From the Executive Director
Dear Friends,
The other day I was talking to a student in the college program about his plans for after leaving prison. He said he was worried about trying to leave his old life behind – especially the drug-dealing and the gang he’d been a part of. He was concerned about becoming a target of violence by “dropping out,” and about jeopardizing the safety of his family.
He was also worried that if unable to find other work, he’d end up going back to the
one way of earning money that he’d ever known, which would start the whole cycle
over again. Was it even possible to get away from all of that without actually moving
to another part of the state? He knew that the terms of his parole would require him to
stay in the county, but even if by some long shot a request for a change of county were
granted, his girlfriend had a job she was unwilling to leave.
Above all else, he didn’t want to abandon his children, and didn’t want to come back to prison; the dilemma was that he wasn’t sure it would be possible to fulfill one commitment without failing at the other. It wasn’t just that he felt he had to choose between changing his own life and caring for his family; he also felt that if he didn’t change his life he would eventually end up back in prison, or dead.
This kind of conversation reminds me both of what it means to help improve a person’s chances of obtaining a good job when they leave prison, and of the complexity of the challenges that so many of our students will face. It’s also the sort of conversation that makes me wish I had a tape recorder with me – or, better yet, that I could, at will, convene a roundtable discussion among our students, and members of the legislature, or the media, or with random people off the street. We would all sit down together and figure out what it would even look like for this person to “do the right thing.”
Neither this man’s dilemma nor his desire to do the right thing is unique or even unusual among people in prison — in fact, both are defining features of the lives of thousands of people in California and across the U.S. And yet how sharply this reality contrasts with the images of selfish and willfully destructive criminals that we encounter everyday. What would happen if we began to understand the commission of a crime as an act of desperation, or the result of a real or imagined lack of options – rather than as an expression of some innate evil character?
I imagine those brittle, simplistic stereotypes about people in prison like ugly wallpaper
that’s been pasted over a gigantic window. I am always looking for ways to tear that
wallpaper down so that people walking by can finally see what lies beyond it. So far
it seems to be the kind of material that tears as you pull on it, rendering the work
piecemeal, and painstakingly slow. But we are making progress.
One day a couple of weeks ago, I stopped at the post office on my way to work and
discovered a stack of letters from an English class in a high school in Illinois. They had
been reading about prisons, and their teacher had assigned some essays from OpenLine
(our journal of student writing) and other PUP materials. The letters expressed their
thoughtful and compassionate responses to the essays they’d read; some expressed
appreciation for the affirmation of knowledge they’d already had. I’m pleased to share
one such letter with you in the column to the right. It’s the passion and intelligence of
students like these, and those at San Quentin, that give me hope.
With warm regards, Jody Lewen
