the mail. Out of sheer panic, he called his wife and emailed his lawyer to tell them that they wouldn’t be receiving calls or emails from him, and he was immediately served two more Incident Reports for contacting them. This was not common practice by staff at this institution, one guy warned David, they are targeting you. Once winter hit and he was still living with no phone or email privileges, an instance of frustration over being forced to work long hours in the freezing cold put David in a position to be targeted again, this time placed in the SHU, or solitary confinement. A Discipline Hearing Officer (DHO) found David guilty of the two further infractions–disobeying orders, and being in an unauthorized area, and in further retaliation his Unit Team ordered that he be transferred to a new facility.
One day, after not communicating with his family for two months, David was placed in transit aboard a bus from FCI Loretto in PA, destination unknown, and watched as all of the local landmarks passed by. Arriving at the first holdover, the officers escorting him said nothing. When placed on a plane days later, he overheard another prisoner discussing what he planned to do in Oklahoma City upon his landing. “Okay, so I’m going to Oklahoma,” David thought to himself. In Oklahoma, David was placed on a flight to Texas. Upon arrival, David overheard a man talking on the bus, anxiously awaiting his arrival in Beaumont, TX. So in all, David was taken, shackled, placed on a bus to a holdover, then bused to an airport, filed onto a plane to another holdover, loaded back onto a plane to Texas, and finally transferred to a bus without ever being told where he would end up.
In Texas David met Garry, a ‘prison lawyer’, who was a licensed paralegal who provided legal advice to fellow incarcerated people. Upon hearing David’s experiences, Gary summarized bluntly, “You were attacked.” To Gary, every event in David’s timeline could be traced back to that original letter that he had written for Onie. By effectively initiating a hearing with top officials, he was exposing the treatment that Onie endured and cost the institution an enormous amount of money and effort. “That’s it,” Garry said. “Not only did you make them spend their money, but you embarrassed them in front of the trial judge. They probably didn’t do anything to you in Brooklyn so it wouldn’t look like retaliation.” Gary explained that it was convenient for the retribution to occur at the next physical institution, in Pennsylvania, because if he had received additional Incident Reports and been placed in the SHU immediately, he would have a case for retaliation. Thus, the blows continued as David was flown across the country away from his entire family and moved into a higher security prison without the ability to notify his lawyer or any of his loved ones.
From the moment Garry opened his mouth, he tugged at the small string that held David’s reality together. Now, it was unraveling before his eyes. To Gary, David had not undergone repetitive impersonal injustices but rather the intentional leveraging of carceral tools intended to crush acts of radical solidarity. Gary’s gift of demystification was one David wanted to pass on to other incarcerated people: a refusal to be at the whim of an opaque series of causes and effects. In cutting through the prison’s patterns of abuse, Gary challenged the incident reports using the Administrative Remedy process. Therefore, David also learned how to file administrative remedies, forms that incarcerated people can use to report abuse or neglect, as well as how to avoid the bureaucratic traps that stall remedy processes. David then joined Gary and worked on other incarcerated peoples’ administrative remedies, forming a support network within the prison. David would go on to spend the next 8 years of his prison sentence honing these skills, with nothing except his faith in a Creator and desire to see his case overturned driving him onward– he never lost sight of these two focal points.
Life was far from easy after David was released from prison. At the time, David was living in a halfway house, taking classes at Columbia University through a program he’d heard about in prison. For four and a half months it finally felt like things were going his way. In his “Contemporary Civilizations” course, David met students who expressed an interest in social justice and were proud of what they stood for. One student, Anna, would later become his Co-founder of the Student Justice League.
One day in class, the professor announced a trip sponsored by the Justice Center, so David formally requested time off from the halfway house. Though he was approved, for the times he requested, unknowing to him a staff member changed his return time causing him to arrive 23 minutes after his curfew; there was another complaint already filed against him for being 16 minutes late coming from class because of poor train service. David was sentenced to loss of privileges and unjustly returned to prison for four and a half months in MDC Brooklyn. David knew intuitively that one of the staff members in charge of his time request had changed it without informing him– and he was right. The halfway house administration and BOP official in charge had colluded to send him back to prison because he was writing administrative remedies for himself and others in the halfway house.
David’s time in prison, strengthened by his relationships and experiences with people like Onie and Gary, proved to him that resisting the powers that be, those that trample on a person’s humanity, was a marathon. Therefore, David spent the remainder of his time in MDC planning the creation of the Student Justice League (SJL). The Federal Bureau of Prisons and Probation Department could throw David back in prison for anything, at any time, so he needed students who would do the work of filing administrative remedies to support the rights of incarcerated people. David found students who were willing to learn how to carry the torch Garry had passed on to him.
When David got out of prison for the second time he landed a job as an electrician and took full responsibility for his son's finances. After spending a month in a shelter and several months on his brother’s couch, he rented a room, all the while continuing classes at Columbia University and attending a drug program forced upon him by the court– despite the fact that he had never used drugs or had a drink since his arrest. Throughout such hardship and resilience, David grew the Student Justice League, with Anna and others, into the functional organization it is today. Leveraging the power of the Administrative Remedy process from the outside, SJL works to defend the rights of people on the inside. Therefore, formerly-incarcerated individuals recruit and train students, who embody immense privilege and education, as advocates for currently incarcerated people across the US. However, at its inception, working all day and meeting with SJL members at night wasn't sustainable; the students needed David’s guidance– a transition was overdue. Ultimately, David was forced to choose between remaining at his job, one that promised financial stability, or SJL, a beacon of light if successful but offered virtually no safety net. As history would have it, David chose the latter.
Today, David reflects, “The only reason I am fighting so hard to make the American system humane is because I believe in the students’ well... if it weren’t for their will to make a change, I would not be here. This American crisis continues to have devastating effects on incarcerated citizens– on families, livelihoods, mental and physical health inside and outside prison. Crimes, neglect, and civil rights abuses are committed on a daily basis in prisons. Prison staff take away women's ability to give birth, men and women are raped, people lose body parts or are permanently physically harmed under the umbrella of “Justice.” The evil must stop. It is our responsibility as fellow human beings not to only address inhumane acts served by fellow regular human beings, but also to address inhumane acts being served by those hired to be Just. Will you have the courage to assist us in addressing inhumanity in the Prisons, or will you continue to look away? I am with you and those you recruit to help in putting an end to this. I believe that the Student Justice League can severely damage the prison industrial complex, changing it forever, if not destroy it.”
David survived one of America’s greatest ongoing human rights crises. Everyday, alongside other incarcerated people in what has been rebranded as The Remedy Project, David continues to put himself in harm's way full time now without a salary yet in the hopes that we might rise to the occasion and put a halt to the systematic violence committed against incarcerated community members.
The Remedy Project is always looking for additional support, whether through writing or advocacy, or via donations that allow this organization to grow and evolve. We must defend the human rights and dignity of all.
