California staggers on with its intertwined correctional and fiscal crises.
In the latest episode, the state suspended virtually all visists to inmates, except for those by attorneys, for the weekend of June 26-27. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation asserted that the suspension would save $400,000 for the cash-strapped state.
Regular visits are supposed to resume in July, when the new fiscal year begins. That is some consolation, I suppose, for inmates and their families who were denied visits this weekend. But it certainly does not justify creating such an unsustainable prison system in the first place and repeatedly failing to fix it, despite a plethora of federal court orders to do so.
Pennywise, poundfoolish.
Showing posts with label prison visits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prison visits. Show all posts
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Through the Gate(s)
When the author Ted Conover worked as correctional officer at New York’s notorious Sing Sing prison in the 1990s, he sometimes had to pass through ten different locked gates to reach his assigned post.
My visit with other board members of Prison Congregations of America to inmates at the Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility in western Michigan on April 10 did not involve nearly as many doors. But it was far from simple.
The process unfolded like this:
Several weeks before our board meeting, Mary Mortenson, the director of Prison Congregation, collected the names and Social Security numbers of those intending to visit the prison. She passed those along to Rich Rienstra, pastor of Celebration Fellowship, as the congregation at Bellamy Creek is called. Rich in turn provided them to the official prison chaplain, who notified the appropriate security authorities in the prison.
When we arrived at Bellamy Creek, we left our billfolds, belts, cell phones, and virtually all other personal objects in our vehicles. There were lockers just inside the entrance for other miscellaneous items. I tossed my comb in one of those, keeping only my driver’s license.
After a bit of milling around, we passed − in groups of six or seven − through the first gate, into an area that Rich called “the bubble.” There, we had to leave our licenses, remove our shoes as in airport screening, and have our hands dabbed with a substance that was then scanned.
Finally, after more milling around, we were in. Only two gates, not Conover’s ten, but “the bubble” packed numerous security features into an enclosed space.
We were lead down a corridor to the room where Celebration Fellowship meets, to spend a remarkable two hours with the brothers there. The Spirit was moving, animated by a mutual recognition that ultimately there is only one gate that matters: the one Jesus offers in John 14:6, “the way, the truth, and the life.”
My visit with other board members of Prison Congregations of America to inmates at the Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility in western Michigan on April 10 did not involve nearly as many doors. But it was far from simple.
The process unfolded like this:
Several weeks before our board meeting, Mary Mortenson, the director of Prison Congregation, collected the names and Social Security numbers of those intending to visit the prison. She passed those along to Rich Rienstra, pastor of Celebration Fellowship, as the congregation at Bellamy Creek is called. Rich in turn provided them to the official prison chaplain, who notified the appropriate security authorities in the prison.
When we arrived at Bellamy Creek, we left our billfolds, belts, cell phones, and virtually all other personal objects in our vehicles. There were lockers just inside the entrance for other miscellaneous items. I tossed my comb in one of those, keeping only my driver’s license.
After a bit of milling around, we passed − in groups of six or seven − through the first gate, into an area that Rich called “the bubble.” There, we had to leave our licenses, remove our shoes as in airport screening, and have our hands dabbed with a substance that was then scanned.
Finally, after more milling around, we were in. Only two gates, not Conover’s ten, but “the bubble” packed numerous security features into an enclosed space.
We were lead down a corridor to the room where Celebration Fellowship meets, to spend a remarkable two hours with the brothers there. The Spirit was moving, animated by a mutual recognition that ultimately there is only one gate that matters: the one Jesus offers in John 14:6, “the way, the truth, and the life.”
Monday, January 12, 2009
Read, mark, learn . . .
When I arrived at Valparaiso University to begin law school, there was an assignment posted on the notice board just inside the entrance to Wesemann Hall. First year students were to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” several cases on lost or abandoned property for the required property course.
At the time, I did not know this language had been appropriated from the Book of Common Prayer. Though I had spent six months in Oxford as an undergraduate, and had frequently attended Anglican services, it was not familiar to me. I was oblivious to the irony of using language taken rather too freely from a completely different context to make a school assignment about lost or misappropriated property. Years later, I wondered whether the irony was intentional or merely the result of what Walker Percy calls linguistic drift. In any case, the theme of digesting reading material, in the sense of making it part of one’s inner apparatus, still carries power for me, a quarter century later.
In Real Presences, his remarkable meditation on the nature of creativity in the arts, George Steiner picks up the ingestion metaphor. Citing Ben Jonson, he writes eloquently of how what we know by heart becomes an active shaping force in our consciousness. Memory is crucial to identity – a fact known to the Greek muses and a reality that becomes agonizing for those suffering from forms of dementia, when they feel the old anchors of the self slipping away.
On the subject of criminal justice, what have I (in a secular sense) ingested? In high school, I came across Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol in our little library, and portions of that poem stay with me. Around that time, I also read much of Solzhenitsyn’s monumental Gulag Archipelago, as well as Falconer by John Cheever. A little more than twenty years later, when Tom Wolfe published A Man in Full, I had occasion to compare Cheever’s prison descriptions to Wolfe’s. More importantly, by then I had first-hand experience of visiting real correctional facilities to draw upon, starting with Clarinda, Iowa, in 1999, followed by most of the state-run correctional facilities in Minnesota, including Stillwater, St. Cloud and Oak Park Heights, in 2001. What I quickly learned, on these visits to actual correctional facilities, is that books can only take you so far. How could it be otherwise?
At the time, I did not know this language had been appropriated from the Book of Common Prayer. Though I had spent six months in Oxford as an undergraduate, and had frequently attended Anglican services, it was not familiar to me. I was oblivious to the irony of using language taken rather too freely from a completely different context to make a school assignment about lost or misappropriated property. Years later, I wondered whether the irony was intentional or merely the result of what Walker Percy calls linguistic drift. In any case, the theme of digesting reading material, in the sense of making it part of one’s inner apparatus, still carries power for me, a quarter century later.
In Real Presences, his remarkable meditation on the nature of creativity in the arts, George Steiner picks up the ingestion metaphor. Citing Ben Jonson, he writes eloquently of how what we know by heart becomes an active shaping force in our consciousness. Memory is crucial to identity – a fact known to the Greek muses and a reality that becomes agonizing for those suffering from forms of dementia, when they feel the old anchors of the self slipping away.
On the subject of criminal justice, what have I (in a secular sense) ingested? In high school, I came across Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol in our little library, and portions of that poem stay with me. Around that time, I also read much of Solzhenitsyn’s monumental Gulag Archipelago, as well as Falconer by John Cheever. A little more than twenty years later, when Tom Wolfe published A Man in Full, I had occasion to compare Cheever’s prison descriptions to Wolfe’s. More importantly, by then I had first-hand experience of visiting real correctional facilities to draw upon, starting with Clarinda, Iowa, in 1999, followed by most of the state-run correctional facilities in Minnesota, including Stillwater, St. Cloud and Oak Park Heights, in 2001. What I quickly learned, on these visits to actual correctional facilities, is that books can only take you so far. How could it be otherwise?
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