Features
Freedom on death row
Joanna Jepson
As a mentor and life coach in a maximum security
prison, Joanna Jepson has seen men initiated and
transformed into the role models they once so sorely lacked. But
does society have the vision to receive the gifts they offer?
At Angola Prison in Louisiana, USA, two major
execution rehearsals are taking place. Out in the recreation area,
the crucifixion scene for the upcoming 'Life of Christ' play
is putting its props to the test as inmate Bobby, playing Jesus, is
hauled up onto one of three life size crosses.
And a little way off, in an unremarkable
single-storey building, devoid of the familiar razor wire, another
group of men gathers to walk through the execution by lethal
injection that is set to take place the following week.
A correctional officer of the same height and weight
as the condemned man becomes stand-in as the strap-down team times
how long it takes to fasten him to the gurney and find a decent
vein. 'I didn't like it,' murmurs the officer later, as he tells me
how four of his colleagues held him down on the death table while
assistant wardens checked logistics and asked practical
questions.
Death is by its nature a lonely place and for both
officer and inmate the experience of being so reviled - even as
actors - subdues any small talk. Yet death permeates the very
foundation and existence of this place.
VIOLENT HISTORY
Named after the birthplace of its first slaves,
Angola was a plantation until it became a penitentiary in 1901, and
is now the largest maximum security prison in the US. Home to 5,400
murderers, rapists and armed robbers, plus 86 inmates on death row,
the average sentence is 93 years. These men expect to die here.
Within living memory that death would more than
likely have come at the hands of a fellow-inmate armed with a crude
homemade weapon. Men would sleep two in a bunk, splitting the night
into two watchman shifts, such was the likelihood of murder in this
the most bloody and violent prison in the USA. All that changed
with the arrival of Warden Burl Cain in 1995.
A straight-talking, Southern-drawling boy in the body
of a gentle, ambling grandfather with impish eyes and easy grin,
Warden Cain is a legend not only among his charges but throughout
the State of Louisiana and beyond. He follows a brisk succession of
wardens, none of whom could keep the place together, yet in the 17
years since his arrival Cain has combined his simple Christian
faith and outlandish vision with phenomenal results. His ethos is
quite simply 'moral rehabilitation'.
'Criminals are selfish people, and religion is the
quickest way to rehabilitate a selfish person.' He's relaxed about
what religion they are - 'I don't care!' - but here in the Deep
South, the Southern Baptist Union was an obvious first place to
turn for help. Government grants for prison education had been
scrapped so starting a Bible Seminary in the prison was one way to
fill a dangerous void. 'Without moral change you're just educating
them to become smarter criminals,' he says.
FILLING A VOID
The justice department thought he was crazy but the
SBU said yes and soon opened the Angola Extension Centre as part of
its seminary - with startling results. Within months the violence
had dropped by 73 per cent. Cain was not naive about the
motivations of those signing up for the four year Bible course.
'Some of them just wanted to get out of work, some of them wanted
to be there because it was air-conditioned,' he says. 'But they
can't sit there for four years learning about Jesus Christ without
a lot of them realising they got a calling to be pastors.'
Now these pastors are being sent out to other,
medium-term, jails in Louisiana and across other Southern States.
And the authorities are unable to deny the positive difference
these men are making, not least to the levels of violence in
surrounding jails.
In the Deep South, where a particular biblical slant
prevails, it can be difficult to distinguish cultural habit and
rhetoric from genuine conversion. I meet some who rolled out a neat
religious patter - perhaps hoping to add some shine to their parole
hearing, if they are lucky enough to get one. But I see a
burgeoning core of men prepared to drop the act. They seem to me to
have found a meaningful existence in serving their fellow inmates,
with a compassion and authenticity that goes beyond superficial
religious dogma.
It's not as if most of these men grew up without a
strong Christian influence: many of them were involved as children
in their church communities and spoke of the strong faith of their
mother or grandmother. However, true manhood had eluded a
significant number - until prison woke them up. As Richard Rohr has
observed, 'institutional religion commonly avoids true
enlightenment, [which] feels too much like dying… Initiation is
always training in dying.' 1
LIFE IS HARD
Rohr, a Franciscan priest and writer, is one of the
few contemporary sages who has tracked the subversive path modern
man must take to discover his authentic power. In Adam's
Return, he shows it leads, paradoxically, in the direction of
surrender - and the realisation of five core truths:
1) Life is hard
2) You are not that important
3) Your life is not about you
4) You are not in control
5) You are going to die. 2
It is evident from my conversations with the inmates
that Rohr was right when he wrote: 'We are not a healthy culture
for boys or men. Surely one reason is that we are no longer a
culture of elders who know how to pass on wisdom, identity, and
boundaries to the next generation. Someone has to give the young
male boundaries and identity. He does not get them by himself or
without guidance.' 3
Many of the inmates speak of their life 'in the hood'
trying to establish themselves through incoherent and manipulative
behaviour, looking to their elders in crime for validation. The
prevailing impression is of brazen egos battling it out for
notoriety no matter the depths of foolishness this required. The
men describe their former selves with the gentle sorrow of a
long-suffering father aching over the wayward wretchedness of a
son.
FREED BY PRISON
As Ernest Becker writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning
book, The Denial of Death, until men move into death and
live the creative tension of being both limited and limitless, they
never find their truth or power.4 Many of the inmates are living in
that tension.
For just as old cultures drew men away into a liminal
wilderness experience, life in Angola prison has faced them with
the inevitability of their own death, and forced them to surrender
their small plays for power and prestige to the reality of their
limitedness.
With magnificent Mississippi swamps on three sides
and the hostile Tunica hills to the north, some 18,000 acres
provide the territory for this contemporary rite of passage. But
with sentences of 90 years or more, there will be no re-entry into
the free world. Instead, the authorities bestow trust and
responsibility on those who have been proved - and a range of
opportunities to serve.
TEND THE SICK
If four years in Bible College does not appeal, the
prison hospice offers others a different means to serve their
fellow inmates. Volunteers wash the patients, change their
dressings and often find themselves a buffer for the
psycho-emotional eruptions of terminally ill inmates. When death
draws near they work shifts to keep unbroken bedside vigil,
ensuring that they do not die alone.
Late at night the volunteers may well be found
stitching quilts embroidered with the patient's name and images of
butterflies - the promise of freedom - as a gift to keep him warm
and, eventually, to become a pall for his coffin. Mentored by
experienced workers, the inmate volunteers undergo weeks of
training which will expose them to fear and bravery and the
temptation to drop out. Here again the ancient way into the desert
has been refashioned for a group of modern men who want to simply
and boldly, as one volunteer put it, 'live out life with love'.
Shaheed, a recent graduate of the volunteer team,
describes being at Angola as 'the best thing that could have
happened to me. Like silver that needs to be refined and purified.'
And though he will probably die here, he has given his patients the
chance to live life with a different kind of freedom than the kind
they were squandering back in the 'hood.
LIFE MENTORS
Shaheed is one of 15 men with whom I have worked as a
personal coach. He and the other 14 lifers are mentors to 60 young
men who have been sentenced to join Angola's pioneering Re-entry
Programme. Here the crimes are mainly drug-related and recurring.
Sentences range from two to eight years and it's a rigorous but
hopeful existence.
Living in a large dormitory Shaheed and his fellow
mentors become father-figures to their charges, available 24 hours
a day, leading them at dawn in daily spiritual devotions and
mantras - 'I am better than my worst mistake' - before sending them
off to classes in welding, horticulture, cuisine, mechanics, or
electronics.
Evenings are spent with them in a curriculum of life
skills and cover everything from financial peace to literally
pulling up one's trousers to give future employers a better
impression. Most of the lads come in with a 4th Grade education.
They leave with a General Education Certificate, a vocational
qualification and, for most, the affirmation of having emerged into
an authentic experience of their identity, gifts and power.
DIFFERENT BARS
Originally invited to become a chaplain at Angola, I
wrote to Warden Cain and asked instead to work as a coach with the
men. 'We all live behind some kind of bars,' I wrote in my
letter. 'For most of us those are emotional, spiritual and
psychological … for your men they are also physical bars. Having a
choice about how we're going to live - even behind prison walls -
that is freedom.'
The evening I first met my group of 74 men I
remembered Warden Cain's words that most of these guys had been
victims of crime as well as being perpetrators. Freedom and
forgiveness were a good place for me to start the conversation with
them and, though I wasn't there to be part of the chaplaincy, on a
basic human level everyone in the compound was grappling with what
forgiveness means.
As Rohr writes, 'to forgive ourselves of everything
is the deepest kind of death for the ego.' That first evening
together I talked about my experience of having been a victim of
crime, opening up the way for their experiences to surface too. We
offered stories and varying examples of how unforgiveness reaped
bitterness, resentment and diminished us in unforeseen
ways.
For victims and perpetrators alike, forgiveness can
be place we would rather not - or perhaps cannot - go. But the
invitation remains. Many men at Angola have faced their own abyss,
and been liberated in the deepest, hardest sense. 'Escaping
wouldn't give me any kind of freedom,' remarks one lifer. 'Escaping
would mean I'm still on the run, still trapped by the same thing
that I was bound by 20 years ago.'
FREEDOM BOUND
Yet the deeper, inner freedom of the men I meet has
little chance to filter beyond the prison walls. Unlike the ancient
indigenous rites of passage shared by young men across history,
these inmates will not return to their tribe for the betterment,
the strengthening, the stability of the community as a whole.
In contemporary USA, where political, social, and
economic pressures are taking unprecedented toll particularly on
young black men, it's a tragedy that the very men with the
experience and story to speak credibly into that need are locked up
until they die, without possibility of parole.
Statistically, children of imprisoned men are more
than 70 per cent more likely to end up in prison themselves.5 But
at Angola a contingent of inmate fathers has decided to try and
change that statistic. The Malachi Dads is now an international
programme, pioneered from Angola, to support fathers in prisons
across the world.
MALACHI DADS
It begins with a letter of apology from dad to his
children, an apology for abandoning them by choosing crime over
their responsibility to be there for them. Supporting each other,
the Malachi Dads meet together weekly to share reflections from
their spiritual and personal journals, and to encourage along the
thorny path towards reconciliation with their estranged
families.
The culmination of their efforts is Returning Hearts:
one day a year on which all their children are invited to the
prison for a fun day. A whole day for them to spend with their dads
in prison eating pizza and ice-creams, playing games, having photos
taken, beginning conversations, beginning relationship… and then
the dismal grief as they say goodbye. The Returning Hearts day
is as close as these dads and their kids will get to a healthy,
functioning bond. Yet having turned their lives around through
accountability, group work and commitment to serve, these are
no longer the murderers, rapists and armed robbers who came into
Angola. They should be back in free society, allowed to be the wise
fathers, husbands, leaders and mentors that so many have
become.
While the church in the USA laments the dearth of
men, and the African-American community talks about crisis of
commitment in husbands and fathers, there exists a
short-sightedness in the vision of political leaders. They seem
satisfied to watch Warden Cain's methods bear fruit but not to let
the seeds of transformation return to the streets and communities
where fear, shame and power-struggles allow entrenched patterns of
violence to revolve.
I sit in on a visit by a New Orleans judge who wants
to talk to the mentors about the kinds of offenders he needs to be
sending to them to benefit from the Re-Entry Programme. This is
perhaps the closest I see to the outside authorities recognising
the vital power that these men possess in steering and inspiring
vulnerable young men towards a truly integrated life.
NEARER HOME
On the face of it, the UK prison system seems a
little more enlightened. The government's recent publication,
Transforming Rehabilitation: A Strategy for Reform, proposes that
twelve months statutory rehab for anyone leaving custody is
necessary to allow a good foundation to be built.
However, this may lead to longer tariffs being handed
down so that offenders can benefit from this new system. Critics
claim it may even gather up some for whom a community sentence
would have been more appropriate. And if contracts for prison
management fall to private companies like Serco and G4S, can we be
sure that humane rehabilitation will not fall victim to
profiteering?
Politicians on both side of the pond can easily
become hostage to a conservative public's appetite for long
sentences, all done under the slogan of ensuring public safety. And
there's no doubt that in the case of some inmates, the risks do
indeed remain high. Many men refuse to take responsibility for
their crimes. There were places in Angola where inmates were held
in a cell behind a cell to keep them from throwing faeces as we
walked past.
Yet this does not negate the vast evidence
documenting the effectiveness of prison education and the purpose
that it generates. I can't help feeling that ministers of justice
might be inspired to shape creative and alternative proposals here
in the UK if they could encounter some of the mentors I have met in
Angola.
Society loses out when it writes off the
rehabilitation former offenders can bring to the culture that
engenders crime to begin with. Men and women in the West are
increasingly noting the need for male mentors and elders. The
capacity for truthfulness, and courageous surrender required of
such leaders is not going to be plumbed from your average
achievement-driven curriculum vitae.
DEATH DEFERRED
Of course, amidst all I have encountered in Angola,
it is the Death Row situation that is hardest to resolve. These men
have killed deliberately, their victims often children or elderly,
the methods sickening - even so, I have been shocked at my gut
reaction that they deserved to die for their crimes. But revenge
does not ultimately console.
In fact, one of the biggest problems is that Death
Row is rarely the end of the line - more often a sort of limbo
which puts inner change on hold. The political energy provoked by
numerous appeals enables the men to enjoy a welcome degree of
distraction provided by media, lawyers and supporters alike. It is
telling that where a Death Row sentence is reduced to 'life' the
inmate - no longer special - has to be put on suicide watch as he
joins the rest of the lifers in the main prison camp.
In fact, by the time I leave Angola, that is the
situation for the condemned man whose execution was being rehearsed
when I arrived. He has won his appeal against death - for the time
being.
The other execution prefigured on that first night
goes ahead with gusto. Bobby takes to the stage - and the cross -
to play Jesus in the Life of Christ play, and it's clear that there
is nobody more suited to the part. He and his fellow actors are
somehow iconic, their lines and scenes rehearsed by their very
lives. They bring moving poignancy and life to the familiarity of
the gospel story, perhaps because they have entered into a
dimension of resurrection that eludes most of us.
In the midst of all its complicity with death, Angola
prison has become for me a beacon. I have worked with the men for a
month in person, five months by video link until my baby arrived -
and I plan to return in due course. I will never forget those men
who, having owned their crimes, are transforming the hopelessness
of a life sentence into unsung fullness of life.
NOTES
1 Rohr, R From Wild Man to Wise Man (St Anthony
Messenger Press, 2005) p35
2 Rohr, R Adam's Return (Crossroad Publishing,
2004), pp32-33
3 ibid, see also www.malespirituality.org
4 Becker, E. The Denial of Death, (Souvenir
Press, 1973)
5 Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
2008