A Grueling Journey--The Prison Transfer

I was recently transferred to a different facility to participate in the Calvin College Initiative, which is a college degree program for prison inmates in Michigan. I'm excited about the opportunity and I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Because this program is conducted at a facility in Ionia (MTU) and not at the prison where I had been for the last nearly four years, I had to be transferred. What an experience a prison transfer is!

My day started at midnight when I was woken by my unit officer and told to pack because I was leaving. I had to pack quietly because everyone else in my cube was sleeping, but I managed to do this and then bring my property to the officer. After unpacking to inventory my property with the officer, I repacked and laid back down in my prison blues, my transfer outfit. I couldn't go back to sleep because of the adrenaline and anticipation, but finally around 3:30 AM I fell back asleep, only to be woken again at 4AM and told it was time to leave. I left without saying goodbye to most of the men I had grown to know over the last nearly four years; they were all asleep or in different units.

I and about a dozen other guys went to the control center where we waited for further instructions. At 5AM or so we were given a bag with four pieces of bread, one thin slice of bologna, peanut butter and jelly, an apple, and a cookie and told we needed to eat now if we wanted to eat before lunch. Finally around 6:15AM we began to be strip searched, handcuffed to belly chains, and shackled.

Just after 7AM we were loaded onto a thirteen passenger van, crammed in so tightly several guys were half on, half off the benches. We drove to a central location where the trailer we pulled with all of our property was unloaded and we were transferred to a bus that was crammed full of nearly fifty prisoners in hard plastic seats that were hardly big enough to fit a child, let alone full grown (and some over grown) men. I had the "privilege" of being put in a high security cage with another prisoner simply because there were no other seats. This cage was barely thirty-four inches wide and the other prisoner and I could not even sit shoulder to shoulder because the box was too tight. Somehow I managed to keep my claustrophobia at bay for the more than an hour and a half we were in this cage.

We drove to another central location where we were again transferred to a different bus and sat waiting for more than an hour before we left. We were given another bagged lunch with two cheese sandwiches, an apple, and a boxed juice.

We, and dozens of other prisoners who joined us, were driven on winding country roads to be dropped off at five different prisons. Again, the seats were very cramped and the belly chains and shackles restricted movement making finding a comfortable position impossible. The trip was long, hot, and highly uncomfortable, but finally about 4PM we arrived at our destination, only just over an hour's drive away from where we started that morning. Twelve hours of waiting, transferring rides, waiting some more, and making frequent stops finally brought us to our destination where we were released from our belly chains and shackles and again strip searched before being given our housing assignments and sent to medical for our intake processing. Some of us received our property, which had transferred separately, later than night and after doing some unpacking I laid my head on my bed and closed my eyes to sleep, nearly 24 hours after my journey began with a midnight wake up.

My new address is: 

R.A. Handlon Correctional Facility
1728 W. Bluewater Hwy
Ionia, MI 48846

Justice for Crime Through Accountability

In his book "The Little Book of Restorative Justice", Howard Zehr defines restorative justice as "an approach that involves, to the extent possible, those who have a stake in a specific offense and to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations, in order to heal and put things as right as possible"

While restorative justice practices do not ignore the judicial consequences of criminal behavior, one of its focuses is on the accountability processes that help each offender understand and take responsibility for the harms he caused.

For the criminal justice system, and the majority of prisoners for that matter, accountability for one's crimes ends in a prison sentence and perhaps some court managed restitution. Society has been duped into believing that this is justice.

Accepting responsibility and accountability for one's crimes goes beyond pleading guilty though. Among other things, it also means focusing on correcting the thinking errors that led the offender to commit his crimes.

For many victims a prison sentence for their offender does little if anything to heal the emotional and psychological harms caused to the victim. For some victims a mediated dialogue between the offender and victim may be beneficial in reducing the victim's fear and anxiety, and it may begin to heal the wounds the offender caused. For other victims, mediated dialogue with their offender may cause more harm than good, but it may be helpful for the victim to know what specifically the offender is doing to hold himself accountable for his behavior. Some victims may even want a voice in this process.

When an offender cannot specifically contribute to helping heal his own victim he can work to help heal those in the category of his offense. I have seen offenders donate hobbycraft items that took hundreds of hours to domestic violence shelters or crisis pregnancy centers. I have also seen offenders with histories of youthful drug abuse work with at risk youth centers to provide literature and personal testimonies to help curb drug abuse in young people.

These are simple examples, but they are an important part of the process of healing for offenders. True restorative justice would involve the victims of crime in this process and contribute to healing for the victims as well.

Until the justice system sees the value of restorative justice practices, offenders must continue to put accountability into practice the best way they know how. Victims who wish to have a voice in the process of what accountability means to their offender can work with a mediation service (who normally provides the service for free) to discover the offender's level of commitment to holding himself accountable and to communicate their wishes to the offender.

Ultimately, whether or not the victim is ever engaged in the process, each offender can begin to heal his harms by holding himself accountable, not by simply doing his time.

What do you think accountability should involve for the offender? (Please provide feedback in your comments.)

One Act of the Will

I woke up the other day with my hand "asleep", that strange feeling that this appendage at the end of my arm belongs to me but it has no feeling, and the commands sent to it by my brain go unheeded.

As I waited for the blood to again return to my hand and return my hand to my use once more, I thought pensively that this feeling was bit like apathy.

When we fail to exercise our will and simply succumb to the pressures of life, we sometimes lose the ability to force our will to act. We then sit with a confused feeling in our minds like, "I know I should be acting, but no matter how much I know this, nothing happens." Our will becomes like that pathetic appendage at the end of our arm which refuses every instruction sent to it by its master.

Exercising one's will is not a matter of constantly battling that which is outside one's control, as if by simply willing it one can change one's circumstances. No, but willing one's self to surrender these things to God is a matter of operating the will. It is not simply giving up or succumbing to life's burdens, hurts, and disappointments.

Willful surrender is not a submission to things as they are. It is submission to the purposes of God and the hope that God will use our undesirable circumstances to accomplish His purpose in our life.

To arrest the apathy in our will we have to allow ourselves to feel the emotions that we have suppressed in the past in order to avoid the pain. We can feel the hurt, pain, and disappointment and accept the reality of those emotions while still surrendering the circumstances that drive them to God.

Allowing these hurts to fester under the false cover of apathy or denial only increases their septic power over every otherwise healthy part of our life. By allowing these emotions the freedom to flow again we allow ourselves to experience them and then heal from them. This healing process then strengthens our will to act in ways that agree with the hope that we hold in God's purpose for our life.

If I am powerless to do nothing but surrender to God's purpose, this one act of the will makes all the difference between giving up and holding onto hope for a better tomorrow.

Excuse Me Officer: Daddy Broke The Law

Sometimes I hear things in prison that make me shake my head in frustration at the stupidity of how they sound.

This morning as I heated some water for tea in the microwave in the dayroom a news story on the T.V. caught my ear and the ears of several other prisoners. It was a story of a little six year old boy who called 911 to report to the police that his father had driven through a red light. The story was cute because the boy was innocently responding to what his father had taught him--call the police if you see someone breaking the law.

What struck me was the reaction of two prisoners who on hearing this story immediately said, "That kid's a rat! He would definitely be a rat in prison!"

It's true that in prison the "code" says that you mind your own business and stay out of other people's business. In prison keeping that code could mean the difference between life and death. But to immediately conclude that law abiding citizens should turn a blind eye to crime just shows the criminal mentality many in prison operate under.

For sure, some prisoners talk the code because they think it makes them look "hard", but as soon as it is convenient to save their own skin that code gets tossed to the wayside. Some prisoners don't even need an excuse to tell someone else's business, but let them tell it and they hate rats.

This criminal mentality, that crime should be allowed to go on unchecked by those who suffer from it, is illogical, and it contradicts the actions of those who operate under this criminal thinking. If one of these criminally minded people is harmed himself he will not stand idly by; instead, he will take justice into his own hands, rally his friends to enact justice, or yes, he will report the harm to the authorities.

Maybe the little boy calling the police on his father is a little extreme, but we should not be surprised when law abiding citizens report crime. That's their civic duty and the morally right thing to do. Those who commit crime should be held accountable for their behavior, and accountability is one of the foundational principles of restorative justice practices.