Johnnie Walton Seeks Prison Reform from Within: Opening Our Eyes Within
Johnnie Walton owns Me to We LLC, a personal coaching service which assists people in changing their lives from the inside out.
By Jonathan Gramling
It’s a wonder that Johnnie Walton is even alive today to tell his story. And even after all of the barriers and misfires and negative circumstances, Walton is succeeding. It is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit.
Walton grew up on the rough and tumble streets of the south side of Chicago without much protection. His mother passed when Walton was two-years-old and his father was in prison until he was 27-years-old. And his grandmother tried to raise too many grandchildren at once to provide them with discipline and guidance.
Walton ended up doing prison time three times before he turned his life around. While he could have continued on with the street life ways, Walton decided to make a change for the sake of his daughter. He really ended up doing it for himself.
For Walton, it is about breaking the chains of the continuous messaging that African Americans, particularly youth, receive.
“I mostly want to help our youth, help our youth deal with their fears and learn how to be in relationships with each other,” Walton said. “Social media has the option to change what you think every five minutes. And most of our children are stuck in front of that. And then they will go to jail.”
In essence the change needs to come from within. Through their attitudes, in Walton’s way of thinking, they can become empowered to take control over their own lives. In commenting about the new proposed jail, Walton emphasized that the new jail needs to do more than just provide a more humane way to be incarcerated.
“They are talking about bigger rec rooms,” Walton said. “Yes, they need space to exercise. They need a library to read. But they have basketball on the outside, libraries on the outside. What is going to change my thinking? What’s going to make me use these tools to create a better life? And even if I do graduate from one of your college programs, how is that going to make me not beat my wife? How is that going to make me not disrespect my children? I’m in it for changing hearts. I’m in it for raising consciousness. And that’s why I think Diane picked me up to be a part of this team. There are over 50 people who are part of Madison Justice Team. We have an agenda. It’s first to bring awareness to the community on how much is being spent for housing inmates in each of these prisons, the types of circumstances that they live in and deal with.”
Walton feels the jail needs to change the person from within and not just mimic “good behavior” that isn’t internalized and so they will fall back into the street life once they are released.
“They need to have mindfulness and wellness activities in the new jail,” Walton said. “They need to learn practices for dealing with difficult emotions. Meditation. Yoga. We need education. We need housing. We need healthcare. And those are the things that the justice team is working towards. But we also need to know how to hold it together, how to not just have a good life, but also to have good wellbeing so that my soul feels satisfied. They say they have over 70 groups that are coming to the jail. And I’m not stepping on anyone’s toes, but why is there still a jail if there are 70 plus groups in there? If the focus is on making productive members of society, it’s not about giving them what you have. It’s about raising consciousness so that they know and can be aware of how they are showing up. Am I being the victim, the blamer? Why me? People show up that way. Am I the taker? I win, ha, ha. We have people like that. And I’m not saying they are a problem or are bad. I’m saying, ‘Something happened. If you don’t figure out what happened, lead yourself to see why you think that way and how long you have been thinking that way to change your thinking.’ Those are the types of things that they need, tools to change their thinking.”
Ever since Africans arrived in America in chains, some 400 years ago, they have experienced trauma that has been passed down in some way, shape or form by many families who don’t understand oftentimes what they do.
“Black people need help dealing with a lot of unresolved trauma between Blacks and whites and between the Black man and the Black woman as well,” Walton said. “We need help dealing with those unresolved issues and traumas. For a person to believe that it’s okay to make another group of people suffer, then they need some help too. They need some counseling and some type of coaching as well. I’m not just trying to touch Black folks. My wife and almost everyone I know is Black, Black, Black. And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ If I raise my consciousness and you don’t, we’ll war with each other. My goal is not to just get in there and coach the inmates, but also to coach the staff who directly impact those inmates. And that is the same thing that I want to do with the schools, the students and the teachers. But that’s another story. Like I said, I hadn’t met a white person in Chicago until I went to prison. My trauma didn’t come from that. My trauma came from my uncles and aunts and granny. And their trauma came from something and ultimately from slavery and the conditioning from that. Until that’s corrected, it’s all going to be a mess.”
And African Americans need to take control of themselves and their lives and not just follow the orders of society like the slave followed the master.
“Until we recognize the soul separation, we’re all different expressions of the all-knowing that created us,” Walton said. “We’re different expressions. How will I know how to express if all that I am taught is, ‘Go to school. Get a job. See cocaine. Be tough, cold as ice.’ And that is what most Black people are taught. Even our women are taught to be tough and cold and hard. So it’s time for us to get a little bit softer, first with ourselves, to be able to hold our condition and see it and not run from it. And once we are able to correct ourselves and see ourselves and now I can see me, then I can see you. I don’t want to hurt you. But if I don’t see myself, then I’m going to hurt you. If I’m walking around with my eyes closed because of all of the pain in my life just causing me to close my eyes, then I’m not going to see your pain. We have to open our eyes. We have to open our eyes just a little bit more. I’m not saying that we aren’t trying to. I’m saying that we are better together.”
The community needs to heal together.
