Memory Matters

A few weeks ago, a new student started working with me in our afternoon GED class. “CJ” is a thin, gray-haired, sixty-two year old man who has spent the last thirty-eight years behind bars. He’s one of the “old time” inmates. Given a life sentence with the possibility of parole (odd, isn’t it, life but parole eligible), he is one of the approximately 7,000 Virginia inmates who are given perfunctory “parole hearings” annually. CJ’s annual review sheet shows his release date as “none.” Still, every year he appears before a parole examiner via Skype, answers a half dozen questions, and waits three weeks to receive his form letter denying him parole.

            CJ reads at less than a fourth grade level. His math skills are only somewhat better. But, a strange thing happens. I spend a fair amount of time reading to the guys in class. I’ll read a “social studies” piece about the Nazis and concentration camps. A day or two later, CJ will put down on paper with perfect recall every camp name, town, battle, General. It’s freaky to see, as if his mind hears the words and the spelling, then creates a photograph of it to be recreated by him on paper. He has amazing recall. “Larry, you said last Tuesday … “It’s a memory thing.

            I regularly read the story of Moses and the Exodus, the wandering through the wilderness by the people of Israel. I find comfort in knowing God never gave up on Moses. He had a plan for Moses’ life and neither his murder of an Egyptian, nor his fleeing Pharaoh to start a new life as a shepherd, would prevent God from carrying out His will.

            One message comes through over and over in the wanderings of the Israelites. “Remember,” They are told, “what your God has done for you.” It’s a message I keep close: “Remember; always remember.”

            I spent almost a year at a jail before transfer to DOC’s receiving unit. During that year I saw daylight exactly five times with three of those times being driven in a police car to court hearings. I arrived at receiving with a sickly pallor. I was a pale as I’d ever been. The first afternoon at receiving, my cell door opened for the daily thirty minute call. I walked out into the sun and heat of an August Virginia afternoon and saw the one-tenth of a mile track around the perimeter of the small rec yard. Without a second thought, I took off and began running. My chest heaved and my legs felt like rubber, but in just a few short laps it all came back, all the runs I’d had in my normal life. And, I ran and remembered running in the woods or around town or on the beach. It was as if the memories wired into my muscles reset the memories in my mind.

            “Remember.” So often guys in here try to forget who they were, where they are from. They create “new” persons who bear no resemblance to the real them. It’s so obvious: Ignore your past at your peril. In almost every letter he wrote to the small churches in Asia Minor, Paul reminded his flock where he came from. He never hid his truth, his life, because the miracle that was Paul’s life was his Damascus Epiphany. “Look where I was; look what I did; and then, God …”

            For a long time, I felt captive by my memories. I tried not to remember; fearful they would haunt my sleep. I would replay scenes over and over trying to understand why and hoping that “this broadcast” would lead to a different result. But, like that first run at receiving, my memories came back, but in a good way. I saw the joy and heartache as pieces of my life with many pieces still to come. And, as guys got to know me, they realized the man they saw wasn’t trying to be somebody he isn’t. As the great philosopher Popeye said, “I am what I am.” What I am is the product of a loving God who never gave up on me even as I went down some paths I shouldn’t have.

            “Remember.” Memory matters. Remember where you came from, who you are, and the path you followed to find your way home. It’s a lesson worth carrying in your heart in this place.

 

Getting to the Root of the Issue

This past week BET ran in its entirety Alex Haley’s “Roots”.  Originally broadcast in 1977, “Roots” was a transformative event in American television.  It told Haley’s family story from the capture of a young Gambian teenager, Kunta Kinte, sold into slavery before the American Revolution, through Haley’s own life as a successful author in the late twentieth century.  It was a moving, powerful story of a man’s search to find who he is and the relationship of that quest to this nation’s story.

I read “Roots” as a high school sophomore.  And, as a senior, I sat in my living room and watched Haley’s family saga unfold.  That Haley was criticized for “creating” dialog for his ancestors didn’t faze me.  The fact that I was a WASP with family roots traced back to the 1600s didn’t strike me as odd.  Like my own family’s story, Haley’s was as American as apple pie.

With that in mind, I watched dozens of young black men between the ages of twenty and thirty watch “Roots” and completely miss Haley’s point.  And, I became discouraged and troubled.

For starters, not one man in here had ever read Haley’s book.  “Roots” was a seminal publication.  Haley almost single handedly led Americans of all races, creeds, and national origins to discover who they were and how they tied into the quilt that is America.

As with most issues in here, they saw “Roots” purely in terms of black and white.  Slavery, oppression, failure.  “No wonder all of us are locked up.  They’re doing the same thing to us they did to Kunta.”

That’s a shame.  Prison breeds ignorance and victimization.  Too many black – and white – inmates see their situations one dimensionally.  And, that one dimension is race.  They miss the big picture.  The story of Kunta Kinte and all of Alex Haley’s other relatives is a story of triumph.  It is the Exodus story, a story of struggle and ultimate success.  And, it is a story that needs to be told especially here in prison.  Only then will the chains of ignorance be broken.

Empty

Easter, 2012.  Another “new” season and yet, so much this year is like the last three Easters.  All of them spent incarcerated; all of them spent removed from what I knew, what I cherished.

Each year as Easter approached I’d try and find meaning, try and understand why, why was I going through this, why had I lost so much, where was the loving God I prayed to each day in the midst of struggle?  On a simple level, I knew I was guilty.  I was paying the price, serving the sentence, imposed by a legitimate court following my guilty plea for the theft of two million dollars.  And, I knew I deserved to be punished.  I knew all along I was breaking the law.  I knew I’d lose my wife and friends.  I knew it all.  Yet, the punishment was worse than expected.  The swiftness and finality of rejection beyond what I could imagine.  I was paying more than a just price for my conduct.

I have felt so alone, so abandoned, rejected, and betrayed that no one, I feared could comprehend the depth of my suffering.  I would cry out, over and over at night alone in a stank cell, “help me, God.  Please help me.”  And my tears, my pleas would fall on deaf ears.  Everything I had feared my whole life, everything I believed about myself, that no one did love me, that everyone was dependent on me giving them something or they would abandon me, proved true.  It was, on more than one occasion almost too painful to bear.

On more than one occasion, especially in that first year of living in a jail cell with no physical contact with friends or family other than the all too infrequent thirty-minute “how are you doing?” through Plexiglas, I actively planned my own death.  Death, I believed, was better than prison, divorce, rejection.  I was empty.  Nothing could change my circumstances.  It is the worst position to be in.  Hopelessness kills.

Each year, as the Lenten season began, I vowed to renew.  I’d sacrifice some silly pleasure and devote myself to meditation and prayer.  I’d try and meet God halfway, try and understand what all of this meant, try and hope when every rational fiber in me said hope is gone.  Easter would arrive; I’d hear the words from my years of church attendance ring in my head.  “The Lord is Risen”, and the rote response, “He is Risen indeed”, and I would wait expectantly for the miracle to unfold.  I wanted, I craved that “come thou long expected Jesus” moment, the one that would restore me to family and friends.  It never came.

Tough.  Painful.  Lonely.  Survivable?  I wasn’t sure.  I cried to God, I argued with Him; I tried everything I knew and then I concluded nothing I could offer or promise would matter.   My life was beyond my control.  The only decision I really had to make was, do I hope or do I just go on. 

I thought of a man in Texas as I tried to figure out what to do.  He served over fifteen years in a Texas prison, convicted of murdering his wife.  He told anyone who would listen he wasn’t the killer.  He loved his wife, he told the jury.  But the evidence, the prosecution argued, was overwhelming.  It was cold-blooded murder.  Life in prison was his destiny. 

I heard Michael Morton speak about his time in maximum security, how close he came to breaking.  There was the time his son turned twelve and wrote him and announced “I don’t want to visit anymore”.  And the pain from that letter seared his heart.  It got worse.  At seventeen, his son wrote again.  “I’m going to be adopted” by the family raising him.  He was changing his name.  “My heart broke”, Morton said.  He gave up.

Then a miracle happened.  The Innocence Project heard about his case.  They petitioned the court to examine the prosecution’s file and discovered evidence exonerating Morton that was withheld at trial.  And then DNA evidence proved conclusively Morton was not the killer.  Another man, already doing life in Texas for murder, had killed his wife.

Michael Morton walked out of prison a free man.  But, he wasn’t truly free until he was able to forgive all those people who put him in that hell, all those people who abandoned him.  Nothing he went through made sense and yet, in God’s infinite wisdom it all made sense.  He had survived the valley, stared into the abyss, and was made whole.  More importantly, Michael Morton found peace.  He mattered and what he’d gone through mattered.

This Lenten season I embarked on another time of renewal and spiritual cleansing.  I gave up potato chips – my weakness in here, and coffee.   Each morning I began with reading one or two Psalms and an Old and New Testament lesson.  Ironically, three times I read Psalm 77, a Psalm of crying out to a silent God and then finding strength remembering His prior amazing deeds.

More ironically, I read the story of Joseph, sold into slavery, imprisoned for thirteen years, and then he saved both Egypt and the Israelites.  “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.”  I read the Exodus story.  God heard the cries of His people and sent Moses, a murderer of an Egyptian, abandoned by his own people, to go and announce to Pharaoh, “God says, Let my people go.”

And I listened as I prayed waiting for God to tell me what this all means.  I heard silence, but the silence gave me comfort.  I cried out some nights, I hurt, I was lonely, but somehow each morning the silence sustained me.  Did anyone know what I was going through?  Did anyone care?  I read the Gospels and saw it, the suffering, the rejection.  His twelve most trusted friends; one betrays him, ten run and hide, afraid for their own lives; only one – John – shows up at his execution.  He knew what I felt.  He knows what I’m going through.  He is with me.

This morning I awoke to a cloudless Easter morning.  I went out and ran.  Over and over I heard the words from the Gospel of Luke, “and they went to the tomb and it was empty.  And the angel of the Lord said, “He is not here.  He is Risen.”  I thought about that empty tomb.  I thought about all I’d been through these past four years.  And I realized I’d never felt closer to God than I did this morning.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.  I don’t know when this trial will end or what will be in my future.  I know what I pray for each day.  There is hope in suffering; there is hope in emptiness.  “The tomb is empty.”  There is hope.

The "F" Word

Words matter.  No doubt about it.  Words paint mental pictures for us.  They can sway our emotions, feeling heartbreak, joy or blinding anger.  Words are important.  And, many times it is the simplest words that carry the most power.  Think of Moses in Exodus, who asked God “who should I say sent me?”  Exodus records God’s simple, yet powerful words, “I am”. 

Hemingway once wrote a six word short story.  You can’t help but be moved by his words, “For sale.  Baby shoes.  Brand new.”  What, we wonder, is the story of the baby?  Why are the shoes for sale?  And our minds suddenly envision a grieving couple looking at an empty crib.  Baby blankets and sleepers and diapers folded neatly on the dresser.  But there is no child.  The baby has died.

Words matter.  Woody Guthrie soulfully singing “This land was made for you and me”.  Bob Dylan hoarsely calling out “The answer is blowin in the wind”.  Dr. King in his soulful, rich baritone calling forth “Free at last.  Free at last.  Thank God Almighty.  Free at last.”  Yes, words matter.

Words can lift up or bring down.  Perhaps that’s why both Solomon and James focused some attention on taming the tongue.  From my own life I know I have a gift for words.  Yet my gift can be a demon.  Too often I have said things in anger, in haste and hurt those near me.  Words are powerful.  Words can create or destroy.

Words.  For the young boy struggling with his sexual identity being called “fag” tears at his soul.  For the young learning disabled girl called “retard” her heart aches.  She feels loneliness and shame.  Words are a sword that cuts and slashes the fabric of our being.

I hear all kinds of words in here.  Each day is a cacophony of expletives.  I’ve heard every imaginable word to describe every race, every ethnicity.  And, I’ve heard words of hope, of longing, of regret, of comfort.

There is one word, the “F” word that matters most to the 2.3 million men and women in America’s prisons.  That word is “Felon” and the stigma and stain it carries does as much as anything to define which released person succeeds or fails.

As Margaret Love, former US Pardon Attorney recently noted,

“Felon is an ugly label that confirms the debased status that accompanies conviction.  It identifies a person as belonging to a class outside many protections of the law, someone who can be freely discriminated against, someone who exists at the margins of society…a legal outlaw and social outcast.  No passage of time,” she says, “or record of good works can erase the mark of Cain.”

Love notes that labeling a person convicted of a crime as a “felon” for life survives even “forgiveness”.  It is, she argues, an unhelpful label for people who have paid their debt to society.  It is also deeply unfair.

Until the late 20^th century prison, criminal justice was seen as a temporary period.  You broke the law, you went to jail.  But, upon your release you returned home.  However, in the last three decades America, under the dual mantras of “war on crime” and “tough on crime” made an industry out of penology.  And the law expanded with literally hundreds and thousands of new crimes created for social behaviors.  Punishment became key and what better way to punish than make a person wear the scarlet “F” for the rest of their life.  As scholar Nora Demleitner has pointed out, using the label “felon” creates a state of internal exile for those wearing the mark.  Today that label applies to more than 20 million Americans.

Labeling those who have paid their debt to society is directly contrary to the expressed goals and efforts to reduce the number of people in prison, and encourage those who are to rehabilitate and then re-enter society as productive citizens.  And, it mocks the myth of America as a land of second chances.

“Felon” arouses a sense of fear and loathing in “law-abiding” citizens.  Who would want to live – or work – with a “felon”?  In Virginia the fact that one is a felon can be used to deny a person employment and access to many grants, loans and benefits programs.  It shouldn’t be that way.  Love correctly argues that it is time to scrap the word “felon” and the equally reprehensible word “offender”.

In Virginia, over 90% of those currently behind bars will be released.  Governor McDonnell has correctly noted that any recidivism is too much recidivism.  He has made re-entry of released prisoners a cornerstone of his administration’s agenda.  But, it is idle words if the stigma of “felon” remains.

Words matter.   So do actions.  It is time to lay to rest “felon” from this nation’s lexicon.

Bob Sold Out, Martin and Moses Didn't

I read an article this week about Bob Dylan taking his tour on the road all the way to China. In order for Dylan to perform there he had to agree to strict government censorship of his songs. He agreed to abstain from performing “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “The Times They Are A Changing”, “Chimes of Freedom”, “Desolation Row”, and “Hard Rains Gonna Fall”. For the opportunity to finally perform in the world’s most populated country, Bob sold out.



What’s left to believe in now that Bob gave up his message for a show? Like the little boy who ran into “Shoeless Joe” Jackson on the street shortly after his lifetime ban from baseball was announced by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, I want to run up to Bob and cry out “say it ain’t so Bob; say it ain’t so”.


Selling out is a funny human trait. We abhor it, yet we tolerate it, we expect it and worst of all, we do it. In here, selling out comes in a couple of different forms: being a snitch is one noticeable one. Buddying up to the officers, ratting out a fellow inmate to make your life easier is wrong. The job of the prison staff is to maintain order and discipline. The job of the inmate is to do their sentence. It is not the inmate’s job to police the compound.


Another sell out is the way guys react to this environment. You should never get comfortable in here. Too many men in her consider this place home. This is not home. This is a government imposed penalty; a court sanctioned “time out” in effect. Everything an inmate is given was fought for and eventually conceded to as a means of maintaining security, discipline and control.


Prisons are in place to house inmates. They aren’t places for treatment or rehabilitation, at least not as they are currently structured. It is the responsibility of the incarcerated to do their sentence and to challenge the status quo, the “that’s just the way things are done” attitude that permeates DOC when “the way things are done” is unjust.


This past week the English students were assigned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”. Forty students; twenty-two African American, eighteen white and not one of them had ever been exposed to the letter before this week. As I’ve written before in this blog, there is perhaps no other single piece of writing by any American clergyman that as profoundly and persuasively spells out the moral obligation of Christians to challenge injustice.


To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law that is not rated in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”


I broke the law. The Commonwealth of Virginia has the absolute right to set a just punishment for my law breaking. The Commonwealth doe not; however, have the right to operate an unjust sentencing apparatus and prison system. And, there can be no mistaking this simple fact: Virginia’s prison system degrades the men and women it holds. The system is unjust.


“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”


What does Dr. King mean by that? He means that everyone, especially people of faith, should care how a state punishes those who break the law. It is the moral responsibility of every person of faith to ensure that justice is done – even to those who break the law.


As I said earlier, guys in here sell out regularly. They feel hopeless. They see a system that not only has deprived them of their basic freedom, but then continues to break them down. They believe the system is rigged, that the poor, the uneducated, the nonwhite, receive harsher more frequent sentences.


And they see me and they are amazed of the harsh, unjust sentence I received and they wonder “what did you do to deserve being treated like us?” And they ask “how can you still have hope?” Simple, I tell them. Because in a dark, lonely cell God saved my life and told me He loved me. And my God is a God of justice and He is stronger than any prison, any prejudice, any predicament.


The Apostle Paul commanded believers to:


“Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves are also in the body.”


Remember the prisoners –


If the Commonwealth takes your freedom then they must provide an adequate, nutritious diet;


The Commonwealth must provide adequate, competent medical care for inmates;


The Commonwealth must provide adequate personal mental health, drug and alcohol treatment programs for those in prison;


The Commonwealth must provide meaningful access to rehabilitative programs and give inmates a just opportunity for early release and restoration of their rights as citizens.


Disparity in sentencing must be eliminated.


This past week my Old Testament lessons were from the Exodus. As I sat here each morning I pondered the story. We all know the ending, but the story itself, how Moses – a murderer – went to the leader of a powerful nation and delivered a simple message, “God says let my people go”. The Egyptians, under their “rule of law” had every right to hold the Israelites. They scoffed at Moses. The Bible even goes so far as to say “Pharaoh’s heart harden”. Over and over, God sent signs. Over and over, Moses repeated “let my people go”.


This coming week, the Jewish inmates here will celebrate the Passover as a reminder that God is a God of justice. He demands the same from us.


Bob sold out. Martin and Moses didn’t and there are 40,000 incarcerated people in Virginia that can rest assured that justice will be done.


Remember the prisoners. Remember the Exodus. Remember justice.