Interviews with Future IDs at Alcatraz Collaborating Artists
Filmed and edited by Ben Leon
LUMUMBA EDWARDS, Future IDs at Alcatraz Artist-Participant
“[I] try my best to heal the community by them understanding where I came from, just to try to stop that violence within the community by letting them know the consequences of going to prison when you get there. I’m just trying my best to save a life.”
DR. LUIS GARCIA, Future IDs at Alcatraz Core Project Collaborator
“As I was driving in to do a workshop one day, I was like, ‘resilience’—University of Resilience just popped into my head…And that kind of sums up the resilience I’ve had over the years to navigate these things I had thought were impossible and that I achieved.”
KIRN KIM, Future IDs at Alcatraz Core Project Collaborator
“[My ID] says who I am as a person in that, yeah, I’ve been out for six years, but I’m also still trying to find my way in life. Because I got locked up at 16, I never got to have my formative adult years. And yet here I am, now 42, trying to figure that out.”
CIRESE LABERGE-BADER, Future IDs at Alcatraz Artist-Participant
“I am so proud of who I am today and what I do has so much meaning, not just for me. I am and could not be more thrilled with the people who are in my life today, that I get to share my life with. That is the most important thing to me, is sharing life.”
PHILLIP LESTER, Future IDs at Alcatraz Artist-Participant
“Most of the time I don’t tell my story from the front end, it’s from the back end. When people see the ID, that’s what I want you to see. I was always told, ‘sometimes, you’ve gotta see it in order to be it.’ So now that you see this, now it puts you in that mode to where it’s like, ‘I can really be that.’”
JD MELENDEZ, Future IDs at Alcatraz Artist-Participant
“There is a whole cohort of all of us who have been impacted by the system at some point in our lives and we somehow have come to the other side and we’ve been able to express our experience, our strength and our hope through these Future IDs.”
FELIX MIRANDA, Future IDs at Alcatraz Artist-Participant
“You have to even smile in dark times, you know? You have to break that with a smile even when it gets tough. ‘Revolutionary, breaking the cycle with a smile.’”
ADRIELLE PITTMAN, Future IDs at Alcatraz Artist-Participant
“I’m doing my own thing. And God has led and put me in a position to walk my own lane, to learn what is I have to do to remain humble, and to be as aggressive as I need to do in business, as a black woman, as a minority, as an ex con, as so many different things with all of these different struggles, but I’m not afraid of none of them.”
CANDICE PRICE, Future IDs at Alcatraz Artist-Participant
“Everything that I’ve been through in life, it was a lesson taught and a lesson learned. And I do not regret anything that I’ve been through in life. And my service to the community is giving back. Instead of tearing down the community, it’s to uplift the community and to make a change in the community.”
SABRINA REID, Future IDs at Alcatraz Core Project Collaborator
“San Quentin, any prison, it’s grey, it’s colorless. You have your ID that’s like—you lose that thing you get in trouble. That ID is everything…that’s all that you are. So just that part of it, kind of putting that away, and here’s this new [future] ID, and being able to express [yourself].”
JARRED WILLIAMS, Future IDs at Alcatraz Artist-Participant
“I consider myself someone that repurposes prisons and jails. It’s just that sometimes those are currently occupied, so we have to close them.”