“We need to keep making noise. He needs treatment...This doesn’t have to kill him, but it can….don’t stop mentioning the Imam. Keep his name alive, and make these people understand that people care about him.” This is what Kairi Al-Amin had to say about his 81-year-old father, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown. But on November 23, his father passed.
Since 2000, Jamil Al-Amin had been unjustly tangled in the shooting of two cops in Fulton County, Georgia. Images showed a tumor on his face, connected to the horrifying conditions disabled and older people face in prison.
Crime is typically not associated with the elderly. But in 2021, 15% of incarcerated people were 55 and older, up from 3% in 1991. People are aging into their sentences, but elder arrests related to homelessness, mental illness, and substance use are, too. Age is warped in prison; an incarcerated 59-year-old has the morbidity rate of a non-incarcerated 75-year-old.
According to Prison Policy, “incarcerated people’s complaints get ignored, their requests for exams get denied, and their care gets slow-walked...That’s because prison healthcare systems are really more like liability management systems, and what’s bad for patient care can actually be good for limiting liability.”
Prisons are not designed to heal. They’re designed to punish—and in Al-Amin’s case, to eliminate our revolutionaries. Honoring his life requires us to stop legitimizing the prison system in our fight for Black liberation.