Omar Yamini
Friday, October 24th at 11:00 a.m.
NEIU Auditorium
No tickets or reservations required.
Parking permits required.
What’s Wrong With You is the book that takes the public through a detailed day-to-day prison life, so that the readers clearly understand what is waiting for them if they participate in any behavior which leads them to the penitentiary.
My name is Omar Yamini, and I was charged in 1996 at 20 years old, sentenced in 1999 and sent to the penitentiary. I was raised in a modest, respectful two parent household on Chicago’s south side and attended a private school until the 7th grade. At age 11, my parents bought a home and moved our family to Dolton IL, a suburb of Chicago, so that we could have a safer environment in which to develop. My 5 siblings and I received love and support for any activities we were involved in as children and had wonderful childhoods. Our mother, a determined, hardworking, God fearing woman saw to it that her children were not only well provided for but had instilled in us the core principles of human decency that helped develop us into the adults we have become. My mother did her job well. We we’re not at risk children in an at risk environment. We were safe but that safety still did not stop me from making terrible choices that would devastate my family and send me to the penitentiary for 15 years.
For four years I attended Thornridge High School and fell short of graduating by half an English credit so at the time of my arrest in 1996 I had no diploma or G.E.D. Determined to get anything I could out of a bad situation I signed up for GED classes immediately when I entered the Cook County Jail and during my prison sentence I took all of the educational courses that were available to me from 1997 until 2007. I am currently finishing my bachelors degree in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and set to graduate in the Spring of 2014.
While in prison I watched young men ages 17-21 enter this non-productive environment desensitized and hopelessly defeated so I, along with a few others, helped coach them back to their human sensitivities by teaching them the principles of decency. Out of this experience Determined To Be UpRight, a 501(c)(3) was born of which I am the Executive Director. Now that I have returned home a man whose fought the influences of prison culture for so long a time I make it my life’s work to help deter our young people from making those same devastating decisions that landed me in prison. By explaining to our youth through a method of descriptive language that enhances visual stimulation, my goal is to get them to picture in their minds life in prison so miserable and dreary it will make them reassess the bad decisions that they are about to make.
