How I Got Locked Up #2: Stories of Youth, Opportunity, Crime, and Punishment

Most people do not wake up one day in otherwise happy situations to begin a life of crime. That shouldn’t be surprising, but this series nonetheless provides a needed jolt of reality with these collected oral histories. How I Got Locked Up returns the human face to the prison population in America. Striking, honestly observed, and written with the force of lived experience, these zines provide insight and emotional context to what incarceration really means. A foreword by activist-poet Jimmy Santiago Baca opens the volume. The entire zine is an essay by Kenneth Campos, beginning with an unforgettable description of a young child watching his father be arrested in their home in the middle of the night. This terrifying event launching Kenneth into a cycle of abuse and eventually incarceration, culminating in shots fired at random, in anger, with devastating consequences.