I am lost,

trapped in a body

whose mind is still free although I am in a cage.

To you I am probably just a person to laugh at,

point at, and make fun of,

someone in a orange jumpsuit and handcuffs in the back of a police sheriff�s van.

To me I am a precious soul.

I am delicate,

with a heart, a spirit, and feelings.

Nico

I�m a young African American male from southwest Rochester, New York who has been through terrible things in my life. Lots of murders happened in my only eighteen years. My friend was killed in front of my face when I was fourteen, and I was shot in the leg and shocked by the scene. I never can stop thinking about that day, April 11, 2007. I hate the life I have lived after that day because my life was almost taken, and I think about that everyday. My mother had to raise me all alone for all of my life. My father was shot and murdered when I was young, and that, plus what happened to me, scarred my mother forever. I made mistakes I know, and now I am trying to do something about it. I dropped out of school, and I am pushing to get a GED. I want to look forward to going to college. I want to believe I can go to college. I want an education. I want to work to help my mother with the bills.

Give me a chance!

Please give me a chance.

Please let me not have my mother, family, and close friends worry about me everyday. I tell my girlfriend and my mother I�ll be okay, but I wake up in the middle of the night mostly every night and try to read myself back to sleep.

How long will this go on here?

I ask myself this in my head.

Please give me a chance to do more things.

Kashbi

When I was sentenced, to be completely honest, I wasn�t expecting to accomplish anything in jail. Come on jail, jail where all the bad people live, where time stops and everything is lost. Can you blame me for giving up hope. This mural was a second chance in all that was forgotten, like dreams, goals, disappointments to all those we all dishonored. We made mistakes. We are human. The mural has been a bridge between our community and the civil war going on in our minds.

I

am tired

of fighting

my dreams.

I want you to look at this mural and know I want my dreams. I want my purpose on earth. This is what I want you to grab.
 

Tarquin

I learned so much working on the Timeline. I learned about things I never knew about or knew how they came to be. These are clear to me now.

I thank you for putting this together so we could work as a group and learn things.

I learned where my family and culture came from working with this group of young men.

Trevor