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March
3, 2014
In
the 1939 film classic The
Wizard of Oz,
the wizard, played to flamboyant perfection by the incomparable Frank
Morgan, decides that he will solve young Dorothy's dilemma (and
consequently his own) by simply taking her back to Kansas in the hot
air balloon that had brought him to Oz in the first place. In his
farewell discourse to the gathered citizens of the Emerald City, he
states the purpose of this sudden departure as an "...unexplainable
journey into the outer stratosphere.
To
confer, converse, and otherwise hob-nob with my brother wizards."
On
February 19, some of us in Michigan who are engaged in Catholic
ministry to the incarcerated had the opportunity to confer, converse
and otherwise hob-nob with our brother (and sister) wizards at a
meeting at the Michigan
Catholic Conference
in Lansing. Ostensibly, this meeting was called by our good friend
and Public Policy Advocate, Paul Stankewitz, for the purpose of
sharing our observations and concerns with a committee from the Council
of State Governments Justice Center,
which is currently gathering data and formulating recommendations for
the Michigan
Law Revision Commission,
which will in turn use these findings to inform future legislation. For
an avowed cynic such as yours truly, it is always heartening to
to see our system of government actually functioning in an
intelligent and productive way, and even more refreshing when this
functioning includes seeking the perspective of the Catholic
community "down in the trenches" in the war against crime
and injustice. Beyond this stated purpose for our gathering was the
chance for those of us so engaged to share our experiences,
frustrations and concerns with each other, and this provided an even
greater highlight to the day.
I'm
sure no one who does
work with the incarcerated would describe him or herself as a
"wizard" or what we do as "wizardry." The
information gathering being done by the Council for State Governments
Justice Center on behalf of the Michigan Law Revision Commission was
concerned with reentry issues, but the discussion also followed up
the corrections food chain to the numerous difficulties encountered
in the rehabilitation process, and beyond this to the criminal
justice system itself. It is a system that has made the difficult
process of reentry into society even more difficult and, in doing so,
has only complicated and exacerbated the problem of crime in the
streets. And there is certainly no wizardry involved here either. In
fact, the most telling term I heard used among my colleagues to
describe this situation was "broken."
It
should be no secret that the criminal justice system that seeks to
correct the most basic ills of our society is broken. The fact that
we live in the nation with the greatest per
capita prison population on
earth is the most obvious proof of this, and the fact that the State
of Michigan ranks near the bottom in virtually every statistical
category concerning criminal justice should be cause for more than
casual concern among the good citizens of our fair state. To be
sure, addressing the needs of this broken system is the purpose
behind the Michigan Law Revision Commission, and providing the data
and information necessary to inform policies that actually work is
why the Council for State Governments Justice Center was brought into
this discussion. And so there is cause for hope that, since the
Michigan Law Revision Commission is a bipartisan effort, we may
finally rise above the idiotic finger pointing that goes on between
the two parties and attack this issue at its roots. The failure of
our criminal justice system is not a political problem, it is
systemic. And the creation of this broken system has been a team
effort led by both parties. This broken system is only reflective of
the broken people who comprise it, and fixing it will require rising
above "politics as usual," and addressing the human needs
of these broken people, who are merely represented as numbers in the
data and statistics -- just as they are in the jails and prisons.
The
great advantage inherent in working directly with those in jail or
prison is that one gets to know them as living and breathing human
beings, rather than as just numbers and statistics. This quickly
results in a change of perception from that of society in general,
and the conditioning that has resulted from an entertainment
influenced media that tends to paint all individuals involved in
criminal activity with the same broad and evil brush. A popular
instance of this currently making the rounds in the theaters of
America is the film RoboCop,
which is disturbing at numerous levels in its futuristic portrayal of
law enforcement and criminal justice in America, but perhaps never
more so than when it portrays every individual criminal in the film
as psychopathic and subhuman. Elimination is the preferred option to
apprehension, and rehabilitation is not an option ever presented or
considered. And what makes this truly disturbing is the truth that
this near future is merely the natural outgrowth of our current
national mindset, which is based on the erroneous idea that the way
to solve the crime problem is to simply keep increasing the severity
and intensity of the punishment until it is eliminated. This hasn't
worked and it won't. What it results in is a prison system that is a
series of warehouses filled with broken people, and an overloaded and
overburdened corrections and rehabilitation apparatus that finds it
increasingly impossible to fix them. As this all becomes
prohibitively expensive, perhaps the next logical step is just to
eliminate the cost by eliminating the offenders right on the street.
That RoboCop
takes a tack that is morally ambiguous concerning this is the most
disturbing aspect of the picture.
Let's
put a human face on this for a moment by considering two young men I
know who are currently incarcerated in the Michigan
Department of Corrections. Both are now in their mid 20's, and I
have known both since I was
their jail chaplain over five years ago. One of these young men is
black and the other white. Let's call the young black man "Isaiah"
and the young white man "Carl." These are not their real
names. Both of these young men were convicted of criminal sexual
conduct in the third degree, which in their cases involved sex with
an underage girl. Both girls were 15 at the time (the age of consent
in Michigan is 16). Both were sexually active and promiscuous at the
time the offenses against them were committed, and both initiated the
sex act that resulted in the criminal charges brought against the
young men, both of whom were around 20 years old at the time.
In
Carl's case, the crime
was committed with his sister in law. Carl was married at the time
to a woman several years older than he, and in an attempt to seek
retribution for some offense she felt had been inflicted by her older
sister, Carl's sister in law induced Carl to smoke marijuana with her
and then seduced him into an act of oral sex. She then claimed that
he had forced her into the act, and he was arrested. When the young
sister in law realized the full ramifications of what she had accused
Carl of, she tearfully recanted her earlier statement on the stand
and admitted to the scenario as described above. The court
determined that Carl was still guilty of statutory rape, and he was
convicted and sentenced accordingly to two to 15 years in prison. He
was ordered to complete sex offender programming while imprisoned and
before being eligible for parole, and was credited with his time
served in jail. This meant that he would be eligible for parole
after 18 months in prison. I counseled Carl numerous times in
one-to-one settings at his request. His remorse over the events that
had transpired was real and intense, and his hope at the time of his
sentencing was to complete his time and programming quickly, and come
home and rebuild his life and his marriage centered in Christ. He
and his wife have a son together, who was still an infant as all this
transpired, and Carl very much wanted to heal his family in the life
of the Church.
The
reality turned out to be far different from what Carl had hoped for
and anticipated. As a good looking young man inexperienced in the
realities of prison life, he was quickly preyed upon by sexual
predators. He was offered protection by the Nation
of Islam
in exchange for his services as an "enforcer." Carl was
not, and is not, a violent young man, and his first attempt at
collecting a debt for the Nation of Islam resulted in a severe
beating to himself, a major ticket for instigating the fight, and a
couple of months in segregation (solitary confinement, popularly
referred to as "the hole"). Because he had confessed the
truth about what had happened to him at his disciplinary hearing, the
Nation of Islam had "hits" out on him when he was released
from segregation, and he was quickly attacked and was sent back to
the hole for his own protection until he could be "rode out"
to what was hopefully a more neutral facility. This cycle of
violence followed him through a couple more transfers, and the
skirmishes that he encountered along the way didn't make for a very
attractive prison record. To date, he has been turned down for
parole twice, and if he is fortunate enough to be released his next
time around, what started out as 18 months in prison will have turned
into a five year ordeal. During this time, his wife has divorced
him, and her subsequent lifestyle has resulted in his son going into
foster care. The rest of his family has deserted him, and he will
reenter the world with no one and nothing but the hope that he can
somehow build a new life from scratch. And from a parole to
community placement housing, this is a long, hard climb indeed.
Compared
to Isaiah's
experience in prison, Carl's life has been a gay, mad whirl.
Isaiah
had what he maintains to this day was consensual sex with his white
fiancé's
younger cousin, and when the girl's mother discovered this, she
insisted that charges be filed against him. Isaiah, in the days when
I first knew him in jail, was a sensitive and quietly intelligent
young man, and a very talented artist. His dream was to be a comic
book illustrator, and he had the skills to do it. He had been
involved marginally in gang activity and had a juvenile record, but
nothing serious and nothing as an adult. He hadn't been in any
trouble for several years, and after a very shaky childhood in which
his father had deserted his family, and his mother had abandoned him
to one foster home after another, it looked like he was going to
overcome all of this to make a successful life for himself. He and
his girlfriend had a son together, and Isaiah loved this child and
was bent on dedicating his life to him by being the father to his son
that he had never had. They had plans to be married. In my
counseling sessions with him, he insisted that he wanted to put this
stupid act behind him and make it up to everybody he had hurt. Isaiah
was a strong Christian in those days, and every time I visited
him, we would end our talk by holding hands through the bars, and he
would pray for God's forgiveness and guidance with tears running down
his cheeks and staining the front of his orange jumpsuit.
Though
her own family members have told me that the girl in Isaiah's case
fabricated the true nature of the encounter she had with him, this
was never admitted officially and Isaiah was convicted and sentenced
to eight to 15 years in prison. Understandably, this is a much more
severe sentence than what Carl received for the same charge. Was the
black on white nature of the crime a factor in the result Isaiah
experienced? Maybe. Maybe not. However, when we hear that justice
is blind, we must remember that the reality is that Lady
Justice
often picks her blindfold up to check the racial makeup of the
defendant, and then proceeds to throw the book at black and minority
individuals. Young white men often get probation, maybe two or three
times, and young black or Hispanic men go to prison first time out of
the box. I know two men serving time for homicide in the second
degree and the white man got eight years minimum, whereas the black
man got 20. All other circumstances were the same. I find it rather
disingenuous when northern white folks look down their noses at the
racism of the deep south as if it can't happen here in the north. It
can and it does, and it ought to be all the more disturbing that it
happens in the courts. A black friend of mine in Florida who is a
social worker describes the situation this way: "In the north,
they stab you in the back. In the south, you at least see the knife
coming."
Isaiah
and I exchanged a
few letters when he went off from jail to prison, and when he quit
writing to me, we lost contact for a year or better. One day, I got
a letter from another man I had known at the jail, and in it he told
me that Isaiah had recently arrived at the facility he was at, and
was having a very tough time of it. He suggested that I write to
him, and so I did. Isaiah and I began exchanging letters regularly,
and the Isaiah I got to know at this point in time was a far
different person from the young man who used to cry to God to help
him straighten out his life and move on from all of this. This
Isaiah was angry and callous and hurting at a very deep level.
Isaiah
started his prison
time out by hooking up with some young men he had known as a teenager
who ran with the East Side Gang in Saginaw, and his life has been in
a downward spiral ever since. He began "running store"
which means just that -- selling merchandise and various services to
other inmates. As the enforcer for his own business interests and
those of others, he made enemies, got into fights and was slashed and
stabbed. He slashed and stabbed back. As a man convicted of
criminal sexual conduct, he was called "baby raper" and was
harassed and beaten by other inmates. The gentle Isaiah I had known
in jail had turned into a bitter, violent and spiteful young man in
prison. He was twice convicted for weapons possession, and this has
added another 3 to 10 years to his sentencing.
When
repeated trips to the hole didn't break him of his violent ways,
Isaiah was put in maximum security at the Marquette
Branch Prison,
which is the deepest pit in the Michigan prison system. He is
currently in another maximum security facility, where he has to be
shackled and escorted every time he leaves his cell. On the outside,
his girlfriend has taken up with gangsters -- or he thinks she has. And
those with whom he is incarcerated threaten his son's safety and
life, and this torments Isaiah and drives him ever deeper into
madness and despair. His family has retreated from him because he
lashes out in anger at everyone. Like Carl, I am the last person he
has contact with in the outside world, and I endure his letters full
of paranoid rantings and verbal abuse because, as I tell him, I
believe somewhere deep down inside that old Isaiah is still there. He
is angry at God and takes this anger out on me by denouncing me as
the false teacher of a false religion that couldn't save him, and I
don't give up on him because I really do believe that the real Isaiah
is in there somewhere and that God does love him and somehow will
deliver him from all of this. Someday. Someway. Isaiah believes he
has all of the answers, but all of the answers he has are wrong. He
is in rebellion against everyone and everything, but especially
against the authority of the prison system, and this means, in turn,
those within it who are sincerely trying to help him find his way
home.
The
idea behind the character of the Wizard of Oz was that, as wizard, he
was the self proclaimed man with all the answers. He was, of course,
a charlatan -- a "humbug." And while he had contrived
answers to the largely imagined dilemmas of the Scarecrow, Tin Man
and Cowardly Lion, he had no "magic" capable of returning
the lost Dorothy back home to Kansas. In the absence of such magic,
he turned instead to science in the form of his old hot air balloon,
and when Toto took out after a cat, this science subsequently took
flight and left Dorothy behind. The moral to the story was supplied
by Good Witch Glinda in the lesson of the ruby slippers: the journey
home from the strange land of Oz couldn't be accomplished through
magic or science but was, after all, a spiritual journey enlightened
by the encounters and adventures found along the Yellow Brick Road. And
the lesson was brought to fruition with the realization that the
way back home is not to be found outwardly in the strange world of
Oz, but inwardly with the awakening of the true and higher nature of
the self. In The Wizard of
Oz it
is at this moment of Dorothy's awakening self awareness that Glinda
is able to point to the ruby slippers as the true way back home. In
prison ministry, it is at this moment of awakening self awareness
that we point to the Cross as serving this same purpose. And this
approach works because, unlike the Wizard of Oz, Jesus Christ is
the man with all the answers.
Because
this is so, we must never give up on fixing our broken system of
justice, and we must never entertain the idea that eliminating the
broken people within it is any kind of viable or just solution. This
is the reasoning that resulted in a Roman justice that led Jesus to
the Cross. He didn't transform this false justice of men into the
eternal salvation of God so that we might submit others to it, but
rather so we might know to deliver them from it. This is a justice
that is truly restorative, and it is the message the Michigan
Catholic Conference is trying to convey to the Council of State
Governments Justice Center, the Michigan Law Revision Commission,
and, in turn, to our legislators in Lansing. As Catholic Christians
and Americans, we should pray that this is also accomplished on the
national stage before it is too late and we descend irretrievably
into the robotic and godless future Hollywood has envisioned for us
in RoboCop. It is time we all
wake up to the same truth that Dorothy realized:
there's no place like home. And helping those who are the most lost
find their way is how we get there ourselves.
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