#SafetyIs Adequate Warning

This year for Night Out for Safety and Liberation, we asked people who are currently incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in California to share their thoughts about what safety means. Read the below post by James R. Metters Jr.:

Right before a storm, we often see flashes of lightening and hear the rambunctious roar of thunder echo through the skies. This is nature’s way of warning creation that the weather is about to change. The hiss and rattle and the tail end of a rattlesnake is a warning that the snake is about to strike.

Almost everything from domestic products, medicine, and industrial related materials require safety information. On the label of cigarettes, it is required by law that tobacco companies inform smokers that smoking tobacco (and secondhand smoke) may cause cancer. When traveling to certain countries, travel agencies give notice of caution concerning kidnappers and no-hostage policies. We have alert systems that pop-up across electronic billboards and cell phones when a child is missing; and rightfully so, human life is priceless, and should be protected, at all costs. It is because of these different warning signs and systems that the potential for danger and death can be avoided.

What I find interesting though, is this: in the United States, in urban communities, many productive citizens are victimized. Thousands of minorities are being murdered in the streets by one another. Others are being sent to prison to serve extremely long prison sentences, and yet - there is no adequate warning, no strong subliminal, mind-changing, thought-altering suggestions to convince the youth and others, otherwise.

There are no signs posted where they need to be. There are no sessions taught in the public school system concerning the influence of gangs, the reality of the prison industry, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the lobby for laws written to incarcerate those who are bound by poverty and ill fortune.

Many urban youth are born into societies geared to watch them fail rather than make sure they succeed. There has been no yellow light designed to slow us down and help us avoid social collisions. No “shaking of the rattle” that mass-incarceration is about to strike. And no admonition that toxic levels of street life destroy one from the inside out.

Today, many youth and young adults are ignorantly leading themselves like sheep to the slaughter. They grow from little boys and girls only to become dope dealers, drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, and hard core criminals. We die in the streets like mobsters in a mafia movie or like Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown. Simply put, in urban communities there is no adequate warning.

Safety is looking into my life and many of the lives that surrounded me. In doing so, I believe there are four problems that allow youth and young adults to become indoctrinated in a reckless lifestyle.

First, the primary social institution; the home, fails. Single parenting, having a mother who is an addict, a father in jail, or no father at all, being raised by grandparents, along with being surrounded by a negative environment is an incentive that pushes kids and people to the streets. Broken homes in America are widespread and there is not much anyone can do about it; it is what it is.

Second, secondary school institutions, group homes, the church, and schools are also failing. They are not effective in helping the youth understand they have purpose, nor do they expose the truth concerning the reality of what encompasses delinquent and criminal behavior. Young people need to be taught: money isn't everything, the streets will destroy them, and the state will lock them up!

The third problem is that many urban and other productive citizens have lost personal concern for what happens to America’s youth. Government officials, lawmakers, middle and upper class citizens are not directly affected by the delinquent and criminal conduct, so the issues with anti-social kids and people is of no real concern to them. I understand that. But inner-city citizens cannot afford to mimic that attitude.

Bad kids and frustrated adults equals crime, victims, loss of resources, and waste of time. Moreover, lack of empathy on all fronts encourages youth and others to seek refuge and sympathy in the streets. In the streets they are welcomed. This is where the homies show them love; the wrong kind of love, but still, it is love.

Last but not least, the fourth problem is that urban citizens have relied on the government for too long, to curb the violence which plagues inner city neighborhoods. It is time for urban citizens and other concerned citizens to come together and devise viable alternatives to the problems the nation is experiencing with troubled youth and young adults. It is true, hurt people, hurt people; likewise, fixed people have got to start fixing people. #SafetyIs adequate warning!