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."