CAUTION: Road Paved with Good Intentions

This sermon was presented on 7 September, 2014 by Ashley Hummel. Ashley is a Criminal Justice major at the University of Texas Pan-American.

Reading 1: 
In Les Miserables, the convict Jean Valjean spent a night at a bishop’s house. The bishop treated Valjean kindly, but in desperation, in the middle of the night, Valjean stole some silver plates and fled. Suspicious of his behavior, some police arrested him on the road and brought him back to the bishop.

The bishop, however, saw that the real crime was not Valjean’s…

The following is from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables:

“Ah, there you are!” said he, looking toward Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. But I gave you the candlesticks also, which are silver like the rest, and would bring two hundred francs. Why did you not take them along with your plates?”
Jean Valjean opened his eyes and looked at the bishop with an expression which no human tongue could describe.
“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier, “Then what this man said was true? We met him. He was going like a man who was running away, and we arrested him in order to see. He had this silver.”
“And he told you,” interrupted the bishop, with a smile, “that it had been given him by a good old priest with whom he had passed the night. I see it all. And you brought him back here? It is all a mistake.”
“If that is so,” said the brigadier, “we can let him go.”
“Certainly,” replied the bishop.
The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who shrank back.
“Is it true that they let me go?” he said in a voice almost inarticulate, as if he were speaking in his sleep.
“Yes! You can go. Do you not understand?” said a gendarme.
“My friend,” said the bishop, “before you go away, here are your candlesticks; take them.”
He went to the mantelpiece, took the two candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean…
Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a wild appearance.
“Now,” said the bishop, “go in peace.”
Then, turning to the gendarmes, he said:
“Messieurs, you can retire.” The gendarmes withdrew.
Jean Valjean felt like a man who is just about to faint.
The bishop approached him, and said, in a low voice:
“Forget not, never forget that you promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.”
Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of this promise, stood confounded. The bishop had laid much stress upon these words as he uttered them. He continued, solemnly:
“Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!”

Reading 2:
"It is said that the real reason Justice wears a blindfold is so she doesn't have to see everything that she stands for get pissed on."
-From the HBO series, Dexter

Sermon: CAUTION: Road Paved with Good Intentions

My parents were terrible at explaining things. When I was a child, they warned me, “If you ever see anyone wearing all white, don’t talk to them, and if they try to talk to you or come near you, run away.” You can imagine that made me uncomfortable at weddings. What they should have said is, “We live really close to a prison and sometimes dangerous people escape. They wear all white jump-suits and may try to get into the house to hide.” I learned this years later, when an inmate was found changing clothes in my friend’s laundry room. It really sunk in when I started driving, and passed fields of cotton, with  white-clad working men being guarded by other men with shot-guns and dogs. Before that, prison wasn’t a thing in my awareness. I suppose, as a child, I knew that police got the bad guys, but I didn’t put much thought into what was done with them afterwards.

When I learned about the legal system in school, it was mostly in a context that fit my childhood perception: the police got the bad guys, the bad guys went to jail. Great! My overdeveloped teenage perception of justice was OK with that narrative. And now?

*SIGH*

I began writing this sermon many times. Every time, it broke me. What to say? I started to tell you about the issues, but you know the issues, at least in a general sense. I started to tell you about my own experience with the justice system, why I began to study it, and how everything I learned opened my eyes a little wider, a little wider, until it felt like all that was left of me were two giant, gaping eyeballs, with no head or body at all. I began to tell you how I was horrified, how I struggled with my opinions, with what to do, with how to fix things. How do you fix something so terribly broken? How can we fix this without tearing it down? How can I convince you that a patch here and there does nothing?
I’ve thrown away at least four sermons on this topic.

Then it hit me: most of us, well, maybe not us here, but most of our society seems to accept the good cop/bad criminal narrative. They accept it because the powers-that-be do just what my parents did: they tell us something about what is happening, but it isn’t really what they mean. We accept that good cop/bad criminal has always been the way. We think kings locked bad men in dungeons, and police lock bad men in cells that are much better than dungeons. We think that when this happens, we are safe.  

So I want to tell you a different story. I want to tell you a history—how we came to be here and how good our intentions were.

Of course you know dungeons were mostly a place for political enemies. When the lower classes committed crime, dungeons or jails were just places to hold them until they were punished. Punishment was public and usually humiliating, sometimes painful, sometimes lethal. Sometimes, the punishments didn’t fit the crime. Today we consider most of the old punishments barbaric. In some ways, the severity and swiftness of these punishments was useful. Humiliation is a proven method of affecting behavior, even if it eventually does more harm than good, and a swift punishment which leaves someone alive meant peasants could return to work. If everyone was locked up forever, the feudal lord or colonial municipality would have to feed a person who was not contributing to society, and there would be one less person helping to bring in the harvest or put out a fire. Though barbarically flawed, this system acknowledged that all human beings are members of a community, even after they commit crimes.

The modern prison system is largely influenced by the ideas of 17^th century Quakers , who were appalled by the brutal punishments of the time and, stop me when this sounds familiar, “Believed a part of God’s nature lived within every person.”

In 1682 the Quaker rulers of Pennsylvania passed “The Great Law” which required that crimes be punished by confinement in a so-called house of corrections. In 1718 the English government overrode the Great Law because they thought it was too weak and would lead to a culture of lawlessness. Is it me, or does that sound like those “tough on crime” policies we hear so much about from politicians? Anyway, upon independence, Pennsylvania went back to their Quaker methods because it was believed that orderliness and not brutality would make people morally better. 

Penitentiaries were secular, but spiritual in intent. The idea was to give criminals the space and solitude that was necessary to bring about a spiritual awakening and change of lifestyle. It was to make them penitent. Reformers had a monastic lifestyle in mind and modeled penitentiaries with individual cells, like a cloister, only much more secure. In the first penitentiaries, silence was strictly enforced. Inmates were not allowed to speak to guards or the person who brought their meals. They were brought into the facility with a hood on, so they couldn’t even see anyone. Attempts to communicate resulted in punishment—a common one was dumping ice water on the inmate, even in the middle of winter. Another punishment was being gagged with uncomfortable metal devices; one of which was like a clamp over the tongue.  Aside from these horrifying things, the penitentiary was supposed to be sanitary and peaceful—a contrast to existing lockups, which were just communal cells with a hole in the floor or a bucket to relieve yourself in.

There are some key beliefs that lead to this system:

1.  People who commit crimes will only stop committing crimes if you succeed in making them feel remorse 
2.  Isolation is necessary for remorse because it will block on the negative external influences that lead people to commit crimes
3. The external influences leading people to crime have more to do with their nature or social group than oppressive and inequitable structures in the larger society

Once they (those in power) realized how psychologically damaging complete isolation was, they decided that men could eat and work together, but silence was strictly enforced. They (the powers) quickly realized this method was much more economical, and to my mind, this is the beginning of the prison as an industry. Soon, inmates were being lent out to work. This was great for the prisons, but not so much for the inmates. Since the law only required that they be fed, many prison workers were worked to death.  It didn’t matter, because there were always more prisoners to replace the ones who died. Of course, this has been reformed, and now prison industry is optional, and many inmates can earn eleven whole cents an hour. 

Nothing existed in the way of women’s prisons until the late 1800’s. Prior to this, correctional houses were primarily for the reform of white male criminals. It was believed that women and minorities lacked the moral ability to be reformed by the penitentiary model. They were disregarded and left in the old-style communal cells. Between 1788-1852, about 24,000 women were transported to the colonies, usually for prostitution. They were sold into indentured servitude to pay for their passage or housed in communal dungeons. In order to survive in the dungeon, many of these women resorted to prostitution as a way to bribe the guards. In both the American and Australian colonies, those sold into servitude were often forced into the sex trade. Sometimes women were housed above male penitentiaries, which left them vulnerable to sexual assault from both inmates and guards, as well as unwanted pregnancies and unsanitary birthing conditions, which only added to the psychological devastation of imprisonment.

In 1816 the reformatory movement began—this was well after the penitentiary movement had proven “successful” (which probably means economical). A reformatory was a women’s version of the penitentiary, which taught domestic arts and attempted to reform the criminally minded woman into a suitable housewife or domestic servant. The women were allowed to do needlework and such, but they worked in cubicles that prevented them from seeing or interacting with the other women. This movement lasted until the 1930’s, but some reformatories were in use as late as the 1990’s, and the vocational training programs in women’s prisons today still reflect gender stereotypes, with few exceptions. The biggest difference between a reformatory and the modern women’s prison facility is that we’ve stop caring about whether or not they get better. The women’s prison system today is run the same as the men’s, and nobody cares about why they’re really there, or what they’ll do when they get out. 

It’s worth taking a minute to examine why women typically end up in prison. The majority of offenses women commit are non-violent drug offenses or property crimes. When women commit property crimes, usually petty theft, it is often directly related to family poverty and the need to care for children. And, as you may know, poverty disproportionately affects single mothers. Furthermore, the number of traumatic experiences in a woman’s childhood is directly correlated to their lifetime number of arrests (I believe this to be causal), and traumatic experience, most often child molestation or rape, are most frequently cited by female drug offenders as the reason they began using drugs. All of this is the result of a dysfunctional society, not individuals with a proclivity for sin. So, what are we doing to these women, most of whom have been traumatized by abuse or sexual violence? We’re taking away their autonomy, body autonomy included. We’re strip searching them, controlling all their movements, when they eat, sleep, go outside, see their children. Wow. That sounds a LOT like domestic abuse, and it sounds like no one could ever come out of it “reformed.” What happens in most, if not all cases, is women are re-traumatized by their prison experience.

-----Some things that are wrong: our present system (just like the penitentiary movement) assumes that criminals don’t feel remorse. I would guess that many feel remorse for many things, some of which may not even be crimes. This approach fails to recognize why crimes are committed, and that any one of us could, under the right conditions, commit a crime. We also assume, or we did, that remorse can be forced on someone through a certain set of harsh conditions.  Today, we don’t seem at all concerned with remorse or any sort of moral improvement. So what is our concern? What is our justification for this dehumanizing sort of justice? How can we reasonable expect any improvement on the part of the inmate, when we don’t put forth any effort to help their condition? We can correct income disparity. We can provide mental health care. We can stop contributing to cultures of violence and racism. We can show compassion. We can forgive.

So what do we want from the Justice system, and do we really believe that prisons will get us what we want? Like most revelations, mine happened in the middle of the night. Laying awake and thinking about the recent killing by police, like so many killings before, about this sermon, about how to express to you what I, a survivor of violent crime, want from the system. What I want, what I think we all want, is accountability. When tragedy happens we have to heal, and we can’t heal without accountability. Somebody has to say, “I did this.” Then what? Then we lock them away? Great that you admitted you did that horrible thing, but we don’t care, and we totally hate you now, k-bye. Locking someone up, dehumanizing and forgetting about him, does not heal that person. It does not heal me and it does not heal the community. What’s more, you cannot legislate accountability. It has to come from within. For that to happen, we have to create a culture in which it is ok to confess a mistake. 

I want to do a little exercise here, and it requires us to trust each other. I'm putting a Vegas bubble around the sanctuary: what we find out here stays here. Raise your hand if you have ever broken the law. Keep them raised if you have broken the law not including traffic violations. Keep them raised if you have broken the law not including drug violations. Keep your hand raised if you have committed a felony. (my hand is still up at this time).

*take a moment to sink in*
 
 Let’s face it, we all fall short of moral perfection, and many of us in this room fall short of moral certitude. 
 
In my head, I imagine it like this: the transgressor says, “I did this,” the victim says, “I’m angry with you,” and society says, “How are we going to heal?” I know that’s not enough punishment for people. I know it sounds unrealistic. To quote a friend of mine, “It sounds like a bunch of New Testament hippie shit.” Yeah, it does. But it’s also something we can do. I’m not asking that we turn the other cheek over and over and over again. I’m asking that we activate compassion in our lives and challenge our perception of what is right and what feels right at the time. We need to challenge our perception of what people deserve.

 
To me, our current system is nothing more than institutionalized revenge.  Now, take a moment to think about that, and about everything you already know is wrong with the system, and reflect on the words of Confucius: before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. We are hurting ourselves. We are hurting our community. We need to stop.