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18 “Better off in the Penitentiary” When Malik Rahim came out of Orleans Parish Prison in 1971 there was no person he trusted quite like Lolis Elie, one of the lawyers who had won an acquittal for the Panthers after eleven long months in OPP. Just five days after Malik was released from that “hellhole,” he was picked up on kidnapping charges. The last thing he wanted to do was go back to a cell where his toothbrush reeked of tear gas. But Elie convinced him to do just that, promising that he would get him out soon. Malik had been accused of kidnapping two guards during the time when prison guards were making life almost unbearable for the detainees. Elie had the charges reduced to “false imprisonment,” to which Malik pleaded guilty and was released after a week and a half for time served.1 Malik may have been guilty of false imprisonment, but he was also falsely imprisoned himself. After he was finally free, Malik implored Elie to spend a day in the projects with him so he could see for himself how the people there lived. Elie protested. He already knew about poverty. Poverty was where he had come from. “You don’t need to tell me. I come from Niggertown.” (That is what many of the people who lived in Elie’s neighborhood called the Black Pearl area.) But Malik wouldn’t let up. It took him a year to convince Elie to go with him to the Fischer Housing Development near where Malik had grown up. When the two finally made the trip, they were an odd couple. Malik is tall and imposing. He looks tough, but he has another side 147 that is caring and gentle. Elie, twenty years Malik’s senior, is a small man who looks gentle. He is, in fact, quite tough. “Malik was the disciplinarian . When he spoke, people obeyed,” Elie said, remembering the incident that was still so vivid to him thirty-three years later when I interviewed him that he related conversations word for word.2 The first thing that happened down in Fischer was that a man came up to them and wanted two dollars to buy heroin. The man had ten dollars, but the heroin cost twelve. Elie remembers Malik saying, “Let me talk to the seller and see if I can get him to take the ten.” In addition to being a disciplinarian, Malik was also a mediator and a problem-solver. But the prospective buyer was in no mood to negotiate. He’d just go hold the seller up and that would be that, he reasoned. Malik said, “No, man. If you do that, he’s gonna come back at you.” So Malik talked to the seller and got him to take ten dollars for the transaction . The police sat parked no more than fifteen yards away, observing everything and doing nothing, Elie remembered. Then another person came up and asked Malik to loan him ten dollars , just until the next day when he could hold up a 7–11 convenience store. At this point Elie jumped in. “Look, man, don’t you know if you do that you gonna get caught and go to the penitentiary?” The man said, “Yeah, man. I’ve been to the penitentiary. I’m better off in the penitentiary than I am out here. When I was in penitentiary I got three meals a day. I had a place to sleep. I was in charge of something. My folks wrote me letters. They came to see me. I ain’t got none of those things out here. No one pays any attention to me. I’m not in charge of anything.” Elie said it stuck in his mind that “there are people who are so bad off, their lives are so hopeless, that prison is no threat.” Ever since then, he has continued to question the premises of a society where a “signi ficant portion of its citizens believe they are better off in prison than in the so-called free world.” Elie says he learned another thing in Fischer that day. He learned that “people who live in the projects don’t associate with other people. They are ashamed. They feel stigmatized, not so much by whites as by other African Americans. I wasn’t aware of this.” Elie and Malik didn’t see each other again after that Fischer trip “Better off in the PenitentiAry” 148...

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