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.

Conviction

Hillary Swank stars in a new movie based on the true story of a woman who returns to school, gets her high school and college diplomas, then goes to law school and passes the bar; all to take on her brother’s case and have his conviction for first degree murder overturned.



She was interviewed this past week with lawyer Barry Scheck, director of “The Innocence Project” (http://www.innocenceproject.org/). In a poignant scene from the movie, Swank’s character visits her brother in prison shortly after he attempts suicide. “I’ll go to school, become a lawyer get you out of here. I promise. But you have to promise me you won’t give up, you won’t kill yourself.”


The brother was, in fact, innocent. DNA testing proved it. In the same interview, twelve recently exonerated men from Texas, men who had served sentences from 10 to 26 years before DNA testing proved their innocence, appeared on screen. To a man they spoke of the isolation they endured, the inhumane treatment, the loneliness, the despair – almost each man had tried suicide – loss of family and friends. Yet, each man said the same thing. “I survived because I had faith. I knew God was with me.”


Until you are incarcerated, until you hear the cell door close, you cannot fully understand, fully empathize with these men. Prison changes you. You lose so much, suffer so deeply. If you are lucky, in your loss and despair you find faith and meaning. Still, there is a sadness that always remains.


I used to believe that justice was indeed just. I used to believe that you were “innocent until proven guilty”, that courts were fair, prosecutors honorable, defense attorneys dedicated, prisons places for rehabilitation. I know now my beliefs were all myths. I have dedicated myself to speaking out about what I see each and every day.


The vast majority of inmates are guilty, but they do not deserve the treatment they receive. The criminal justice system and prisons in particular, has become a giant machine with its gears being continually greased by the men and women convicted, their families, and their victims. Prisons warehouse inmates then release them feeling more bitter, more alienated, more lost.


How do you explain to a man that he deserves six years in prison for a driving violation? How do you tell a woman she must serve 10 years for embezzling $2 million, while a woman in Maryland only gets 18 months?


The system perpetuates itself. Virginia DOC maintains 22 facilities, employs 11,500 and holds between 32,000 and 38,000 (both figures provided by DOC themselves). DOC’s 2010-11 operating budget exceeds $1.1 billion. That does not include DCE’s (Department of Correction Education, a separate agency) budget, or that of Probation and Parole. Virginia has one of the ten largest inmate populations in the country, though its population is not in the top ten.


On October 18th a new director of DOC will take over. The outgoing director, Gene Johnson, on the eve of his retirement began speaking candidly about the failures of Virginia’s current sentencing and incarceration practices. His sobering statements should give all conscientious Virginians pause.


The newly appointed Director – Harold Clarke – was previously head of the Massachusetts’s Department of Corrections; he oversaw an inmate population of 9,000. Massachusetts, with a state population of 6.5 million, has only one fourth the prison population of Virginia, a state with a population of approximately 7.6 million. Why the vast disparity?


One of the men I count as a friend is “Black”. When Black was eighteen, he killed a man in a drug deal gone bad. He turns 40 in two months. He’s still under the “old system” (parole; his crime occurred before 1995). For the last ten years he has been “parole eligible”. Ten straight years he has been denied parole. Two days ago he had his annual “parole hearing”. That term doesn’t fit what occurs. Black sits before a video conference hookup. A young female investigator stares at her laptop and asks three questions: Name; DOC number; mandatory parole date. Hearing concluded.


For ten years Black has received the same parole denial form letter. Its reads in part: “parole has been denied due to the severity of the crime”.


During his imprisonment he has earned his college degree. He is active in the Rastafarian Church, a vegetarian and a pacifist. He reads voraciously and writes eloquently. He and I discuss politics, philosophy, religion, music, food. I have no doubt, however, that he will receive the same form denial letter in a month. That is the nature of the amoral system of “corrections” that lives and breathes in Virginia.


In March 2014, Black will be released on mandatory parole. As much as the system has tried to break him, this man survives. What he did was wrong. What Virginia did, and continues to do to him is worse.


DOC reported that last quarter 14 inmates were granted parole. There are approximately 6000 inmates parole eligible. That means on average each quarter 1500 inmates have an opportunity for parole. In practical terms, parole doesn’t even exist for parole eligible inmates.


Despair, loneliness, hopelessness, fear. Each day, inmates fear those emotions. Many quit. They give up. I choose not to. This isn’t about retribution or revenge. It is simply about justice. And justice is, in the end, about fairness, mercy, forgiveness. As President Lincoln noted: we, as a society are to act as the “better part of angels”.


Sometime all it takes is for just one person to believe in you, to love you, to pray for you, to fight for you. The movie “Conviction” is about that. The present state of Virginia’s prisons convicts all well-meaning citizens. Make a difference. Demand change.