SERVING LIFE

THE STORY

Excerpted from the Introduction to Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row

In 2013, Hidden Voices was invited to develop a project for a group of men living on death row. At the time, the death penalty was lawful in 35 states, down one from the previous year when Connecticut abolished their death sentence.  More than 3,000 people were incarcerated on America’s Death Row.  And that number didn’t include the children we sentenced to life without parole, meaning the children we sentenced to die in prison.

Since we describe Hidden Voices as “a radically inclusive, participatory, and co-creative collective committed to creating a just, compassionate, and sustainable world,” we suggested that rather than developing a project for the men, we follow our usual process and develop a project with the men. At Hidden Voices, our core values are simple: All lives have meaning. All stories matter. The Programs Director agreed.  We were in.  But little did we imagine what we were in for. 

When we walked into that first meeting in 2013, we brought nothing but paper, pencils, and our Hidden Voices process.  At the close of our second meeting, we left with a list of intended outcomes, a rich visioning of what we might create to achieve those outcomes, and a third list for whom to invite to our table: both to speak and to listen.

By unanimous agreement, the most critical intention read like this: “We intend for our stories to break the stereotype of who is on death row. We want the public to know we are not monsters.”  And so, we set our forth with a destination clearly in mind and absolutely no idea what it would look like.

During the following years, we collaborated with those original men, and then others around the country, to create SERVING LIFE:  ReVisioning Justice.  The project evolved to include a wealth of material: collections of stories, interviews, monologues, public readings, two interactive exhibits, plays--including COUNT:  Stories from America’s Death Row and A GOOD BOY, a musical theater work sharing stories from families with loved ones on death row, and a book RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW: Life Stories from America’s Death Row. We developed the work with groups of men, and one-on-one, laughed and wept together over phone calls, exchanged letters, spoke with family members, and invited other men around the country to share their most intimate stories, words, and prayers. 

These men generally preferred to share stories of the “good times,” in no small part because those stories stood in relief to the background chaos: the time they went to an amusement park; the time they got a pair of brand-new shoes; the time they went fishing at the creek and Grandma slipped and lost her wig to the brimming waters. Heck, who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh? But we invited them to also share the other stories, the ones that required more effort. Those stories—of meals that consisted solely of ketchup crackers, of a parent waking the children in the middle of the night and forcing them to choose which one would receive that night’s beating, of learning to ride a tricycle and smoke weed at the same age—those were shared more slowly and at more cost.  Often they were introduced with the halting words: “I’ve never told anyone this before.”

More than once the speaker wept.

In those moments, the other men sat quietly.  Patiently.  There was no attempt to console, no attempt to stem the rising waters, no patting someone’s back.  This was prison, after all.  The men offered something far more powerful and healing: the profound respect of allowing another person the space to feel what they were feeling, without any need to have that other person stop feeling so that the rest of us might feel better.  In that windowless place, there was so much unspoken, of tenderness and grief.  Of shared, unshed tears, for the children they once were, for the men they had become.

One man commented how he never realized the traumatic things that happened in his life were tragic until he became an adult.  “It was just stuff that happened, understand?”

Well, sure.  Who notices the water in which we swim, the air we gladly breathe? We don’t question the beliefs that drive us, because we don’t recognize them as beliefs.  We just see them as “what is.”  You can’t question what you don’t see.  As children, those men were just trying to keep their heads above water. 

No other society has imprisoned as many of its own as we do here in the US.  More than 10 million children have parents who have been in prison or jail. Imagine. Can you? Ten million? Half these children are younger than 10. The effects of this massive prison population stretch to the very foundations of our society.

What we hide in the dark obscurity of prison and jails are real men and women, shredded by mental illness, violence, abuse, and poverty.  As one young man told me, “Poverty and prison go together like Kool-Aid and sugar.  Without sugar, you got no Kool-Aid. Without poverty, you got no prison.”

Scholars from around the world refer have referred to our current State of Incarceration as “American Apartheid.” In her February 6th 2009 ChildWatch column, Marion Wright Edelman writes, “Incarceration is becoming the new American apartheid and poor children of color are the fodder . . . Child poverty and neglect, racial disparities in systems that serve children, and the pipeline to prison are not acts of God. They are America’s immoral political and economic choices that can and must be changed.”

Perhaps we would benefit from our own Truth and Reconciliation process.  Who needs to tell the truth?  Who need to listen?  Surely, we all do.  We need to tell the truth about who we incarcerate.  We need to tell the truth about why we think it’s okay.  Too often what we accept as “truth” is simply some form of It must be, because it is.  Stay within that circular world and those statements hold up. You can’t see the river till you climb onto the banks.  But clamber up, and suddenly the river is defined.  It stands out against a larger landscape of possibility. 

After one of the public readings, an audience member said, “I always assumed those men must belong on death row because that’s where they were.”  Simple, isn’t it?  We can’t see what we don’t know.  The muddy waters of their lived realities are opaque to us.

In one of our prison sessions, a man stated bluntly that he thought childhood was overrated; he didn’t remember “anything positive under all that dirt.”  Another man gently insisted they shouldn’t blame circumstances for their choices. As young teens they had chosen to start selling drugs. No one had forced them. 

The notion of “choice” has such allure.  It is seductive to imagine we are in control of our destinies. But when I asked my children how they might have gone about buying and selling drugs in middle school, they just laughed.  The best they could come up with was a girl rumored to have smoked a joint. 

My children wouldn’t have “chosen” to sell drugs because 1. we didn’t need the money and 2. they’d have no idea where or how to begin. At thirteen, my children were surrounded by ice skates, baseball practice, and violins.  The young man who made the comment about “choice” was surrounded by guns, drugs, and an immediate need for rent money. Are we seriously trying to convince ourselves that he had the same choices as my kids?  Do we really believe it’s just fine that we have sentenced fourteen-year-old children to life in prison without parole, meaning we have sent children off to die there?

The men were shocked to hear me say this.  But my goodness, just look around.  Who benefits from this conjoined notion of choice/personal responsibility?  Those with the most benefits. It enables us to wash our hands of our responsibility to fix what’s clearly broken.  It allows us to ignore what and whom we leave in our wake.

At thirteen, I don’t think anyone has much free choice.  What we have are our given circumstances. In one conversation the men compared notes as to the first time they saw someone killed.  Think back—how old were you?  The youngest was three.  These children, now prisoners, were caught in a net not of their making.

When I listened to their stories, one thought arose over and over:  it’s a wonder any survive.  That some survive with hearts intact is a damn miracle.  Many have never, in all their years in prison, had a single rehabilitative or support program.  Some were surprised to know there even were such.  Many men have lived twenty-three hours a day in a small, windowless cell, food trays pushed through a slot in the door, with only one hour spent outside, and that in a cage.  Most of the men have not had a contact visit in decades.  They have not hugged their mothers in ten, twenty, thirty years.  Have not touched their children, their grandchildren. These men reflect to us the communities of absence in which they were reared, which are our very own shadow communities. 

Yet somehow their hearts have expanded beyond their often violent and despairing upbringings, beyond their current deprivations.  They want so much to be of service.  One man wrote that “sacrifice is not the ending of life but the devotion to it.”  These men envision a system where they might serve as coordinators of rehabilitative programs, their focus not on freeing themselves but on freeing younger prisoners’ minds through the truth of their own stories.  They imagine these younger prisoners returning to their neighborhoods and families with a new restorative vision of justice.  As one man wrote, “I pray, I hope to give back a bit of what I have taken from the world.” 

After listening to a public reading of the men’s stories, the audience tends to sit silent, stunned. 

“What do you feel?” I often ask.

One woman answered, “I just feel shame.  For years, I’ve driven by the prison near where I work without once thinking about who is inside.” She teared up.  “It makes me wonder what else I’ve never thought to think about, who else I’ve overlooked.”

Do these stories humanize the men?  Certainly.  But my hope is that in reading these stories, we humanize ourselves. We need to trouble the waters of our complacency.  A complacency that claims those of us gifted with childhoods free from witnessing murders, from the need to sell drugs for rent, from incarcerated parents, aren’t indebted to those who were not so blessed.  We are. And we are called to recirculate our unearned good fortune in the form of tangible, hands-on, active love. 

Just like that woman, most of us have washed our hands of these men and their families long ago.  Yet, it is Easter and Passover as I write this, the season of new life, new beginnings, the coming of a new day of liberation.  I have heard that the true meaning of washing one’s hands during the Seder isn’t about pretending to some inner purity but signifying that we are prepared to participate.  Without hesitation, we are ready to do whatever is within our reach. 

What is within your reach?  Who is within your reach?  We all know some small action we can take in the name of love and compassion and liberation from our own limiting and hidebound perspectives.  One small action practiced over and over can free us all.

All artwork by men living on death row