Learning Writing in Prison

I took a creative writing class in prison and it was where I first learned how much I really enjoyed writing, and this article from the New York Times Book Review magazine reminded me of that.

An excerpt.

“The sliding door buzzes and rumbles open. The guard calls out: “Come on, you’re next.” I stand up from the waiting area pews, where I have stowed my bag, watch and jewelry in a locker, and step forward. I enter the trap, a room between outside and inside worlds. I turn my pockets inside out, remove my shoes, walk through the metal detector and receive an ultraviolet stamp on my wrist. Every few months for 12 years, I have visited a Massachusetts prison to teach creative writing to a group of locked-up men.

“The visits begin with a welcoming. The men rise from their circled chairs and thank me for coming to their cramped classroom. They hurry to get me tea or instant coffee and animal crackers, for which they have chipped in. They pass around a baggie of what my grandmother called penny candy: caramel squares and peppermint wheels, root beer barrels and Atomic Fireballs. Take a minute to breathe, they urge me. How’s your moms, your son?

“After we’re settled, we go around the circle for a check-in. I had a visit. I moved cells. I worked on my garden plot. I worked on my appeal. They tell their mostly mundane news, each one finishing up with And with that, I’m in, conveying his commitment to the group’s efforts while passing the focus to the next man.

“After everyone has spoken, we turn to our afternoon’s work with meditation. “Close your eyes,” one of them says. “Picture yourself in a green meadow, feeling the sun, the grass, the summer breeze.” He banishes the wasteland of prison and conjures color, life, peace. When we have returned from our imagined freedoms, I offer up a writing exercise:”

California Realignment is Failing

Another Press Release from the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation documenting the failure.

An excerpt.

“A report released last week by the FBI, documenting crime statistics in larger U. S. cities over 2012, provides more evidence that crime in California is increasing under Governor Jerry Brown’s Realignment law (AB109) according to the California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. The Foundation, which has been monitoring crime across the state since Realignment took effect in October 2011, cites data showing that while nationally both property crime and violent crime either increased slightly or decreased, in California all categories of crime increased, some at several times the national rate.

“While these statistics only document the first full year under the new law, which reduced the sentences and shifted responsibility for tens of thousands of habitual felons from the state to California counties, they indicate sharp increases in most crimes after decades of steady reductions.

“Between 1993 and 2011, violent crime dropped every year but 2006, when it increased by 1.2%. Last year violent crime in California went up 2.9%, more than twice the rate of the rest of the country. Murders in California increased by 10.5%, while the nation as a whole saw a 1.5% rise,” said Foundation President Michael Rushford.

“The Foundation also cites FBI statistics showing that, while rapes were down nationally, they increased by 6.4% in California. Property crimes also dropped nationally in 2012, but increased in California by 9.7%. The disparity in auto theft was even more dramatic. California saw a 15% increase, while the national rate increased by 1.3%.

“Supporters of Realignment initially promised that crime would not increase under the new law, and later characterized local reports of rising crime in many parts of the state as “alarmist” and “fear mongering.” The Foundation suggests that this second FBI report, showing increased crime in California, bears out the concerns expressed by numerous police chiefs, sheriffs, and prosecutors that Realignment would jeopardize public safety.”

The Church & Salvation

A superb set of two reflections from Catholic Culture, one about the authority principle and the second dealing with other religions.

An excerpt from the second.

“My little City Gates item, “And what is Islam, anyway?”, produced surprising reactions. Some emphasized that Islam is a lie from first to last, about which nothing good should ever be said. And some took exception to my perceived criticism of Islam (along with every other religion but one) for not having an authority principle, on the basis that non-Catholics can be saved and so we should always be positive toward other religions.

“Given these bizarre extremes, where does one start?

“Perhaps it is best to begin by clearing up some basic confusion about salvation. Nobody—but nobody—is saved apart from the salvific work of Jesus Christ. Further, nobody—but nobody—is saved without being joined to Christ, which is the same thing as being joined to the Church (Christ’s mystical body). But there is a distinction between formal and substantial membership in the Church. Not all formal (juridical) members will be saved; yet many who are not formal members will be saved.

“God’s salvific will is universal. He “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). But not all are brought to realization of the full truth revealed in Christ. The Holy Spirit, however, knows what gifts of truth have been effectively made available to each person in the course of Divine Providence. As St. Paul taught, faith is belief, trust and obedience to whatever the Holy Spirit has written on the heart. Therefore, those who seek wholeheartedly to know the good and do it, taking advantage of whatever they have been given, are substantially joined to Christ and the Church.

“This has been referred to in various ways: Baptism of desire, joining to the Church by an unconscious yet intense wish (“desiderio ac voto”, Pius XII), and substantial membership in the Church (John Paul II).

“Unfortunately, there are many things which work against not only finding the good (of which God is the source), but also even our wholehearted seeking of the good. There can be psychological impediments, cultural impediments, and impediments arising from our own all too ordinary weaknesses; such impediments may derive from disorders within our personalities, ignorance, error, and the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil.

“When we are carefully taught the wrong things by our culture (whether a religious or a secular culture), it becomes increasingly difficult to see beyond what “everyone” accepts as obvious, and seek instead to know, trust, believe and obey God. Moreover, our weakened human nature needs to be brought to perfection through grace, and our intellects tend to be darkened in the absence of grace. While grace is manifestly available in some measure to all, the complete set of goods which God has provided for our salvation, including every means of grace, is available only within the Church.”

Prisoners of Communism

Communism has proven over the past century to have mastered the art of the doublespeak and this article from the New York Times notes it in relation to the prisoners in labor camps who are called students, which also may be how Communist countries proclaim they imprison less than the U.S.; just call prisoners something else.

An excerpt.

“MASANJIA, China — The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon.

“Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.

“Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” said the note, which was tucked between two ersatz tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie Keith, opened the box in her living room last October. “Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

“The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention to China’s opaque system of “re-education through labor,” a collection of penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police without trial.

“But the letter writer remained a mystery, the subject of speculation over whether he or she was a real inmate or a creative activist simply trying to draw attention to the issue.

“Last month, though, during an interview to discuss China’s labor camps, a 47-year-old former inmate at the Masanjia camp said he was the letter’s author. The man, a Beijing resident and adherent of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual practice, said it was one of 20 such letters he secretly wrote over the course of two years. He then stashed them inside products whose English-language packaging, he said, made it likely they were destined for the West….

“Corinna-Barbara Francis, China researcher at Amnesty International, said that abolishing or significantly reforming re-education through labor would prove daunting because it provides the police an easy way to deal with perceived troublemakers, but also because it can be lucrative for those who work within a sprawling system that includes more than 300 camps. In addition to the profits earned from the inmate labor, prison employees often solicit bribes for early release, or for better treatment, from the families of those incarcerated. “Given the serious money being made in these places, the economic incentive to keep the system going is really powerful,” she said.

“During labor shortages, inmates say Masanjia officials simply buy small-time offenders from other cities on a sliding scale that begins at 800 renminbi, or about $130, for six months of labor. They include people like Zhang Ling, a 25-year-old from the eastern coastal city of Dalian who said she was among a group of 50 young women rounded up by the police last May during a crackdown on illegal pyramid sales schemes and then sold to Masanjia. While there, she sewed buttons on military uniforms but was released 10 months early after a brother paid for her release.

“Masanjia officials did not respond to faxes and phone calls requesting an interview. Approached one recent afternoon, a half-dozen guards on a cigarette break outside the women’s work camp refused to answer any questions. One guard, however, made a point of correcting the way a question was phrased. “There are no prisoners here,” she said sternly. “They are all students.”

California Realignment, FBI Stats Show Failure

As noted by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation on their blog Crime and Consequences.

An excerpt.

“Nearly lost in the hubbub over the DNA decision, the FBI on Monday released its preliminary full-year crime statistics for 2012. (The first-half stats were released in January.)  The national data show an uptick in violent crimes (1.2%) and a downtick in property crimes (-0.8%).

“Naturally, I was curious to see how California fared relative to the nation as a whole in the first full year of realignment.  Not good.  The FBI strangely does not give state totals in this report, but it gives numbers for cities over 100,000 population, which covers about half of the population of the state.  So I totaled these city numbers for 2012 and compared them with 2011.  Crime rates are generally higher in urban areas, of course, but we are dealing with year-to-year differences here, so that factor cancels out.

“Unlike the mixed bag in the national numbers, California city crime is up in every category.  Not only that, but California city crime increased more than the national figure in every category.  Violent crime is up 2.9% compared to 1.2% nationally, but when we focus on the most violent crimes, we see murder up 10.5% v. 1.5% nationally and rape up 6.4% v. a 0.3% drop nationally.”

Peter & Communism

One of the major problems within the Orthodox Christian world during the last century was the control by the national government of the Church—especially pronounced in the Communist governments of Russia and China—and that issue is addressed in this article from Catholic Culture.

An excerpt.

“Speaking at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, the Vatican’s leading ecumenical official challenged the Eastern Orthodox world to “boldly examine its main ecclesiological problem, namely, autocephaly of national churches and their inclination toward nationalism.”

“From the Orthodox point of view, the Church is present in every local church that celebrates the Eucharist, so each Eucharistic community is a complete church,” said Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. “Instead, from the Catholic point of view, a separate Eucharistic community is not a complete church. Therefore, a basis of the Catholic Church is the unity of separate Eucharistic communities with each other and the bishop of Rome. That is, the Catholic Church lives in the mutual intersection of local churches in one universal Church.”

The Poor

Pope Francis has spoken very compassionately about the poor—which must always, in our thoughts, include those who, as he reminds us, are spiritually poor—and perhaps the poorest of the poor are the prisoner and the homeless, for whose sake we need extend our prayers regularly.

I was homeless for brief periods during my years as a criminal but was usually able, by hook or crook, to secure shelter and food; but the experience left searing memories, mostly those of walking, walking, walking, forlornly around the downtown grid of my hometown.

As I am currently in the process of completing Lampstand’s annual book, which this year is about the intersection between Communism, Catholicism, and criminal reformation, I am aware of how deeply those who are homeless can often wish to live in a society where shelter and food are freely provided; but that provision too often goes hand in hand with government control, too often becomes government operated by Communist principles, and as history has shown, that type of government is procured at dreadful cost to the very poor it supposedly is designed to help.

Catholic traditional teaching—and I am not including the recent teaching coming from many Catholic clerical and lay leaders which calls the Communist-inspired liberation Theology a viable option—is vigorously against any form of Communism; knowing that the total government control that is central to Communism, is also totally against the basic freedoms of speech and religion that are central to Catholic doctrine.

One of the most eloquent responses to Liberation Theology is that of Pope Benedict XVI when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which can be read here.

From Prison to the Church

An absolutely wonderful conversion story from Bring Us to Life Blog.

An excerpt.

“Introduction

“At the age of 18, I was a high school dropout who robbed three banks, and was on his way to maximum-security prison.  There didn’t seem to be much reason for hope.  But ten years later, by excelling in academics after my release, I would begin my doctoral studies in political philosophy at the University of Michigan.  On the surface it appeared like I was living the American dream: I had a good comeback story, a bright future, I was young and physically fit and I always had a girlfriend.  By our cultures’ standards, I should have been happy.  But I only loved and trusted myself.  There was no room for God in my heart and in my understanding of the world, and so I was slowly dying from the inside out.  And I knew it.  Then one day in April 2007, while doing yard work, God reached down and reversed the course of my life with the resounding intervention: “I love you and I forgive you”—followed by an infusion of his divine love.  From that moment on I set aside everything I thought I knew, and pursued this love.  I was surprised to soon find that the source of this love was Jesus Christ, and that my home was the Roman Catholic Church.

“An Escape Into Prison

“So let’s start with the obvious question: How does an eighteen year-old come to the shocking decision to rob banks?  For it was a real decision, a decisive break that I carefully considered and turned over in my mind for months.  So unlike many robbers, my crime was not a crime of opportunity or an immediate response to the ache of a drug addiction.  But I suppose I robbed banks for the same reason that many poor souls turn to drugs or suicide: because I was without hope, saw no path forward and needed out.  My mind had become uninhabitable to myself as I was deeply estranged from myself, from others and from God.  At that time I thought I was at an impasse: I dropped out of high school after being suspended seven times my senior year, and I’d just quit my job because I couldn’t manage my anxiety amongst the ups and downs.  I thought that robbing banks and the prospect of prison would be my escape—for I assumed that I would get caught since I knew that nine out of ten bank robbers end up in prison.  I know it sounds crazy—a wild paradox—but I was making an escape into prison as a last attempt to salvage myself.  And believe it or not it actually worked and exceeded all of my desperate hopes.  But we’ll get to that later…

“Before I robbed banks I’d been committing an escalating series of petty crimes: vandalism, fistfights, and large and small thefts.  I’d prowl about at all hours of the night with like-minded friends and seize opportunities to destroy or steal property from anonymous strangers.  It was a very strange thing to do night after night, and so what was I up to here?  On the one hand, the thrill of danger briefly made me feel alive and in control, and I knew that robbing banks would just ratchet up the thrill.  On the other hand, I was striking out at the very anonymity of strangers—the fact that I was alienated and disassociated from others.  They had their lives that were separate and totally unknown and unconnected to me, and I hated that separation. This view had its origins in the troubles in my home.  When I was a child my home was marked by conflict and instability, and I felt isolated in my fear and helplessness.  I always fantasized about escaping into the woods to live alone, but I knew that was impractical.  And so I wanted someone to intervene—some neighbor or stranger—but no one ever did.  And so I viewed that separation as a threat, a betrayal, a sign that notions of justice were a fiction since real justice depends upon the fact of interconnected lives—a genuine community.  Since I had no hope that life was ultimately just, and found no consolation from others, I gradually retreated into myself as into a fortress.”

National & Local Crime Statistics

The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program is the standard for information on crimes nationally, but, as this article from the Denver Post reports, sometimes mistakes are made, big mistakes.

An excerpt.

“The FBI on Monday released statistics that show violent crime in Denver fell last year while property crime rose, bucking national trends in both categories.

“But the Denver Police Department’s own data paint a less rosy picture of crime in the city, showing a 4.3 percent increase in crime overall in 2012.

“The FBI’s statistics were part of the agency’s Uniform Crime Report, which tracks only the offenses reported to police agencies. The numbers released Monday were preliminary; a final report on crime in 2012 is due out later this year and could more closely resemble Denver police data. Violent crime throughout the country rose 1.2 percent, and property crime nationwide fell .8 percent, according to the crime report.

“Denver police cautioned against relying on the federal statistics for a full portrait of crime in the city, as discrepancies between the FBI and department data are vast. For example, while the FBI report says violent crime in Denver fell 3.6 percent in 2012 from the year before — from 3,718 to 3,584 — data provided by the police department show a 9.3 percent increase — from 3,810 violent crimes in 2011 to 4,163 last year.

“The FBI numbers indicate a nearly 4 percent drop in aggravated assaults, yet Denver police show an 11 percent increase from 2011 to last year. There were 28 homicides in Denver in 2012, by the FBI’s count, and 38 by the police department’s.

“There were smaller discrepancies in property crimes such as burglaries, arsons and thefts. The FBI data show a 3.4 percent increase last year — from 22,493 offenses in 2011 to 23,249 last year, while Denver police reported a 3.5 percent increase — from 22,662 to 23,454.

“The process they use to collect data doesn’t capture everything,” Denver police spokesman Lt. Matt Murray said.”

Russell Ford, Rapist?

I’ve been following the Russell Ford story for a few years, exchanged letters with him while he was still in prison, spoke with him when he got out, exchanged emails and sent him Lampstand material, and I accepted his innocence.

Like many Catholics, I enjoyed his many articles and was impressed with the support for his work from prominent Catholics, and his long protestation of innocence has certainly given resonance to his prison ministry.

However, the recent information that has come out in the article from Aleteia has left many of us uncertain as to the truth of his past, though the court document Aleteia quotes, if it is accurate in its description of the government’s case, is pretty damning.

Catholic Culture’s perspective is a good one.

David Gray’s approach is productive.

The bottom line is: what is Russell Ford’s response to the claims outlined in the Aleteia article?

Until we hear that, we still do not know the truth.