Saint of the Day & Proposed Criminal Justice Legislation is Bad

Today, December 6, 2018, is the feast day of St. Nicholas of Bari (270 AD-343 AD) according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year), read here http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots375.htm and a more detailed article from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j050sdNicholas12-6.htm

The definitive article though is at the Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm and here is the Wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives the saints lived, such an army, the Church Triumphant, who has our back in heaven.

Proposed Criminal Justice Legislation is Bad

Following up on Tuesday’s post, this article from the Wall Street Journal furthers the case.

An excerpt.

First, do no harm” is a well-known motto of medical professionals. If only our politicians followed it as well.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress are eager to pass something this year under the banner of “criminal-justice reform.” But bipartisan support isn’t an automatic Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Members on both sides of the aisle can, and sometimes do, team up to pass bad bills, and the so-called First Step Act is a good example. The more we learn about it, the worse it looks.

By a vote of 360-59 in May, the House passed a version of the legislation designed to curb recidivism by helping inmates return to society. It provides for more rehabilitation programs and vocational training, for example. Prison conditions also would improve under the bill: Inmates would be placed in facilities located closer to their families, and women would no longer be shackled during childbirth. So far, so good.

But once the First Step Act moved to the upper chamber for consideration, what had been a federal prison-reform measure morphed into a sentencing-reduction bill. For starters, the Senate bill eliminates mandatory life-without-parole penalties for repeat drug offenders and reduces mandatory-minimum sentences for other serious drug offenses.

On Monday, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard pointed out that the bill would give prison wardens the authority to deem violent criminals no longer dangerous and make them eligible for early release. “At the very least,” he writes, “this loophole undercuts the claim by supporters of the bill that ‘violent criminals and sex offenders’ would not qualify for shortened sentences.”

Among those supporters are President Trump and many Republicans in Congress who have made common cause with Barack Obama, Eric Holder and others on the activist left in denouncing “mass incarceration.” Some on the right believe that locking arms with liberal criminal-justice crusaders will help Republicans win minority votes. Others, like libertarian-leaning Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, point to the high costs of locking people up. But you do not help minority communities by going easy on the very people who prey on them. It is black and brown people who benefit the most when violent crime drops.

The costs of incarceration should be measured against the cost of letting criminals go free. The relevant comparison is not between, say, schooling and a prison cell. Rather, it’s between the cost of imprisonment and the cost of criminal activity. What are the costs of stolen or damaged property, lives lost, or families living in fear after dope pushers take over a housing project? And what price will unelected judges and prison wardens pay when their decisions backfire?

Also lost in this debate is sympathy for the law-abiding residents of violence-plagued ghettos who believe that these criminals are not so much victims of “society” or “institutional racism” as they are victims of their own character flaws. The left-wing Sentencing Project reported in 2014 that when Americans were surveyed on whether courts “deal too harshly or not harshly enough with criminals,” 73% of whites and 64% of blacks responded, “not harshly enough.” If nearly two-thirds of black respondents feel that the criminal-justice system goes too easy on lawbreakers, perhaps the mass-incarceration activists aren’t speaking for those in the black community after all.

Until recently, the most vocal opponent of the First Step Act was GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. But the more Republicans learn about the sentencing provisions in the measure—and how different it is from the version that passed the House—the less they like it. I’m told that Republican critics now include, among others, Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marco Rubio of Florida, Ben Sasse and Deb Fischer of Nebraska, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Ted Cruz of Texas, Richard Shelby of Alabama and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Law-enforcement agencies like the National Sheriffs’ Association also are pressing for changes to the bill. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has kept his opinion to himself, but his staff has disseminated articles critical of the legislation.

Retrieved December 5, 2018 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-senate-surrender-on-criminal-justice-1543966360

Saint of the Day & Releasing Prisoners

Today, December 4, 2018, is the feast day of St. Barbara, Virgin, Martyr (Third Century) according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year), read here http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots373.htm

There is a more detailed article from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Barbara

The definitive article though is at the Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02284d.htm

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives the saints lived, such an army, the Church Triumphant, who has our back in heaven.

Releasing Prisoners

Ann Coulter nails the untenable logic included in the latest proposed criminal justice reform.

An excerpt.

In the systematic dismantling of common sense in America, Jared Kushner’s “sentencing reform” bill is the coup de grace — a Mack Truck hurtling down the highway about to take out thousands of Americans. The Idiot Army is already in place to fight and win this battle.

Jared and the hip-hop artists currently advising him have decided that too many people are in prison. If you think you’ve heard this before, you have: Genius insights of this sort have preceded nearly every major crime wave this country has experienced, from Philadelphia to California to a bloody period known as “the Warren Court.”

As anyone with an amoeba’s understanding of recent history knows, beginning in the early ’60s, assorted heads-up-their-asses liberals jettisoned logic, common sense and a basic understanding of human nature by releasing criminals from the prisons where they belonged.

Instead of punishing criminals, we would give them social services, education and job training — with the implied understanding that they wouldn’t move next door to any of the reformers. The experts assured a disbelieving public that these policies would reduce crime.

As Thomas Sowell writes in The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, the stage was set. Liberal criminologists’ soft-on-crime policies were in place. We only needed empirical evidence.

“THE RESULTS: Crime rates skyrocketed. Murder rates suddenly shot up until the murder rate in 1974 was more than twice as high as in 1961. Between 1960 and 1976, a citizen’s chances of becoming a victim of a major violent crime tripled.”

Prior to this period, crime had been declining for three decades.

Thousands of Americans were murdered, raped, assaulted, disfigured and robbed as a direct result of the exact same policies that Jared and his assistant, Donald Trump, are trying to foist on the country right now.

Then-Princeton professor John DiIulio Jr. looked at the consequences of a single order by a Carter-appointed judge, Norma Shapiro, that put a population cap on Philadelphia prisons in the 1990s. In an 18-month period between 1993 and 1994, 9,732 prisoners released as a result of Judge Shapiro’s order were re-arrested for committing 79 murders, 90 rapes, 701 burglaries, 959 robberies, 1,113 assaults, 2,215 drug offenses and 2,748 thefts.

It took more than a decade of Reagan and Bush judges, Republican mayors and governors, and the endless complaints of ordinary people to produce the low crime rates we have today. Their formula was: Do the precise opposite of whatever the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice and The New York Times recommend.

In New York City alone, at least 10,000 people — mostly minorities — are not dead because Rudy Giuliani revived the idea of punishment for criminals, in lieu of understanding them.

Progressive young hipsters living in Brooklyn today have no concept that their trendy neighborhoods would be uninhabitable war zones but for Mayor Giuliani. If you don’t have order and safety in big cities, you can’t have anything else.

In 1991 the U.S. murder rate was well over twice what it is today.

Normal person: Thank God we started putting criminals in prison again!

Jared: LET’S RELEASE THEM.

A 2014 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that, within five years of release, 82 percent of property offenders, 77 percent of drug offenders, 74 percent of public order offenders and 71 percent of violent offenders were arrested for a new crime — after not getting caught committing God knows how many others.

This is not rocket science. Lock up criminals and they can’t commit any more crimes. As a New York Times headline put it in 2004 with characteristic cluelessness: “Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates.”

Retrieved November 23, 2018 from http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2018-11-21.html#read_more

Saint of the Day & Giving Books to Prisoners

Today, November 15, 2018, is the feast day of St. Albert the Great, Bishop, Confessor & Doctor of the Church, (c. 1193 – November 15, 1280), (and the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas) according to the 1962 Roman Missal, and you can buy a copy of the 1962 Missal at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Roman-Missal-1962-English-Latin/dp/0954563123/ref=sr_ and there is an article about him at Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus

The definitive piece though is from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j230sd_AlbertusMagnus_11-15.html

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives the saints lived, such an army, the Church Triumphant, who has our back in heaven.

Giving Books to Prisoners

Very nice work being done by this nonprofit in Appalachia, as reported by BuzzFeed. (Hat tip to Stacy)

An excerpt.

There’s a scene in The Shawshank Redemption — that 1994 feel-good prison break classic — when after more than six years of effort, our scrappy inmate-hero, Andy (Tim Robbins), finally receives funding to begin building a prison library. Soon, bookcases are being assembled, boxes of dusty used novels are being unpacked, and Andy is rattling off where to file the works of authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas (whose name is initially pronounced “dumbass” by the inmate doing the filing).

“By the spring, Andy had transformed a storage room smelling of rat turds and turpentine into the best prison library in New England,” a dulcet voiceover from Morgan Freeman tells us, as the camera pans to a bustling room filled with inmates plucking books from well-stocked shelves and crowded around hand-carved wooden reading tables.

Reality, though, isn’t so charmingly bespoke. Today, prison libraries are hit-or-miss, more often falling on the “miss” side: frequently barebones, stacked with outdated textbooks, or littered with battered romance novels. Some prisons are even attempting to do away with libraries entirely, instead placing the burden on inmates to pay for e-books. In Pennsylvania, inmates have to pay for a $147 tablet in order to read books.

“The quality of the libraries is very uneven. People don’t have access to the books they really want to read, particularly if they’re on a specific subject. Some prisons try to do interlibrary loan, but it’s a very delayed service and, again, limited,” explains Katy Ryan, a professor at West Virginia University and cofounder of the Appalachian Prison Book Project.

Ryan shows me a recent letter from an inmate in Tennessee describing the library at his correctional facility. “Our library here isn’t very big, and besides, getting to it takes an act of Congress,” he says in nimble, attentive handwriting. “I am an indigent inmate and have no T.V., radio, etc., so books are my life. A fellow inmate said you guys could help me get some new reading material.”

Fortunately, he’s written to the right place.

The Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP) is a nonprofit organization based in Morgantown, West Virginia, that sends free books to incarcerated people across six states in Appalachia: Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Founded in 2004 by Ryan and fellow professor (and recently elected Morgantown deputy mayor) Mark Brazaitis, APBP was born out of a class Ryan taught on the literature of incarceration.

“While reading works from formerly incarcerated or currently incarcerated people, we learned how important books were to them,” Ryan explains. “I mentioned to the students that I didn’t know if a prison book project existed in West Virginia. It turns out, there wasn’t one in the entire region. So, we carved out those six states, and committed ourselves to sending books to people who wanted them.”

Ryan’s all-volunteer organization started its work from a church basement, then operated briefly out of a graduate student’s apartment, then finally found a home inside the Aull Center, a historic building in downtown Morgantown where the small, donated office space — which Ryan says has “an ineffable spirit” and volunteers frequently reference in magical terms — is stacked high with incoming letters and outgoing books. At any given time, there are up to a dozen volunteers, all of whom have been trained in the APBP system, matching inmate request letters with books on hand — or putting out feelers to rustle up a book on the topic (or by the author, or in the language) requested. The majority of books donated are from the local Morgantown community, but APBP also regularly receives packages filled with novels, how-to guides, and beyond from across the country. Soft-covered books are preferred to hardbacks (which are more difficult to get into prisons), and when it comes to anything small-press or handmade — comic books, zines — staples are a no-go. The entire process is powerful in its simplicity: Once a letter is paired up with a proper book, volunteers simply record it in a handwritten log as a “match,” then deliver it to the post office.

Retrieved November 13, 2018 from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahbaird/appalachian-nonprofit-sends-free-books-prison-inmates

Saint of the Day& True Conversion

Today, October 22, 2018, is the Feast Day of St. Abercius & St. St. Peter of Alcântara, according to Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j228sd_Albercius10_22.html for St. Abercius and https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j043sdPeterAlcantara10-22.htm for St. Peter of Alcantara.

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives they lived, such an army who has our back in heaven.

True Conversion

In reading a wonderful book by Rachel Fulton (Now writing under her married name Rachel Fulton Brown), I read this paragraph so relevant to Lampstand where she is writing about the Real Presence in the Eucharist in the conversion of the Saxons, with the key Lampstand related point which I have bolded:

“To understand why, it will be necessary to consider not only the Frankish program for the conversion of the Saxons but also the contemporary reform of the Frankish liturgy and the corollary effort to instruct the laity (the “people of God”) in its significance. Above all, however, it will be necessary to consider in some depth the process of conversion itself. As we shall see, for Augustine and his readers among the Frankish clergy like Paschasius, who were concerned with the instruction of the “people,” conversion was to be understood as a process not only of instruction but of translation. In this context, Paschasius’s representation of the body and blood as historically present was an attempt to translate the written history of the Incarnation into a spoken history of the Word-made-flesh. The gap that made this translation necessary had as much to do with differences between Saxon and Frankish perceptions of history as it did with any arguable differences between “oral” and “literate” tradition. The Frankish clergy were conscious of this gap, and they were also convinced that they knew how best to overcome it: as they saw it, real translation could be effected only in a moment of sympathy, the potential convert or catechumen becoming capable of understanding and learning from the missionary only from the moment that the missionary adapted his speech to the understanding of the catechumen. Whether or not it was usual (or possible) to realize this moment in practice, [effective ministry to criminals is only possible by a transformed criminal] the effort to do so was paradigmatic for Paschasius’s attempt to make sense of the Eucharist for Warin’s Saxon novices, and it was fundamental to his conception of the efficacy of the sacrament as a moment of translation at which God became flesh in order to adapt his divinity to the understanding and experience of human beings, making of them through the Eucharist one flesh with his own (in Christo naturaliter unum corpus)” (p. 16)

Rachel Fulton. (2002). From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ & the Virgin Mary, 800-1200. Columbia University Press: New York.

And for insight to the author, here is a link to her blog and a recent post about why she studies Mary, https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/2017/06/why-i-study-mary.html?fbclid=IwAR1GGazd6znUSvmHWhEZxUbZ_ZLx0FC5KuA9-CBgfOMSwgjhQ8K5X_i4m5E

An excerpt from the Lampstand book on prison ministry (The Lampstand Prison Ministry: Constructed on Catholic Social Teaching & the History of the Catholic Church) can be read at https://davidhlukenbill.wordpress.com/category/publications-book-excerpts-holy-prisoner-monks/

 

Saint of the Day & Mass Incarceration Propaganda

Today, October 18, 2018, is the feast day of St. Luke according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year), read at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots324.htm and a more detailed story from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j150sd_Luke_10-18.html

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives they lived, such an army who has our back in heaven.

Mass Incarceration Propaganda

In the ongoing argument over mass incarceration the propagandistic claim is made that the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.

Lampstand’s position has long been that many of the Communist/Socialist countries incarcerate far more but hide the fact, as this story from the Wall Street Journal reveals.

An excerpt.

BEIJING—A senior Chinese official offered the government’s fullest defense so far of its mass detention program for Muslims in China’s far west, saying it formed a bulwark for social stability and suggesting the detentions are voluntary.

In a lengthy interview published Tuesday by the government’s Xinhua News Agency, the chairman of China’s Xinjiang region, Shohrat Zakir, portrayed the camps as generously equipped vocational schools that are vital to a crackdown on religious extremism. He said the clampdown helped bring an end to terrorism and a drop in crime in the region.

“Facts have proven that vocational education and training fits the reality of current efforts in countering terrorism, maintaining stability and eradicating extremism in Xinjiang,” he said, according to Xinhua.

The interview, published in Chinese and English, is part of an evolving strategy by China to explain the campaign. U.S. officials and United Nations experts estimate hundreds of thousands of Muslims, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, have been detained in the past two years. While the detentions initially attracted little attention, criticism—from the U.S., Europe and some Muslim groups—has been building in recent months.

Chinese officials equivocated over the mass detentions before a United Nations panel in August, saying minor criminals in Xinjiang had been sent to vocational schools to learn how to reintegrate into society. Revisions to Xinjiang’s counterterrorism regulations, made public last week, acknowledged for the first time that the vocational training centers were being used for “deradicalization” work.

“They clearly want to get out in front of the story after a year of trying to deny it,” said James Leibold, an expert on Chinese ethnic policies at La Trobe University in Australia. Part of the current effort, he said, is likely aimed at pre-empting further criticism at a U.N. review of China’s human-rights record, scheduled for November.

Reporting by scholars outside China and interviews with former detainees and their relatives by foreign media, including The Wall Street Journal, have documented the expansion of the detention program and the intense political indoctrination those held are subjected to. They described being held against their will, forced to sing patriotic songs and prohibited from praying.

In the Xinhua interview, Mr. Zakir contradicted those accounts, suggesting enrollment in the institutions is voluntary. He said the facilities sign “training agreements” with each trainee.

Chinese law doesn’t allow for indefinite detention without trial, so Xinjiang’s camps can only be legal if they are voluntary, according to Jeremy Daum, a senior research fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. If they are, he said, independent experts should be allowed to inspect the facilities—something that authorities have refused to allow thus far.

Offices with Xinjiang’s Communist Party Committee either declined to comment or didn’t respond to a faxed request for comment.

China’s resort to mass detentions comes after a yearslong government campaign to suffocate an occasionally violent Uighur separatist movement that Beijing says has links to extremist religious groups abroad. Islamic State has produced videos aimed at recruiting Uighurs, some of whom have left China to fight with the organization in Iraq and Syria.

Human-rights groups and Uighur activists living abroad say the violence is driven by extreme restrictions on Uighur religious and cultural activities and by state-sanctioned policies that ultimately benefit Han Chinese at the expense of minorities in Xinjiang.

In the interview, Mr. Zakir cited several laws and regulations he said justified the campaign. He reiterated earlier government statements that the centers are intended to rehabilitate minor criminals.

He described the vocational centers as resort-like facilities equipped with volleyball courts, ping-pong tables and film-screening rooms, where ethnic customs are respected, nutritious meals are provided “free of charge” and each air-conditioned room comes with its own TV.

According to interviews with former detainees and their family members, conditions in the centers vary widely. While some resemble vocational schools, others seen by the Journal look more like prisons, surrounded by thick walls topped with razor wire and watched over by armed police in guard towers.

Several former detainees told the Journal they were subjected to hours of political indoctrination daily and forced to denounce Islam. One said he was strapped to a chair for hours with his hands shackled behind his back and interrogated about ties to religious groups abroad, which he denied having. Authorities declined to comment.

Retrieved October 17, 2018 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-ending-denials-defends-muslim-detentions-as-vital-for-stability-1539691263

Saint of the Day & Holy Prisoner Monks

Today, October 9, 2018, is the feast day of St. Dionysius and his Companions, Martyrs & St. Louis Bertrand, according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year) read about these saints at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots315.htm

It is a great daily refection reading about the saints.

Holy Prisoner Monks

This wonderful story from the New York Times about how a reformed criminal benefited during his prison term from the help of other prisoners serving long sentences reminded me of a piece in my book about prison ministry; how some lifers can become holy prisoner monks, which you can read on our website at https://davidhlukenbill.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/publications-book-excerpts-holy-prisoner-monks/

An excerpt from the New York Times story.

I can speak for both myself and my older brother, Darryl, when I say that March 8, 2000, was the most regrettable day of our lives. On that day, I accompanied Darryl to an encounter with a gang member who, days earlier, had sexually assaulted Darryl’s wife. We were both armed. Rather than report the assault, we set out for a confrontation. Within seconds, the situation escalated and Darryl fired several shots in a struggle for the gun, wounding the gang member and himself. Darryl and I survived. The gang member did not.

Months later, we stood shackled and handcuffed inside a muggy Brooklyn courtroom. I was 20 and Darryl was 21. We had every reason to think we’d spend the rest of our lives in jail. But Justice Gustin L. Reichbach did something unexpected, something that probably saved both our lives: He did not impose the maximum prison sentence of 40 years to life — the equivalent of life without parole — and instead sentenced each of us to serve 17½ years to life.

We were taken to Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, to serve our time. That Darryl and I were in the same prison gave us both real advantages. Friends and family could visit us in one place, helping us maintain a connection with the outside world. We were able to reflect together on where we had gone wrong and to commit ourselves to turning our lives around. Seeing each other every day provided a constant reminder of the worst choice we’d ever made.

We made a pact not to ever do anything that would separate us. We became partners in accountability, supported each other during difficult times and deepened our faith with the help of wonderful chaplains there. We also had the guidance and wisdom of several “old-timers” — prisoners decades older than us, some serving life sentences, who committed themselves to keeping us out of trouble. It worked. After seven years of good behavior, Darryl and I were granted permission to become cellmates and spent the next 10 years sharing a bunk.

Soon enough, we followed the lead of those old-timers. We mentored younger inmates. We were co-chairmen of the Youth Assistance Program, where we re-enacted our crime and relayed our life experiences to young men, many on probation or taking part in diversion programs, which offer young offenders alternatives to criminal prosecution With the help of other inmates, we also created the Prison Community Awareness Program, mentoring inmates aged 16 to 21, some of whom were serving life sentences. The institutional example we set simply paid forward the wisdom and guidance those older men extended to us.

In 2017 Darryl and I were paroled just after serving our minimum sentence. This was rare. When we entered the system in 2000, only a very small percentage of violent offenders — by some estimates, roughly 3 percent — serving life sentences in New York had been paroled after serving their minimum sentence. That aversion to parole, together with tougher sentencing laws, has contributed to what is now an aging prisoner population, with New York housing more than 10,000 inmates age 50 or older.

Today, I’m a full-time student at Cornell, majoring in government, while Darryl is making his mark in the Justice-in-Education program at Columbia. The most frequent question Darryl and I get is: “Exactly how did you guys do it?”

Evidently, the notion that convicted felons can ascend from the lowest depths of maximum security to the Ivy League is counterintuitive. But I’m quick to deny that Darryl and I are somehow exceptional. In prison, we shined because of, not despite, our circumstances, especially the presence of the “old-timers” who helped guide us to our coming-of-age. We owe them tremendous credit.

Retrieved October 8, 2018 from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/opinion/sunday/aging-inmates-prisons-mandatory-sentencing.html

Saint of the Day & Freed After Wrongful Conviction

Today, October 6, 2018, is the feast day of St. Bruno, founder of the Carthusians, according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year) read about this saint at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots312.htm and a much more detailed account from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j041sdBruno10-3.htm

Freed After Wrongful Conviction

Good and very tragic story of a man freed after 27 years imprisoned for a murder he should not have been convicted for, as reported by the New York Times.

An excerpt.

Larry McKee’s eyes lost their glimmer the second he stepped out of a car on a recent morning and recognized the Bronx corner where a street fight derailed his life more than 20 years ago.

Mr. McKee had returned to the corner in Morris Heights to make peace with his past, he said somberly, but most importantly to embrace his future. A laundromat had been replaced by a delicatessen, but other than that the corner retained the same bustling feel.

“This is where I was taken from,” he said, almost in a whisper. “It’s a hurt feeling, but I’ve got to move on.”

Mr. McKee spent two decades in prison for a murder he has long maintained he did not commit. Eight months ago, a state judge threw out his conviction on the recommendation of the Bronx district attorney’s office, which determined important evidence had never been given to the defense.

Ever since his release from the Adirondack Correctional Facility in Ray Brook, N.Y., Mr. McKee, now 47, has been learning to live in a very different world than the one he left in 1997. It is a difficult adjustment that parallels the experiences of many others who have been released in recent years after serving time for wrongful convictions.

“Technology’s changed,” he said, holding his iPhone 8 curiously. “The phone. I’ve still got problems with it, with emails and texts.”

A jury found Mr. McKee guilty of murder after a 16-year-old witness testified that he saw Mr. McKee shoot Theodore Vance, 29, after a fight on the corner, at 176th Street and University Avenue. The fight turned into an all-out brawl in which brickbats and other debris became weapons.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers agree Mr. Vance struck Mr. McKee with a pipelike object during the melee, and then was shot by someone. Mr. McKee insists he ran away before the shot was fired. The gun was never recovered.

Mr. McKee was released after a new witness came forward last year and gave a different description of the killer. The Bronx district attorney’s office, after a six-month investigation, also determined important grand jury testimony was never shared with the defense. A person who knew the victim told the grand jury that in his last moments, the man had described his killer as a “Spanish guy.” Mr. McKee is black.

In January, the Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, asked Justice Robert E. Torres to throw out the conviction, which he did. Ms. Clark’s office also dismissed the indictment.

Mr. McKee’s lawyers argue the grand jury testimony alone would had been enough to clear him of the murder charge in the 1990s.

“He would have never gotten convicted if the jury heard the victim’s last words,” said one of the defense lawyers, Oscar Michelen. “Here the prosecutor intentionally withheld evidence that could have proven that Larry was innocent. There is no excuse.”

Retrieved October 6, 2018 from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/nyregion/wrongful-conviction-larry-mckee.html

Writing from Prison

Excellent article from the Wall Street Journal.

An excerpt.

When a revolutionary mob stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the famous Paris prison held only seven inmates. The eighth, the Marquis de Sade, had already been transferred to another jail. But the liberators did find the manuscript of his pornographic novel “The 120 Days of Sodom,” which he had managed to write on a narrow scroll of parchment 50 feet long.

Sade was uncommonly prolific during his 11 years in the Bastille, producing 20 plays and eight novels. Two centuries later, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to five years of hard labor by the Soviet government, wrote in his essay “The Prison Where I Live,” “Prison writings are about suffering and endurance.” In its perverse way, Sade’s work exemplifies both.

The real significance of prison literature, though, whatever its subject matter, is that it speaks to a higher truth about the human condition: The spirit remains free, even when the body is in bondage.

St. Paul’s Epistles to the Philippians and the Colossians, written from prison around the year 62, combine practical admonitions to these early Christian congregations with musings on the cosmic nature of Jesus. Likewise, the prison diary of Vibia Perpetua of Carthage, who was martyred in 203 at the age of 21 after becoming a Christian convert, recorded both her inner thoughts and daily life, making her the founding mother of prison literature.

In the sixth century, the Roman senator Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was brought down while at the height of his power, having been chancellor to the Ostrogothic king Theoderic. In prison, Boethius composed “The Consolations of Philosophy” while awaiting his execution. The treatise is one of the great meditations on the meaning of life in all its vicissitudes.

Modern prison writing came into its own during the Reformation, when large numbers of educated people were incarcerated as being enemies of the state because of their religious views. Writing became an act of political resistance. In 1642, the poet Richard Lovelace, imprisoned for his support of King Charles I in the English Civil War, wrote from the Gatehouse prison in London, “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor iron bars a cage.”

Not surprisingly, prison authorities have often reacted by trying to silence the writers in their midst. Sentenced in 1849 to four years in a Siberian prison, for the crime of belonging to a progressive literary group, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky could only write in secret. Miraculously, his prison notes survived, courtesy of a sympathetic hospital doctor, and formed the basis of “The House of the Dead.”

Dostoyevsky’s message in that novel—that oppression destroys the oppressor as well as the victim—continued to resonate in the 20th century. Writing from Birmingham jail in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded his fellow pastors that society cannot avoid the consequences of injustice: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Retrieved July 16, 2018 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/literature-behind-bars-1531414940

Stanford Prison Experiment was a Lie

And the harm caused by the fake narrative generated by the experiment is incalculable

The whole sad story is reported in Medium, a must read.

An excerpt.

The Lifespan of a Lie

The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?

It was late in the evening of August 16th, 1971, and twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, a slim, short-statured Berkeley graduate with a mop of pale, shaggy hair, was locked in a dark closet in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, naked beneath a thin white smock bearing the number 8612, screaming his head off.

“I mean, Jesus Christ, I’m burning up inside!” he yelled, kicking furiously at the door. “Don’t you know? I want to get out! This is all fucked up inside! I can’t stand another night! I just can’t take it anymore!”

It was a defining moment in what has become perhaps the best-known psychology study of all time. Whether you learned about Philip Zimbardo’s famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” in an introductory psych class or just absorbed it from the cultural ether, you’ve probably heard the basic story.

Zimbardo, a young Stanford psychology professor, built a mock jail in the basement of Jordan Hall and stocked it with nine “prisoners,” and nine “guards,” all male, college-age respondents to a newspaper ad who were assigned their roles at random and paid a generous daily wage to participate. The senior prison “staff” consisted of Zimbardo himself and a handful of his students.

The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but after Zimbardo’s girlfriend stopped by six days in and witnessed the conditions in the “Stanford County Jail,” she convinced him to shut it down. Since then, the tale of guards run amok and terrified prisoners breaking down one by one has become world-famous, a cultural touchstone that’s been the subject of books, documentaries, and feature films — even an episode of Veronica Mars.

The SPE is often used to teach the lesson that our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves. But its deeper, more disturbing implication is that we all have a wellspring of potential sadism lurking within us, waiting to be tapped by circumstance. It has been invoked to explain the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, the Armenian genocide, and the horrors of the Holocaust. And the ultimate symbol of the agony that man helplessly inflicts on his brother is Korpi’s famous breakdown, set off after only 36 hours by the cruelty of his peers.

There’s just one problem: Korpi’s breakdown was a sham.

“Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking,” he told me last summer, in the first extensive interview he has granted in years. “If you listen to the tape, it’s not subtle. I’m not that good at acting. I mean, I think I do a fairly good job, but I’m more hysterical than psychotic.”

Now a forensic psychologist himself, Korpi told me his dramatic performance in the SPE was indeed inspired by fear, but not of abusive guards. Instead, he was worried about failing to get into grad school.

Retrieved June 18, 2018 from https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

Ministry to Prison Guards

There is an excellent article by Eve Tushnet in America Magazine bringing attention to the humanity of guards which too many in prison ministry either forget, do not accept or do not know.

I spent 12 years (1960s /1970s) in maximum security state and federal prisons and long held the typical criminal’s position regarding guards, but in those 12 years I saw more decent behavior from guards than not, even though I pretty much remained alienated from them due to the situation.

More ministries dedicated to them is something that should be done; and it would be best done by a guard.

An excerpt from America Magazine.

The patron saint of corrections officers, St. Adrian of Nicomedia, is said to have been a Roman officer astonished by the faith and courage of the Christians whose torture he was supervising. Legend has it that he declared himself a Christian and ordered his own name to be added to the list of those facing the death penalty, although he had not even been baptized.

In Acts 16, Sts. Paul and Silas converted their warden after being miraculously freed from their chains; they prevented him from killing himself in shame over their escape.

At the crucifixion, the two people who confessed Jesus as Lord were a fellow prisoner and the centurion assigned to guard them. From the very beginning, Christ came to deliver not only captives but their guards.

And yet today, startlingly few Christian ministries exist to serve those who work in jails and prisons. Chaplains and other Christian volunteers come to visit inmates—following Jesus’ call in Matthew 25:36—but corrections officers are mostly left to handle their spiritual lives on their own. Trained to mistrust others, doing work that is poorly understood and only noticed when it is done wrong, working overtime in an environment of fear, stress and split-second moral decisions, officers show all the signs of people in crisis: high divorce rates, high rates of post-traumatic stress and depression, high rates of substance abuse; several studies have found that their suicide rate is among the highest of any job in the United States.

I spoke with several people who looked back on their corrections work as a time when they were able to make a positive difference. But most people I heard from echoed the assessment of Jeffrey Rude, a chaplain and trainer of corrections officers: “Our staff are hurting, and our staff are desperate.”

Hidden within our contemporary debates about the nature, expanse and injustices of incarceration in the United States are hundreds of thousands of people who took a job. They took the job because they needed work or because they wanted to protect their communities. They came out of the military or out of neighborhoods much like those of the inmates. Some had loved ones behind bars. Others came out of sheltered environments utterly foreign to what they were about to experience.

Officers noted that their job was to watch over people who might be trying to kill them or threatening them or their family members with assault. They work in unpredictable environments, where even elderly or ill people may become violent. They have seen religion used to manipulate, shanks hidden in Bibles. They are often explicitly trained to view inmates with suspicion and even contempt, and yet some put themselves at risk to save inmates’ lives. Officers work grueling hours, sometimes in facilities without adequate heating in the winter or cooling in the summer—an issue of prisoners’ rights but also workers’ rights.

People used words like “thankless,” “unappreciated” or “guilty until proven innocent” to describe their role. Almost all of the officers and former officers I spoke with told stories, unprompted, of fellow officers who had committed suicide.

Many people knew corrections officers who had been raised Christian but no longer went to church. Long, inconvenient hours made churchgoing hard; some former officers said they were anxious in crowds or they’d had painful experiences worshiping alongside inmates’ families. This can be considered fraternization, a security risk and therefore a risk to their jobs. Every single person I talked to mentioned that C.O.s learn to close themselves off from others.

Retrieved June 12, 2018 from https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/05/31/you-have-heard-it-said-visit-imprisoned-what-about-their-guards#