The freedom within.

Just when 1 thought I'd escaped my likely fate, I went to prison.

I had been visiting a friend in Crystal City, Virginia. I left her hotel around 9:30 in the evening and called a cab back to D.C. As we drove down Jefferson Davis Highway, a cop stopped us. He pulled his gun, told me to get out and put my hands up. I said "get that f----gun out of my face." Four more cars arrived. The cop who arrested me had overheard the private security guards on their walkie-talkies saying that they were looking for a black guy who had stolen $50 and that they had seen me getting into a cab. I had $223.94, a Rolex and a rack of credit cards. I saw the man I had supposedly robbed for the first time at my trial.

I brought my own lawyer to court, but the judge said he had known my court-appointed public defender for ten years, that he was good for the job and that I could not use my own lawyer. When I protested, the judge said, "We can either do this with you here or with you in the bullpen." Half of my jury was selected while I was in the bullpen. I was sentenced to seven years.

It was all unjust. But none of it, not one fact of my case, is unique. It happens to one in three black men, every day.

I had found the paths to success in college and then in training with well-known brokerage houses. I had built a profitable financial consulting firm working 70 hours a week, always trying to make more, prove more, be more. I thought that if I could close one more deal, break one more record, trespass one more line, maybe I wouldn't walk around feeling like my colors were spilling out with no border to define them.

I can still taste the metallic rage I felt that first day in prison. I was shackled hand and foot, being led by two black captors who were "just doing their jobs." The prison--with its gun towers, its gangs led out each morning to work in the fields or slaughterhouse for 13 cents an hour, its overseers of every color on horseback--had been standing for over 100 years. They pushed me into my cell. Snow blew through the broken window and piled up on the thin plastic mattress.

Alone, without money, without position, without even a name, only a number, I realized that everything I'd believed in was a lie. If my choices were dictated by someone else's sensibilities about what was valuable, how could I have been free? I had known superficial luxuries, but real freedom is an inside job. I had never known that feeling. And for that I sat on the cold cement floor and cried.

It scared me to be that angry. Until then, I had silenced my rage, unwilling to admit that education, intelligence, kindness, connections, money, power, a lack of criminality never have and never will keep black people out of prison. That silence builds our prisons, and I'd contributed my own share of bricks and steel.

About a year into my sentence, I had a dream that I was kneeling in prayer when I felt a voice in the room, in the walls, within me. I knew it was the voice of my Creator, whom I felt must have deserted me. The voice said, "if you want to start over, then you have to do it right." When I woke up I was on my knees in front of my bunk.

I started organizing with other men who'd believed they too were powerless to take back our spirits and get free. Once, after a successful four-month battle to get college classes, I walked out onto the yard--the guards had put me in the hole as soon as the men had gone on strike--and said to my crew "I didn't think we were ever going to win this one." This old man, who will be in the penitentiary "from now on," looked at me really annoyed and said, "Who are you not to have faith? You're standing here, right? You're breathing, aren't you? Then you owe, Youngblood."

After I got out in 2002, my conviction was overturned. I started working with ex-prisoners to bring our voices into policy debates. Sometimes, in spite of the mounting victories, when I feel like I can't do enough, I go back to that moment on the yard. I hadn't escaped my fate, but I found my freedom in spite of it.

Michael Blain is the policy director for the Drug Policy Alliance.