‘We Free’: Imagining a world without youth prisons

After we tear down prisons and the systems that built them, what do we create in their place?

That’s the question Talisha Daniels explores through her involvement in the No More Prisons campaign of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC). Talisha has spent the past year exploring her vision of a world without youth prisons.

Her poem, “Freedom Lives Within Us,” imagines what exists beyond youth incarceration and challenges us to consider freedom not as something granted by a system, but as something cultivated within ourselves and our communities: the belief that we can be and are already free.

Florentina Staigers Cruz

Freedom Lives Within Us

By Talisha Daniels

my meditations on free and learning:
teaching free
libation pour in the midst of a young black soul whispering the gospel into the ethers
___

what is free?
how much of it am i?
how do i maintain it,
sustain it,
and make sure that it can be gained by those after me.
free is a frequency
a way of being
be free
i am free
we free.

as the season reminds us, the heat carries an intensity and a deep energy that cannot be mistaken.
as Black people, there never is a moment of cease. there is a constant moving and shifting of momentum.
in this state, disorientation, dissolution, joy, and gospel toggle.
with that comes memory.
questions.
and a surge waiting to take form.
what does it mean to be told that you are free?
what happens when freedom is spoken of after much of one’s life has been of captivity?
what exists when the systems that confined you remain and reform themselves?
this phenomenon continuously complicates my relationship with the current understanding of freedom.
and i find myself picking through it often.
as a daughter of the deep south, the land, and of Black diasporic tethering.
but also as someone attempting to make sense of this concept of me, my world, my future, and of free.
i stand with the belief that free is not a tangible destination but rather a responsibility.
a way of life.
__

over my growing seasons, much of my life has been spent sensemaking and connecting dots around these very thoughts.
from writing and singing,
to teaching,
to being a student, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a partner.
to navigating the ranges of love, pain, grief, joy, and all the others in between.
the only constant ground i have witnessed has been change as learning,
knowledge as power,
and free as a livelihood.
this is free to me.
this is freeing to me.
it leaves us with more to come.
more questions.
more responsibility.
more becoming.
yet the complication of our sense of self and the world often blurs that. we inherit stories, structures, expectations, and realities that attempt to tell us who we are before we ever have the chance to decide.
and still, we learn.
and still, we seek.
and still, we free.

can freedom be given?
or is it remembered?
reclaimed?
embodied?
or practiced?
free is an active verb.
the english language does not begin to speak to the depth of defining ourselves, teaching ourselves, honoring ourselves, sharing ourselves.
much has been done to remind us of what we are not and blind us from who we are.
there is an extra exertion of energy needed to combat, survive, build, and create an alternative.
to us free.
__

i invite you to explore a meditation of what has been and leave your own.
i am ___
i free myself via ___
i leave ___ as my offering to those who seek.
and together
we free.
__

may our steps be ordered and may our eyes be opened.
may our souls drive us to embody real freeness.
may our minds be strengthened as we learn.
may we be models for those walking with, among, and beyond us.
may our ecosystems know we are free and sustain us to continue.
to those who sacrificed
lived
loved
became
cried
sang
prayed
and tried—
know no lives were in vain.
we are free
and are freeing ourselves continuously.
ashe and amen.

Talisha Daniels is a writer, artist, organizer, and youth leader who is part of FFLIC’s Youth Leadership Cohort. Her billboard will continue to appear in New Orleans until November 15 in two locations: the corner of South Broad and Thalia Street and where North Robertson Street meets the Industrial Canal. Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) is a grassroots, statewide, membership-based, intergenerational organization working to support children and families and transform the systems that put children at risk of prison.