Malik’s Story

A watchtower at Collins Bay Institution in Kingston, Ontario

Throughout August, incarcerated people in Ontario are sharing their stories in the hopes of bringing light to the conditions of incarceration, and the experiences and structural injustices that lead to imprisonment.

Today’s story comes from a man with African Nova Scotian roots raised in Ontario. All names have been changed in this story.

“My goal in sharing my story - because remember, these things are triggering to me, and some of these correctional officers or people of authority will use this shit to inflict punishment on me and throw it in my face. They’ve done it before. But I believe that me sharing my story, maybe I’ll come across another Malik and he’s not going through as much, or maybe he’s going through the same damn thing. And he’s saying to himself, if Malik made it and got out of jail and trouble and is doing peer support work, then maybe I can do that too. I can release myself from these confines.”

By Intelligent Dissident (Malik)

I was born addicted to crack. I should say, we were born, my twin brother and me. We were two fraternal twin brothers and our mother was a sex worker and on drugs. When we were born, my mother went missing from the hospital. I imagine she was going through her own struggles as a poor Black woman before she had us. So another woman that she used to work with, her mother raised three kids. She raised three kids until the parents got off drugs, reunited and got clean and came back for their kids. But that never happened in our case.

So when the woman, her name was Maureen, when my mom went missing, she heard we were at the hospital. So she told her mother, “you remember Shelley and Wanda who I used to hang with?” Her mom said no, and she said, “Okay, Wanda has two kids, they don’t know what they’re going to do. The mother’s missing and they said they might have to split them up because there’s nobody to take them. Will you take them?”

And her mother came to the hospital and seen us and fell in love with us and brought us home.

We were raised in a community away from Toronto, by Niagara Falls. I never really met my mother until I was thirteen years old. I was raised under the guise that this was my real family: me and my twin brother, and there were other foster siblings as well.

When I’m thirteen, they told my twin brother that we were adopted. And then he subsequently told me. I was heartbroken.

I asked the woman what I looked like when I was born, how much I weighed, and I remember the words that changed my life. “Malik, I’m not your biological mother.”

It was then that I chose the streets.

After that, I started stealing cars, running away from home. At thirteen years old I got charged with a theft. Then, I was being bad. I was the worst kid out of like twelve kids in the house. There were two sets of twins: my brother and me, and another set of twins, a boy and a girl. The woman I thought of as my mother decided that rather than pollute the rest of the kids, she was just going to leave me alone. So she told me, we’re moving and you can’t come with us.

I had been passed around from different families, but always made it back to my mother’s home.

So they moved. I stayed on the streets a couple of nights, and then I seen the family of one of the kids I used to live with, and I walked home with them and the mother took me in when they found out I was homeless and had been sleeping on the streets.

Then, miraculously, my sister called one day in the summertime and said, “Malik, I have your biological mother on the phone.” And I spoke to her. I started coming up to Toronto in the summer of ‘96, staying for the weekend, and then going back to this family. I remember making about five trips. My biological mother, this stranger, would lavish me with gifts in the big city, Toronto.

Now, grade nine. I’m fourteen. I’ve come and moved to Toronto with this stranger I don’t know. And she’s still working the streets, she still had the man she was working for there living with her. She went to jail, and I remember he would buy me Jordans and McDonalds. Within six months, she would beat me. She beat me so bad one day I couldn’t use my arm when I went to school. And the school called Children’s Aid.

Thus I entered the foster care system.

I was upset at that point that I didn’t have a family dynamic. I was bouncing from group home to group home. I went through like nine of them. I was not violent, but I was angry. And back then in the group homes, it was a mix of - half the kids would be from 311 Jarvis, which was secure custody, and the other half of the kids were dysfunctional group home kids like me.

The kids would try and pick on me. Remember, I’m like a country hick at this time. So they would try and pick on me, and I would fight back. And then the staff in the group home would try and restrain me and I’d fight back. Maybe I’d make a threat, and they would not deal with me the way a family would have dealt with me. They called the police, and I entered the criminal system of injustice.

All my first entries on my youth record were all group home related, and all for threats or assault on either staff or residents.

I never got out. I never learned the coping skills. I never learned because now I’m meeting these kids in jail and we’re linking up, we’re trading phone numbers. I’m getting out, I’m going to the group home, but I’m calling these kids up and I’m hanging with them. And I start selling weed. You know what I mean?

Now I know what the foster care to prison pipeline is - I was unfamiliar with this term. And I have yet to stop my recidivism. It’s been an ongoing problem throughout my life because I never learned the coping skills to stop and then I just met worse kids, worse and worse kids, and I went to the downtown area of Toronto and started selling drugs.

And it became a part of me, an identity. These were kids now that had the same dysfunctional family background as myself: same at-risk, same marginalization. I remember growing up and I would sleep in stairwells and sell crack all night downtown.

I would sleep on benches other nights, and just sell drugs. That’s basically how it started. And now I’ve been a familiar face in all these jails from Halifax to Toronto.