Multigenerational trauma and a life of violence led to many of Airto Morales' early years being incarcerated, ultimately landing him with a long prison sentence. But even after getting out from behind the wall, Airto never did leave the prison system. Airto is now an advocate and consultant at the Haywood Burns Institute in Oakland, where he continues to work with community to abolish carceral systems across the nation, targeting structural racism and supplanting it with structural wellbeing.

"I had another nightmare last night that I was back in captivity. The longer I have been in the community, the more it hurts as I can feel the roots being torn and reassessed from a captives perspective each time I have this nightmare. This time the panic was heavy. It hurt for my soul to feel that heaviness again. Even more so, I thought of how my family and little ones would have to renegotiate space without me.

The nightmare that I usually have is that I am stuck in prison with a date for release that keeps getting forgotten and no one has answers. So I'm stuck in a perpetual hell of not knowing if I am, or can get out. A fate meted out to thousands of sisters and brothers behind the wall every day in determining sentences with a term to life.

This time, the nightmare shifted a bit though. I've managed to escape from the pressure cooker, but I was now a fugitive on the run. Another sort of treacherous feeling that still leaves one disconnected and with high blood pressure. I felt the stress within a nightmare of being chased and hunted down and of the threat of potentially being killed because in prison, there are no warning shots fired.

These feelings are meted out every day to sisters and brothers in the killing field we know as the urban cities, across A-night-merica, a death sentence prior to trial at the hands of police or minute men or insane people who just feel that they have the right to take a life because of the color of a person's skin.

As this nightmare was ending, I sat in the darkness on a mountain behind the prison, wrapped in a prison blanket, overlooking the escape route. I could hear dogs barking and sniffing for my scent, and I could hear the voices of my captors getting closer as I was thinking of my next move. I loved the idea of the freedom that I had, but I had to reckon with the fact that as long as the place called prison or jail exists in our world, my nightmare could be your reality one day. Or the reality of our children, and that hurt.

The fact that places like these even exist, almost certainly justifies the logic and thusly the laws to fill them up by any means necessary, and this logic is meted out as a threat and a coercion to every human being on the planet. As the default, I think we can conceive of a better world, but until then I think the nightmare and the reality are eerily one of the same.

What's our escape route?"

First generation NYC graffiti writer, author, documentarian, archivist, and historian Chris Pape, AKA FREEDOM, tells his own surreptitious stories around the Upper West Side Manhattan train tunnel that was ultimately named after him. His decision to live on the streets and paint in the "Freedom" tunnel propelled him toward a career that he never could have imagined.

"So, what we did was we kind of herded along some of the tougher guys on our block. We had a lower income housing thing next to right next to where we lived and we got those guys and we went down there, we went into the bathroom and sure enough, just as it was told, there was a plank of wood there and there was a blown out hole in it.

And you slide down to this embankment that, you know, it's just dirt and rats and stuff like that. And then you'd have like a six foot drop down to the train tracks eventually. And then there, they were five tracks across and freight trains and stuff like that. It was exhilarating. So we did that. We bought spray paint with us cause we were just getting into our graffiti thing.

And this was a much, it just seemed like a much safer place to write than actually going to a real train yard where real kids could rob you and stuff like that.

We actually did try and open some of the freights and there was nothing in them. They were just empty. One time we open them and there were some boxes and we're all, “Boxes! We've got boxes!”  You know, this is so great and there were cans of Carnation instant milk, aluminum cans of Carnation milk, kind of like soup cans.

And so we had a battle of those. We would throw them at each other because that's, which weren’t the swiftest bunch, and they would hit the wall though and crack open and just go, “Plssssh!” This white powder everywhere.

Then the next time we went down in there, somebody fired a shot at us. So there was a track security guy who had a salt gun, and we had been warned of this, and he fired it at us. I fell, I hurt my knee, and then that kind of turned into the story that I got shot with a salt gun, which wasn't really true. But it was a great story, you know, when you're 14, so yeah, I got shot.

You know, but yeah, they dragged me out. We got home, cleaned the whole thing up, and then we never went down there again."

Sometimes we cross a line that we never ask to cross. Join us as luminary musician, producer, and mixing engineer Scotty Hard details an evening that changed his life permanently.

"When I was mixing the show and I was like, dubbing out all the vocals and doing all this stuff and I'm moving back and forth and I'm in the music and I'm like, I completely at that point forgot that I had been in an accident, I was in a wheelchair and that's the sort of power of music and that's why I keep doing it.

And that's why I do do it because, you know, I was, I don't believe I was given a gift or anything like that cause I worked my ass off to learn how to do this shit, but it's my passion. And it's something that means something to me and that's what I do. I work with people and I make music and I can't do it as many hours of the day as I used to.

But I mean, when you used to work 80 hours a week in the studio, battering your ears and liver, it's not a bad idea to slow down a bit. And I've had to learn how to do things a lot faster. I've developed a lot of techniques and just a lot of work habits to allow me to continue to work and, and, and not have to work those hours.

Plus, you know, digital recording and stuff makes it a lot easier and more streamlined to do things. It can also be a fucking albatross, but in general, it's been a, I think, a good development and for me as a disabled person and not having to work behind a 72 input console makes life a lot easier as well.

Yep. Continue to work, continue to do it. I got to, man. That's my legacy. My, my passion is what I bring to the world. So if I wasn't doing that and I guess I'd be just be drinking beer at three o'clock every day of the week, instead of just today."

A special bonus episode in your Yard Tales feed. Last week we were lucky enough to hear Garth Mullins tell his incredibly personal tales of having to navigate forbidden space. We heard about his trajectory towards activism, reporting, and radio documentary work. We also got to hear about the birth of his podcast, "Crackdown."

So today I'm bringing you Episode 1 of "Crackdown." It's such a well-made and important show that I wanted to give Yard Tales listeners a chance to hear it. The combination of first-person storytelling and in-depth reporting make for an extremely compelling show. My own prospective on drug use, addiction, and policy has shifted significantly from listening to "Crackdown."

When you're done listening, make sure and search for Crackdown wherever you listen to podcasts and follow the show in its own feed. So please enjoy Episode 1 of "Crackdown."

Garth Mullins is a journalist and radio documentary producer who focuses on the decriminalization of drugs, issues of race, class, environment, capitalism, colonialism, and oppression. Garth has written for the Vancouver Sun, Georgia Straight, and Vice. His documentaries have appeared on CBC Radio One, he has spoken publicly at countless schools, protests, conferences, and media outlets, and holds multiple awards for his work. Garth is a drug use activist who has worked with organizers to campaign for a safe and legal drug supply, which in turn could completely eliminate the overdose crisis as we know it.

"You know, I scored and used drugs on the downtown east side, when there was really strong, dope, and there was lots of overdoses and people were dying. And they, even the health board here declared it an emergency in the city, like, so I've lived through an overdose emergency before, and I saw these posts and I heard these two guys that I kind of knew of who used to hang around there and both died off the same batch.

"And there was a siren somewhere and I got this feeling like in my stomach and in my feet, like this really deep sense of déjà vu, you know, it's like in the matrix where the black cat walks past you and you know the program's glitching and I'm like, “This is going to happen again. This is happening again.There's an overdose crisis. There's a, this whole thing is going to happen again.” And I, and then I thought I can't sit out.

You know, I want to be with the people who are pushing back, the people at the Vancouver area network of drug users. This is a union for drug users that people organized in the late 90s or starting then anyway.

And there's the people there that I've learned so much from and work with, like Laura Shaver, she's a, you know, a methadone activist, but also a really, for decriminalization and a safe supply of drugs and all that. And me and her have worked on a bunch of campaigns now, and lost friends together.

But then, back then I went to VANDU and just met her and, Laura is the person who taught me really how to talk about being a drug user. How to say this stuff and not be ashamed, you know, to look people in the eye and just say, this is who I am and just deal with it. I really learned a lot of that from her and, yeah, I felt like I couldn't sit out of this one, you know, because it's not right. It’s not right to sit out."

Produced, directed, reported, edited, and sound designed by Luz Fleming. Production Assistant: Davis Lloyd. Executive Producer: Jacob Bronstein. Music by Luz Fleming, Garth Mullins, and James Ash. Theme Music: Andy Cotton & Luz Fleming. Art & Design: Andy Outis.

Find more information on this episode including related images visit: yardtales.live/home/garthmullins

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