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Angels with Dirty Faces
Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption
By Walidah Imarisha
Praise for Angels with Dirty Faces
“Walidah Imarisha has written a brave book. It demonstrates both the universality and distinctiveness of three lives enmeshed through the US prison system. Imarisha pushes us to give up easy distinctions between innocence and guilt, good and evil, and to experience punishment and imprisonment as the messy, complex systems they are. And she reminds us that, while there are no winners in this game, it is one replete with compassion, care, and resistance enough to permeate walls and cages.”
—Rachel Herzing
“Some authors approach the subject of incarceration from a great distance, but with Angels with Dirty Faces, author/activist Walidah Imarisha goes as deep as any writer can without actually serving time. The result is a highly personalized and intimate portrait by a courageous writer who goes beyond clichés and platitudes. This book is a bracing, clear-eyed exploration of one of the most important issues of our time: the growing incarceration rate in the U.S., and the consequences of this for citizens both inside and outside prison walls.”
—T.J. English, New York Times best-selling author of Where the Bodies Were Buried and The Westies
“Angels with Dirty Faces is a powerful exploration of America’s prison nation. Using three disparate yet interconnected stories, including her own, Walidah Imarisha gives us an unvarnished take on prison abolition. Beyond slogans or strategy, we are left with people, in all our imperfections and possibilities. This is a bold, beautiful, and absolutely necessary book, told with urgency and passion.”
—Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era
“We live in a violent state, run by a violent economic trap, that a violent prison system perpetuates and hides. The reality of violence in the US is so pervasive that the state has all the mirrors in the house covered up. Angels with Dirty Faces is a memoir of a reality so crucial and transformative that the state is desperate to keep it locked out of our collective consciousness. And yet we live it.
Here, Imarisha is doing the work that we all must do if we are going to have the world we deserve. She is looking deeply at the violence of prisons and the lives and impact of people who have engaged in violent acts with a love that never stops believing that we are more than the violence that structures our days. There is hope, love, and honesty here. And a model for the conversations we need to have right now, right here in hell.”
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“Walidah Imarisha relates the experiences of crime, punishment, and victimization, not as abstractions, but as lived human tragedies. She shows us how they diminish and distort—but never define—the lives of those who suffer them. Writing with sorrow, and anger, and courageous hope, she forces us to reconsider what we mean by ‘justice,’ and by what endeavors its cause might be advanced, if never finally achieved.”
—Kristian Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
“A brave, honest search for answers regarding incarceration.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Angels with Dirty Faces is actually three biographies in one, a ‘triography’ so to speak, of the lives of Mac, Kakamia, and Walidah converging at a California prison. In the beginning they all thought they would just be telling a story... until they made the decision to tell the truth.
Angels with Dirty Faces is a superbly written, shocking, sensuous, sometimes sadistic and even scandalous binding of biographies struggling with the question: What does redemption actually mean? It is impossible for one to engage this work and not emerge on the other side profoundly affected.”
—Sundiata Acoli
“I read Angels With Dirty Faces in one sitting, mesmerized by what Walidah Imarisha has accomplished: a daring dive into the real deal about why prisons don’t work, filled with love for hustlers, rebels. and the criminalized, imperfect survivors that the prison-industrial complex locks up. Written in such lyrical, fierce poetry it takes your breath away.”
—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home
Dedicated to Hasan Shakur
and James McElroy
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my mother and my family, Kakamia, Mac, Mumia, Haramia, Hasan (Rest in Power), and to everyone else who let me borrow their stories and lives for this book.
Thanks to Bayla, Turiya, Elijah, EKela, Pete, Nadia, John J., Kodey, Alexis, Leah Lakshmi, adrienne and the Brood, Hasan Salaam, Ian, Seth, Aishah, Sham, Leah Yacoub Halperin, Khalil, Jasmin, David W., Amelia, Gabriel, Eliana, Jordan, fayemi, Joy, The TARDIS Collective, and every friend/heart family who listened to me about this project, gave feedback, or just hugged me after a hard day of writing.
Thanks to Sundiata Acoli, David Gilbert, all political prisoners, all prison organizers in and outside of the walls, and especially thanks to the Human Rights Coalition.
Thanks to the Institute for Anarchist Studies, to Lara for being such a thoughtful and supportive editor. Thanks to Nick for copy-editing. So much thanks to Charles, Zach, Suzanne, and everyone at AK Press.
Thanks to Critical Resistance, Ari, Molly P., Molly and Chela, Chris F., Claude Marks and the Freedom Archives, INCITE, Scott Handleman, Juanita, Gaby, and Graciela. Thanks to Kristian, Dan, and Max for reading and helping to keep me honest, while telling me the project was worth finishing. Thanks to Matthew Shenoda for his mentorship when this book was a thesis. Thanks to Aimee Liu, Michael Klein, Jennifer, and Patricia. Thanks to the Blue Mountain Center, to Ben, Alice, Nica, and Jamie. Thanks to Cloee, Center for New Community, Favianna, Culture Strike, Jason, Oriana, Lisa, Sophia, Eduardo, Sesshu, Gan, Andrew, Jesus, Azul, Cesar, Siddhartha, Naeem, Julio, Imin, and Manisha. Thanks to Fred Bryant (Rest in Power), Alyssa, JoAnn, and the Justice for Keaton Otis Coalition. Thanks to Kent Ford and Dr. Haynes. Thanks to TJ English for his amazing scholarship and writing. Thanks to Stefan and Marion and the Mayfair Retreat Center.
Through the Gates
“Ma’am, you’re going to have to check the underwire from your bra, or I’m not letting you in.”
She was a squat woman, bleached blonde wisps leaking out from her California Department of Corrections baseball hat. The mud brown uniform drew color from her face. In the unforgiving fluorescent lighting of the prison processing center, her features bled away, leaving only razor-edged eyes that bored into me, a mouth twisted with impatience.
The people waiting behind me in line, shoes and belts in hand, shifted irritably. I understood. We had all been on our feet for an hour and a half, up early enough to see the sun crack dawn over the lonely highway that, for us, dead-ended at a wall wrapped in concertina wire.
In the bathroom ten minutes earlier as I hurried into a stall, I passed two women who had the movements of birds, faces heavy with makeup too hastily applied. Using the box cutter with the chipped orange handle given to me by the dour-faced guard,
