An Interview with Omar Yamini
Author Omar Yamini
I read somewhere online that one out of nine African American men will spend time in jail between the ages of 20 and 34. No subtext here on the flaws in our system that have caused those numbers to be so high, no tirade about white privilege or anything else. It’s simply a statistic, and for Omar Yamini, that number needs to change. Yamini spent 15 years, from the ages of 20 to 35 in the Illinois prison system, experiencing first-hand what most of us know little about aside from watching “Orange is the New Black.” After getting out in the summer of 2011, Yamini began writing his story in a book, What is Wrong With You? that pairs with his non-profit organization, Determined To Be UpRight, to warn young people about the realities of serving time. I talked to him recently about his book and further into that experience:
When did you decide you wanted to write this book?
I wanted to write this book soon after I got out. My mother was a strong influence on me writing this book. When I was in prison, she used to always tell me “Omar, you need to write a journal. You need to write a journal so you can tell people what it is that you are seeing and witnessing. The way you are explaining things to me, people need to hear.” I would write letters to my mother and to my family and to Carrie (Yamini’s wife) explaining to them what is going on, telling them some of the behaviors of the people in prison. It was during one of those times that my mother told me that I need to write a journal. She said that for years, until I actually started to do it in my last year of imprisonment.
What would you consider to be the one worst thing about prison?
The worst part of prison is being without your family. Being in a place around people who don’t care, and this can be inmates or correctional officers and having to deal with strangers who don’t care about you or anybody else, and having no family to help you through those hard times. The hardest thing about prison is being without your family, without the people you love and trust the most. That’s the hardest. Because you need them. You really understand the meaning of family when you are in a situation where you need people that you trust the most.
Did you get a lot of visitation time?
I was one of those people who was blessed to have a supportive family. Whenever I needed to see someone in my family because times were getting rough, somebody was always there, whether it was a brother or a sister or Carrie, someone always showed up. My mother had a hard time seeing me in prison. It was too much. I did not see her until the last two years of my sentence. However, I talked to her all the time. She answered all my phone calls. She answered all my letters. It wasn’t abandonment; it was just, “I cannot see you in prison like that, so call me.” And I was blessed to have that. That correspondence was just as important as visitation.
Do you think your experience would have been different if you were a white man?
Yes, absolutely. American white men, for the first time in their lives, find themselves a minority. Some of them struggle, and some of them don’t, but they see what it’s like to have to go to another people, another race, who are pretty much the overwhelming majority, to get the things they need inside of prison. Some white men struggle with that. Not all, but some find themselves as part of supremacist groups. Some of them aren’t even racist, or even prejudiced, but they feel that they need to belong or need some protection. Now, the County Jail is another story. At Cook County Jail, I witnessed white inmates get treated really bad. A lot of young, wild gangbangers who were looking for some get-back, men who were probably going to lose their cases, especially the violent ones, because the conviction rate is so high in Cook County Jail, so many of them have no hope. They look to take out their frustrations on anyone they chose. And because you’re dealing with a gang affiliation, white men in Cook County Jail don’t have those protections. They’re pretty much on their own.
One of the strange things about white men in prison is that it can vary with the guards. Sometimes other white prison guards may give them special favors; and sometimes, you see the prison guards really mistreat them for being white in prison. Like they’re saying, “you wanna act like these other savages, we’re gonna treat you like one.” You never know how a white prison guard is going to treat another white man.
In the book, you mentioned meeting a man with an 850-year sentence…
Yeah. And beyond. It was heart-brekaing. It was dismal. It’s a feeling of complete despair. Probably the most depressing thing that I’ve ever been around. It set me straight. It made me give up any complaints about how much time I had left on my sentence. And I knew some of these guys that were getting mountains of time, Star-Trek time we called it, just light years. With my own eyes, I witnessed 20-year-old African Americans and Hispanics come back from court from their sentencing day with 250 years or 90 years or 430 years, and one guy, an old cellmate of mine was given 847 years, or something crazy like that. It was like, “we don’t stand a chance in here.”
Yeah. What kind of attitude would you have after getting that kind of sentence?
I guess that depends on the person. For me, it was what do I say? What kind of conversation can I possibly have with this person that just got 700 years? Some of those guys exploded before they transferred out. Some would start riots. It was terrible. It was worse than someone having a loved one pass. We deal with death in life, you can go and console the person that loses a mother or a child. But how do you console a person that’s gonna spend 800 years in prison? What do you say? What do you tell them, it’s gonna be okay? When you know this person is about to die in the penitentiary?
It was these dynamics that added to the mental and emotional stress that everyone was going through. I’m not making these statements to say that these people didn’t deserve it. Some of them probably did for the heinous crimes they committed. But that wasn’t the point of my book. The point of my book is a look into the conditions, and explaining these conditions to young people. These young people may not like the situation they’re in. They don’t like the financial situation they’re in, or they want to impress another person, or they want to belong. But when they get what’s coming, it might be 280 years.
