If You Could See My Wings

The California Youth Authority (CYA), is a division of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that provides education, training, and treatment services for California's most serious and violent youth offenders. Experts who have studied these prisons have declared them the most violent in the nation and have concluded that 90%% of those released from CYA ended up in adult prison. Within three years of release, five percent were dead. These poems are a reflection of us, the raw and uncut, the pain we suffer and the redemption of the wards of the California Youth Authority.