The ConTextos Authors Circle was developed in collaboration with young people at-risk of, victims of, or perpetrators of violence in El Salvador. In 2017 this innovative program expanded into Chicago to create tangible, high quality opportunities that nourish the minds,,expand the voices and share the personal truths of individuals who have long been underserved and underestimated. Through the process of drafting, revising and publishing memoirs, participants develop self-reflection, critical thinking, camaraderie and positive selfprojection to author new life narratives. Since January 2017 ConTextos has partnered with Cook County Sheriff's Office to implement Authors Circle in Cook County Department of Corrections as part of a vision for reform that recognizes the value of mental health, rehabilitation and reflection. These powerful memoirs complicate the narratives of violence and peace building, and help author a hopeful future for human beings behind walls, their families and our collective communities. While each author’s text is solely the work of the Author, the image used to create this book’s illustrations have been sourced by various print publications. Authors curate these images and then, using only their hands, manipulate the images through tearing, folding, layering and careful positioning. By applying these collage techniques, Authors transform their written memoirs into illustrated books. This project is being supported, in whole or in part, by federal award number ALN 21.027 awarded to Cook County by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
No Path to Redemption Samuel Salas
I was sitting on the floor of my cell inside Menard Correctional Center way in the southernmost reaches of the great state of Illinois, dripping sweat in the middle of a heatwave & mired in legal research material, when it dawned on me that the law had branded me an irredeemable monster at just 16 years of age to be kept locked away in the interest of public safety forever more. At the same time, somewhere in our nation’s capital, the highest Court in the land was set to move through the great lumbering motions of a major shift in its holdings on the sentencing of juvenile criminal defendants just like myself.
Sitting in my little makeshift workstation, stacks of case reports & my own sweat sodden handwritten notes all about me & weighted down against the blowing of my little 8” plug- in electric fan, which had to stay on because it was providing my only reprieve from the wilting press of the day's heat… I couldn't know that though. So I did despair to be so decried by society's chosen voice, & in the depths of my misery I composed a very detailed letter to my good friend, Zoe Mendelson.
I wrote to her in a fever of anguish, tears sometimes falling to stain the pages, telling of how the different legal statutes converged to send this very clear message, "You are unsalvageable," that I'd heard & taken to heart…because, why shouldn't I have? After all, we're taught to believe in democracy & the sovereignty of the people's will, & these laws, passed by the people's duly elected public representatives, were an expression of that will. So, it was right. Right? Am I a monster, Zoe?
Mail moved excruciatingly slow then, & if I'm being perfectly honest, I didn't expect a response…or, if I did, I didn't expect it to change anything for me. I mean, what could she have possibly said? I just couldn't hold onto the burden of this terrible revelation alone, so I wrote, but countless nights spent waiting in vain anticipation for mail call only to have the officer walk on by without so much as a glance in my direction had taught me it was better to put it out of your
mind. Don't even look or get up when u hear those keys jingling & announcing his passage, just keep doing you & if it comes to you it comes to you. So in a way, sending that letter off felt a lot like what I imagine casting a message in a bottle out to sea must feel to the hopelessly stranded: Desperate & futile, but at least it's something.
Much like the marooned might forget that bottled message of hope as their days slipped back into the monotony of the doldrums, so did I forget my letter & my life became an exercise in futility slowly yet inexorably grinding my spirit into dust. I'd spend hours & hours every day descending into the labyrinthine twists of the law involved in my case searching for some magic legal loophole or undetected error that might bring me out of this waking nightmare until my eyes were full of grit from focusing on the small print used in those case report & I was too weary to continue. Then I'd drop off to sleep, only to wake up the next day to do it all over again… I was, Sisyphus, pushing my own personal boulder up the proverbial hill, & it was breaking me apart inside.
It's not easy to admit to myself, let alone someone else, even now, with the moment past & better days ahead, but the truth is that at this time in my life I was losing hope. Indeed, I was losing my very will to live. In retrospect, I can see what it was doing to me, constantly, sometimes even subconsciously, questioning if perhaps the People were right about me. I may even see its fallacy, with the benefit of hindsight, but while I was in the thick of it… It was like I was trying to find my way through the dark, the type of darkness that eats illumination, & my only source of light was gradually guttering out on me.
Such was my perspective, the lens through which I saw all things, that my gallery officer stopped at my cell months later with Zoe's response letter in hand.
It was a single page, covered front & back in some very emphatic script. I must paraphrase, because the language she actually used was a bit coarse…my favorite line was, "You're a f'ing lion!"
It read something like this: "Sam, I've had the privilege of getting to know you these past few years & you are absolutely NOT a monster. You're just someone who's made a mistake. Albeit, a very terrible mistake, still only a single act & you are not this one thing. You are a good man. If the law says different, then the law is broken & don't you DARE let yourself believe otherwise!"
Her words were a jarring force shoving a fracture I wasn't even aware of back into place, so that, with time, it might heal properly. To those of you reading on, this all probably sounds awfully sad, &, perhaps, it is. For me though, it's a fond memory of a time when a dear friend saved me from the abyss, & it marks a new beginning as well. The beginning stages of my undoing this calcified knot of hard emotions & negative narratives about myself that I had secretly always carried around inside. I emerged from that dark night into the light of the morning sun feeling renewed & like I'd found something to believe in again.
Shortly thereafter, the United States Supreme Court, would announce its, now infamous, decision in the case, Miller v. Alabama, creating a separate category for juvenile criminal defendants that recognized us as less blameworthy & possessed of a higher potential for rehabilitation than our adult counterparts, & launched a cascade of jurisprudential developments in my home state's appellate courts as they began exploring its implications.
For me, it meant I was suddenly no longer a monster. I was just a dumb kid who made an egregious choice because I didn't have the full complement of cognitive tools to choose better. It was a victory. It was public validation from on high of everything Zoe had only just convinced me of, & it did feel good… Yet, even as I leveraged their authority to draft my own pro se petition, something kept this watershed moment in my life from being as full as it ought to have been.
Trying to reconcile this victory with the image of triumph that I'd conjured to keep myself going over the years, I became a ship unmoored & adrift… or perhaps more accurately a warrior yet clinging to the sword after all his fighting had ended.
It seemed the single most defining purpose of my days, the fight of my life as I knew it, had become irrelevant & I didn't even know what I'd won. It seemed like just an offer to do more time, without even knowing how much more time & that unknown was terrifying to me. However, I would soon discover something I'd secretly always desired inside myself within this uncertain leap, something more than mercy, more even than my own freedom: redemption through true accountability. The journey to that realization wasn't at all a straight path, but once Pandora's box has been opened there's no closing it.
From the very 1st court date, just a few weeks after my 16th birthday, my attorney, the only person in the room who knew the law & was formally on my side, instructed me to say the words, "Not guilty," because if I didn't they couldn't help me & the best I could hope for was the mandatory minimum sentence of 45 years. Then I was convicted & went to prison where my options became acceptance of the 50 year prison term they'd sentenced me to, which I firmly believed meant I'd die behind bars, or else to remain in denial where those "magic legal loopholes" might just save me.
Until Zoe, no one had talked to me about my crime or its impact on the lives it touched– not the corrections staff, not the other incarcerated people, or even my family on the phone or during visits. So I built a wall between me & what happened that fateful day in my mind so that I could focus on teaching myself the law & seeking my salvation within the turn of a technicality, because that is what I had been conditioned to believe was my only hope.
What I discovered when the law changed to offer me an alternative was that I'd also walled off a vital portion of my own humanity; the part that makes it possible for us to use our empathy to try to understand, &, to the extent possible, work to repair the harm we do to our fellow human beings.
I was determined to abandon the relative certainty of denial because I also discovered I wished deeply to recover that part of myself & become whole. Only, I had nothing from which to draw the comparison from my lived experience to that of those I'd wronged. I knew they must hurt, but I had lived a life where the violence done to me either didn't happen or didn't matter.
It was my mother having me wear clothes as a small child to conceal bruises from DCFS investigators, & telling me to lie or they'll take me away; &, it was also CPD detectives pushing my fragile teen form aside, (with 13 staples in the back of my head & fresh scrapes & bruises all over my body, from having just been beaten in the street) to perform an illegal search of my home simply because they smelled the weed when they were supposed to be there investigating what happened to ME so that they might bring my attackers to justice.
I badly wanted to embrace this chance to make it right, but I just didn't have anything to put what was required of me into perspective.
Fortunately, Zoe wasn't done doing it for me. I needed insights I didn't have, &, while I was searching myself in vain, she was out behind the scenes searching for legal representation in my case. She went to a few different places but wouldn't meet success until she brought my case to the Bluhm Legal Clinic, where she would find an old acquaintance in the incomparable, Shobha L. Mahadev, attorney at law.
Shobha’s daughter had once lived in the same building as Zoe's mother & Zoe would babysit for her in times of need. So when Zoe had come to request her clinic take my case pro bono it was as though the universe had aligned. My case was already among several under consideration to be offered free representation, so this personal connection allowed Zoe the chance to impress upon Shobha my more redeeming qualities & why my case should be chosen.
Meeting Shobha myself was not what I'd expected it to be. She came to visit me while I was in Stateville, her, Scott Mane & 3 student attorneys from NW University interning with their clinic, & was just so purely good & clearly there to help. They all were, & when I sat with them I realized I could have told them any story I wanted & they would have taken it into the courtroom to fight tooth & nail… but when I saw how sincere these people were about helping me, something else shifted in me & I chose truth.
In return, they listened patiently as I dismantled the mental wall I'd erected to protect myself & unpacked what was there as best I could, then offered me insights from their perspective of having worked with victims of crime & other defendants like me over the course of their careers. It was revelatory for me, & I often left these visits doing my best to hide my puffy red eyes, feeling emotionally drained after allowing myself to feel what I'd done & cry tears of remorse & compassion as I unburdened myself.
Toward the end of this process, as my role became more & more passive, I became frustrated. Shobha & company had everything so well in hand there just wasn't much of anything for me to do. So I decided to focus on the one chance I'd get to address the court in my own words with my own voice, & began drafting my allocation statement.
I remember trying to distill the purity of what I was feeling inside & failing to quite capture its depth or what it meant to me. Here I was completely changed by the rediscovery of my own humanity & so eager to show the world, but I just couldn't find the words & it was robbing me of my inner peace. I was so worried that I'd get there, to my 1st opportunity to be publicly heard since I was that scared broken little 16 year old boy all those years ago & I'd blow it.
I obsessed over every word, spoke to everyone in my life & even asked my lawyers to pull examples from other cases for me. The advice I received was great, but not very instructive, (more or less, speak from the heart), and what little my lawyers could find lacked the sort of meaningful articulation I felt compelled to include in my own statement. So it was, rightfully so, all on me.
I would look back at the 1st sentencing hearing, & think of how I was so deeply hurt I couldn't see that I had the power to extend some semblance of solace to my victim's family with a word from my mouth. Then I'd pick up a pen & start trying to write something that I felt might be that for these people I owed such a deep debt…and end up sitting there paralyzed.
It got to be a real problem for me, because everything I wrote seemed like a pale offering in the face of what I was owed.
In my mind, I saw this blast radius of lives touched & forever changed with me at the center of it. I was the bomb that changed everything, that they didn't cause, didn't choose, that wasn't even meant for them. I saw that they must have been angry with me for bringing that evil into their lives, & that they must be tired of having to wake up every day angry at me for all these years.
Then inevitably, I'd see their pain beneath that anger, & just know there was a deeper sadness that lived in them not knowing if these feelings would ever go away. It was too big for me, so I gave it up to God one day. I prayed about it, asking for divine guidance & inspiration. If you know me, you know I wasn't much for praying in those days. I believed in God, just not that he cared what I had to say after what I did. So much had happened to me in my life that seemed to make that very clear, but I couldn't fail & didn't know what else to do.
I'm not sure how to measure such things, but it would seem that He had heard me because that same week a dream would come to me. The dream was ethereal, with a sort of fog all about fuzzing the details, & had me sitting across a table from an indistinct man who I knew I'd taken something irreplaceable from… & just destroyed it. I want to make it right, but I don't know how. So I ask the man, "What is it that I can do…" He sits with the question for a time, then finally speaks, "I don't know that there is anything you can do, but make an offering …then make another & another, maybe somewhere along the way we can come to a place where we can be OK, if not even." Then I agree, & we go to shake on it…& that's when I wake up into the dead quiet night still reaching out for his hand. I sat like that for a while inside the twilight silence that finds a cell house full of tortured souls at a certain point every night, just contemplating what it could mean.
The dream was so real, & it was still so clear to me. Usually, my dreams would fade as soon as I woke up. This time I'd still be sitting at that table trying to think of what I had to offer weeks afterward. Some might say my dream was just the product of an overstressed & sleep deprived mind feeding itself the answers it craved. Others might say dreams in general are just made up nonsense, but I choose to take it as a sign of hope that I am not as powerless as I once believed to repair the situation. I do not have power over life & death to completely undo my horrible mistake, but that does not mean there's nothing I can do.
I can choose to face what happened within myself, acknowledge its wrongness to those wronged & then resolve to never allow myself to commit similar harm again. Does this seem like just plain common sense? Well, for me, it wasn't. It was something I had to reach past a chilling fear of the unforeseeable legal consequences that surrendering the lie would expose me to & a lifetime of personal life experiences that suggested nothing from me could matter or make it better, to discover. I began this story, & my journey, believing no path to redemption existed for me, except through secrecy & deception along a path of shadows.
In conclusion, the law seemed to reinforce where it only provided a life spent in hopeless captivity as a remedy. Today, I stand firm in my faith that, if I choose truth, seek healing & place the purity of the process above what I may hope to receive out of my resentencing, people will see that & respond in kind with their better angels in toe…but of equal importance, I will find my own peace at long last. My name is Samuel Salas, & I am not a monster beyond all hope of saving, to be caged or killed. I am fully human, capable of change & possessed of the power of choice. I choose to use that power to make the rest of my life an offering at God's table. For Mr. Ojeda & his family, for the public good & humanity at large…but, most of all, for myself, because, while I am yet afraid of my uncertain future with the judge in court, the judge presiding over my heart will accept nothing less. Thank you for listening to my story, &, please, accept it as my 1st offering, along with the knowledge that there are many more to come.
I Am From
Samuel Salas
I am from, “Sweet Home Chicago” That beautiful yet treacherous archipelago Tribal landlocked islands of culture divided by thin red lines I am from we all played together when I was a kid Grandma’s porches, Burroughs Elementary, Kelly High To my childhood must die so that I can live I am from Mike and Jane From lots of love covering spikes of pain And divorce leaving things never just the same I am from “You’re such a bright boy!” And from “You’re going to end up dead or in jail.” I’m from cross yourself within sight of the church Insurance against our everlasting collective curse I am from Brighton Park and its enduring uncaring streets From Donalds on 36th and Cal, hot dogs and Italian beefs From my sister Sweetpea watching over me And Rhino “G”, may he rest in peace I am from, yeah, we out here killing, but we’re also dying From overflowing love having me inside forever crying
Until the lion learns to write their own story, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter - African Proverb Copyright
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