Hello, how you doing today? This is Eddie Treadwell. I’m incarcerated here at Michigan Prison at Brooks Correctional Facility. I’ve been here for 34 years now. Individual robbed and killed my brother, and basically tried to rob and kill, basically tried to kill me, you know.
I would like to call this piece “Apology”. I apologize, you know. I apologize to my family for leaving ’em, abandoning, coming to prison. 34 years, all my family members have passed (inaudible) died since my incarceration. Grandmother, mother, father, brother, sister, and so on.
And I’d like to apologize to the victim’s family. Because they family lost a lot. You know, when life is being taken, we lose a lot, you can’t get that back, you know. In a lot of times it is caused by the stupid mistakes, or things that we do, or caused by somebody else that done something to us and force us, and force our hand, to be violent. What we lose at the end, we don’t really win nothing. So nobody involved win.
You know, I didn’t win, come to prison killing the guys tried to kill me in the alley behind my house on Valentine’s Day. And with killing my brother, robbing my brother on the front porch, his family didn’t win. My family didn’t win. There’s a lot of tragedy going on, in our communities that need to be resolved, need to be fixed. We need to find a way to solve the problems of the inner city and United States.
You know, people have a tendency to always, “We’d like to ask them this, we got the scientists for this, we got the professors for this, we got the experts for this, we got the people for this, we know how to do this, we don’t have to do that”, in the United States.
But, our problem is simple as education, economic security, and equal opportunity. You don’t say for the people within them environments, “we just can’t get no assistance, we can’t get no help.” We can find the institutions, welfare institutions and various other institutions we are confined to, you know what I’m saying, to, whatcha call it, institutionalize. We become to be more so institutionalized to conform to the government.
But we not, the government is not equipping us to be able to raise above of an ignorant mental state of mind and be more productive, educated, respectful type of individuals who assist in the upkeep of the government, or what you call, assist in the government, the people of the state, or the government work to support the state.
The government, you got the firefighters, janitors, plumbers, doctors, so on and so forth. Their job is to be educated to participate in service of our state, of our country, right? So in that sense, you have put forth the curriculum to teach and educate the people to be able to take care of this country.
How come you don’t teach and educate these people to rise up out of these ghettos? You know, I think it can be done, if first we put forth the effort to do it. But people, it’s not like a (inaudible) high-tech activity that’s been involved. It’s just the ability to come together with the desire to make a change within our communities, you know.
And I send out the apology to all families who’ve been victimized by crime. I send out my apology to all people who have been a victim just by being in the inner cities coming to prison, a victim of drugs, a victim of violence.
You know, we’ve been victimized too much. You got all these millionaires, you know, I see on TV, you know, “We just for the people, for this for that, and Black lives matter this that.” I ain’t see nobody, when it was time to try to come up with some significant prison reform, tax, you know, everybody when it comes time to put some money for education, to try to educate the people or drug programs, or to get the people off the drugs.
You know, it’s a lot of issues and a lot of problems that we face within our inner cities, and I don’t think this one’s phone call will be enough to accomplish all of them. But I gave you as much as I could and I’m sorry if I take up too much time. Y’all have a great day and I be expecting to hear from you soon. And you can be expecting to hear from me soon. I’m out.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.