Contra Mundum

You’ll have to pardon me some in this piece, but I’ve been thinking a great deal about all that’s taken place the last 5 ½ years; where I was, to where I am, to where I’m headed. And sometimes those thoughts have just rambled on their own, rushing over me with memories. I’ll sit there and think, “that really happened,” and look and see where I am now and wonder how did I not have the trust to believe.

            Believe. I used to roll my eyes when I’d hear someone at church ask to hear another worshiper’s “faith” story. It was always when we’d start with a new class of elders – good old Presbyterian bureaucracy – and I’d listen to someone thirty years my senior drone on about their parents’ church and their first Bible and I’d think “faith stories,” those don’t exist anymore. They ended with Joseph, and Daniel, and Paul. After all, I was master of my own future. Life was good – on the outside anyway – and appearances mattered.

            Early on at the jail, as my life was spinning out of control (as if my former life was ever really in control) I came across Charles Colson’s book, “Who Speaks for God.” Colson was one of the most powerful – and feared – members of Nixon’s inner Whitehouse circle. He was a brilliant lawyer. He was also ruthless, cunning, and not prone to tolerate dissent. Colson met his downfall in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. He was convicted in Federal Court for his role in that scandal and sent to prison. Everything that he had worked for was stripped from him.

            I read Colson’s book feeling hopeless and lost. I was in the initial weeks of the total collapse of my life. I didn’t think I could survive a day, let alone the rest of my life, with the pain and guilt of the past and fear of the future overwhelming me in that dirty cell. And I tried to focus on something Colson wrote in that book, something – a little thread – to help me hang on. You see, Colson found God at his worst moment. God was never lost, he said. It was Colson who had been lost. He wrote these words:

            “I had spent my first 40 years seeking the whole world to the neglect of my soul. But what I couldn’t find in my quest for power and success – that is, true security and meaning – I discovered in prison where all worldly props had been stripped away. And by God’s grace, I lost my life in order that I might find true life in Christ.”

            I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There was no way Colson could mean what he wrote. It made no sense. I knew his story, knew how he left prison and founded “Prison Fellowship” and devoted the remainder of his life to spreading the message of God’s power and love in all circumstances, but there was no way he honestly believed what he wrote.

            A few quick stories. The lawyer.  I have a friend – that word doesn’t begin to describe him – who I called from the jail moments after my arrest. He’s a lawyer and jeopardized his own career by staying by me through those first difficult months. He came to the jail every day for the first three months and then four or five times a week thereafter just to check on me. He asked his minister to visit me at my worst when my own minister refused to “get involved.”

            The minister.  So an Episcopal minister shows up to meet with me and we’re talking through Plexiglas – that’s the way visits are at the jail. And I lose it. I’m a mess, sobbing, wishing I was dead but knowing I can’t be since I’d made a pact with God to “see this through” (whatever that meant. I really hadn’t given it much thought). He listened to me and then didn’t offer me any cookie-cutter prayer or syrupy words of encouragement. He just simply said “God is with you, Larry,” and he asked if he could return for more visits.

            That minister – a man I never would have even met but for my lawyer friend and my own church’s abandonment of me – has become a close friend. He visited me at the receiving center, he’s come out here, and he has led the charge to get me released early.

He is like family which brings me to ...

The relative. My cousin and her husband, a successful couple living in Northern Virginia learn I was arrested. Over Thanksgiving – my first and worst Thanksgiving while locked up – I received a simple “thinking of you” card from them. “We are here for you,” the note said. Two months later, I was called to the visitation room. There again, through the dirty Plexiglas, I saw them. I was as pale as you can be from a lack of sunlight in six months, and I was scared, and lonely, and frankly tired of it all. And yet, after that visit I wrote in my journal something I hadn’t written before that day; I wrote, “I think all this will work out.”

            Five and a half years. I’ve been let down by people in here and out there and I have seen horrendous violence and the waste of many lives. Yet, there are the other moments, like when the big, black kid at the jail bear-hugged me and kept saying over and over “we did it!” when he passed his high school equivalency test. There’s my friendship with DC, a man who forty years ago was as notorious as any inmate in the Virginia prison system. Today, he is one of the kindest, most decent men I’ve ever met. I trust DC. I don’t say that very often in here. And, I feel a kinship to him and a brotherly love I didn’t think possible in the confines of prison.

            Chuck Colson kept a diary of his time behind bars. He wrote the following insightful thoughts early in his incarceration:

            “This is no country club … It is a prison and the conditions are really worse than I expected … there is everything here from lifelong, hardened criminals to young drug offenders.

            The reason I am glad to be here, however, is the sudden realization of how many needs there are here … My heart has ached for so many while I am here; more important, when I leave I hope I can do something about the concept of rehabilitation and punishment. All its high sounding names – deterrence, rehabilitation – are untrue. If it is punishment, so be it; but maybe it is more humane to whip a man’s body than destroy his soul slowly.”

            He concluded with these words:

            “I have an obligation to try to improve the fate and circumstances of man in this plight … I am convinced the Lord has planned this for me and will use me for His purpose.”

            There is a simple story in John’s Gospel about Jesus healing a young, blind man. Prior to the healing, the discussion centers on the cause of the man’s blindness. “Is it the result of his parents’ sin or his?” the disciples ask. “Neither,” comes Jesus’s reply. “It was so the works of God might be displayed in him.” And with those words Jesus gave the young man his sight. Those in power didn’t understand who did this; how could it be, they wondered. And they questioned the man about the “healer.” His answer comes to me often: “All I know is once I was blind and now I see.”

            “Contra Mundum” – “against the world” – it was the great Latin rallying cry of the fourth century Christian theologian Athanasius. It means to stand for Christ against the powers of the world and to understand that God’s ways are different. I see now why God has so long spoken through the perspective of the powerless, why He makes special demands on His people to care for the oppressed, sick, and suffering. Justice does not devolve from human institutions and laws but in the righteousness of God and His Word.

            That may sound all fanciful and self-delusional, but it simply means it is wiser to take refuge in the Lord than any earthly prince.

            What does all that mean? It means even when we get off course, God is in control. It means at my worst, God was at His best. It means that there is a reason for all this. As Bob Dylan sang in “My Back Pages,” “I once was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” The visits, the Bible coming from my friend Charlie, being befriended by an Episcopal minister, the cards from “Martha,” and even my divorce, they happened to put me where I am today in relation to my God. Or, as the young man told the Pharisees, “I was blind and now I see.”

            It is the season of Lent, preparation for Easter, and for the first time in six years I didn’t give up something like coffee or chips. Instead, I’m reading a treatise on the 91^st Psalm and a study of the Book of James. It is hard to fathom any sacrifice I could make worthy of what God has done for me.

            What does this have to do with prison? Probably nothing, but nothing happens by coincidence. I look back over these past 5 ½ years and see what Chuck Colson meant. Like Paul being blinded on the road to Damascus and the scales suddenly falling from his eyes and he saw, I see what it means. Or, as Mr. Colson so eloquently put it,

            “It is in God’s timing, not ours. And it is the result of His sovereign will, not of any magic wand we may think we wield.”

            This chapter of my life will someday come to an end and a new one will begin and the lessons of this chapter, the understanding of contra mundum will carry forward. And I don’t think the Circuit Court judge who sentenced me had any idea what God would do for me.

            

Ignoring James

A friend pointed out the other day that I seem to focus a good deal of attention on the New Testament Book of James. I thought about her comment a few minutes and realized she was right. James wrote a straight-forward, short letter to believers that says, “You want to call yourselves followers of the Risen Christ, then do this …” He doesn’t pull punches. He tells his readers there will be trials, tough times, pain and difficulty, but you go forward, “consider it all joy …” because these tests produce endurance. I still remember the first time I read those words when everything (no exaggeration, I mean everything) was lost. James’s words couldn’t be any clearer, I thought to myself sitting in that cell at the jail. Suck it up, tough it out, endure, persevere, overcome … have faith.

James is so blunt. Perhaps that comes from being the Lord’s half-brother (think about that: “Mom always treats you better … like you’re God!”); or perhaps James just understands that to be a believer you can’t just “talk the talk.” No, you have to “walk the walk.” As he puts it, “But prove yourself doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.” I thought about those words the other afternoon as I once again saw the hypocrisy in our politicians’ words.

“Obama would rather spend money on food stamps than a strong military.” Those were the words put forth by former Vice-President Dick Cheney reacting to budgets and troop reductions in the Pentagon proposed by the Obama Administration. And, I thought of my Bible reading and remembered a number of instances where Jesus fed the masses and ministered to the poor. I couldn’t think of a single instance where the Savior told his followers to spend more on weapons. I thought about the Book of Judges’ Story of Gideon. How God told him to only use 300 soldiers, not 10,000, so that God could show by His power our enemies are vanquished. We profess we are a Christian nation yet we somehow think by our own hand, our own might, our military strength we live free. We are deluding ourselves. James reminds us to care for “the widows and orphans.” We are judged by our compassion and our mercy, not our human might.

Then there was the member of the Virginia House of Delegates who recently commented on the failure of a bill that would have drastically cut phone rates for inmates. Phone call rates for those behind bars – and their families – are beyond usurious. A twenty-minute, in-state call from the facility can run over $15.00. Why? Because the state signs exclusive, kickback contracts with one of three “corrections telephone system providers.” That provider then kicks back a percentage of the annual revenue to the state. Virginia derives $3 million from their sweetheart deal with CTL.

What did this politician say when pressed for comment on a bill that would have 1. made phone rates in prisons and jails the same as competitive rates on the streets, or 2. specifically earmark all monies “earned” by the state under the CTL contract for prison education and re-entry? He said, “They broke the law, they can pay the higher rates.”

Really? Let’s see … there are thousands of men and women sitting in jail cells who have not yet been convicted of anything. And for those who are convicted, over 90% will return to their communities. Most are from poor families (I know this will come as a shock to the delegate, but income disparity, education level, and race play significant rules in who ends up in prison). The Commonwealth talks out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to prepare incarcerated men and women for release and reintegration in their communities. And they know family connections are a major factor in a released offender’s success. On the other hand, the state has in place policies which bleed poor families. Outrageous phone rates lead to less family contact.

But this isn’t about economics; it’s about hypocrisy and “being a doer” of the world. This same delegate talks about the push toward marriage rights for gays as an affront to what God believes marriage should be. Well, here’s the thing about tossing your alleged Christian views into the mix. Most of the time, your views line you up with the Pharisees, not Jesus. I’d like the delegate to point out any case in the New Testament where Jesus turned his back on those who were different. He didn’t. In fact, he drew the outcasts closer. It was the Samaritan woman whom He explained to about the “water of life.” The lepers, the mentally ill, the blind and deaf were made whole. It was a law-breaker (the adulterous woman) through whom Jesus taught us to avoid judgment because in God’s eyes, we are all sinners. And, it was the thief on the cross who full of remorse for his wrongdoing was given eternal life.

We live in a world that professes one thing and does another. Jesus never denied aid to a hurting person based on their race, creed, nationality, or sexual orientation. Jesus never sided with those living by their definition of the law; He sided with those living the law in their hearts. And so it goes today. Are we really much different from Palestine in AD 30?

“If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in the mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.”

James was pretty clear with his admonitions to believers. Seems like its time we start paying attention to what he said.

Herman, Jo Pa and Us

Yes, we have cable connections at our beds.  Most guys have TV’s:  clear plastic, 13 inch color sets (remotes are prohibited) that cost over $200.00 but can be purchased in catalogs for $70.00 (electronics are covered by the exclusive contract DOC has with Keefe.  Inmates – just as with commissary, phone calls, and CDs – pay exorbitant mark ups for “personal property”.  And most guys do their time watching TV – a lot of it.

Sports, as you can imagine, dominates TV watching in here (closely followed by BET and Univision (the Spanish network that specializes in beautiful women 24/7).  This past week all eyes were focused on two huge scandals and news and sports converged into a perfect storm of opinions.  Herman Cain, black Republican candidate for President, has been dogged over allegations brought by four white women that years ago he sexually harassed them.  As that story swirled around the building with debates over the veracity of the accusers’ stories and underlying racial component to it, the tragedy that has become Penn State broke.

Penn State:  Football, Jo Pa and pedophilia.  Newscasters flocking to “Happy Valley” to “report” (I use that word tongue in cheek) every scurrilous detail.  With self-righteous indignation, talking heads tell the viewers exactly what the proper moral response should have been from Joe Paterno, the athletic director, the grad assistant and everyone else involved.

And the news reporters:  what must Edward R. Murrow be thinking?  They report as “breaking news” every lurid tidbit they can find.  Each mention of “anal penetration” brings another spike in their Network’s Neilsen rating.  And the notion of innocent until proven guilty?  “Screw that.  We can speculate why Sandusky wasn’t offered a head coaching job anywhere. “

Meanwhile, as their grandfatherly head coach is forced out, Penn State students gather and chant, “Jo Pa” until the cameras show up and the night mixes with alcohol and anger and cars are turned over and windows broken.  All the while we sit in our prison dorm and watch and argue.

Herman Cain.  You want black inmates to feel sympathy for a Republican, run the stories the way they’ve come out about Cain.  The entire episode smacks of the century old fears that black men are hypersexual.  The fact that the black man in question is a conservative Republican only adds to the feeding frenzy.

Penn State.  Regular inmates hate sex offenders, especially pedophiles.  Though this – and all compounds – have their share of them, they survive in prison under the constant fear their crimes will be found out.  If my crime and education carry special status with respect and admiration, theirs is at the opposite end of the spectrum.  At higher level facilities child sex offenders are routinely raped, beaten and murdered.  They spend their bids in “pc” – protective custody – for fear of what the general prison population would do to them.

Here, they are taunted (“diaper sniper”, “clown hands”), pushed around and robbed.  A year ago I wrote a blog detailing my ambivalence dealing with sex offenders.  How, I wondered, do I meet my Christian duty to be merciful with my disgust over a man who would find sexual release with a child?  I reached an uneasy equilibrium, a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach that allowed me to treat each man the same, to not pass judgment.  And then came Penn State. 

Is Sandusky guilty?  I don’t know.  Should Joe Paterno morally have done more?  I don’t know all the details.  I know this – in a frenzy to get ratings our “Fourth Estate” has sold their souls and we collectively encourage it each time we buy into the “breaking news” of the day mantra.

I know one other thing.  The New Testament Book of James (my favorite Book in the Bible) details in five chapters Christian discipleship.  It is not an easy path.  As I listened to the debates in here unfold about Herman Cain, Penn State and Joe Paterno; one admonition from James kept replaying in my mind:  “mercy triumphs over judgment.”  Wise words if ever there were any.

And for all those who “know” precisely what Herman Cain did and what Joe Paterno should have done Rudyard Kipling said it best:

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

to serve your turn long after they are gone
And so hold on when there nothing in you
except the will which says to them:  Hold on.”

A Response to Governor McDonnell

Dear Governor:

I intently read your office press release concerning recent legislation you signed to push your prisoner re-entry initiative forward (http://www.alexandrianews.org/2011/06/governor-mcdonnell-signs-prisoner-re-entry-legislation/).  I also read your online op-ed piece (http://www.riponsociety.org/112bm.htm) touting prisoner re-entry which appeared on the pages of “The Ripon Forum”.  Ironically, I had to wait until someone on the street sent copies of these to me.  Even though I serve as an academic aide in one of your re-entry pilot programs – this one training inmates in computers – we aren’t given access to the Internet.

Like the folks in Syria and Libya, I am one of approximately 40,000 incarcerated persons in a Virginia prison yearning for freedom.  Like those people in the heart of “the Arab Spring”, I am cut off electronically from the outside world.  And like those people, I hear politicians speak and write each day in lofty platitudes about “freedom” and “second chances”.  But, as my Grandfather used to say “actions speak louder than words”.  You talk a good game Governor.  But, as you will see below, there’s no action behind your words.  If you really do believe “everyone deserves a second chance”, then cut the bs.  Stop the quick campaign slogan gimmicks about “public safety” which have absolutely nothing to do with the operation of prisons or the failures of “truth in sentencing” laws which instead just lead to a bloated, money down the drain, criminal justice bureaucracy that cannot be sustained. The legislation you recently signed will do nothing to lower recidivism rates in the Commonwealth.  The legislation, simply put, doesn’t address why some men and women commit crimes, nor does it address the attitude most pervasive in here:  the system isn’t fair.

Start with your comments about “truth in sentencing” and Virginia’s abolition of parole.  Statistics can be used to skew the truth.  It’s obvious you know that.  Yes, Virginia – per the recent Pew Center study – has the seventh lowest recidivism rate in the country.  But, the rate was actually lower when parole was in place.  As for “truth in sentencing” you know better than anyone the vast majority of states have adopted the same laws.  Why then are non-violent felons sentenced to substantially shorter sentences in the neighboring states of Maryland and North Carolina?  Why does the state most comparable to Virginia in population – Massachusetts – have about 11,000 inmates while Virginia has 40,000?

The reality of truth in sentencing is there is no truth to it.  Real examples for you to ponder:

·         A woman steals $2.3 million from a Norfolk business and gets 28 months. 

·         A Republican political hack steals $4 million in public funds and has a conviction for public indecency on his record (you know the case Governor.  When you were Virginia’s AG the investigation came across your desk and suddenly got misfiled) gets 10 years.

·         An employee in Fairfax steals almost $2 million, causing the company to lay people off.  He gets 4 years. 

·         I steal $2.1 million over twelve years; pay back over one third prior to sentencing, cooperate fully and accept responsibility for my actions and get 15 years.  

Sadly, the examples I just set out happen every day.  It’s called sentence disparity, Governor.  We sentence petty drug dealers to more time than child pornographers.  My sentence is higher than the dozens of child sex offenders I’m doing time with.

“Truth in sentencing” doesn’t exist.  Your sentence is dependent on the harshness of the judge, the case load of the prosecutor’s office, publicity surrounding your case, and the quality of your defense attorney.  What the abolition of parole and “tough on crime” rhetoric has led to is a prison system at 137% bed capacity, spending for DOC at over $1 billion a year, with no lessening of the recidivism rate, and those beds filled primarily by non-violent felons.  The “truth” Governor:  this isn’t about public safety; it’s about justice and economics.

Your press release and op-ed tout the work your Department of Corrections is doing to turn inmate lives around.  Have you ever been to one of Virginia’s prisons?  Go to C3, Powhatan Receiving Unit.  This time of the year the 10 X 6 cells hit 95°.  Chances are you’ll be put in with a sociopathic gangbanger who’s killed two men already for wearing rival colors.  Maybe, you’ll get to do time with a child molester who’ll be interested in pictures of your kids.  Yes, Governor, that’s your DOC receiving unit.  And that doesn’t include the toilet leaking, the roaches and ants crawling over everything.  That’s the system you’re overseeing Governor and it is broken, unyielding and cruel.  And Sir, as Governor, you are responsible for it.

I can’t speak for all the incarcerated, but to a man, the ones I have talked to think you’re just another politician feeding the public a cartload of manure.  “He doesn’t care about us” is the most common refrain I hear in this place.  Imagine trying to convince men that you really are sincere.  I’m labeled a hopeless optimistic.  “These guys say this all the time when they’re in office, but nothin’ changes.”  Makes me feel like a young Natalie Wood in “Miracle on 34^th Street”.  See Governor, one thing this experience has taught me is, we’re lost without hope.  So I believe in you.  “I believe.  I know it’s silly, but I believe.”

Instead of travelling all over Europe, drive out to Lunenburg and talk to a few of us.  We’re the guys who are spearheading the pilot IT Certification program for the forty at risk guys.  You may not like what you hear from us, but it’ll be a damn sight more honest and on point than what your own people are telling you.

For example, at this facility we have a college dorm with seven academic aides and almost eighty students.  Ask any teacher who comes “behind the walls” and they’ll tell you the same thing:  these guys have a hunger, a desire, to learn that isn’t seen on the street.  That desire is what motivates me to work my regular thirty hours a week as an adult basic education aide and then put in twice that amount of time – without pay – to tutor these guys in English, History, Philosophy, computer and a creative writing program.

This program, partnered with Goodwill (God bless those people) and Southside Community College can be a model for prison education around the country.  What does DOC do?  They assign a head warden here who said in a meeting to these college students “I don’t know much about this college re-entry program”.  Then, DOC puts an aggressive Assistant Warden in place who is openly opposed to the program.  His own officers have warned men in the college building “he wants us to come down on you.  He hates the building and all it stands for”.

So Governor, you can talk about re-entry all you want, but if your people don’t buy in, it’s doomed from the start.

And then, there’s early release.  You know why inmates don’t believe in you?  Because you keep peddling the false notion that longer sentences work.  They don’t.  Length of sentence bears absolutely no correlation to crime rate or recidivism rate.

What does work?  How about this.  Tie good time/early release into educational, vocational and rehabilitative programs.  An inmate who actively works at change and accepts responsibility for their crime should get out early, say after 25% to 50% of their sentence is served.

The fundamental flaw in your logic is you think making a criminal do a long prison sentence will make them feel more remorse and responsibility.  They’ll come out better citizens.  That Sir is backward.  The longer a person stays in prison, the more bitterness is created.  Every day in here is a day to lose hope.  You want prisons to be places of rehabilitation and restoration?  Turn the system on its head.

Governor, you talk a great deal about your faith.  The Book of James reminds us of two significant points:  faith without action is not faith and God’s judgment will be merciless on those who fail to show mercy.  Jesus dined with the prostitutes and the tax collectors.  If He were here, He’d come out to Lunenburg.  He also told the adulteress – seeing her remorse – “I forgive you.  Go and sin no more.”  He didn’t set an 85% minimum sentence on her.  That should be the model we follow for incarceration.