The Problem is Here

A man I admire recently retired. He came from humble circumstances, a blue-collar family in New Jersey. He was the first in his family to go to college using his basketball skills to gain a scholarship. He turned that opportunity into a vocation. He earned additional degrees, became a basketball coach to team after team of inner-city black kids, and eventually rose to the level of college President. And he never forgot; he never forgot that education could lift even the most impoverished. There was a second lesson he knew from his life of hard knocks: you can’t ever quit. No matter how badly the odds seem against you, you don’t quit. You play on.

            This man’s mission, his passion, became delivering education to those normally not given easy access. As long as he was president, the underclasses, the disadvantaged, the disconnected, would have a chance to go to college. He even included the incarcerated. “They want to punish you. They want you to suffer. All the talk about corrections, about punishment fitting the crime, isn’t what’s behind this. You get your degrees. You leave here and be the men I know you can be. You don’t quit; you show them.”

            I listened as this remarkable man spoke to a hushed classroom full of students, our students “here,” in this place. It was his vision that started and moved this program forward. It always was an uphill battle. No state money; no public support; no assistance from the powers that be in Richmond; even worse treatment from some of the officers who work here. After all, successful offenders don’t reoffend. Less prisoners means less prisons which means less guard jobs.

            We had a young woman involved in the college program this summer. She’s a visiting scholar from a liberal arts college on the west coast and she read about “here” and wanted to see it for herself. And as she sat in the classes and listened to the discussions and read their words she wanted to let the world know that this matters; in here matters; these men and their lives and their futures matter.

            I was interviewed the other day by this young scholar. She remarked how across the board the students “look up” to me.” They respect you and have great affinity for you,” she said. And, I choked up and told her about my failure as a father and how I came here and was asked to join this program to teach, and tutor, and mentor and how the judge and all those who judged me and sent me away to suffer and rue what had become of my life had failed. I turned 55 the week before and I told her I kept hearing David’s words in Psalm 37.

            “I have been young, and now am old;

            Yet, I have not seen the righteous forsaken,

            Nor his descendants begging bread …   

                     ‘

            There was a professor working in here this summer. She is conservative, Republican, a Fox News watcher. And her experiences in here have, as she told the class, caused her to look at what she took as Gospel; there are consequences for a wrong, but should the consequences never cease? Should you pay forever? That’s the problem in “here” and every time someone from out there comes in they see it.

            I was like that professor. I never met a Republican, a conservative, I didn’t like. And I was sure I knew everything about right and wrong; life wasn’t hued, it was black and white.

            “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord

            And He delights in his way.

            Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down;

            For the Lord upholds him with His hand.”

            The professor wants to return to teach here again because this matters. She’s right. As I told the young scholar interviewing me, I thought I was being sent to prison to suffer and die ashamed. Instead I’ve learned to live.

            Here are a few facts from around the country to consider. It costs a student $37,000 for tuition at Princeton; it costs New Jersey $44,000 to keep a person in a state prison for one year. Think Virginia’s any different? Instate tuition averages $14,000. It costs the commonwealth $26,000 per year for an inmate in one of its prisons.

            California has to most people in prison and in college. If the state emptied every prison and sent every released person to college it would save $7 billion a year.

            The United States has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world. If the incarceration rates of individual states are compared with other nations you would see that 36 states and the District of Columbia have incarceration rates higher than that of Cuba, the next highest nation. Yes, Virginia is in that group of 36.

            Law Professor Michelle Alexander, author of the controversial treatise, “Mass Incarceration: The New Jim Crow” recently penned an op-ed piece for Sojourner.  In it she quotes the research of Harvard Professor Kaia Stern (Dr. Stern specializes in prison education and is also an ordained minister. She also visited this facility a few years ago in preparation for a new text she was writing: “Voices from American Prisons: Faith, Education, and Healing.”) Alexander wrote:

“The system of mass incarceration is rotten to its core. As Dr. Kaia Stern eloquently explains in her book … the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades and the relegation of tens of millions of people to permanent second-class status is a reflection of the fact that we in the United States are captive to a “spirit of punishment.” She writes, “there is no more pressing human rights, issue, no more urgent spiritual crossroads or threat to democracy than the current penal crisis.”

            Both Stern and Alexander speak the truth. America cannot nor will not ever be, that “shining city” on the hill Ronald Reagan so eloquently spoke of (borrowing from John’s Revelation) until the soul of this country burns for righteousness and mercy – two tenets at the foundation of our Judeo Christian parentage which are ignored “here.”

            I have never met a young student who has told me “I am innocent.” No, they tell me they did the crime; they accept punishment. But consequences for one’s actions must have a termination date. And a remorseful, rehabilitated man – or woman – must be allowed to live free and be welcomes back to society.

            “Here” is a leper colony. “Here” are criminals and dredges of society; losers; drug addicts; thieves, murderers. And I can’t help but remember the Gospel writers over and over as they told the stories of Jesus. It was these untouchables who the Lord cared for, and ate with, and forgave. You may not want to know what goes on in “here,” but I can assure you Jesus is here. He is with the disadvantaged, the discouraged, the disenfranchised.

            Political courage. We lack leaders with political courage who will tell you that what I write is true: prisons are failing; punishment does not fit the crime. April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. Inner cities around the nation erupted as news of the assassination spread.

            Senator Robert Kennedy, Democratic candidate for President, was in downtown Indianapolis. Against the advice and wishes of his staff and Indianapolis police (who couldn’t “guarantee” his safety), Kennedy left the hotel and went to the worst housing project in the city. He stood on a car and spoke about pain in the loss of a great leader; he listened as black citizens expressed their dismay and anger, and then he quoted the Greek philosopher Aeschylus: “Excruciating pain leads to greater wisdom.” Indianapolis – unlike almost every other urban center in America that night – remained calm. Political courage.

            The problem is “here.” Prison doesn’t rehabilitate anyone. Prison doesn’t make you more likely to follow the law. And while some violent sociopaths must remain forever separated from society, for the vast majority sentenced, their time behind bars and their treatment after release destroys more lives than are changed. In spite of that, young men in the college program here believe if they just get their degree they can overcome. Even with the odds stacked against them from a society which talks of “second chances” almost with a sarcastic sneer, they believe.

            They believe because of men like Dr. John who tells them not to quit. They believe because professors like Joan, Amy, Joy, Allie, and Anne come out here and treat them like scholars, not felons. They believe because it is in the human DNA to overcome, overcome where they came from, what they did and what is in “here.”

            The great African-American writer James Baldwin wrote a letter to his nephew that became a major portion of his great 1942 book, The Fire Next Time. It was a book of cathartic anger at a white society that continued to place blacks in second-class status. Often, I return to his remarkable words as a holder of the “Scarlet F” (felon). For six years I have held a front row seat to “here.” Instead of destroying me, this place and my God’s intervention have opened my eyes. I read Baldwin’s words and I know in spite of “here” these men will overcome.

            “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what it must become. It will be hard, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off ...”

Election Day, Part 1

In July, 1776, delegates from the thirteen break away colonies gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to sign their names to a declaration.  From that moment forward the uprising that had begun a year earlier could lead to only one conclusion:  it would be independence or death.

The author of the Manifesto, Thomas Jefferson, borrowed heavily from Scottish political philosopher John Locke when he penned that people “are endowed with certain unalienable rights…”  Jefferson listed three:  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The men gathered in Philadelphia, this nation’s founding fathers, understood the importance of the words they were placing their signatures to.  God, not government, gives human beings certain rights.  Freedom, liberty, are God’s dictate, not some privilege that can be handed down by a ruler.

It was a daring statement of faith in the absolute rights of humankind derived from the sovereign Lord.  And, it formed the basis of the most successful experiment in republican democracy the world has ever known.  “We the people…in order to form a more perfect union…”

I write this fifteen days from the presidential election.  Supporters of both candidates will tell you this is the most important election in the nation’s history.  I’m not so sure.   Somehow the crises affecting this country in 1860 when Lincoln was elected, and again in 1864 at his re-election, make this era pale by comparison.

This piece isn’t about Romney or Obama.  This is about voting.  Virginia is one of only four states that do not automatically reinstate voting rights to felons upon their release from prison.  This election day some 350,000 Virginians will be unable to vote solely because they carry a scarlet “F” on their record.  Voting is not a privilege.  It is an unalienable right of a people to have a say in their governance. 

The current Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, has touted his administration’s efforts to restore voting rights to felons.  He should be applauded.  In less than three years in office, McDonnell has streamlined the process (it is now just filing a simple downloadable form with his office versus the former cumbersome process of petitioning), and restored voting rights to nearly 2,000.  That’s more than any previous modern age Virginia Governor.

The problem is McDonnell, like his predecessors and for too many politicians, believes voting is a privilege and that government can decide the terms and conditions of exercising that privilege.  Disenfranchisement, even after over 225 years, still shows itself each election cycle.

It is an irony not lost on me that this nation, “the shining city on the hill” as former President Ronald Reagan described her, is the only western nation that restricts felons from voting.  Even in this country, all but seventeen states automatically restore voting rights to felons as they exit prison.

Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, a critical assessment of the nation’s mass incarceration push, argues that voting is a fundamental right of citizenship which cannot be usurped by a felony conviction.

And the arguments used to deny felons the right to vote are the same arguments used earlier in this nation’s history to deny women, the poor, and ethnic and racial minorities a say in the future direction of this land.

A few years ago, during George W. Bush’s presidency, this nation became transfixed as we watched millions of Iraqis brave bombings and threats of murder to cast ballots in their first democratic election after the overthrow of the dictator Saddam Hussein.

And we watched as these citizens dipped their fingers in purple ink and displayed them to the world saying “our vote matters”.  I remember one man in particular, carried his child in his arms.  He’d been imprisoned during the Hussein years.  And he proudly walked forward and voted.  “I want my child to know it’s not your past that matters.  It’s your future.”

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…”

Amazing words.  It’s a shame this nation, this state doesn’t believe them at election time.

 

The Re-entry Con Game

Prior to his inauguration, amidst much fanfare, then Governor-Elect Bob McDonnell visited the Henrico County Jail to announce that under his administration a partnership would be formed with the private sector and faith based organizations for the re-entry of inmates back to their community.

The hearts and minds of thousands of inmates languishing in Virginia’s prisons were suddenly buoyed that finally a politician had been elected who gave a damn.  It was surprising, no astounding, that the politician was a “tough on crime” conservative, born-again Christian, Republican.  Within weeks of his inauguration, a huge “Re-entry Initiative” was printed at a cost of thousands of dollars and who knows how many trees.

But, it appears that after months of talk about re-entry, Governor McDonnell’s plan is nothing but a sophisticated snake oil sale.  Nothing about McDonnell’s plan is different from the past.  Bob McDonnell is long on words and short on action.

As I sit here at Lunenburg, a facility specifically designated as a “re-entry center”, I can assure you the exact same “transition out program” used for years before McDonnell’s election is still the same program used today.  Nothing different.  Nothing new.

The old “Breaking Barriers” program, a touchy feely group exploration of why “we” break the law has been replaced with “thinking for a change”.  Same poor program taught by prison “counselors” (who are a joke).  The name changed but the content remained the same. 

Even worse, Lunenburg is now being managed by a warden who plays no role in the day to day operation of the facility and by an assistant warden who actually scoffs at the notion of inmate programs.  In other words, DOC has placed management of one of its re-entry facilities in the hands of people who are opposed to re-entry.  Is it any wonder approximately one third of Virginia’s inmates re-offend within three years of release?

My friend in “Alaska” has been taking me to task for the great waste of resources used on prisoners who never even admit their culpability for their crimes and see themselves as the victims.  I couldn’t agree with you more “Alaska”.  Almost every day I have some guy come up to me and say “I didn’t do it” or “the Commonwealth attorney paid off the judge”.  Most inmates won’t accept responsibility for their behavior, won’t seek forgiveness for their wrongs, and won’t apologize to their victims.  And the reason, quite simply, is because people that do that suffer worse at the hands of the system.

What “Alaska” wants I think, is what I have called for almost from the inception of this blog, implementation of restorative justice principles, not retribution.  Founded on Biblical tenets, it was what Bishop Tutu used in South Africa and what is leading to societal reconciliation in Burundi and Rwanda.  And, it is the exact opposite of what we do in our prisons.

Over and over I am told by well meaning people inside and outside of these walls that for “a smart man” I was “foolish” for (1) admitting my wrongdoing the day I was questioned without even asking for counsel; (2) pleading guilty to all charges brought without requiring proof of the “loss” or any sentencing deal.  I’m looked at as a fool because I apologized to the court, my employer, my wife, children, parents and friends and told the judge I deserved prison time.

“What were you thinking?  “Why would you give everything to your wife knowing she would divorce you?  Why would you apologize to an employer who was calling the prosecution demanding you get one hundred years?”  When I tell them I did what the Lord requires us to do when we fail, I’m met with “the Lord sure didn’t tell the judge to be just did he?”

Inmates and accuseds will never accept the idea of remorse, of just punishment, and of rehabilitation, as long as the system is so blatantly unfair.  Sentences bear no relationship to the crime committed and in many instances are products of an accused’s race and class.

A book that draws widespread attention in prisons is Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow”.  In it, Ms. Alexander argues quite persuasively that prisons in modern America have replaced the plantation model of pre-civil war America for black men.  I’ve read the book.  It is disturbing and insightful and correct.  White, middle class teens committing the same crime as impoverished black teens receive substantially shorter sentences.  And once in prison, inmates (a majority of which are African American) are put to work doing dangerous, harmful work for slave wages.  During the Gulf Oil spill, for example, thousands of Louisiana inmates were put to work handling carcinogenic laced oil without adequate safety measures and without pay.  Here at Lunenburg, VCE (Virginia Corrections Enterprises) operates a furniture shop in an un-air-conditioned shop.  Inmates build furniture for state universities for 55 to 85 cents an hour.  That furniture is then sold to those schools (who must buy it even though furniture from private manufacturers is less expensive).

The system should be built on the simple, yet all important premise, of restoring the lawbreaker – where possible – to the community as a whole person.  To do that requires the law breaker to admit their wrong, reflect on why they did it, apologize to the victim, where possible make restitution to the victim and be reconciled to the community.

This process isn’t accomplished by giving a man fifteen years with no hope of early release and in his fourteenth year sending him to a ten week “transition out program”.  All that time before is wasted, making the inmate more embittered, feeling more victimized himself.

Governor McDonnell needs to quit selling snake oil and really make prison matter.  Reinstate early release and tie it specifically to the principles of restorative justice outlined above.  Make prison an effective method of correction, not a dumping ground based on punitive principles.  Inmates will change when they see the sincerity, not the hypocrisy, in the system.

General Assembly Update

Once again the Virginia General Assembly is considering a number of bills that will directly affect inmates. But inmates are the one minority it’s OK to mistreat. As pointed out in the book The New Jim Crow, prison inmates today are the last discriminated class in America, akin to the black struggle against injustice in the segregated, Jim Crow era south. Michelle Alexander, the author, is a radical. She believes mass incarceration is as morally repugnant as apartheid.



This year the General Assembly will consider giving inmates additional “earned good time” days each month. The fact that we sit here and hope an additional five, seven or even ten days a month could be earned to the paltry 4.5 days currently on the books should tell you how desperate the prison population is for any relief.


I repeat something I have stated more than once in this blog: Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote 150 years ago that “a society is judged by how it treats its prisoners”.


Virginia has a moral imperative to ease the length of prison sentences and ensure prisons are humane. The Commonwealth, the country as a whole, risks moral bankruptcy unless prison reform becomes a reality.


The General Assembly has a clear choice. They can be just, be honorable, act morally or continue with business as usual.

Future Prospects

The January/February issue of the magazine The American Prospect is devoted to criminal justice reform. Try these facts on for size:



1. Nearly 1% of the American population is imprisoned.


2. Approximately $70 billion is spent annually on the nation’s local, state and federal corrections system ($1.1 billion in Virginia alone).


3. Between 1972 and 2008 the state inmate population grew 708 percent.


4. In 2001 (the last year data was available) the cost to incarcerate an inmate for one year averaged $22,650.


5. Spending on corrections has grown 300 percent in the past 20 years.


6. The United States accounts for 25 percent of the prisoners in the world, but only 5% of the global population.


7. In 33 of 50 states (include Virginia in this) more was spent on corrections-related costs than education spending.


As Michelle Alexander, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University wrote:


“Crime rates have fluctuated over the past 30 years and are at historical lows, but incarceration rates have consistently soared . . . crime rates and incarceration rates have moved independently of each other; incarceration rates have skyrocketed regardless of whether crime has gone up or down. . .”


And she concluded with this telling pronouncement:


“As a nation, we have managed to create a massive system of control that locks up a significant percentage of our population . . .into a permanent, second-class status. . .we have all been complicit in the emergence of mass incarceration in the United States.”


Virginia, a state that did away with parole in 1995 and then saw its prison population climb from 9,000 to almost 40,000 in 15 years, elected Robert McDonnell Governor a year ago. McDonnell, a Republican and former Virginia Attorney General, was known as a tough on crime candidate. But, McDonnell is also an evangelical Christian.


Leaders of Prison Fellowship, a Christian outreach organization include former Virginia Republican Lt. Governor Mark Earley as a senior staff member. The group is making inroads in the conservative Christian movement by urging their members to take a serious look at inmate re-entry and alternatives to incarceration. It is, they argue, a moral obligation for Christians to care for the incarcerated. “Jesus would not have turned away from the prisoners and neither should his believers”.


Powerful words. But, it will take more than words to correct the problems associated with mass incarceration. Governor McDonnell has made a start with a re-entry initiative. Beginning January 10th, 40 at risk inmates (at risk means they are within 18 months of release and have a high probability of re-offending within a year of release) will begin an intensive eight month information technology certification program. Over those eight months they will earn 37 credits toward a college degree: 15 hours in general education courses (2 English, 2 Math, 1 Social Science) and 22 hours in information technology. They will have a counselor in here helping with job placement and a counselor “on the street” sponsored by Goodwill Industries to help them tackle work and community issues. Basically, help them adjust to freedom.


Those guys make up half the college guys in the newly created college dorm I’m now living in as an academic tutor.


The Governor appears willing to change Virginia’s prison model. He must do more. Give inmates like me – nonviolent offenders serving our first sentences – the opportunity for early release (say 25% to 50% sentence time); implement restorative justice and community corrections programs and remove the stigma attached to felons.


Do nothing and, in the future, corrections spending will completely overwhelm state and federal budgets. Do the right things, the moral things, and broken lives can be restored. Governor McDonnell has a choice and future prospects for correcting corrections hang in the balance.