How One Chicago Man Turned His Life Around In Prison
You can find Yohance Lacour’s podcast “You Didn’t See Nothin” here. Learn more about his luxury leather label YJL here.
TRANSCRIPT
From Chuck Taylors To Air Revolutions
One of Yohance Lacour’s earliest memories was thumbing through the Chicago phone book and looking at all the names.
I mean, the phone book was so, so thick. And so there were just thousands of thousands of thousands of names in these phonebooks…And so I can remember feeling like so many names in this book, so many names in this book. And all of these people are real human beings with real lives. And behind every one of these names is a story. But when you look at them, all is just compiled and pressed on top of each other they start to just feel random. And I remember feeling I didn't want to be a random entry in that phone book. I didn't want to just be another name. I wanted to stand out.
Initially Yohance stood out with his clothes. He was a sneakerhead long before the phrase was coined. Growing up in the 1980s on Chicago’s south side he coveted a pair of Air Jordans.
You know I had to wear Chuck Taylors and canvas sneakers for a long time. I couldn't afford Jordans when they first came out.
But those shoes became the incentive that drove him.
I started shoveling snow and raking leaves, everything but a lemonade stand. I'm dog walking. My shoes reflected my own entrepreneurial endeavors because my shoe game elevated as I grew older. Because as I grew older, I grew more entrepreneurial.
He looked at what hip hop artists wore but also prided himself on standing out from the crowd.
But there was something about the scarcity and how hard it was to find certain gym shoes back then… You had to know one little hole in the wall spot to go find certain shoes. Certain sneakers Foot Locker didn't have … I remember popping up with the all black Air Force Ones and it was like, ‘where did he find them?’ And my crew would lie to, you know, some of the other crews we came in contact with about where we got our shoes because we didn't want them to find them. There were so many beautiful shoes out, but once somebody else had them for me they were a little less valuable…So I think that my collection spoke to my desire to kind of stand out and to be unique and to do something that I've not seen done.
This is a story about the lengths Yohance was willing to go to stand out. This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
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From Book Smart To Street Smart
Yohance Lacour grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
It is the most integrated neighborhood on the south side. It's also, you know, a really quick walk from some of the most notorious and dangerous neighborhoods in the country. Actually, not just the city. I could escape a lot of the perils that the South Side presented if I chose to. But I was an outgoing kid and a curious kid, and I had family, close family members on the South side. The south side grounded me in the black American experience, the most segregated city in the country with most of our black population residing on the South side. There was a lot of examples of very deep poverty and there was a lot of examples, fewer, but still numerous examples of upwardly mobile folk, black folk who understood who they were and what they were, what they're up against.
Yohance’s dad was a professor and his mom was an elementary school teacher.
I mean she taught in the ghetto. She taught some very disadvantaged youngsters, victims of all types of stuff. And some of those kids would live with us. My mother is very religious, very much a Christian. My father, he's a brilliant guy, one of the smartest men I've known. I attribute my spirituality and thirst for black liberation to my mother. I attribute my quest for honesty and critical, deep thinking to my father.
Yohance was an inquisitive kid who loved to draw, read and write poetry and plays. He quickly became book smart as well as street smart.
I prided myself on knowing things. I wanted to have answers. I wanted to be able to explain things.
He liked being the guy people came to for answers. He had big dreams of influencing people to make great change.
If more people knew me and I knew more people and I still resonate and connect with more people, then I could lead people. I could influence people. And so me, you know, striving to figure out answers, you know, I felt who better to influence people than the guy with the answers? That is what precipitated and drove my hunger to develop those street smarts so that I could go there and apply book smarts and hopefully change the landscape of the streets. So between books, lots of street smarts, was constant and all the connection was what I would say, a revolutionary spirit.
In the eighth grad Yohance started smoking weed.
Me and my buddies would make trips to the projects to go buy weed. For whatever reason I wound up being the guy who would go into the building to make the buy. So it got to the point where, you know people would contact me early in the day, like, here's my $10. Here's my $20… And so I make those trips, right? Sometimes somebody says, ‘I’ll buy you a bag, if you go get a bag for me.’ Well, okay, that's an incentive…And so then I looked up and so now. You know, I got people buying. I'm starting to smoke for free … I looked up and I was a weed man.
In Yohance’s mind weed wasn’t a big deal.
Weed was like, not a drug to me. My father smoked weed and he was like I say, almost every man I've ever known like a harmless thing. But as the rest of America 30, 40 years later has come to look at it.
There’s Knowing The Risks And Knowing The Risks
But in the 1980s and 90s it was still illegal and he knew people who were arrested for selling. In fact one of his friends got caught and went to jail over a big score from Texas. Yohance had invested everything he saved in the deal and lost it all.
My buddy got bumped by the police. And so that sent me into a little funk because I had started doing well for myself and I went back to zero…and so you got all these people who still, ‘get off of this depressed name and get back in the game, get out there, do your thing.’ And I'm like, ‘yeah, you're right.’ And so I'm like, okay, let me let me start fresh…at that point I'm thinking like like a marketing specialist. And so I came up with this number, um. Well, the last four digits spelled W-E-E-D …that just turned the game on its head and I you know I was on the way more to family and friends after that.
Word was out who to go to for weed. Money started to pour in, and Yohance was able to buy nicer shoes, live in a nicer place, and drive a nicer car.
But everything for Yohance was about to change. In 2002 when he was 29, he and his girlfriend had a daughter.
I wanted a child for selfish reasons, to kind of slow me down. I felt a little bit out of control.
His daughter spent most of her time with Yohance, because his line of work made for a more flexible schedule, and her mother had an 8-5 job.
It made me look at relationships differently, life differently, women differently, love differently.
Yohance got away with selling weed for about a decade. Once he became the “weed man,” many people assumed he could get them other stuff, harder stuff. And he liked being their go to guy.
It was like, ‘you know anybody who got some coke?’...And at this point it was like, ‘oh, yeah, actually, I do.’ Once you're selling weed, while it's illegal, you are in the underworld now. And the weed guy often supplies the harder drug sellers with their weed ... I sold weed to the guys who sold Coke. I sold weed to the guys who sold heroin.
In the early 2000s Yohance started hearing about people dying from heroin overdoses, and sellers charged with their murder.
I was selling large quantities. I wasn't selling to heroin users. I was selling to other suppliers who would sell to other suppliers who would sell to end users. But, I didn't know what suppliers may be putting something extra of some sort to the drug.
In 2007 Yohance and his best friend became partners and wound up in over their heads.
He developed some relationships with some pretty, pretty powerful guys in the street. I had a plan to get in and get out to get a certain sum of money... And I just thought that I could pull it off. I trusted who we were dealing with. That was one of my large mistakes. But knowing something and going through something is just…once it became real, it was just another another monster.
Yohance and his buddy supplied drugs for some guys in St. Louis, who got caught.
‘Then Everything Changed’
One morning Yohance was taking his five-year-old daughter to school…
So as we're walking to the car, I hear, ‘Mr. Lacour,’ which is like, what? Who’s calling me Mr. Lacour? And I turn around, and it's, you know, 10 or 12 guys in the FBI DEA jackets the blue and yellow jackets. You know, my heart kind of dropped. I'm with my daughter. I didn’t panic, but I'm very worried at this point because I can't imagine a world where I get to leave here and with my daughter … I couldn't have imagined letting police take my daughter from me. Letting white men, white policemen, for that matter, take my daughter from me.
When Yohance refused to rat anyone else out, the feds had no choice but to release him that day. Less than a week later the feds from Missouri made the official indictment and Yohance was arrested.
And that was just a day that I realized that life had changed forever.
Yohance was sentenced to 10 years in prison. One of the first things he had to do was hand over his personal belongings including his shoes. In their place he was issued plain canvas slip ons. Of course it wasn’t just the prison shoes…
It's another world. I mean when you're in there, you talk about everybody who's outside of there as the world. I can't wait to get back to the world or… I was just talking to somebody in the world … because you’re a world apart. We watched people be killed and stabbed to death. You’re away from women and children, which just makes it very inhuman… It was tough to disappoint my mother. It was tough to, you know, watch my father feel like he failed. That was hard. But the hardest thing was being away from my daughter and having my relationship with her interrupted and derailed. I was with my daughter every day for five years. She was only five years old. I felt like I wasn’t all she had. Thank God. I felt like I was I felt like she was all I had. She was my best friend.
Yohance says he could’ve easily continued a life of crime in prison.
I had every opportunity, but just because of the relationships I developed and the respect that I had in prison. You know, for the longest, the staff and the guards actually swore I was part of some illegal activities in prison because of how much respect I commanded from so many of the men. You know I had opportunities to break the law in there. People sell drugs in prison.
But Yohance knew it was time for a change.
I often referred to as the darkest part of time in my life. But it was in that darkness that so much was illuminated for me. And it was in that darkness that I realized that I had another shot at life.
It started small with the little decisions Yohance made. Some of the inmates could get mp3 players. Yohance chose very carefully what music to download.
And I can remember intentionally not downloading certain artists and certain songs that I loved and listened to in the world because of how heavily I won't say promoted, but how heavily they celebrated the life I had lived. There were so many rappers and rap songs that kind of provided the theme song for street hustlers. There's something bigger about those lyrics and those songs that also just speaks to the underdog and making something from nothing and finding a way out of poverty and bucking the system. Right. I love those songs. But I found myself like, ‘you know what? I'm not going to listen to that because if I listen to that.’ It can put me in that place, you know, run the risk of kind of being emotionally triggered and put in that place where I might consider taking advantage of some of the opportunities that they laid in front of me in prison. I was very intentional about standing my ground.
Yohance had an opportunity to transfer to another prison in Atlanta that was a lot more laid back.
… a much more relaxed place where, you know, a lot of folks was bribing police. But I remember thinking if I go there and I get that type of freedom, same way with what I thought would happen if I sold drugs behind those walls. If I get away with breaking the law in the police’s house, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I would get back to the real world and break the law. I didn’t even want to build that energy.
Going to prison, losing the opportunity to see his daughter everyday forced Yohance to make the conscious decision to change his life.
The prison taught inmates to make shoes and profited from their labor. But Yohance found he enjoyed leather work and making bags from the scraps, and started to think maybe he could develop this new skill and even build a career.
So, yeah, I turned my life around in prison when I decided to just focus on leather work and writing and only think about what I could do legally and constructively when I got out. There's something about making something from nothing.Right? Which is also a through line between hustling and creative arts, right? Making something out of nothing, you know, starting setting out to do something, to make something. And you look up, and you got something that didn't exist. That's the nature of the hustle. You know I built a business that didn't exist. … and it was therapeutic. It was therapeutic. It was an escape from some of the madness in prison sewing thread with two needles through hand punched holes.
From Prison Shoes To Redemption Shoes
Yohance now had plenty of time to look back on his life and how he wound up there in prison.
The vast majority of guys who get to selling drugs don't do well. I did very well. I created a life for myself in the streets through illegal activity… There are people who were depending on me for product because of their own habits so you're part of an ecosystem that is really hard to remove yourself from. That's why so many people say the only way it goes is the cemetery or the prisons because very few people at a certain level can just walk away from it. So when I was arrested, when I was locked up, it was like, okay, this is fucked up right? But I can kind of breathe in a different kind of way because all of those stresses were lifted off me. I didn't have to look over my shoulder for the police anymore. That kind of burden was lifted, especially when I realized I'm done. Because I also realize in that moment I'm not doing this shit again.
He thought back to the phone book and knew he still had a chance to become the outstanding person he always wanted to be.
I wasn't that kind of typical drug dealer, prison bound guy. I had a lot of buddies in there who, you know, they planned. They're really just planning on how they were going to sell drugs differently and not planning on doing something different. But that's because they don’t know about anything different…So I already knew I had a support system and a set of skills and access to sets of information that can operate as currency for me … I was very intentional about creating a new mindset for myself that would not rely or even look to illegal activity to sustain. So that already kind of separated me from the pack in there. But I also knew that I wanted to come out and make a difference.
Repairing And Redeeming
When Yohance got out of prison, his daughter was just starting high school and she was struggling academically.
It was tough. When I left her academic situation plummeted. Even her skills, the rate of growth, it's slowed. And so when I came home, I wanted to you know, I felt like I got to get her caught up in school.
He decided to home school her to get her caught up.
I had the best intentions. I made the mistake of trying to create a student- teacher relationship when I had and restored a daddy-daughter relationship. And so it was a wildly unsuccessful, um. And it might have driven an even bigger wedge between us.
She had visited Yohance a few times while he was in prison, but it wasn’t enough to foster and maintain their relationship. So when he got out, he knew he had some work to do.
I just had to stay the course and be determined in the face of her unwillingness and sometimes resentment. I had to just kind of hold fast and understand, you know, that she while she might have been having the wrong idea about me, it wasn't her fault. So it was tough. But today, we're still not where we were when I left. But we're so much better than where we were when I came home.
Yohance set about trying to get a legal job writing or doing leather work. That’s when he met Jamie Kelvin, the founder of the Invisible Institute.
I was just trying to see if he knew anybody in our local newspaper who would hire me to edit classifieds, just do anything. He didn't. But what he did have for me was a different opportunity. He asked me, you know, ‘what is your background? What do you like to write about? What have you written about?’
The two of them brainstormed until they came up with the idea for the podcast “You Didn’t See Nothin’” and introduced Yohance to investigative journalism.
CLIP FROM “YOU DIDN’T SEE NOTHIN” TRAILER
He also took a class on shoemaking.
I liken my my shoemaking to soul food, right? Slaves were given scraps and given the shit that you know slave owners didn't want. And you know thought to be the garbage of parts of the animals they didn’t want and whipped wonders up with them. Right. And created delicacies with them. You talk about making something out of nothing.
Each pair is crafted with love and given a name. His favorite is called Redemption. It’s a high top performance sneaker with an oversized cuff and tongue. The description says, ‘this silhouette is for those who have fallen hard only to come back harder.’
The Redemptions were kind of inspired in part by my love for the Revolution gym shoe the Air Revolution…Before there can be revolution, there has to be redemption for men like me. Before we can figure out how to change the world, we have to be reintroduced and accepted by some part of the world. The idea behind that Redemption sneaker is just that it's me getting a second start, whether it's given to me or whether I take it.
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
