There are many types of crimes, but in a civilized society, murder is considered one of the most heinous, perhaps because of its bleak finality. The person convicted of the violent act is called a “monster” and shunned by society.
Ar-Raheen Malik was 25, when he committed murder. Malik says it was initially hard for him to accept responsibility for his crime, yet by the time he got locked up in 1975, he began to recognize the horrific nature of his actions. Yet that was just the beginning of a long self-realization process.
For decades, Malik says he has labored to understand and reflect on how his wrongful acts have devastated the victim’s family, the community, his own family, as well as himself. He says each day is a struggle to tear down self-made barriers that have caused him to delude himself about his own actions. Instrumental to helping him, Malik says, are the prosocial programs provided to him by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation located at San Quentin.
His past delusions were cultivated in the environment in which he was raised.
“I really didn’t know my father,” Malik said. “My last memories of him were when I was nine. He picked me up to go shopping in San Francisco.”
That was in 1959.
Malik said his mother married twice, and he had good relationships with both stepfathers. However, since locked up, they have passed away. “My last step-father, John, was really like a father,” he said. “We worked together when I was on the streets, and when I got locked up, he used to visit me. So, it really hurt when he passed away.”
Malik himself is a father to four children. His first was born when he was just 16, in 1966, the result of a one-night-stand.
Just a year later, he was smoking marijuana heavily, drinking alcohol, and dropping pills — his gateway to cocaine and heroin. Looking back, Malik said he did not know his enemy was a sickness he didn’t even recognize— drug addiction. It took its toll as he said he ended up being kicked out of every high school in Oakland. “By 17, I was doing what I wanted to do,” he said. “Even though the principal tried to talk to me, I wouldn’t listen. He told me that since I was a bad influence on all the other students, I shouldn’t be in public schools. My parents thought the same, so I got kicked out of the house, also.”
Yet he still had not learned his lesson.
In 1969, another relationship resulted in a second child. A third relationship, which lasted three years, resulted in still another child.
Malik says he always wanted a relationship and children, and for a while, he had both. However, as the years passed, so did the relationships.
Malik’s life in Oakland was not easy, especially because of the drugs, crime and fast lifestyle.
Malik says, while not an excuse, his addictive behaviors contributed to his committing a murder one fateful day in 1975.
As he recalls, the night before the murder he had taken LSD, and was up all night. Early the next morning, a friend came by his apartment and asked him to help collect some money.
Malik said he took a gun with him, “because it was standard operating procedure in the neighborhood,” which he said gave him a sense of security. “I was only going with a friend to pick up some money owed to him,” he said. “It never entered my mind that I’d be using the gun that morning.”
But, he did. Malik says he regrets using the gun. He says the lives of three people were changed that night, in which one person died.
For two years, he was on the run.
Malik said his murder trial lasted two weeks. “The public defender did the best he could,” he said. “After two weeks of deliberation, the jury found me guilty on all counts.”
When he was first locked up, he blamed his actions on alcohol, drugs, and a head injury he suffered in 1972 when he was hit by a police officer’s baton for resisting arrest.
In 1979, after he began participating in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous because he wanted to understand the events that led him to prison. He also began seeing the prison psychiatrist who helped him dispel a false belief system and realize how he was minimizing his past actions.
He credits the psychiatrist with helping him grow out of his delusions and to understand his criminal behavior. Malik said, “The programs through out my time in prison, and the psychiatrist helped me change my belief system and therefore, change how I view the world.”
Although he was securely locked away from the world, personal tragedy still crept inside the walls of his confinement.
In 1981, Malik’s youngest sister Debora, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge while he was doing time at San Quentin. And, in 1991, his brother Luther, 40, hanged himself while he was doing time at California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo.
“It was devastating to me to lose my brother and sister that way,” he said. “They both needed the same help I needed at that time. Poverty is a cold monster,” adding, “A lot of time you’re cold and hungry.”
In 1988, Malik met and married Frances Tops, his first wife.
They were married 15 years but divorced in 2003. He says even after the divorce, they regularly wrote each other. Then one day she stopped writing. A few weeks went by, and then he received a letter from the mailman informing that Frances passed away during a surgical procedure. “A person who’s locked up is blessed by having a precious soul to bring her softness inside a prison and help an inmate change his belief system,” adding, “I only regret I didn’t have the opportunity to spend time with her on the streets.”
Around the same time Frances died, Malik’s mother passed away.
Malik recalls family life with being very hard for his mother, as she had to raise five boys and four girls. “It was tough for her,” he said. “My mother was an uneducated woman from Arkansas and she was very superstitious. Raising so many children took away from her being able to take care of herself. I think this overwhelmed her and drove her to drinking.”
Malik, who has been imprisoned for 36 years, believes he has gained much wisdom from reflecting on his life and choices. The greatest advice he has for his younger friends is to listen to their teachers and to stay away from drugs and alcohol. “Don’t live the street life. Don’t even think there is power in carrying a gun; the only real power is in education,” he said.
Today, Malik is proud to say he is a devoted Christian. He says that if he gets an opportunity for parole, he wants to get into a program that allows him to work with at risk kids in the community.
