Being a 140-pound 19 year old, who had not yet had to shave is a daunting time to enter an American prison with a life sentence, especially when the system has no interest in rehabilitating you or helping you reintegrate into society. The greed of the prison industrial complex squeezing slave profits out of imprisoned people through the exploitation of the 13th amendment and the brutal system set up to limit opportunity usually leaves most who walk through the gates hopeless and abandoned.
Dorsey Nunn, a formerly incarcerated individual, co-director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC) and co-founder of All of Us or None (AOUON), a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people working to secure their civil and human rights, explains to host Robert Scheer how his prison experience is rare but demonstrates that it is possible to make it out of San Quentin’s cells a changed person, with the hope of helping others.
Nunn’s book, “What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection,” co-written with former Los Angeles Times reporter Lee Romney, paints the picture of Nunn’s life. Specifically, it points to how the lived experience and wisdom of his fellow prisoners, some who were veterans of the Black Panthers, such as Geronimo Pratt, and the education he received from reading books by Angela Davis and George Jackson, were fundamental to his story of resilience and resurrection.
Nunn’s story is an indictment not only of what goes on inside prison but what happens afterward in explaining “the box.” That refers to the empty square on a form to be checked on employment, healthcare and childcare documents that ask if you ever committed a felony. Nunn explains the extent to which that box affects someone’s life and resources: “The box is an economic question and we started getting into the fight to ban the box because with employment came healthcare, it became the ability to take care of our kids.” It is a fight that among others has led to some of the most significant reforms of the carceral state.