I was 12 when I was first arrested for weeding. I was handcuffed and taken to a juvenile detention center, this was the beginning of my life in the network of the prison system. Every second since then I have been incarcerated or on probation.
I’m 41 now, paying 45 years in prison for someone else’s life. In prison, I watched CNBC’s “The Exchange” every morning and I was amazed at the talking heads discussing the money generated by cannabis stocks. I take full responsibility for my actions that led to my incarceration, but I often wonder how my life could have turned out differently if it had been legal in the state of Washington when I was as young as I am today.
Getting to know weeds when I was 6 years old. A family friend who was watching me decided I was super hyperactive and gave me a bong. When I was 11, a nearby senior merchant asked me to help me get drugs. My family is very poor and I want to live, so I am willing to do whatever they want. During these times, I started smoking weed and drinking alcohol regularly.
I grew up resisting drug addiction, which led to an explosion in the number of people arrested for drug offenses. From 1980 to 2019, the number of Americans arrested for drug offenses increased from 40,900 to 430,926. On the day of the arrest, I was walking home from school with my best friend. The police noticed that we were pulling his car to the side of the road to block the road and he said he needed to talk to us.
We’re not doing anything wrong, but my friend is black and we live in a low -income, crowded neighborhood. Interaction with police officers is not uncommon, even in our time. I hated the police at the time because I had never seen them help people in my community. All I see is harassment, insults and arrests.
“Where have you been?” churches.
“School is going to be a clear place,” I replied, well.
He did not like my comment. He asked me if we had anything in us that shouldn’t. That’s when I remembered I hid the grass in my sock, packed in a small clear blue plastic box.
“No,” we said confidently.
But he obviously does not believe. When the pockets fell on the hood of the car, another policeman appeared and pushed my friend away.
My friend was placed in the trunk of a police car and the officer who asked him went on to whisper to another officer who nodded and looked at my ankle.
“Are you sure you want to cover everything, son?” churches.
“Yes,” I said blindly. I’m good at lying to bosses, or at least I thought so.
“Are you sure there’s something wrong with the socks?” “Because your friend said you had marijuana with your man,” she said.
I was just looking at the police. I know I have a problem. He told me to take my hands off the hood and started holding my hand. He quickly searched for weeds and arrested me.
I spent a few weeks at Juvia before I was released as an examiner. Spending time in the woods dropped me off at school and it soon became impossible for me to keep up. After leaving school, I returned to Yuvia, violating the terms of the probationary period.
The cycle has begun. The more time I spent on Juvi, the more often I made friends with people with legal problems. At the age of 14, I was arrested more than a dozen times and stopped studying. At age 18, I spent three and a half years in prison for probation violations or drug -related offenses and theft.
College and more traditional career paths were inaccessible to me, so I lived as a drug dealer as I learned from people older than me. When I was 22, I continued on the path I had taken after that first incarceration, committing drug theft that resulted in someone’s death – which is why I am incarcerated now.
“I was arrested more than ten times at the age of 14 and stopped studying. At age 18, I spent three and a half years in prison on all probation charges or drug offenses and theft. “
I don’t share my experience to relieve myself of responsibility for other people’s lives. On the contrary, I would like to acknowledge that detention of children affects their development and has an impact on public safety.
It is vast Research Document how incarcerated children are more likely to commit crimes than those who receive alternative interventions such as counseling or drug treatment. I know from experience this is the case.
My story is not unique. Almost everyone I knew in prison was exposed to the criminal justice system through drug crimes. Weed criminalization has less affected blacks, who are 3.64 times more likely than whites to be arrested for possession, according to the American Civil Liberties Union in 2020. Report.
I understand that even if an herb is made legal, it may be illegal for people under a certain age to own and consume it, as is the case with alcohol. I was probably still arrested when I was 12. But weed criminalization and the war on drugs were targeted at my low-income community. This caused him to stop and continue to search for the police. And while children may have a drinking problem along with minors, they are rarely arrested and sent to Juvia for crime.
Some jurisdictions that have legalized weeds have taken steps to address the damages of past criminalization. Deleting the previous sentence At People’s priority for cannabis retail licensing. But these efforts are separate, and even philanthropic policies often fail to address the long -term harms of incarceration. Even in the case of priority access to licenses, many spend time in prison – where the salary is almost nonexistent – Not enough money To start a business.
We need to look at the damage that weed criminalization has done to poor communities like mine. Many of us have suffered irreversible damage. As children, we were forced to leave our homes and suffer from the corpse system and the trauma it causes to those inside. Childhood can no longer be changed, and even the “free” may no longer recover from the experience of confinement at an early age. And many of us are still struggling to get out of it.
Christopher Blackwell, 41, is serving a 45-year sentence in Washington state. He is a co-founder of Watch 2 Equity, an organization that provides civics education to communities affected by the system and is actively working to enact criminal and political reform laws. He is currently working on publishing a book in a solitary confinement cell. His writings have been published by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, HuffPost, Insider, and many other publications. You can follow him and connect on Twitter @chriswblackwell.
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Source: Huffpost
