Around fifteen years ago, I received a letter from prisoner named James Draper, who asked to correspond with me. James was incarcerated as a young man, and has now been in prison for around more than forty years.
At first we communicated by letter, then in later years by telephone. I sent him dozens if not hundreds of books, and appealed to friends on social media to purchase books on his wish list for him. From being a high-school graduate who was barely able to read, James became a dedicated student of philosophy and science. Most of his days were and are spent reading in his cell and educating other prisoners. He attempted (unsuccessfully because of lack of support from the prison authorities) to establish a humanist group, for which Daniel Dennett wrote a letter of support (Dan also sent him autographed copies of his own books). His intellectual trajectory and passion for learning has been nothing short of remarkable.
James wrote the essay below around ten years ago. It is a frank account of his life, the events that led to his incarceration, and his hopes for the future.
If all goes well, James will be released on parole in about a month. I have enormous respect and admiration for this man, and I want to help him start life on the outside with a minimum of hardship. So I am raising funds to help ease his transition from prison to life outside. If after reading this you feel moved to contribute to this gofundme campaign, you can do so here. Every dollar makes a difference.
*****
My Life So Far
James Draper
The time was the 1960s. The apartment where I lived was in South Los Angeles. It was a brown, one-bedroom apartment located between Florence Avenue and Central Avenue, adjacent to the old Goodyear plant. The building was a wooden structure that was made to look like it was made from brick. I would estimate that it was built during the 1930s or 1940s. There were four of us living there. My sister Vicky and me shared the only bedroom, while my mother and father shared the living room. The rats and roaches occupied the rest of the apartment.
When I was about six years old, I saw a man who was murdered at the gas station next door. People started gathering around, looking at the sanguinously horrifying scene. The murdered man had deep puncture wounds all over his body. An ambulance came and one of the men tried to resuscitate the murder victim, but then looked at the driver and shook his head. I couldn’t exactly interpret the gesture, but I remember my mother saying remorsefully, “He’s dead.” I paused for a moment, trying to process what had just happened, and asked my mother, “Did the man go to Heaven or to Hell?” Being the religious woman that she was, she simply told me, as you would a child, “I don’t know.” Later on in life, I asked my mother if my older brother from another mother had gone to Heaven or to Hell. Because she knew how violent he was, she told me that he went to hell. Now that I am an adult, I realize that whether a person is thought to go to Heaven or to Hell depends on states of subjectivity. If you like a person, they go to heaven. If you do not care for them, they go to hell. If you don’t know the person, then it can go either way. So much for religious belief.
About six year later, when I was twelve, my friend and I stole a gun. I will call my childhood friend “Mike.” Well, the person we stole the gun from got wind of the theft, and she told the sheriff that Mike and I stole the gun. We had given the gun to a Mexican immigrant, who lived right under us, who was addicted to heroin (I’ll call him “Miguel”). Miguel took the gun from us to keep us from hurting ourselves. When the deputy asked us where the gun was we told him. But then he arrested Miguel. Miguel got out on bail, and was supposed to testify against Mike and me, but before we could go to trial Miguel turned up dead from a drug overdose. He didn’t kill himself. Mike’s mother and stepfather and their associates killed Miguel. My mother and I watched this happen from our apartment window.
Miguel was supposed to take the rap for us because he was grown and we were children. That was the law of the streets. So Mike’s people wrestled Miguel to the floor and gave him an overdose while Mike’s mother stood as a lookout. I remember my mother holding her hand over my mouth while we watched in stealth. I remember her whispering “Oh God!” to herself, as tears rolled down her cheeks.
To the best of my knowledge, my mother and me were the only people in my family who knew what happened to Miguel. The safe way is to keep the police out of the business if you want to live long.
Late at night, when my mother and father were asleep, I used to crawl out of the back window, and jump onto the roof of the gas station next door. Then I would walk two thirds of the way, and crawl the remaining one third of the way to the end of the garage. From there, I would look down onto the street and watch the prostitutes turn tricks and the dope fiends shoot up drugs. As a child, I had a sense that what these people were doing was wrong. However, I didn’t know how seriously dangerous their activities were. I didn’t know about STDs and drug overdoses, not to mention the effects that these unhealthy habits could have in the long run.
There were good times as well. When my sister got her own pad and moved out of the apartment, I finally had a room to myself. It felt great. My sister remained my best friend until she died. I enjoyed spending time with my father, until I got bored. My father was an industrious man. His trade was plumbing. He taught me his trade, and it’s almost second nature to me. Sometimes, my father took me on hunting trips. We would get out of bed at about four o’clock in the morning and travel 350 or 400 miles north of Los Angeles into the rural areas to hunt for small game such as jackrabbits and quail. My father taught me about dangers on these expeditions. He taught me to avoid walking too close to the bush, because rattlesnakes could be basking in the morning sun there, or hibernating in nearby holes or caves, and he taught me about poison oak and ivy. I can’t recall lot of what he taught me anymore, but because it was second nature, I believe that I could recall it if circumstances demanded. I can’t say that I’m an outdoor, wilderness survivor sort of person, but I know that I will survive, because my will to survive is greater than my will not to.
I remember one occasion when my father shot a jackrabbit and skinned it. My sister Vicky was with us, and she started crying about the rabbit, and wouldn’t eat any when we cooked it. I often think about that incident and the psychology behind my sister’s reaction. She wouldn’t eat the rabbit that my father killed, but she wouldn’t hesitate to eat a steak or a chicken. But somebody had to kill the cow or chicken. Dead is dead. What real difference does it make? My sister wasn’t thinking things through.
In the street, as a child, I had become acclimatized to urban life. I realized that I had become part of the collective, part of a subculture of the greater collective, and I wanted to learn what my peers—i.e. the pimps, prostitutes, and cutthroats—were doing in the street life. Although I had two good working-class parents, and I could see that they worked extremely hard, I could also see that the gangsters and drug dealers lived like kings compared to them. But in the end, both my working-class parents and the gangsters, pimps, and hustlers remained trapped in the inner city, where poverty was the order of the day.
As a child, my parents tried to instill in me what they thought were good, Christian values. But I noticed that the people who went to church were really no better than the people who played the street. I asked myself, “Who is right and who is wrong?” I came to the conclusion that there is no right and wrong, there is only functional and dysfunctional.
I remember learning that the preacher’s son was having an illicit sexual relationship with another man’s wife. The news spread through the whole church, and the congregation had a meeting after Sunday school where the preacher made his son expose his wrongdoing. My father laughed, but I don’t think he would have found it funny if he had known that the preacher’s son had set his sights on my mother. I guess that sometimes what you don’t know won’t hurt you.
The preacher’s son would often whip children in the church. One night after church he whipped me. Later, I took my knife out and slashed his new white-wall tires. I was always the sort of person who wanted to get even when people wronged me.
When I turned twelve, I didn’t have to go to church anymore. My attitude, for lack of a better expression, was “Damn! Thank God for that!” I was now able to explore street life more freely. As a young child, the people that I looked up to most were members of the Black Panther Communist Party. As far as I know, the BPCP never lost a battle to the police. The Black Panthers were the resistance to all that was and still is wrong with this damned system. And when I learned that the Panthers were not a racist Black Nationalist group, I explored their ideology more fully.
As I grew into a young man, I viewed the world pessimistically. School offered nothing to me. From elementary school to high school, the educational system seemed hopeless. I was barely able to read, and was functionally illiterate. This intellectual stagnation followed me all the way to the pen. If fact, I did not get a real understanding of how things actually were until I reached the pen with a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
How did I end up in prison? This is the most painful part of my life. I wish that it would magically go away and never come back, so that I would not have to talk about it.
One day, a little over thirty years ago, I had a dream of becoming a wealthy drug dealer. To pursue this dream, I had to start from the bottom and work my way up, so I left my mother and father’s home to sell prescription drugs. There was a place about a quarter of a mile from my parents’ home called “Tin Pan Alley.” It was a spot where all the drug dealers, pips, broken-down prostitutes, and every sort of cutthroat that climbed out from under a rock, did their business. It was lumpenproletariateville.
The morning that I went to Tin Pan Alley to sell drugs drastically changed my life forever. I met two dope fiends who were hurting for a fix. I sold them the drugs, but they tried to cheat me out of my money, and when I called them to accountability over what they had tried to do they tried to set me up and rob me. But I knew what they were going to try and do, so I picked up a metal table leg and commenced to beat their asses.
Later that same day, one of those two guys and his girlfriend drove by my parents’ home. That angered me, because it violated the street code that says that when you have a problem with a person you leave their family out of it. Their coming to my parents’ home made me see red. All that I could think about was harm coming to my mother and father. I panicked. I retrieved my rifle from my truck, squared off, and fired. I intended to hit the guy, but I missed and shot his girlfriend instead. This was around 1981, and I’ve been sitting in the prison system ever since. I don’t claim that it was an act of self-defense. I took (and take) full responsibility for my actions, and over the years have become remorseful.
I’ve changed while in prison, but not in the way that the system conventionally calls “change.” In reality, the bureaucrats who run the system aren’t interested in real, constructive change. And if they realize that you are really trying to change, the guards will try to prevent that change, because if all prisoners corrected their lives then the guards would be out of a job.
When I came to prison, I could barely read and write. I was functionally illiterate. But I was fascinated by books, and wondered what they meant. So I tried to read them, but I couldn’t understand what I was reading. But I just kept at it, and eventually they started to make sense. And when I learned what these authors were trying to convey, their ideas started to change my way of thinking. I became more curious about thinking. Reading books on philosophy, I pondered questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” That’s a good question to think about! In my view, if there was nothing existing, than this would mean that non-existence exists. The deeper question to ask is whether non-existence exists only as an idea, or if it’s part of the material world. We can’t experience non-existence by means of our sense organs, so it isn’t an aspect of matter, and must be an idea.
The more I read about philosophy and the various philosophers, the more conscious I became of humanity. Gradually, I wanted to be identified as an intellectual (for lack of a better expression). I just wanted to know things. And I came to understand that in order to think better we need to be creative with our imagination.
Who is to say that people should think only a certain way? As Bob Avakian, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, once wrote: “Who said that the order of things is, actually, the order of things?” In other words, we should question authority. Is this not what Stanley Milgram addressed in his classic experiment on obedience to authority? Had Milgram thought as the majority does, he would not have discovered why people are obedient to oppressive authority. Another example is Albert Einstein. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is not as difficult to understand as some of us may think. It is more accurate to say that it is strange than to say that it is difficult.
My point in saying all of this is to explain that the more I read, the more creative I became in my imagination. I no longer saw myself as a rowdy gang member. I saw myself as a scholar. And from the moment that I transformed my thinking in this way, my new character changed my behavior. I am James and I want more than anything to be a scholar. Studying has become a way of life for me.
I’m not concerned with degrees. I simply want to know. I look for guidance from people who are accomplished scholars. Although I do not have much knowledge, I want to advocate for science and philosophy. I like to think of myself as a little person walking among intellectual giants. I still struggle to learn, and consider myself a life-long student.
I hope to get out of prison some day and help Inner City youths see that there are alternatives to gangs, drugs, teen-age pregnancy and prison life. As for me, the ship has sailed. But maybe I can get out of here and help someone else towards a better life, because the prison-industrial complex is just another way to belittle African Americans.
One of my hopes and aspirations is to travel to Europe, especially to England, Ireland, and Germany, to meet new people and pay my respects to Karl Marx and Charles Darwin. And I would like to meet David Livingstone Smith, who has corresponded with me for years, as well as John Perry, Richard Dawkins, Paul Kjellberg, and other people who have been inspirational in my life. I would like to visit the CERN in Switzerland, and also visit a few sites in Canada and Africa. I want to visit science fairs, and to travel to Israel and Palestine. I want to eat things that I have never eaten before, like lobster and deer.
But most of all, I just want to get out of prison. I do not want to die in this place.
That's one powerful piece of writing!