The Wisdom Behind Prison Walls [Video]

A note from adrienne maree brown: Gilda Sheppard directed a film called Since I Been Down, in which Kimonti Carter was a protagonist as a transformed man leading his community behind bars. The film lit up my abolitionist heart; these storytellers have so much to teach us.

It was a hot summer day in 2007 when I wrapped filming for a documentary about women and children’s organizing and leadership in a refugee camp in Ghana. As I was saying my goodbyes, a woman approached me and said, “You know, sis, the same AK-47s in child soldiers’ hands in Liberia’s civil war are in your children’s hands [in the United States]. You need to do something about that.”

The comment stuck with me, and ultimately shaped the subsequent decades of my life, when I volunteered to teach sociology courses inside prisons in Washington state, then spent 12 years filming inside those same prisons—and in the …