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 ...”