Airto Morales: Behind The Wall

Multigenerational trauma and a life of violence led to many of Airto Morales' early years being incarcerated, ultimately landing him with a long prison sentence. But even after getting out from behind the wall, Airto never did leave the prison system. Airto is now an advocate and consultant at the Haywood Burns Institute in Oakland, where he continues to work with community to abolish carceral systems across the nation, targeting structural racism and supplanting it with structural wellbeing."I had another nightmare last night that I was back in captivity. The longer I have been in the community, the more it hurts as I can feel the roots being torn and reassessed from a captives perspective each time I have this nightmare. This time the panic was heavy. It hurt for my soul to feel that heaviness again. Even more so, I thought of how my family and little ones would have to renegotiate space without me.The nightmare that I usually have is that I am stuck in prison with a date for release that keeps getting forgotten and no one has answers. So I'm stuck in a perpetual hell of not knowing if I am, or can get out. A fate meted out to thousands of sisters and brothers behind the wall every day in determining sentences with a term to life.This time, the nightmare shifted a bit though. I've managed to escape from the pressure cooker, but I was now a fugitive on the run. Another sort of treacherous feeling that still leaves one disconnected and with high blood pressure. I felt the stress within a nightmare of being chased and hunted down and of the threat of potentially being killed because in prison, there are no warning shots fired.These feelings are meted out every day to sisters and brothers in the killing field we know as the urban cities, across A-night-merica, a death sentence prior to trial at the hands of police or minute men or insane people who just feel that they have the right to take a life because of the color of a person's skin.As this nightmare was ending, I sat in the darkness on a mountain behind the prison, wrapped in a prison blanket, overlooking the escape route. I could hear dogs barking and sniffing for my scent, and I could hear the voices of my captors getting closer as I was thinking of my next move. I loved the idea of the freedom that I had, but I had to reckon with the fact that as long as the place called prison or jail exists in our world, my nightmare could be your reality one day. Or the reality of our children, and that hurt.The fact that places like these even exist, almost certainly justifies the logic and thusly the laws to fill them up by any means necessary, and this logic is meted out as a threat and a coercion to every human being on the planet. As the default, I think we can conceive of a better world, but until then I think the nightmare and the reality are eerily one of the same.What's our escape route?"