Born a Crime

help me. Because she’d told me she wouldn’t. “If you ever get arrested, don’t call me.” I needed someone sympathetic to my pligh ...

it or not. It was at that point that a cop pulled me aside and told me what I was in for. The way the system works in South Afri ...

what’s going on. Your family can’t pay your bail. It could even be that the court’s backed up. “Sorry, we’re too busy. No more h ...

days, weeks, maybe months. It’s the same way in America. If you’re poor, if you don’t know how the system works, you can slip th ...

a postponement, and then maybe you’ll go free or maybe you won’t. Trust me, you don’t want to do that. You have the right to sta ...

Now I needed money, because lawyers, as nice as they are, don’t do anything for free. I called a friend and asked him if he coul ...

“Why do you need my shoelaces?” “So you don’t hang yourself.” “Right.” Even when he said that, the gravity of my situation still ...

— The guards had given me a mat and a scratchy blanket. I rolled them out on the concrete floor and tried to get comfortable. Ev ...

dream. Then I looked around and remembered that it wasn’t. Breakfast came, and I settled in to wait. A day in jail is mostly sil ...

back in my mind for all the stereotypes of what I imagined people act like in prison, and then I tried to act like that. In Sout ...

like Mexican drug cartels. In fact a lot of these gangs base their thing on those Mexican gangs. They have the same look: the Co ...

“I don’t have a knife.” “I know you have a knife somewhere. Where is it?” He searched and searched and finally gave up and let m ...

in America, just dark enough to pass for Latino, walking around jail doing bad Mexican-gangster dialogue from the movies. “Shit’ ...

it. When I walked in that first night, everyone was giving me this look: “I’m dangerous. Don’t fuck with me.” So I went, “Shit, ...

criminal. I shouldn’t be here, because I am not like him.” And round and round we went. At a certain point it occurred to me tha ...

the other guys were pretending to be. Now those guys were going to get out and go home to their families and say, “Oh, honey, th ...

than tea, but it was drinkable. There were older, hard-time prisoners close to parole, and their detail was to come and clean th ...

whooping waiting for me at home that I genuinely considered going to prison. For a brief moment I thought I had a plan. “I’ll go ...

—the second he walked in our tough-guy routines were over. Everyone was terrified. We all stared at him. “Oh, fuck...” For whate ...

Then one of the cops came back and called the Hulk over; they needed information from him. The cop started asking him a bunch of ...