Maybe 2 percent or less of the people are here because they’re mean and evil and were just born bad. Most of them just didn’t have a chance from the word go because of the environment they grew up in. All of them have circumstances to make them what they are. We have guys here ministering today that were gang leaders and criminals yesterday. We have guys here that ran gangs who are now talking against the gang and the narcotics and preaching here every day. Perfect examples how some change and some don’t. There’s two sides to the story, but the sad story is, there’s more that stay and come back than lead successful lives when they leave.
After two years here, I began to see how much trouble the prisoners really were in. And then you say, well, maybe we can find a program to help you; you look like you can be helped. We had two young girls just recently, they went to the store for their mother, and a couple of school friends drove by and said, I’ll give you a lift to the store. They jumped in the car. When the police pulled them over, they all got arrested for narcotics. And they can’t get out until Mom’s come and till they’ve paid a bond because they were in the car and narcotics was found, and now their record shows narcotics. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And after you’re in here for a while, things start changing.
We have a musical program for the inmates. We have a guy come in here named Mr. John Wright. He plays classical and jazz piano, and he interested the guys in music, so different people donated pianos and organs for the inmates to play. We have a band come in and play for the programs here. They play jazz and blues and everything else. So it’s real nice. These are the types of programs I’m proud of. We have cultural enrichment programs. These are the types of things we didn’t have in the jail before, and you can imagine the chaos when you don’t have anything to do. Now those guys can say, well, I can go to the library; I can draw awhile, take that tension off. Go play the saxophone, ’cause they used to play it outside; play the piano a little bit.
It’s been a change in the whole jail since the programs. Something to occupy the mind and the body. The prisoners make crafts and paintings. Some of them are so creative they don’t need a teacher; they’re really good. We have a guy so good with charcoal he can draw anybody anytime, anywhere. You think about how much is lost. The talent. We had some singers and piano players in here; man, they was really something. And if people want to donate some books—hardcover, paperback—they can do it.
KALAIS CHIRON HUNT
One Prisoner’s Story
Thirty-six-year-old Kalais Chiron Hunt was in the Cook County Jail for the typical reasons: drugs, crime, and gangs. But, he told me, this will be the last time. “I’m gonna get out of here. I’ll probably have to do some time in a maximum security prison someplace else, but in any event, I’m not gonna be gone for no long time . . . Before, I was a kid . . . You get back on the street, it was like, man, you was in the county jail—did you have a fight? . . . But now I’m in the mindset where I say to myself, I really don’t want and can’t come back to this place . . . I have responsibilities now. Now what I thought was making me a man is making me feel less than a man.”
I’m under the alias Eric Edwards in jail. My real name is Kalais Chiron Hunt. Eric Edwards is the name I gave to the police so I wouldn’t come to jail, but I’m here, so it didn’t do me any good.
I was born and raised in Chicago. My mom, she used to work at a rubber company when I was a kid, probably on the North Side of the city. Like my father, I’m in jail. My father didn’t do anything. He was just like me, a street person. We got on the streets, sold drugs, did things of that nature. My father now is fifty-eight years old. I’m thirty-six.
I’ve been in this jail on several occasions. It’s a mixture of things that gets me back here. First of all, it’s the way I thought. Right now I’m doing something about the way I think, but previously, the things that brought me here was because it was nothing that one person did, or nothing that a million people did, it’s just the way that I thought and the environment that I was brought up in. It’s easier for me to, say, sell drugs than to go and get a job. I make money faster that way. That’s basically why I kept coming back to jail. Using drugs and doing things to get drugs. That’s why I keep coming back over and over, because I didn’t change the way I thought. And sometimes you get officers in the neighborhood that just say, okay, let’s get this guy, let’s stop him, and I wind up here.
Where I’m from, a kid who wanted to study or become a professor would be considered a nerd. The average kid growing up on the West Side or the South Side of Chicago, they tend to look at drug dealers, hustlers, players— so-called players—and pimps in their neighborhood. They don’t look at the schoolteachers, the firemen, the police officers, or the professors. They don’t look at that because they’re not around in the neighborhood. And then when you’re in a setting as far as your home goes, you’ve got just a mother or just a father. You don’t have two parents; you have one parent. Your mother’s at work, so you have to do what you have to do to survive. And nine times out of ten, that means you are either selling drugs or you’re doing something that’s against the law. It ain’t something that you want to do, but if you be around it so much growing up, that’s something that you start to take on. You start to say, okay, well, I think this is the norm. It’s as easy for me to sell drugs as to expect to go to school. It’s as easy for me to sell drugs as it is to expect to play basketball. That’s the pain of it all.
School for me was like shooting dice, smoking weed in the bathroom. That’s what school was like to me; that’s what I went to school to do. I didn’t go to school to sit up in the class. Oh yes, I can read, I can write, and I thought that’s all I need, but when I pass the bathroom, I hear the music; I go in the bathroom. It was like I should go to class, but no, no, I’m gonna go in the bathroom because I know that’s where it’s happening. That’s what school started being like in high school. ’Cause when you’re in grade school, man, it’s like you say, school, man, I wanna go to school, ’cause I like the girl that sits behind me. Or in my case, I was crazy about my teacher. Every word she said I just hung on to it like that. So after eighth grade, you know, you kind of like think that you’re a man then. You don’t want to listen to your mom, and everything you do and everything you see, like I said, is in your neighborhood. That’s when the gangs kick in. That’s when your guys and everybody that you know belong to one certain section or one certain block or neighborhood, and you’ve got another guy he’s belonging to another certain section, a neighborhood. That’s when gangs kick in, and that’s when you’d be like, okay, well, I’m gonna have this gang ’cause this is the most popular gang. Or this is the gang that’s in my neighborhood.
I’ll say 90 percent of the people here are guilty, even if some are just basically a victim of circumstances. You do have people here because they hang with me and they haven’t done anything and they get arrested. Okay, you haven’t done nothing. But 90 percent of the people that’s here, in the Cook County Jail right now, are here for something they’ve done or they have knowledge of. Me personally, I’ve come to grips with what I’ve done. Ninety percent of the people are guilty. They might say they’re not guilty, but they are. They’ve done something. They took some part in the crime they’re being charged with, and that’s the honest to God truth.
To get prisoners out of here or keep them from coming back, the men who are here need more information as far as jobs, and they need to be given basically like what we’re doing now in this program. This is a life-learning deck now. We study. We study this
Mind of Christ
book. What the chaplain has done was implemented the mind of Jesus Christ into our daily activities. We spend I’d say the better part of the day studying this book. It gives us various Bible verses. It gives us how to change our attitudes towards society and most of all towards our self, and gives us the love of God.
Now I’m not saying that this is the only thing that will stop us, but you have to have other avenues for guys like me that don’t have job training and don’t know how to fill out an application coming out of these places or coming out of the penal institutions. Don’t even know how to be a father, let alone be a friend or a brother. We don’t bond with each other. We spend time tearing each other down. We don’t spend any time building each other up. So what we’re doing here is, we’re trying to reconstruct the way we think about society, about ourselves, about our mothers, about our children, about our brother, just anybody walking down the street. You see, in our neighborhoods now, people don’t care about that. I don’t care about someone being a professor if I have a drug problem; I’m gonna rob you. I don’t care about someone being the superintendent of Cook County Jail; if he has something I want, I’m gonna take it. They don’t teach us about humanity out there, about being humble and about being peaceful and responsible and, most importantly, responsive, because every action has a reaction. If you’ve got a bad action, you’re gonna get a bad reaction. And most of the times, that’s what we’re learning out there.
But see right now, what I’m learning here, me personally—I can’t speak for everybody else, I can only speak for me—what I’m learning now is what a man’s supposed to be. Most of us black males growing up in the neighborhood, we don’t have fathers. Our fathers have either ran off or they’re on drugs or they’re here. And now I’m learning how to be responsible, how to cater to females, my mother, my wife, my children, and all this. How to respect another human being for who they are and what they are and what they think, and not allow that to make me feel inferior or superior, just be comfortable with who I am and working towards our goal, which is the path favored by God—to protect and serve my family. That’s what I’m learning.
There’s not one single reason that so many black men end up in prison today. It’s not just the lack of job opportunities, or just their own responsibility, or just the fact that their fathers are not around and there’s a single head of household. It’s a multitude of things. What I’ve learned, it’s not the fact that there’s not enough jobs, because there’s jobs out there. If you look hard enough, you’re gonna find a job, I don’t care if it’s in McDonald’s. But the average guy that’s over twenty-five is not gonna work at McDonald’s. But you could find a job doing something, or you can come up with your own job, as long as it’s legal. So it’s a number of things that causes African-American males to come to jail. It could be stealing food, it could be drug addiction; man, it could be anything. You can’t just pinpoint no one thing, so you have to come up with a scope of things, and a multitude of ideas and remedies to combat that, because if you just focus on the guys that have drug addiction, but what about the guys that don’t have jobs? If you just focus on the guys that don’t have jobs, what about the guys that’s let’s just say just victim of circumstances?
You have to set up programs for people here to have ways in getting jobs and really taking up all the spare time that they have. A lot of times you find that people just don’t have anything to do. And then they wasn’t taught how to be men. We have to start teaching these people how to be men. I mean real men, not a man because of what you’ve got between your legs, and not a man because you’ve got a child. It’s various things that make up a man—responsibility, protection, being a servant just to the family, let alone the community. These are the things that we should look at that would stop most guys from coming to jail. It took me thirty-six years to figure this out. I wish it would have happened when I was nineteen years old, but I guess that’s how I came out.
Basically, all of us come from the same environment, so we know one another from before we got arrested. People know you by your name. Guys in different parts of the jail, H2 or B2 or D2, they know you by your name. It’s not a matter of how you hook up with other gang members after you’re arrested. They’re gonna actually know who you are when you’re walking down the walkway, when you’re coming down the boulevard, when they see you going to church or on the yard. They know who you are. There’s somebody in this place that you know from your neighborhood and then they in turn are going to relay the message that this person is here, this person is there. In jail, the gang members stay in touch with each other through chapel, anything, work, whatever; it makes no difference.
The gangs work the same both inside prison and outside. Let’s take the officers of the jail. In all the divisions you have a superintendent, you have a chief, the captain, the lieutenant, the sarge, and then you have the officers. It works the same way with the gangs. You have a guy that’s the head, then you have the guys that follow, that will do anything and everything that he asked them to do, no question. You can use the gang structure to get anything you want, besides a female. You get whatever you want. That ain’t no problem— cigarettes, grass, food, whatever. It don’t make a difference.
On their first day here, the people who aren’t a member of a gang get treated. “Treated” means get played. How can I explain this? They don’t get nothing. They got to really know somebody to get somewhere. They just get the necessities. They don’t get any cigarettes; they don’t get any of that. And if they did get it, they’d probably get it took from them by somebody who is a member of a gang. It takes you a lot less than a minute to figure out you should belong to a gang in here. As soon as you walk in that door, you say to yourself, I have to get somebody so I can be somebody.
What the gangs organize to do is nothing that’s worth noting. A hypothetical situation is a guy might be in trouble with a guy over here on another deck, and there might not be enough cats on the deck to help him fight this cat. So they’d wait till they get in the yard and they’d say, okay, we’ve got a problem with this guy; what shall we do? Okay, just hold off, we go, we’ll talk about it. If we can’t talk about it, then we fight, and then those guys get involved and everybody gets beat up but the problem gets solved. You send the message out, okay, don’t mess with them, they’re one of my guys. So that’s how they do it. There’s various ways of getting in contact with a guy you want to talk to that’s on another deck.
People can get drugs in here. Of course they can. This is jail. I mean, just ’cause you’re in jail don’t mean that everything is gonna stop. The only thing you can’t do that’s actually normal is drive a car and have sex with a woman. That’s it. The rest of that stuff you can get. It’s here, not for sale on every deck, but in this place. You can get all those things in any penal institution, whether it’s the county jail in the Cook County Department of Corrections or IDOC, Illinois Department of Corrections. It makes no difference. The same things that’s going on on the streets is going on in here—the same power plays, the same deaths. Everything that’s going on out there is going on in here.
There’s not so much physical violence today in here, people getting beat up. In the earlier times, like in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d say there was a lot of violence. It was real easy to get into a fight. But not so much now. Guys tend to talk now ’cause there ain’t nobody too ready to catch cases. Guys don’t want to catch another case by being here. And as far as sexual violence goes, well, you can’t rape the willing. You’ve got guys that come in here that’s perverse like that. As respects somebody that’s willing, somebody that’s unwilling, most guys say, well, I’m gonna go with the willing, and you’ve got guys that would be willing to do stuff like that.
I don’t know what percent of the inmates have sex with other men from here, ’cause that can vary, man. I could be talking to someone and they could have homosexual tendencies and I’ll not even know it. Your sexual preference is something you don’t wear on your forehead, unless you’ve said it out of your mouth. But I know the percent people say is a lie. It’s higher than most people think, probably. It’s pretty high. But it ain’t true that people who wouldn’t sleep with a man out in society will do it here. They do. If you gay in here, you gay in the world. What’s the difference? Out there you can do it and not get caught.
If I’m in a cell with three guys and they’re having sex with each other, I’m not gonna be one of them. And it’s not too likely somebody would try to overpower me. But if they did, it would probably be cases involved, ’cause somebody going to die; somebody going to lose their life. There’s certain things that you just can’t do to a man, and when stuff like that do happen, somebody gonna wind up being hurt, or somebody wind up changing their name from Steve to Shirley or whatever. Either somebody’s gonna lose their life, or somebody’s gonna become a woman real soon. Seriously.