By Tyreek Goodman

Let’s be honest, in a lot of our communities, getting locked up isn’t always looked at as shame.  Sometimes it’s looked at as survival.  Sometimes it’s looked at as proof you made it through something that was designed to break you.

 

That mindset didn’t come from nowhere.

 

For many people coming from urban neighborhoods, jail isn’t some abstract idea. It’s something you see early. Friends, family, neighbors — everybody knows somebody who’s been through it.  When opportunities are limited, danger is normal, and pressure is constant, people do what they feel they have to do to survive. A lot of crimes don’t come from wanting to be a criminal.  They come from needing to eat, needing to pay bills, needing to take care of family, or just trying to make it out of an environment that doesn’t give you many legal options.  So when someone goes in and comes home, people don’t always focus on the charge. They focus on the fact that the person survived.

 

That’s where the respect comes from.

 

There’s also this anti-hero mentality in the streets. People admire the rebel, the one who stands against a system they feel has never stood for them. Music, movies, and street culture all feed into that idea. The system is seen as the enemy, and anybody who goes against it and lives to tell the story becomes somebody people look up to.  And the truth is, a lot of people feel targeted by that system for real reasons.  The numbers don’t lie. Black and Hispanic people are arrested, charged, and incarcerated at higher rates than others. We’re policed heavier, sentenced harder, and given fewer second chances. When you grow up seeing that, it changes how you view law enforcement and the justice system.  For many in our community, police aren’t seen as protectors, they’re seen as enforcers of a system that’s always watching, always waiting, and always ready to lock you away.  That’s why you hear people compare police to slave catchers. It’s not just disrespect, it’s history. Policing in this country started with controlling Black bodies. Even after slavery, new systems replaced the old ones. Jim Crow. Mass incarceration. Over-policing. Different names, same pressure.

 

So when somebody from the streets gets arrested, some people don’t see it as justice. They see it as the system doing what it’s always done, trying to put chains back on someone it never wanted free in the first place.  And when that person comes home, they’re celebrated. Not because jail is good. Not because crime is cool. But because the system didn’t keep them.

 

A lot of people overlook the crime because, deep down, they’re thinking: That could’ve been me.  Whether you’re in the streets or living straight, if you’re Black or Hispanic, you know how thin the line can feel.  In some neighborhoods, jail becomes a rite of passage nobody asked for. Time served turns into credibility. Survival turns into status. Not because it should. But, because it’s so common that people learn to normalize it.  That’s not culture by choice. That’s culture built under pressure.

 

The real issue isn’t why people respect someone who survived jail.  The real issue is why incarceration is so common in our communities that survival itself becomes something worth celebrating.

Until we deal with the lack of opportunity…

Until we invest in prevention instead of punishment…

Until justice feels equal and not selective…

 

The streets will keep honoring survival — even when that survival comes from making it out of a cage.