I began to smoke it, and that sent me to prison. The war on drugs about to take hold of all of the communities across the country and South L.A., Watts, is one of those communities that was hard-hit where crack became so plentiful. Burton, I'm sorry that you've lost your son." I mean, never.īetween the sadness, the rage, the anger, the loss, I began to drink heavily, and that escalates into drug use. I drink for the loss of my son, but I also drink because this police department never even acknowledged - never even said "Ms. I fall into a depression and an anger and a rage and I begin to drink. And the doctor comes out and tells me that my son is deceased and I ask, "Can I see him?" And I go in and my son is laying there with a little blood kind of dripping out of his nostril, and he's dead. So he hit my son, killed him, and never even got out of the car.Īll of a sudden there are just seemed like hundreds of police all around, and at the hospital hundreds of police walking back and forth. The car happened to be driven by a LAPD detective. And he went back out to play and ran out into the street and got hit by a car. I went to pick my son up from school and walked him back and was in the house preparing dinner and he came in the house and gave me this flower of chrysanthemum that was full of ants. On the death of her 5-year-old son and how she started drinking and using drugs And I carried instances of abuse and trauma with me until I was 46 years old, walking through the hall of a prison. So I didn't know what to do with that, and I carried it with me. In 2010, CNN named her one of their "Top 10 Heroes." Mia Munoz | The New PressĪlso, my auntie, when she realized what was happening one day, she gave all the responsibility to me and called me a "dirty little girl" and swore me to secrecy. Susan Burton is a fellow of the Soros Open Society Foundation. And all while counting, I can remember trying to just fade into the upholstery of the car because he was going to harm me, and I didn't know how to talk about the harm that he was going to do. I can remember counting the trees as a 4-year-old little girl and I would be "one, two, three" and when I got tree 22 danger would get in the car with me. I have two really strong memories, and one memory is sitting in the back seat of the car as my mother drove my auntie to Camarillo State Hospital where she would pick up the boyfriend who would sit across from me, who I knew was going to harm me. On being sexually abused by her aunt's boyfriend when she was 4 But, she adds, "It's not hard for me to go back, because I'm going in with the purpose of freeing people up."īurton traces her journey from prison to recovery - and her efforts to help others - in the memoir Becoming Ms. "So many nights after I've gone into a prison and lay my head on the pillow, it's a heavy head that I lay on the pillow," she says. In addition to housing, it offers 12-step programs, counseling and other help to women coming out of prison.īurton acknowledges that her work - which brings her back to prison regularly - can be draining. Gradually Burton's organization, A New Way of Life, expanded from one home to five. ![]() Knowing what it was like to get out of prison with no money and no safe place to live, Burton started a home for women in the same position. Slowly, she began to rebuild her own life - then she turned her attention to others in Watts, the Los Angeles neighborhood she had grown up in. After her sixth release, she finally received the addiction treatment and counseling she so desperately needed. And each time the task became more and more and more daunting."īurton's prison sentences were all drug related. "Each time I left prison I left with the resolve to get my life together, to get a job, to get back on track. You lose all of your identity and then its given back one day and you're ill-equipped to actually embrace it and work it," Burton says. ![]() "One of the things about incarceration is that you're deprived. It's an experience she lived through six times, once for each of the prison terms she served. ![]() ![]() Susan Burton knows just how hard it is to get back on track after being released from prison.
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