For the first time in over a decade, I’m cruising down a highway, windows down, wind blowing in my face. The warmth of the sun is a calming touch on my skin as Freddie Mercury’s voice cuts through the speakers. As Mercury sings his heart out and urges his mom to “carry on,” I let my guard down and relax into the freedom of the open road.

Under normal circumstances, this would be the perfect ride on a perfect day in the Pacific Northwest.

For me, that’s not the case.

My chauffeurs are two armed prison guards. After nearly a month in solitary confinement, I’m being transferred to yet another solitary unit at a prison two hours away, shackled, cuffed, and my future uncertain. My organizing work with Cultural Awareness Groups (CAGs) has struck a nerve with the right (or wrong) people. 

I’m being sent away for trying to build a community—my community.

As the former president of  the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Awareness Group (APICAG) at Washington state’s Clallam Bay Corrections Center and a former senior advisor to the group’s Stafford Creek Corrections Center (SCCC) chapter also in Washington state, I have always sought to continue the rich history and legacy of APICAG. 

CAGs within the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) have a long legacy of resistance, tradition, and love that stretches back at least to the 1970s. 

This community my brothers and I have built gives us a sense of purpose again. We support each other through our personal traumas and when the whole world feels like it’s crumbling—as was the case for me when I lost my mother in 2021. My mother and I did not have the greatest relationship, and the thought of her alone, battling a lifetime’s worth of refugee trauma, drove me to ensure that resources like the APICAG were available for those going through the same struggles—to ensure that nobody else ever felt alone. 

CAGs provide prisoners like myself with a platform for true growth and liberation through cultural preservation, while also building community and creating safe spaces for healing. Our community gatherings have helped me face my personal demons and find peace in my vulnerability, even if only for a short period.

CAGs also offer classes and resources that the DOC does not make readily accessible to already marginalized BIPOC prisoners, especially undocumented and non-English speaking individuals. The community created within these groups offers participants a rare but critical opportunity to be themselves with people who look and sound like they do. CAGs create a space for people to unpack the trauma of incarceration and a life of isolation—a space to feel safe again.

CAGs in Washington State have deep roots in activism and community organizing. In the 1970s, one of the founders of the Washington State Penitentiary chapter of the Black Panthers, Mark Cook, took what he learned as a member of the party and used it to create a group called the Black Prisoners Forum Unlimited. (This was changed from the group’s original name Black Front United, because the DOC refused to allow members to use the word “united”). Cook taught incarcerated people how to advocate for themselves and their communities. His work eventually inspired the founding of the Black Prisoners Caucus (BPC). Important contributions like Cook’s are often overlooked, erased, or forgotten due to a lack of formal documentation behind bars.

My community, APICAG, was founded by Andres Pacificar in the early ’90s at Clallam Bay Corrections Center. Like BPC, APICAG was born out of necessity. At the time, there were no true resources for the growing population of Asian and Pacific Islander (API)  incarcerated individuals, many of whom were non-English speakers and struggling with refugee trauma. Similarly, newer groups such as the Nuestro Grupo Cultural sprung up out of the need for cultural identity resources not offered within the DOC.

Historically, things haven’t always been easy for cultural awareness group members. Not only have we had to survive discrimination endemic to BIPOC and immigrant communities, but we have also had to constantly persevere through generations of administrative attacks and claims that our people are a Security Threat Group (STG). In other words, a prison gang—essentially telling us that the color of our skin and our beautiful cultures are crimes. 

As community leaders, we pay a high price for our tenacity. Retaliation from prison officials can include anything from unwarranted cell searches, arbitrary mail rejections, and suspicious infractions, all the way up to being ripped away from your community and shipped to solitary confinement at a different facility across the state. This is what happened to me in 2019 and again in 2023. 

The road that led to my 2023 transfer—followed by over a month in solitary—was a long one. In many ways, my removal from my community and chosen family at Stafford Creek Corrections Center was a long time coming. For years, there was no policy that provided a framework for CAGs to exist, let alone function. The existence of these groups and their positive impact often depended on the rapport that members had with their facility’s administration. If a chapter didn’t have a good working relationship with the administration, they were probably not going to have their needs met. This gray area of bureaucracy allowed some chapters to thrive and others to flounder. 

Within Washington state’s 12 prisons, BIPOC people are overrepresented in the system, and it’s clear their needs are not being met. 

Disparities across prisons also fueled an ongoing conversation in recent years about drafting a DOC policy for CAGs. While both CAG members and prison administrators wanted to codify a DOC policy, our motivations couldn’t be more different. Administrators aimed to reel in these groups and strip them of their power. Group members, on the other hand, advocated for protections against staff retaliation and from being labeled STGs.

In 2019, DOC higher-ups began drafting a new CAG policy meant to eliminate independent groups and consolidate them under “diversity” programming, allowing only “heritage months” like Black History Month in February and Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May to be celebrated. Our communities inside and outside prison walls pushed back and worked to play a part in drafting the policy with headquarters.

Then, the pandemic put a stop to everything, halting all progress. 

In 2022, the DOC restarted policy drafting and kept our communities in the dark to repress our efforts. Once group members and their respective networks caught wind of what was happening behind closed doors, we demanded that our voices be heard. Community partners activated their networks to raise awareness and put the administration on notice through emails and visits to headquarters. This did not go over well with the administration.

In response to community advocacy, DOC administration chose to scrap the cultural policy entirely and suspend all cultural groups statewide. While this decision was a devastating blow to our efforts, we rallied together undeterred as part of a cross-cultural movement to advocate for our need to exist. This is when the unofficial Cultural Collective became official at Stafford Creek. We came together to organize an event on April 1, 2023 to highlight the importance of CAGs with the support of the Asian Counseling and Referral Services (ACRS), where the event was held. The Cultural Collective also created a zine outlining our efforts and highlighting the legacy of prison organizing within the DOC, including testimonials from more than 20 incarcerated individuals about the positive impact of these groups. 

Because the DOC suspended all CAGs and their meetings, organizers had to get creative and utilize all available resources. The majority of planning happened on prison yards and the fence line, rain or shine. In an unintentionally poetic ode to historic civil rights movements, we often had to pivot and find alternative meeting spots, such as the chapel library. This move replicated early community movements, who found the church as their only space to congregate. The cold and rainy days we spent organizing on the yard, huddled together, sharing hard candies, and passing a hot cup of harsh coffee around truly revealed what CAGs meant to us—something that made the warmth of the chapel that much more appreciated.

In August 2023, Stafford Creek Corrections received multiple formal grievances regarding former Associate Superintendent Karin Arnold’s repression of CAGs, including her involvement in the decision to suspend the APICAG. Grievances were also filed related to egregious and blatant attacks on various incarcerated-led programs that involved the tossing of cells and the confiscation of APICAG meeting minutes and proposals. 

In response, prison guards ransacked the cells of every APICAG board member and confiscated APICAG documents. I was placed in solitary confinement and accused of threatening staff.

This was what led me to being shackled in a van as prison guards took me away from the very community that was such a source of refuge and solace for me and so many others.

As Mercury finished the ballad, I realized I wasn’t afraid of being sent to solitary again. I wasn’t even that sad about it. What upset me was something much deeper: I was being taken away from my community, my chosen family, and all of the work we did together to make our lives more bearable, to make ourselves more human, and to strive for our collective liberation–even from our concrete cages. To be clear: I would never shed a tear for that prison. Rather, it was the people who were forced to survive in this beautiful struggle that I would miss the most. 

I spent over a month in solitary before I was then transferred to my new prison, the Washington Corrections Center.  I’m now starting the arduous task of beginning (again). Currently, I’m fighting against the feeling of futility as I learn to navigate this new prison system and get to know my new API brothers to continue building community. Due to administrational differences, it’s harder work for my new peers to see the bigger picture that we worked so hard to build at Stafford Creek—not to mention the additional battle of overcoming traumas in order to gather my peers together to show them what is possible when we are in community. 

But the beautiful struggle continues. I’m comforted by the words of my favorite cellie, writer James Baldwin: “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”

Today, various facilities around the state continue to enforce arbitrary protocols around CAGs. For instance, in my current facility, we are not allowed to function at all. As the Washington state legislative session wraps up, it is with this sense of responsibility that the Cultural Collective has decided to partner with Columbia Legal Services, ACRS, and other community advocates. We are lobbying for a cultural group bill in the 2025 legislative session that will ensure that the legacy of CAGs remain protected and most importantly, that all incarcerated people have the right to gather, organize, and be in community with one another. Simultaneously, the DOC has relaunched the effort to create a cultural policy, which we suspect is only meant to undermine our organizing efforts toward next year’s legislative session.

Freddie Mercury was right. We have no choice—we “carry on…carry on.” 

This work is supported by a grant from the Ridgeway Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from the Vital Projects Fund.

Editor’s note: While Prism often uses the phrase “incarcerated people,” this personal essay sometimes uses the word “prisoner” per the writer’s request and preference. As Felix Sitthivong explains, “It’s what we are—prisoners.”   

The Right to Write (R2W) project is an editorial initiative where Prism works with incarcerated writers to share their reporting and perspectives across our verticals and coverage areas. Learn more about R2W and how to pitch here.