“This process is very confrontational. Are you prepared for this confrontation? Is anyone not prepared for this confrontation? You may speak now and we will escort you out, no questions asked. Remember, this process must be voluntary and free—no forcing here.” He surveys the room, which does not stir.
“Last rule of this restorative justice week.” His voice is booming now. “You are not an offender. A prisoner. A criminal. You are a person, loved by God. You are not an inmate—you are a client of the Department of Correctional Services.”
And with that, the program officially begins.
“I declare this restorative justice week open!” Jonathan sounds off, as if the horses are at the gate. Singing commences.
Through you the blind will see,
Through you the mute will sing.
Through you the dead will rise,
Through you all hearts will praise.
Through you the darkness flees,
Through you my heart screams,
I am free, yes, I am free.
Jonathan is at the helm again, distributing the worksheet for today. Discover You, reads the heading. Examine the effects of your hurt, pain, and anger: Who am I? Why am I here? Who hurt me? Who is responsible for my hurt/pain?
“Who wants to talk about family right now?” Jonathan asks the room.
“I don’t talk to my family,” one man calls out. Others concur, nodding.
“Why don’t you talk to your family?”
“They don’t want to listen,” comes one voice.
“I have no family,” comes another voice.
“I am ashamed,” comes another.
“Tomorrow we will phone your families,” says Jonathan. “Who gives us permission to do this? Tomorrow you will hear how your family is hurt. Who gives permission? Stand on the bench if you do and identify your name. Please.”
Jerome practically leaps on the bench, all hip-hop swagger in his brown Timberland boots. He looks to be in his early twenties and wears his uniform jumpsuit unbuttoned down to his waist, white undershirt visible beneath it. At the Confession table, Gerswin rises; “Al Capone” is tattooed in gothic letters across the back of his skull. Finally, twenty-something Yahiya from Responsibility climbs on his chair and adjusts his white takiya, onto which he’s slapped a pair of Ray-Bans.
“You are brave. We will hear from your families tomorrow. Thank you, gentlemen. You may take your seats once more.” Jonathan proffers a slight bow.
“Tell me,” he asks. “What do you want to get out of the process this week?”
Answers spill forth. Healing. Change. Be a better person. Take responsibility. Peace with my victim. Be part of my community again.
I want to be a father to my children: this from a solemn, small, elderly man, tattoos covering every inch of his wizened face. A teardrop is imprinted on his cheek.
“Tell me your fears!” Jonathan thunders.
They flow forth. My children won’t recognize me. My children will end up in prison like me.
Pastor Jonathan Clayton morphs into Professor Clayton, breaking down the principles of restorative justice, complete with a PowerPoint presentation and citations from Howard Zehr, the Minnesota-based father of the movement. Crime is disrespect and irresponsibility, goes the lesson. We don’t need more punishment; we need to address broken relationships. He hands out a short poem about the illogic of a prison-based system of justice.
We want them to be responsible,
So we take away all responsibilities.
We want them to be positive and constructive.
So we degrade them and make them useless.
We want them to be nonviolent,
So we put them where there is violence all around them.
We want them to quit being the tough guy,
So we put them where the tough guy’s respected.
Instead of asking, as traditional criminal justice does, what laws have been broken, who broke these laws, and how we can punish those who broke them, restorative justice—the philosophy behind such US organizations as Bridges to Life in Texas and Common Justice in New York—asks altogether different questions. Who’s been hurt? What are their needs? How can we meet those needs? Some restorative justice programs operate as community courts, which a 2007 University of Pennsylvania study found were more effective than prison at reducing recidivism. Most involve “circles,” in which victims and offenders meet and engage in dialogue about the crime; many are Christian. For all, the goal is victim empowerment of the sort that traditional criminal justice systems leave by the wayside. Study after study has shown that trials, public rituals though they are, are rarely therapeutic for victims. Quite the contrary, they prolong the life of traumatic wounds.
Jonathan approaches to ask if I will go sit at the Confession table and help Gerswin fill out his self-assessment form. Like many in this room, he is illiterate.
I take a seat beside Gerswin and offer a handshake. He gives me the once-over. I notice a star tattooed between his eyes.
“Have you experienced the following,” I read aloud from the form. “Anger?”
“Yes,” comes Gerswin’s answer.
Gangsterism? Yes. Childhood abuse? Yes. Drug addiction? Yes. Depression? Yes. How old are you? Twenty-six. Did you know your father?
“No. Only once when I was a teenager. He was a drunk and my mother, she threw him out. He would beat her up, all bloodied. I would wipe up her blood.” I write this down.
“What happened when you met your father?”
“I—” Gerswin pauses. “I wanted to kill him. I almost did.” I keep scribbling.
“When did you last speak with your family?”
“Three years ago.” Gerswin delivers all of his answers in deadpan fashion. He’s just another kid from the township, three bullet wounds to prove it. Now he’s just another Pollsmoor Numbers gang member. His narrative isn’t exceptional, and clearly, he knows it.
We finish completing the form. Waiting for others to do the same, we study each other awkwardly. Lunch, salty sausage in a stale bun, is passed around. I resort to my usual icebreaker.
“You listen to hip-hop?” This elicits a smile.
“Yes, hip-hop. American hip-hop.” Gerswin raises his shirt to reveal an unsurprising tattoo: “Thug Life” across his stomach, à la Tupac Shakur. I tell him I never met Tupac, but I did tour with Snoop Dogg for an article once. His whole face lights up. He’s suddenly a childlike fan.
“Have you ever”—he leans in, eyes gleaming, mouth full of sausage—“met Lil Wayne?”
We’re interrupted by Pastor Ron, the heavyset, sleepy-eyed facilitator at our table. “I must leave for the afternoon,” he announces abruptly, folding up his glasses and his lunch bag. “You may take over,” he says to me.
And so I am given a new role for the week: part-time facilitator at the table of Confession. Home to Gerswin, Ebrahim, and Anthony. And, when they feel like showing up, Pastor Ron and sidekick Dennis, who stays silent as a stone, his function unknown. All three incarcerated men at my table are admitted gangsters belonging to different Cape Town generations. Gerswin is a member of the 28 gang. Ebrahim, in his thirties, with piercing green eyes, narrow cheekbones, and pencil-thin mustache, belongs to the 27s. Anthony is in his fifties; he was once a member of the Americans, a notorious Cape Town gang, but is now a born-again Christian.
All of the facilitators are, with two exceptions, white. This reality reminds me of the unfortunate, too-familiar white-savior-of-black-souls dynamic, but for the week I have little choice but to stomach it.
“I have four children,” Anthony reads from his sheet. “I buried one of them several years ago. One of my daughters is here, in Pollsmoor. She was caught with her boyfriend’s drugs. I caught sight of her once, is how I knew she was here.” Then the bomb dropped: “I raped my stepdaughter. I was so high on drugs, I didn’t know what I was doing or who she was.”
And for the remaining hours of the day, the room erupts with narrative
s of pain. It becomes an aural fun-house mirror, in which stories echo and reverberate. My mother was high on drugs and alcohol when I was a baby. I was shot seven times. I saw gangsters kill my father. My father died of AIDS. The tales of poverty and crime, gunshots, drug addiction, and abuse might well be set in Brooklyn, New York, or South Side Chicago. Only here they are monstrously exaggerated, everything that lives in American prison narratives but more—more violence, more drugs, more abuse, more wounds. I killed my stepfather. He abused me and my mother one too many times so I stabbed him. This from Peter-John, aka PJ, a formerly incarcerated facilitator.
Jonathan is getting the men to see themselves as victims in vicious cycles of violence, which is critical. People often forget that all over the world, most offenders are also victims. The 2015 Boston Reentry Study, for instance, found a strikingly high incidence of childhood trauma among people returning from prison, with more than 40 percent having witnessed a homicide and half having been physically abused by their parents. But still I do have my moments of skepticism, during which I wonder about, say, the man who tearfully declares that he dealt illegal diamonds not because he wanted money but because he was desperate for his father’s love. Really?
“We spend today,” Jonathan concludes, “so you realize that you are victims of hurt. You are not only offenders. You are victims. You have been deeply hurt.”
And with that, day one is a wrap. I say goodbye to Gerswin, Anthony, and Ebrahim and file out of Medium B. Outside the barbed wire, a Steenberg limo awaits. Climbing in, I feel tremendous shame.
This is work, I tell myself. This limo is not mine—it belongs to my assignment. An assignment I’m privileged to have. Privilege cannot be discarded when convenient, however many barbed-wire fences one crosses. In fact, denial of privilege is the ultimate mark of it.
I repeat this mantra as evening descends and I take in the oak-lined streets and colonial mansions of Constantia. At a lavish dinner, I look around me. Whiteness. Everywhere, except for my waiter. If this is Cape Town postapartheid, I can only imagine the look of things at the height of it. Ghosts of my day begin to invade an elegant evening. Gerswin scowls at my foie gras; PJ sips my Smirnoff. These men are products of the posh world I’m indulging in, conditioned for crime and prison by a society founded on inequality. It began with the Dutch regime, which used local jails to incarcerate those violating the country’s “pass” laws, requiring them to carry passports stating their race. During the late nineteenth-century period of British colonial expansion, prison labor fueled the country’s workforce, so between 1916 and the end of apartheid in 1986, 17 million blacks and coloreds were imprisoned, subjected to corporal punishment, and made to work in the country’s diamond and gold mines for companies, like De Beers, who made fortunes off their backs. Pollsmoor was born primarily for capitalist purposes, not criminal justice ones. After World War II, when the area’s farms demanded prison labor, it made sense to set a prison in the area.
This is true of prison history as a whole. For centuries the institution has expediently produced what its birthmate, capitalism, demands: a perpetual labor force. The process was to criminalize “others” by tilting the law against them, then incarcerate them and put them to work. In the United States, where prisoners produced goods for the Union army and then became the South’s postemancipation labor force, so-called black codes criminalized such things as loitering and joblessness, which meant that by 1870 in the South, black incarceration rates tripled those of whites. For centuries in Europe, confinement had its greatest vogue during times of unemployment, when it made sense to withdraw labor from the overstocked market and put it to work for the state. It’s striking that so many early prison drawings, detailed charts and diagrams about where to situate all those bodies, are eerily reminiscent of slave ship renderings. Slavery, prison, capitalism, and race have long been a deadly global cocktail. Prison was a way to subjugate natives or former slaves while serving the white economy’s best interests.
Our workshop at Pollsmoor hinges on owning choices and working to change them. But considering this history, and the extremity of what I’ve been seeing here in Cape Town, my cynicism about this thing we call choice intensifies. What is choice in the context of slavery, prison labor, apartheid, segregation, townships? Is all this talk about taking personal responsibility and saying one is sorry clouding the reality of systems designed for some to dramatically fail and others to succeed?
Capitalism rests on the notion of the individual standing alone, over and above social factors. That’s the essence of the American dream: “I” over “we.” Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, goes the mantra. But what of the classes and colors who weren’t provided with bootstraps to begin with? We like to talk about giving prisoners second chances, but what about first chances? It’s easy to lap up glorious stories about the exceptions, the ones who overcame the race-and-class odds, because it’s more fun to celebrate the exception than lament the rule.
The word “scapegoat” flashes across my mental screen, from my favorite essay about prisons, by economist Glenn Loury. “Our society—the society we together have made,” he writes, “first tolerates crime-promoting conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then goes on to act out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.” I cannot vanquish that scapegoat image, in its literal, biblical sense: a creature onto which all of society’s sins were thrust and who was then tossed over a cliff to absolve the rest. Sixteenth-century philosopher Thomas More wrote as much in Utopia. “If you suffer people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them?”
“Check, please,” I tell my waiter. He bows.
———
“Reconciliation Is the Journey from Truth to Justice.” So reads a headline in the Cape News the next morning. In between the how-far-we’ve-fallen-since-Mandela stories making up much of the South African news, here’s a story about Olga Macingwane, recipient of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation Award, victim of a racially motivated bomb attack in 1996—a woman who publicly forgave the white men who maimed her.
Minutes later, I’m inside Medium B, noting how sunny and bright it is. Under apartheid this was Pollsmoor’s white prison, boasting more windows than the black or colored units. That fact also explains its double hallways; racial comingling of any sort was not permitted. The very architecture of colonial African prisons thus transmitted a weighty message about racial superiority.
Inside the gym, Anthony gives me a warm handshake and a toothless grin. Ebrahim and Gerswin offer circumspect nods. Facilitators sit serenely, reading their Bibles.
Objective: Understanding the crisis/damage/hurt/pain caused by crime, reads the handout Jonathan presents me with. The inmates will understand in detail the effects of their wrong decisions. Other people are experiencing a crisis because of their wrong actions.
“I am free,” I sing, in unison with the prisoners. Then Jonathan begins today’s session, and true to form, he knows how to immediately grab our attention.
“Twenty-five years, forty days, and thirty-five minutes ago, I was a Pollsmoor resident like you,” he declares.
“That is my confession today. I was once a prisoner, for three years. I stole, I lied, I did wrong, eh? But I stand before you today, a different man. I knew no English whatsoever when I first came to prison, you see? Only Afrikaans. I learned everything inside and I turned myself around. This process is the beginning of your doing as I did. It starts with confession. This day you will confess, eh? You will confess so that you become free.”
Papers are distributed.
“We will get unreported crimes. We always do,” Jonathan whispers to me as the men log their confessions. “Once even a guard confessed, to running a smuggling ring.” He scans the room with an eagle eye.
“
For seven years, I did this alone. Just me alone, with no facilitators, and fifty, sixty prisoners,” he goes on. “The handbook was fourteen pages then—now it’s eighty-five. I would call the prisoners ‘sir’—the authorities couldn’t understand this, for years, the way it’s about treating them as human beings, as people. Even these white tablecloths, the authorities couldn’t understand those. Sit around a proper table and have a meal like humans, I said.” He pounds his fist on the table. Then he breaks down the full dimensions of the program, for my benefit. After these six days there’s a once-a-week follow-up with the men; during these months he’ll locate the men’s victims and arrange dialogues with them.
As the prisoners scribble away, a fired-up Jonathan goes on with a nutshell history of this workshop and his Hope Prison Ministries, now operating in nine prisons. By 1994, Mandela’s election to the presidency represented the final nail in apartheid’s coffin. In 1999 Jonathan was a prison chaplain, but as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission left its potent mark on South Africa—“this unbelievable process of dialogue and confession and reconciliation about apartheid crimes, our country found a healing through it”—he became obsessed with restorative justice and traveled to a peacemaking institute in Vermont to earn a certificate in it. Then he returned with a request for the prison authorities. Let me introduce restorative justice to Pollsmoor, he suggested. Give me your toughest prisoners and let me work with them, bringing volunteers inside to do the same.
His request came at the right time: as apartheid was being dismantled, the South African prison system was radically reformed. Pollsmoor became desegregated in 1991. Shortly thereafter, the Prisons Act was amended. Prison Service became DCS—the Department of Correctional Services. Solitary confinement and corporal punishment were abolished and DCS pledged to respect the fundamental rights of all people in prison. In 1997 a renowned warden, Johnny Jansen, took over Pollsmoor and for the first time opened its doors to a host of NGOs, eager to make the place more humane. The Victim–Offender Dialogue program was introduced and is still touted on a DCS Web site saturated in the vocabulary of restorative justice.
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