"But Darnell, you're young and you have a short prison sentence. Your future is going to arrive quickly as soon as you get out of this prison," I said.

Darnell sat across the table from me with his hands folded in front of him. He was nineteen, tall, slender, and he sat with his legs spread far apart with his large feet extending out from each side of the table. He actually looked a little younger than nineteen. I'd asked him to stop by and chat with me soon after he'd arrived on our Unit. He'd been assigned a maximum custody status and been transferred to us from the Diagnostic and Evaluation Center. He was on my caseload.

I'd reviewed Darnell's Classification Study and noted that he'd struggled in school and had dropped out. The last grade he'd completed was the ninth grade. He'd been arrested for property crimes and several times for violent gang-related crimes. His current prison sentence was for assault.

"When you are released, you need to be ready to make a life for yourself that doesn't involve crime," I said. "You'll want to get a good job and get married and raise a family."

"Mister Larsen," Darnell said, "when I get out I'll go back to the hood and everyone there knows what I'm about. I'll fall right back into the same old shit."

"No, Darnell," I said. "You don't have to go back to the same neighborhood. We'll buy you a bus ticket anywhere you want to go. You could go somewhere entirely different and start a new life. You could start over."

Darnell slowly shook his head side to side, and he began to tap a spot on his left wrist with his right index finger. It was the spot on his arm where you would expect to see a wristwatch, but he had no wristwatch.

"It's the skin, Bro," he said. "I can't go just anywheres like you white folks can. If I just showed up somewheres, I'd probably spend the first night in jail. And if I did find some brothers, I'd be from the wrong gang, and that'd get me killed.

I had no answer for this.

"No," he said. "There's only one thing I'm gonna need when I get out, and that's a gun. And that's the first thing I'm gonna to do when I get out. Get me a gun."

"Get a gun?!" I said. "If you get caught with a gun, you'll come right back here. A gun can get you killed."

"Mister Larsen," he replied, "I'd much rather be caught with a gun than without one."

"So if you are caught with a gun you'll come back to prison, but if you get caught without a gun you'll get killed."

"Yeah. That's it," he said.

I shook my head sadly. I was at a loss for words.

"My life ain't worth nothin," he went on. "If I don't get killed by another gang member, or someone I'm trying to rob, or by someone who's trying to rob me, the police will do it." He emphasized the first part of the word "POlice."

"I won't live to be thirty, so what's there to plan for?" he said. "My best chance to stay alive until I'm thirty would only be if I was locked up in here. Out there," he gestured toward the window facing no-man's land and the perimeter fence and the world beyond, "I don't stand a chance."

We could make no further progress on this day. He was very sure of what he was saying, and his certainty was undoubtedly backed up with the experiences of brothers he knew from the ‘hood,' many of whom, I knew, were now dead. I changed the subject. Instead, I answered his questions about the new prison that would now be his home for a few years. But although Darnell was defeated about his future, I was not, and I occasionally raised the subject with him again.

Whenever I see or hear the slogan "Black lives matter," I think of Darnell. I knew many Darnells over the years, and I wished that they had embraced the sentiment of the slogan. I wished that they would have valued their own lives and taken charge of their futures by planning and preparing for it. It was a hard sell, and I met a lot of resistance and outright refusal to plan, but I never gave up trying.

Occasionally, a death or a serious injury of a young Black man at the hands of the police would make the national news. We had a wide variety of inmates, including white supremacists, and the atmosphere could get pretty tense after an act of police violence occurred against a Black man. At these times, everyone knew how dangerous it would be to broadcast racist views or to respond to provocations with acts of violence.

There were many Darnells that I knew who had listened to my entreaties to value their own lives and to plan for their futures. Often, when they heard the news of a death or a serious injury of a young Black man at the hands of the police, they would make sure to point it out to me. They wanted me to know that this most recent incident of violence toward a brother could very easily have been them. It was one more piece of evidence, they insisted, to support their conviction that they had no future, and planning for one was useless.

One would expect such a defeated attitude to lead to despair, but this proved to be wrong. For the Darnells that I knew, it was a license to enjoy the short lives they had left. It was party time. They enjoyed life, and they were fun to be around. They laughed easily and clowned around endlessly, and they were prepared to die violently and soon.

Discussion

1. Do you know anyone like Darnell?
2. How would you be different if you expected to die violently and soon and had no hope of a different future?

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