Transcript
By Richard Atkins, Jr. September 10, 2018 Essay "How To Turn Prison Time Into An Asset" I entered incarceration December 3, 2007. I trusted a friend and he left me to burn... After I emptied out a pump into a home, over his car. So, I ended up with 23 years; my brother Swavee 12 years and Kevin got 3 years! I lost my rap career, beautiful fiancé Angela Robinson, who was the best thing to ever happen to me since I learned to write raps in 1996. I was admired like 2Pac on some of my begginer raps and that inspired me to write 50-rap-songs per month! That all occured in c.y.a. and I was 15 years old and ahead of my time. So the OGs told me after hearing my spill and seeing the discipline and hog... My father was a militant in the underworld and he intentionally made me a lion! I came into my own mind around nineteen. I was about to parole home, after 4 years in the youth authority! I entered '96 and paroled home August 20, 2000 from Y.A., with 20 inch arms, 18 on the hang and a superb mouth piece for the game, and the women. I was ridah with hands, size and brains. Thinking has always been one of my greatest assets. I never want someone thinking for me. After 3 years and some change on the streets I collided with some friends. And the next thing I know, I was throwing bullets into their home! My life was threatened, so I only thought gun play to escape an early death at the age 22. I followed the rules and looked forward to building our label, but they didn't want my brother Swavee on the team. I felt obligated as a general to draft this 16 year old European, Mexican male. So I gambled on him, cut the other friends aloose and they felt some way about that. They conspired to end me like a rap career and I couldn't even vision my mother at my funeral... So I had a friend drive, pull up and I did a bad thing that afternoon. And before long, I was on crime stoppers! Now I was on the run from detectives, robbery/homicide and the ATF! I kept running, with all my rap songs (1500) from Y.A, in a suit case as I traveled in a ghost fashion. That's until I pistol whipped a hyena for stepping to this lion! What do you know, this killer called crime stoppers and the next day, the ATF found my whereabouts? In prison, I fought my faughts, hustled green and wrote 1500 more rap songs to parole with. I survived the rap game and free world until 2007... Fast forward to 2009, May 14 when I wrote my first urban novel, No Guts No Glory 1, and a year later Part 2. I let other inmates read the urban novels and they gave me inspiration. Telling me my books was active! That from the first few papers, begging, for the conclusion of the novels... I wrote another and now possess three novels. So then I started freeing my mind, writing a new novel in every two weeks time! I got hot with delivering that ink on computer paper, in only two weeks. It takes 14 to 20 days to compose another novel. Today, I have ( 48 )urban novels, on my shelf in my prison cell... I'm trying to be the 2 Pac / Malcolm X of urban novels, and won't stop until my gift is embraced by the critics. I do this for my freedom, mother and three beautiful sisters and the political soldiers behind bars... meaning the crips, bloods, BGF, Kumi, Northern and Southerners Mexicans and the Asians... 'cause the system was all by design my dudes. Ima California Street King and on the other side, the only son a queen gave birth to... If it wasn't for this 23 yeas I received by the state, I would have never, ever wrote ( 48 ) urban novels! Which reading thousands of novels by Walter Mosely, James Patterson, John Grisham, Wahida Clark, Vicki Stringer, Robert Ludlum, and history books, allowed me to study words and articulate. Now I have on my agenda to build my own publishing business from the ground. If some investigators wish to invest, just be humble and righteous when approaching me... Fidel Castro & Nelson Mandela left prison to become presidents of their countries! America would never allow this, so ima be the greatest man to ever put ink on paper...
