" Law is a career, not an answer to injustice"

The separation from family because of prison is more than physical, it's spiritual.

Welcome to our first post! I have been working on the concept of The Incarcerated for over a year now. As a formerly incarcerated person I have had a hard time finding a space that felt like home for me. I’ve been seeking a home that gives me a chance to explore my identity, think about abolition and claim my perspective. The Incarcerated is intended to be a home to explore and share the effects of the carceral state.

The essays below have been in development for a long time. I am so proud of both the work my good friend Janiece and her cousin Keenan have done to find their voice within the misery of confinement. These projects are emotional and have been developed with great care. I hope you enjoy these essays. If you got something out of it please share with friend and foe alike!

-Filiberto Nolasco Gomez

Baby Keenan and me.

My name is Janiece Watts. I write to you in hope. I write on behalf of my cousin, Keenan Miller.

He is currently imprisoned on a life sentence, without the possibility of parole in Sterling, Colorado, on the charges of first-degree kidnapping. Yes, a life sentence. A sentence he has suffered since October 2013. Inmate register number 163188.

He was put on trial for the charges of kidnapping and rape, but the rape charge was rendered a “no decision” as there was no physical evidence to support this and noted “holes” in the testimony of the victim.

He was charged along with a co-defendant, Mario Raxon. His conviction is based on the charges that he was present with Mario Raxon in the alleged kidnapping and sexual assault of a girl, Savannah Rain Pasierb. Keenan maintains that he never physically or sexually assaulted Pasierb. He claims that Pasierb and his friend, the co-defendant Raxon, were friends. The three of them were hanging out together one night when Raxon and Pasierb began physically fighting.

Keenan says he tried to break up the fight. Then, all three got into a vehicle and Keenan tried to convince Raxon to drive Pasierb home. Pasierb alleged that she was assaulted on the ride home and a gun was fired in the mountainous area that they drove through. They drove her to a public parking lot where she exited the vehicle. They left and went to a bar, Belle’s Lounge.

Keenan and Raxon were arrested hours later outside of Belle’s Lounge, after Keenan fired a shotgun - a warning shot, aimed into the air in the parking lot of the bar, following a brawl that broke out between patrons of the bar and Keenan and Raxon. Keenan maintains he never fired the shotgun in the girl’s presence or at her. Shotgun shells were never found in the location that Pasierb claimed, only at the bar. No one was struck by the bullet at the bar. No one was killed. 

Now, Keenan admits to the things he did do. He was with Raxon and Pasierb when their hanging out turned into something violent. He knows that they should have taken the girl home right away. He probably shouldn’t have been hanging out with either of them in the first place.

Keenan admits that he shot the shotgun off at the bar after getting into a fight with the patrons there. The fight ensued after a man, Carl West, bumped into Raxon, did not apologize for walking into him, and dismissed it with a carelessness that upset Raxon and Keenan.

Mistakes were made, but that’s not what I’m questioning. What I question is how a conviction for these crimes warranted a life sentence for a 24-year old Black man. A young man who has had a life that should make us all question and confront a society that keeps failing us. 

Throughout a series of these letters, I am going to tell you about my cousin, Keenan, and Keenan is going to tell you about himself and his life, up to the night that changed him forever in 2012. We were born eight months apart, and we spent so much of our childhoods together. Our lives diverged for a long time, and they collided back together eight years ago when I found out he was sentenced to life in prison.

I wrote my first letter to him in 2014, never having written a letter to someone in prison before. It was hard to know what to say. I did not know the circumstances of the case, and I didn’t really know what kind of sentence he was facing. I didn’t know how this was going to affect our family, or my view of the criminal justice system. What does it give to take away someone’s freedom for their whole life? I don’t presume to know that this repairs anything for the victim, knowing these two Black men are both in prison for the rest of their lives. What I do know is there is an inhumanity about a life sentence. A punishment that renders you an irredeemable person. How can that be for anyone?

Prison is supposedly about correction, that’s why it’s called the Colorado Department of Corrections. But in order for a correction to be made whole, a person has to have a chance to rectify the mistake, the crime, the harm. What chance is given to a person who doesn’t have the ability to make independent decisions? Who is receiving the correction? What is being corrected? This is what I’ve come to question. 

But who is Keenan?

Keenan Clark Miller was born August 19, 1989 first born son of Wendy Miller, my mother’s sister. Born eight months after me, I can only imagine how sweet it was for sisters, our mothers, to have newborns together.

Keenan grew up right next to me and my older sister. His middle name is the same as my dad’s middle name. Keenan told me he never knew where his middle name came from until I told him that on a phone call last winter. That’s important, because he grew up without his biological father in his life. Keenan has two brothers, Marcel, two years younger than us, and Kellen, born in 2000.

Marcel’s dad took him in like a good stepfather should, but unfortunately, he couldn’t mend the hole completely. Keenan suffered from behavioral and mental health issues from a young age. 

Many of my memories of him are blended between the fun we had and the trouble he got in. He could always make me laugh though.

Always with a sense of adventure, Keenan could get us all going on something. Jumping off the couches like we were Power Rangers, rolling around like we were wrestlers. It was fun to have Keenan and Marcel over, but our parents would have to tell us “look out for Keenan, try to keep him out of trouble,” which really meant try to keep him from getting angry.

And for me, my only tactic for that was laughter. But when the laughter ran out, and something washed over Keenan that he couldn’t quite explain, something I certainly couldn’t understand, it would set him off. He lashed out. Never physically against me or my sister, but he would get disruptive to property or worse–himself.

He would jump off more than just couches. He might turn to climbing a tree and want to jump from too high, and that would scare us. Or he’d want to find some matches and start little fires, and that can also turn scary. So it was things like that that would escalate, but what was the response?

I know our family did the best they could to understand Keenan, well, as far as I can tell anyway, maybe Keenan would say otherwise. But in the 90s, mainstream child psychology and behavior advice sat largely around medication and of course, punishment. I would like to think that there was an attempt to understand, to communicate, to resolve what was fueling Keenan’s anger.

Keenan was moved around a lot, from group home to juvenile detention center to back home, being gone from lengths at a time where I wouldn’t see Keenan for months. I can’t imagine how hard that was for him, for my aunt, for his brothers; I only know for sure how it impacted me. I wondered how seperating a person from everything they know could possibly be a solution. The hope that someone else would be better able to understand what to do was there I’m sure, but how did that affect Keenan?

I hope to share his story with the compassion and care that he deserves, and within it, investigate a broken system that has not invested in the restoration of human beings, and call for change.

I didn't even know why I wrote the letter. Knowing that I was addressing this to a prison, I just wanted to tell him that you are not forgotten. The fear of my cousin being erased and thrown away motivated me to write a letter. It seemed so arbitrary. He was taken away from us. I didn’t even know there was a trial. We weren’t there to support him. 

For someone like Keenan, going to prison was preordained. No services or support that could have intervened early on in life—all the group homes, juvenile detention, labeling of behavioral problems and over-prescribed medication—did not solve the harm that Keenan suffered and then perpetuated.

It seemed like the only response to his pain was more pain. 

At one moment, we would be having fun, laughing hysterically as we jumped around the house or rode bikes down the street, and then the next moment he was getting in trouble. Getting taken away. All the focus seemed to be on what trouble he may have caused. Where was the focus on why he acted out? Looking back now, it’s clear the system failed him.

For anyone who may know a loved one imprisoned, an unfortunately large club in the United States that no one would sign up for, you know how painful it can be to confront sentences that seem insurmountable for them, but also for you as a caregiver and supporter, that this injustice system would rather see you detached from the person incarcerated. That way, the system can break their spirit. Again, I’m asking you to question how corrective this can be when the person in need of rehabilitation is separated from everything they’ve ever known?

There must be a better way to balance punitive measures with true restorative ones so that our society can actually heal, so that my cousin Keenan can truly heal from many of the harms that have been done to him that didn’t stop him from falling further into the cracks. This is a call to restore humanity for all those trapped by a criminal injustice system, an infrastructure of under-resourced and overpoliced neighborhoods producing underpaid and overwhelmed families. These are our people, utterly unloved by these United States. How would any of us find “correction” in this system? Perhaps, it is the system that needs correction.

---

My name is Keenan Miller.

I’ve had a trying life, some say the definition of arduous. I grew up the oldest of three sons to our mom, a nephew, cousin and friend to many, living between Minnesota and Colorado through too many experiences in foster care, juvenile detention centers, being overmedicated, judged, and taken away from my family. I don’t want to believe in one of those theories that people must be destined to lose so that others can win and it just so happens that I’m one of these losers. I have a hope that one day it’ll be for something.

For nine years I’ve been fighting a kidnapping case in Colorado. In Colorado, first-degree kidnapping is a life sentence. My trial was fixed from the beginning. I was too poor to afford a lawyer, and my dark skin (as much as I didn’t think it would be a factor) was a strike against me. The prosecutor had a history of harshly trying Black and Brown men around sexual violence crimes. I was provided two public defenders who I feel held their careers’ own best interest higher than mine, and a narrative about my case that did not describe what actually happened.

I’ve written to the Innocence Project and anyone I could think of, but they won’t help me. 

I’m losing hope, I’ve lost so much in life it’s soul crushing. 

I recently put in a legal motion [a Petition for Postconviction Relief Pursuant toCrim. P. 35(c)] to the courts so I might get a chance at a hearing that would be my savior. The court [the 4th Judicial District Bench] responded with a phrase called “recused from addressing the postconviction motion”. It seems that behind one mountain, there’s another, so what do I do now?

I reach out for help until my arms go numb but to no avail. 

The stigma that comes with my name is followed by deep loneliness. That stigma is a punishment in itself. I feel like I have been cast aside by society. At this point in life I want to get back to my Brothers. One of them has autism. I feel it is my responsibility to care for them when that sad day finally arrives, my mom passing away. I have to be there for my younger brothers.

These are my true intentions, but the system doesn’t truly care for the people.

Law is a career, not an answer to injustice.

When you’re incarcerated, so is your family because they suffer right along with you mentally, emotionally, financially. In a way we are all victims of the system. To whoever might read this, take a second and research my case. Look up my name and talk to the people who love me most, and see how a human can be treated like an animal by the ones who swore to protect the people of the nation.

These are my words.