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Dortell Williams is an inmate at the Los Angeles County California State Prison in Lancaster, California. Dortell has been published in a number of community newspapers, including the San Francisco Bay View, The Final Call and The Los Angeles Sentinel. He mentors at-risk kids through San Francisco's The Beat Within and is an inside correspondent for Families to Amend Three Strikes. You can email Dortell at: dortellwilliams@yahoo.com. For more information about the Honor Yard Program, visit: www.prisonhonorprogram.org

Uniting for the Family

Commentary by Dortell Williams, recorded 11/13/07

1) 2:48 MP3 Radio Essay

Uniting for the Family

Not all tragedies happen in a nightmarish instant. Instant tragedies are relegated to auto and other accidents; murders and the like. Yet there is another tragedy that creeps and crawls on one generation after another – like an insidious cancer ravaging its’ hosts from the inside out; fracturing to devastation its’ dwelling. This tragedy is the dissolution of the family, particularly the African American family.

Decades of HIV/AIDS, drug abuse, internecine violence and disproportionate incarceration are just some of the deadly cancers that have manifested from the decay.

More pointedly, African Americans are imprisoned at an astounding rate of one-in-three, between the ages of 16-29. It’s devastating!

Latinos aren’t far behind. African American and Latino women lead in the hideous race to death, strangled by a monstrous HIV/AIDS epidemic. And the children, shackled in circumstance, and fettered from any prospect of self-determination, are ever likely to get pulled into this dark, widening vortex of destruction.

If my prison conversion to faith has taught me anything, it’s taught me that one must help his fellow man.

Viewing it from another perspective, if we don’t help those who suffer, their misery will inevitably spread. By indifference, we fan the flames of misery in the obstinate forms of crime, low standards of morality and indefinite drains on public resources that never seem to loop around to benefit the collective.

Isn’t it about time the good Samaritans of society march out against these devouring trends?

Apathy does nothing for HIV/AIDS, but spread it. Indifference towards “other people’s kids” simply wafts the misguidance around to an odorous backdraft.

I look forward to the glorious day when we set our class and race prejudices aside. That’s the day we’ll reach out to fellow Americans who reside in the outer fringes of our national quilt, yet are knitted to the whole just the same. It’s our choice to either rot together or heal together.

While the less fortunate might lack some of the morals of the mainstream, perhaps it’s time the mainstream fulfill the dearth by example, rather than useless criticism.

Surely, it’s the offenses of abandonment, neglect and collective silence that have given health and longevity to our fermenting social ills.

If but only for self-preservation, isn’t it time society consider lending a compassionate hand and a sympathetic voice to the downtrodden, before this current frigid approach makes for the destruction of us all?

Update:

Senate Bill 299 sailed unscathed through the Senate Public Safety Committee, the Senate Public Safety Commission, Senate Appropriations and the full Senate. The bill is scheduled to go before the Assembly Public Safety Committee, August 31st, where it is expected to hit turbulence. Old fashioned, traditional letters are requested of the public for legislative supporters of the bill to offset expected opposition.