How I Got Locked Up #1: Stories of Youth, Opportunity, Crime, and Punishment

Most people do not wake up one day in otherwise happy situations to begin a life of crime. That shouldn’t be surprising, but this series nonetheless provides a needed jolt of reality with these collected oral histories. How I Got Locked Up returns the human face to the prison population in America. Striking, honestly observed, and written with the force of lived experience, these zines provide insight and emotional context to what incarceration really means. In this issue, Safwan Giravi writes about struggling with addiction after his family had to flee Iraq for Utah. Calvin Moore writes about selling drugs to support his family from age 12. Ben Barnett and Fonua Kimoana each write about searching for love outside of their abusive families and finding various kinds of trouble instead. Includes a foreword by poet-activist Jimmy Santiago Baca.