Along these lines, Jonathan continues, South Africa opens the doors of many parole hearings to victims and encourages prisoners to reach out to their victims. In fact, Jonathan explains, those who’ve not attempted to engage in dialogue with their victims severely diminish their chances of getting parole. This adds up to a great deal of pressure on the man who is, due to budget cuts, Pollsmoor’s lone restorative justice show in town. The administration wants prisoners to get parole—not from love of mercy but because there’s simply no more room in the overburdened system for everyone.
At Pollsmoor there’s one social worker for every three hundred or so prisoners. They avidly refer prisoners to Jonathan, who doesn’t accept everyone and promises nothing, including the coveted letter of support that increases chances of parole. But he does sometimes find himself scouring the nooks and crannies of the townships like a crazed bounty hunter. Have you seen this man they call Nordling? Do you know the mother of the man who was murdered here two years ago? The girl who was raped outside that shebeen seven months ago? He’s searching for victims in the hopes of getting them to attend parole hearings or dialogue with their offenders, anything that will make him feel he can in good conscience endorse his prisoners as genuinely remorseful and thus worthy of release.
But how do you know who’s genuinely remorseful? Saying sorry—and this is the bête noire of restorative justice—leaves potential for what philosopher John Drabinski calls “obstinate narcissism,” which has us hurrying past another’s pain “in order to ‘promote,’ for lack of a better word, this new self that has (allegedly) emerged after the harm we’ve caused.” Jonathan’s task, an impossible one, is to play God with a prisoner’s heart and figure out who’s professing cheap grace.
“The men, they tell me, ‘I want to say I’m sorry. I was wrong. I am so sorry.’ And I tell them, ‘It’s not about you! It’s about your victim. Not your needs. Your victim’s needs.’
“Parole once asked me to set up a mediation involving a guy who killed the son of a high-profile gangster. They said, ‘We need this done quick quick!’ and I said, ‘Hold your horses! This is delicate stuff. Dangerous stuff, eh? I need six months.’ I talked to that gangster’s men. I did homework in the community. Then I went to the gangster himself and paid respects—I followed protocol. By the end of it, they sat together and they shook hands. He did get parole. There have been no killings since.” Jonathan shakes his head vigorously. “That was a rough case.”
He returns to the helm and collects the confession logs.
“How did this feel? To write these confessions, to talk about them at your tables?”
“We are opening up and revealing things we cannot talk about,” Jerome calls out, sounding much like a student hungry for the teacher’s approval.
“For all my life I’ve never had someone I could talk about feelings with,” interjects Yahiya, Ray-Bans still coolly perched on his white takiya. “Now I can think that my life is not only a—” He slips into Afrikaans.
Jonathan: “He is using prison language—it means a flop, a disaster. Your life is not only a flop, yes?”
Gerswin rises. “I confess that I made promises to my family, to stay out of prison. But then they disappoint me and I react and I am violent. And then I end up in prison again.”
Jerome, again: “I confess that I stole. To feed my girlfriend.”
“To feed your girlfriend?” Jonathan presses him.
“Well, some to her. And to party,” Jerome admits.
“And what else?” Jonathan sees right through him.
“Well, drugs.” Methamphetamine is an omnipresent staple of township life, inextricably tied to crime there.
“Are you still together with this girlfriend, who you stole for?”
Jerome shakes his head.
“See, this”—Jonathan air-jabs lean fingers at Jerome, who’s now hanging his head—“is a perfect example of what we call a thinking error. Yes? He is blaming someone else, when really who is to blame? Himself. You stole so you could do drugs. Not for someone else—for you.”
Then it’s time for phone calls, as promised yesterday.
“Gerswin, do you still want me to make this call?” Jonathan asks. “You didn’t make an emotional decision—you are ready for this?” Gerswin nods, but looks manifestly uneasy. Jonathan whips out his BlackBerry.
“Hello! Is this—who? Maria?”
“That is my mom,” Gerswin calls. He’s rocking back and forth, his right leg quaking.
Jonathan switches into Afrikaans on the phone. “Ja, Ja,” he nods. More Afrikaans. He hangs up.
“She says she is cooking and working now so she can’t talk. But she says we can call her back later and she will talk. She asked me right away, when I said her son’s name, ‘What did he do?’ ” Gerswin looks wholly deflated.
The next call is to Jerome’s mom. She does much of the talking; Jonathan paces with phone to ear, repeating “Ja, Ja,” and running a hand through his hair.
Jonathan hangs up and announces, “ ‘I’m sleeping well now,’ she says. ‘But when he’s here, I don’t. I worry about my safety when he is here, and I cannot sleep. He brings trouble and violence. I do not think I will come to the visit on Saturday—he knows why.’ She says to you, Jerome, ‘I love you but I don’t want you home.’ She hopes you stay in prison because she cannot be safe if you are out and she says you and the family will end up dead.”
Her words slice ferociously through the room. Jerome grips his head in his hands.
“How do you feel?” Jonathan asks him.
He says nothing, hands still cradling his head. Then, softly, without looking up: “It makes me want to give up. To go back to that lifestyle, to do crimes.”
Jonathan puts a hand on Jerome’s shoulder.
“You’re not alone,” he tells him. “We support you, sir. We believe you can change.”
Such change demands confrontation with victims, and often restorative justice programs use a stand-in, a violent crime victim whose pain represents that of all those wronged by prisoners’ actions. At Pollsmoor today it is Robin Crawford. Small, gray-haired, and grandfatherly, he speaks softly and almost detachedly of the day he was viciously attacked by a gang in Johannesburg.
“ ‘We’re going to give you AIDS, you fucking white bastard,’ they shouted at me,” Robin says feebly. “They pulled my pants down to my ankles and sodomized me. I was screaming. Blood was gushing out of every orifice. I spent four weeks in the hospital recovering, in a trauma unit. There was a hole in my ankle, made by a concrete slab that was aimed at my head. I couldn’t sleep because I was rigid with fear. I couldn’t pass urine, could not have a bowel movement. I refused to look in the mirror. Friends came to visit me and told me that my face looked like a piece of raw liver.”
The room stops breathing for a moment.
“Responses to this?” Jonathan asks. Robin looks forlorn. The men in orange are silenced.
“I feel sick at these crimes in my own country,” one facilitator calls out.
“If this was your victim, what would you say?” Jonathan asks. No one stirs. “Anyone have the courage to say something?”
“Sorry,” Jerome calls out, faintly.
“Not enough!” Jonathan thunders. The responses trickle in.
“You are very brave.”
“God bless you.”
“I’m sorry and please forgive me. But I need to change my life.”
The men are instructed to write letters to Robin, expressing what they might say to him and their own victims. I move back to Confession to put Gerswin’s words on paper.
“ ‘Dear Robin,’ ” Gerswin begins. He is ready, words hungry to be released. “I hope you will continue to use your pain to give us strength. Thank you for sharing your pain with us. I am sorry for your pain.” We fold the letter and wait.
Gerswin gives me yet another once-over. Then he begins to talk to me. First, about his life at Pollsmoor. Like most residents here, he shares his cra
mmed quarters with more than three dozen others; he’s locked in there daily from 4:00 p.m.—when guards take leave and the place becomes a notorious free-for-all—until 6:00 a.m. Then he begins to talk about his life on the outside, the street stabbings, the number of men he thinks he’s murdered, he can’t be sure how many. About the Numbers gangs, to which he belongs—“we came to be as a good gang, to fight apartheid, originally.” Legend has it that the Numbers were born when two Zulu men, Po and Nongoloza, set out to rob colonial outposts in an effort to redistribute the country’s wealth. During apartheid, they fought for prisoners’ rights on the inside, demanding beds, decent food, the right to wear watches and thus have some control over the passing of time.
Gerswin says he cannot count the times he’s been behind these bars. And he knows he’s wanted on the streets of his township, so much so that he refused parole last time because he knew he’d slip right back into his old lifestyle.
Lunch is passed around. Gerswin asks Ebrahim for a halal meal.
“Six months ago I became Muslim,” he explains. “Some say it’s a skill—how do you say?—like a hustle. Like I am pretending. But I know the truth.” He pounds his chest.
Chomping into his baloney sandwich, he explains that he goes up for parole next month. Then he describes his drug habit, how it consumed him, destroyed him, ran his life. He puts his baloney sandwich down and looks me in the eye. I notice a deep scar between his brows, below the star tattoo, like a permanent crease.
“When I needed drugs, Baz, I would do anything. I would have shot Pastor Clayton right in his face. In his face.” I believe him. But is this a confession or a boast?
“How do you feel about the phone call, to your mother?”
“Her response will be worse than Jerome’s. I told him so. She will say worse things about me.”
“How do you feel about that, though?” He shrugs.
“I am over it.”
“Really?” He nods, chewing, his face like stone.
“Sometimes,” I say, “we think we’re over things, but it’s impacting us in all kinds of ways—we don’t even realize.” He shrugs again, leg shaking.
Robin, meanwhile, begins reading the letters. After the fourth one, he looks up.
“I am touched beyond words,” he announces, tenderly. He continues reading. Later that day, he proclaims that he’d like to volunteer as a facilitator in this program. It’s a breathtaking moment, a flashback to Rwanda, an act of forgiveness and reconciliation that many deem impossible.
But I know the data that say it is possible, psychological studies proving the power of “sorry” and rethinking what victims really want. Restorative justice literature outlines the four needs of victims: truthful answers; empowerment; restoration of respect, usually achieved by the repeated telling of their stories of harm; and restitution, which can be a statement of responsibility or a literal payback. Such needs are best met through dialogue, not punishment and trials, which usually marginalize victims, turning them into passive observers. A study of Chile’s National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, for instance, conducted in 1991 to address the human rights abuses that occurred during the Pinochet regime, showed that hardly anyone wanted vengeance; they wanted justice and truth, and to honor lost loved ones, and assurance that the atrocities wouldn’t happen again. Victims who participate in victim–offender dialogue are again and again shown to feel less fear and to experience high levels of satisfaction with the criminal justice system.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt called forgiveness “the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it.” Forgiveness is a miracle—a life-enhancing one. Social, developmental, and clinical psychologists began mapping this miracle in the 1990s, defining it as a state in which the offended is no longer negatively driven by avoiding the offender or taking revenge on him, and instead is fueled by constructive, prosocial motivations. Tools such as the Forgiveness of Others scale and the Forgiveness Inventory were devised to gauge merciful and vengeful impulses. One study showed that feelings of victimization incur passivity, making people less efficient with everyday tasks and quicker to give up. In 1998 two psychologists surveyed survivors of childhood sexual abuse and, finding better marital relationships among those who scored higher on the forgiveness scale, concluded that forgiveness in one realm translates to another. And a 2008 study reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that far from producing closure, vengeance increases one’s unsettled aggression by making one fixate on the wrongdoer.
Participants in another study were asked to recall a specific offending event and engage in four types of imagery: focusing on the hurt, nursing a grudge, empathizing with the offender’s human qualities, or forgiving. During the latter, subjects’ forgiving feelings manifested physiologically—they showed less elevation in systolic and diastolic blood pressure and lower heart rate when recalling the event. In another trio of studies conducted by psychologists in 2002, participants were asked to envision themselves as robbery victims and then imagine receiving, the day after their victimization, an apology, restitution, both, or neither. When victims received strong apologies they reported feeling less vengeance, anger, and fear, and more forgiveness; when they received both apology and restitution, effect magnitudes about doubled.
Ultimately, retribution has a backlash effect that harms us all. In one 1999 experiment, male undergraduate students were led to believe that they’d unintentionally broken a piece of lab equipment. Then, from the experimenter, they received forgiveness, retribution, both responses, or neither. The experimenter next asked participants to deliver materials to various offices on campus. Participants who received forgiveness showed greatest compliance with this request, whereas those who received retribution showed the least compliance. The giftlike quality of the forgiveness received by the wrongdoers made inequity so tangible, it compelled them to restore equity by performing a positive act of restitution. In other words, punishing people perpetuates destructive actions—and thus increases crime—by amplifying resentments. Forgiveness promotes social order and peace.
———
It’s time to ring Gerswin’s mom. She can talk now, and she does, in rapid, emotion-laden Afrikaans, which Jonathan shares with all of us after hanging up.
“People are looking for you in the community,” he begins, gravely. “Your two sisters live in fear because of your gang affiliation. The word they use for you is buta—big brother—your sisters call you that. There is that kind of a respect for you, eh? Your sisters miss having their big brother.”
Gerswin’s face has gone white. His leg trembles in double time. Jonathan continues.
“Your cousin was shot ten times, his friend eleven times. Your mother, she wants you out of prison but has no guarantee she can keep you out. Your sisters need you. This is what she says. She does not think she can keep you out of prison; the family is not safe if you are home.”
“But I tried,” comes Gerswin’s protest, blurted out with angst. “I tried to reach out. She always, yes? She makes excuses for why she won’t see me and talk to me.”
“How long?” asks Jonathan. “How long have you tried to reach out to her for?”
“Three years since I have seen them.”
“I will bring your mother and sister here tomorrow. I will send a car for them and they will come here for you to talk to.” Jonathan walks over to our table and puts a hand on Gerswin’s shoulder.
“You are crying inside. Crying for a mother. I will bring her to you tomorrow.”
Gerswin looks overwhelmed: emotionally at sea, as if he’s been handed a set of tools for a job but doesn’t know what the job is or quite how to use the tools.
“Baz, I never gave myself the chance to talk to people like this,” Gerswin proclaims, exhaling with relief.
“How do you feel?” I ask.
“Great,” he says, his face lit up. “Now my mother—she cannot run away
, she will answer. She will have to answer. Finally. Tomorrow.”
Leaving Pollsmoor that day, I get lost in memories of New Year’s, 2005. I was in my twenties, unprecedentedly in love with a quite wonderful, quite flawed man who’d moved to the United States from the Caribbean only about a year earlier. Jon made me very happy until the day I got a call from his wife about their son, both of whose existence was news to me. I was floored. In time, I healed; we all do, eventually, once we get over our selfish sense of being singularly wronged by the universe. He and I were back together, on-again, off-again, for a number of years, during which he blamed his mistakes on totally legitimate yet wholly exasperating excuses: racism, lack of education, a hideous economy, and the travails of getting a green card. And for years, I lusted after a single thing from him, an apology. Our love took too long to get over because it required me to forgive a man whose owning of mistakes came in fits and starts and, ultimately, too late.
Why does my petty heartbreak remind me of Pollsmoor? I have no right to connect something so minor with something so major. Yet Gerswin somehow reminds me of Jon. Both are products of a system stacked against them. Yet both are still tasked to slowly don the mantle of responsibility, own mistakes in fleeting bursts that inspire but, because they tend not to last, potentially disappoint. Both have inherited an inherent flawedness, for lack of a better word, of a whole lifestyle. I’m blessed to have never been a victim of a major crime, and I have no right to compare any experience to that one. But I have been the victim of emotional harm by another.
So have all of us. Surely you know at least one living, breathing scarlet letter—someone who erred, maybe even gravely, maybe even against you, and is laboring to come correct. And sometimes not just correct but uber-correct, revising and remaking themselves in ways even those of us with the best of therapists can merely aspire to. Call them modern-day St. Augustines, Malcolm Xs, Mary Magdalenes—there’s a reason religion and lore are filled with sinners-turned-saints; formerly flawed souls come clean in the noblest of ways. So however far you live, literally and metaphorically, from a prison, you’ve had to grapple with making mistakes, with forgiving and being forgiven. This is why prisons aren’t really foreign to anyone; they’re something we can all, on a theoretical level, viscerally comprehend.
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