Born a Crime

across, so I stepped in and translated for them and sorted everything out. Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a ...

with the Hulk. The second I spoke to him, this face that had seemed so threatening and mean lit up with gratitude. “Ah, na khens ...

for squashing a family to death with his bare hands, but it wasn’t anything like that. He’d been arrested for shoplifting PlaySt ...

I tried to help him out a bit. I told him my trick of putting off your bail hearing to get your defense together, so he stayed i ...

something. He’s paid a pittance but at least he’s paid. He’s told where to be and what to do every waking minute of his day. The ...

becomes a petty thief. He’s in and out of jail. He gets lucky and finds some construction work, but then he gets laid off from t ...

driving with bad number plates. He had committed a crime, but he was no more a criminal than I was. The difference was that he d ...

the same. — The day of my hearing came. I said goodbye to my new friend and wished him the best. Then I was handcuffed and put i ...

corridors. What happens in the holding cell is you’re mixed in with the people who’ve been in prison awaiting trial for weeks an ...

I was with these people for only a brief window of time, but in that moment I saw the difference between prison and jail. I saw ...

tied back in this ponytail thing that looked really girly. I looked like Maxwell. The guards closed the door behind me, and this ...

and locked eyes with me, and I guess he thought I looked like a kindred soul he could talk to. He came straight at me and starte ...

and huddled into their clearly and unmistakably defined racial groups: a whole bunch of black people in one corner, the colored ...

but I wasn’t them. I couldn’t go over there doing my fake gangster shit and have them discover I was a fraud. No, no, no. That g ...

gangs even more than going to the colored corner as a fake colored person. Because that’s what had happened to me my entire life ...

white and my mother is black and race is a social construct, so...” That wasn’t going to work. Not here. All of this was happeni ...

school cafeteria, only it was the high school cafeteria from hell because if I picked the wrong table I might get beaten or stab ...

money schemes, fraud and racketeering. They’d be useless if anyone came over looking to start trouble; they’d get their asses ki ...

do. If you go up and get sent back down here, your life will never be the same.” Up in the courtroom, I found my lawyer waiting. ...

I’m not fine.” He looked confused. “What?!” I said, “I’m not fine, sir. I’m really suffering.” “Why are you telling me this?” “B ...