Incarceration Nations

by Baz Dreisinger

  ———

  “O Faithful One”: a new hymn has slipped into the morning song list. I’ve been trying to keep my religious biases in check, my feeling that in prison religion becomes the road to complacency and passivity, because I do recognize that it can also serve positive ends. America recognizes this, too; in 2003, Florida became the first state to dedicate an entire correctional facility to a faith-based model, opening the first of four Faith-Based Character Institutions. In these, about 3,300 men devote their day to religious activities including worship, scriptural study, mentoring, and character development programs related to parenting and anger management. Staff and volunteers reported improvements in prisoners’ attitudes and behavior, while the prisoners themselves described the FBCIs as less stressful and more conducive to self-improvement than traditional prisons.

  Pocketing my skepticism, I scan the daily objective, which is “to instill the core values of honesty, respect, trust, and integrity.” Pastor Ron, sporting shades, is with us today, as is Dennis. Gerswin, wearing a white takiya that matches Yahiya’s, gives me a hearty handshake as I sit down at our table for initial discussion. Anthony offers his signature toothless grin and Ebrahim nods coldly in my direction.

  When asked to address feelings about his victim, Gerswin says flatly, “Well, Pastor Ron, I felt very bad.” Do I detect a smirk?

  “I don’t want to talk about my victim,” says Ebrahim.

  Lifting a hand off his rotund belly, Pastor Ron touches Ebrahim’s cheek. “You will be ready to heal soon, my son,” he sighs. Then, hand lightly placed on Gerswin’s chest, by his heart: “You too, my son.”

  “You are both Muslim, yes?” he continues. The two prisoners nod.

  “You are truly Christian, in your hearts.” Hand on cheeks again. “I see it, yes. Christians. You love Jesus, deep in your souls. In your hearts.” Hand on cheeks, hand on hearts.

  “Let us pray for Gerswin,” says Dennis, head low and eyes half-closed. I swallow my mounting exasperation and bow my head. A moment of silence for Gerswin’s lost, non-Christian soul.

  Heads up. “Are you ready to give up your number, Gerswin? No more gangsterism?”

  “No, Pastor Ron.”

  “Will you still carry a firearm?”

  “It’s not so easy, Pastor Ron. But Pastor Ron, I will not use it. I will be a good man when I come home.”

  The pastor has already moved on to Ebrahim. “Will you give up your number?” Ebrahim hangs his head, a mischievous look in his green eyes. He says nothing. Pastor Ron mumbles something about Jesus saving and continues. “Ebrahim, when you leave this place, will you give in to peer pressure?”

  “No, Pastor Ron.”

  “And Gerswin, where will you live, when you come home?”

  “With my old community. With my old friends but also my enemies. This way I can show them the path that is right, that I have changed.”

  “Excellent idea, Gerswin!”

  Terrible idea! I can’t contain myself anymore.

  It’s break time, but Gerswin and I stay put as everyone else makes restroom runs. I ask him, point-blank, if he’s just going through the motions, telling the pastor what he wants to hear. He shakes his head vigorously. But Gerswin, let’s talk about your game plan. The debate turns heated. I tell him that when my students in America come home, they avoid their former neighborhoods like the plague, lest they fall back into old lifestyles. Many of them want to work with at-risk youth and share their hard-earned wisdom, but they realize that they have to be sure they’ve saved themselves before they set out to save everyone else. He’s adamant that he can resist and insists that he has a calling to guide the youth in the right direction.

  Finally, at a standstill, he asks me if I will come with him to meet his mother this afternoon. She’s on her way. Jonathan had someone pick her up and escort her from the township.

  That afternoon, Jonathan and I head to the building entrance area to greet Gerswin’s sister and his mother, just a few years older than I am. She gives us dense, grudging hellos and sits down with a huff on the bench in the waiting room. His nineteen-year-old sister, wearing jeans and a tight red top and headband, promptly bursts into sobs. I sit down beside her.

  “I didn’t want to come,” she tells me, a river of tears streaming down flushed cheeks. Her mother stares blankly at the wall. I hand her a tissue. You’re in school, I ask? No. Work? She shakes her head.

  “I just, you know. Hang out,” she sniffles.

  Jonathan guides us to the social worker’s office. She greets us warmly, in booming Afrikaans. Her military-style prison uniform resembles the one worn by guards, combat boots and all. She just learned about this reconciliation meeting this morning, but she’ll do her best.

  Gerswin enters. No one moves a muscle as he plunks himself down between his mother and sister, whom he hasn’t seen in three years, and looks straight ahead, stolid.

  “Drukkie!” commands the social worker. Gerswin obeys and gives his mother a stiff hug. As he embraces his sister, her sobs return. Gerswin is visibly moved and does not let go of her. His mother continues to stare at the wall and his sister’s tears leave broad wet spots on the shoulder of his orange uniform. He grips her hand and she grips a tissue as the social worker orchestrates a dialogue, Jonathan intervening every now and then to translate for me.

  It’s an emotional Ping-Pong match. Mom came in drunk one night from the shebeen, husband in tow, and tried to stab her own son. Son has been committing crimes since age ten, when he sold the new clothes Mom bought him for school and used the money to buy drugs. Yes, she’s struggled with drugs and alcohol, too. But she had him when she was fifteen years old, after she was raped by the man who would show up drunk on her wedding day.

  “He is twenty-six now!” says Mom, finger pointed and voice raised. “He has a daughter who is eight. She is in danger! So are we!” Anger fills the room like hazardous smoke and Gerswin wears a face I haven’t yet seen on him: sullen, pained, confused, lost.

  “You never protected me from any of those men you took home!” Gerswin grips his sister’s hand even more tightly. “You never protected her!”

  Suddenly, deeply feeling my not belonging here, I signal to Jonathan that I’m ready to head out. Let the professionals and the family members work privately. I conjure up a supportive smile for Gerswin and exit the gates.

  ———

  Days and hours at Pollsmoor march by, thick with narratives and pain. There’s the moment Anthony owns his mistakes toward his wife—“when we were married I’d watch rugby instead of going with her to weddings, to gatherings”—then shakes his head and goes on, owning up to far grander wrongs. “I spent my life chasing after women and money. I raped my own stepdaughter.”

  There’s the moment Gerswin, calmer and more somber after the meeting with his mother, admits to being emotionally upended.

  “I feel—what do you say?—two things at once. I see that my mother is a victim, too. I had to see my baby sister, she loves me and I hurt her. I see the ripple effect of my actions and my crime.” I’m struck by his use of restorative justice vocabulary; apparently the lessons are sinking in.

  “But I feel angry, Baz. And so I think, why should I stop my actions? And it is this, see—I want—a father. I am jealous of these happy families. What did I have? Zero. Drugs.”

  And there is, too, the afternoon at a coffee shop, post-Pollsmoor, when I ask Jonathan to tell me the long story of how he came to devote his life to restorative justice.

  He grew up in Paarl, near the Winelands outside Cape Town. His grandfather lost his farm under apartheid land seizures, and the only white people he ever saw were those who came to preach in his ultra-strict church, all the while refusing to acknowledge apartheid as a moral wrong. He was taught to revere them. “Back in those days, if a white person smiled at you, you’d think it was God himself,” he laughs.

  When his mother was pregnant with him, her neighbor was pregnant, too—from the same man. His f
ather then had an affair with the housekeeper before eventually abandoning his wife and seven children altogether. Dropping out of school in the tenth grade to work in a factory and support his mother, Jonathan discovered he’d become just like his father.

  “I loved women. Entertaining women, being in the company of women. And to do that I needed money.” He took it wherever and however he could, via credit-card schemes, petty thefts, small hustles.

  “When I finally got arrested, my mother came to the police station and said, ‘I’ll pray for you, my son.’ Another cousin came with a Bible and I almost spit in his face. I wanted nothing to do with religion.” Handed a six-year sentence, he eventually landed in a maximum security unit of Pollsmoor, the only colored section with available beds. He learned English behind bars.

  Good behavior earned him early freedom, in 1990. At the gates waiting for him was the one woman who’d stayed in contact with him throughout his incarceration, a childhood friend named Jenny.

  “She said two things were on the agenda for that day, the day of my release.” Jonathan grins broadly, as if greeting the memory. “ ‘One: my mother prayed for you every morning—you will join her for prayer. Second: I’m going to take you to your dad.’ I said, ‘Jenny, you’re mad.’ I hated that man with a passion—he never even came to visit me. Hated him, eh? But I did what Jenny said. We went to my father’s house and I walked in, and a five-year-old boy ran to me and put his arms around my neck and called me buta, ‘great brother.’ I was thirty-one years old and I embraced him. I took my father’s hand. That was my first experience with restorative justice, without knowing it.”

  “Meet my wife!” Jonathan announces at Pollsmoor one day. Jenny, all smiles in her pink lipstick, wears a chic black-and-white suit and her raven-colored hair is pulled back into a neat ponytail. She’s Pastor Clayton, too, a minister who runs restorative justice workshops in Pollsmoor’s women’s prison, next door. Jonathan had painted their courtship to me in sparkling detail. He’d known her during his rebellious, womanizing days—“I threw eyes at her when I was at my girlfriend’s house. She wouldn’t have any of it, eh? But we became friends.” They stayed in touch, even after his arrest. And on January 1, 1989, after he’d been incarcerated for just under a year, she surprised him by showing up. They corresponded in long, detailed letters, and Jonathan kept painstaking notes of her every visit. After his mother’s death, he began addressing his letters to “my loving Jenny.” But all along he’d assumed he was pushing the envelope. She’d never marry, he thought. Her life would be devoted to the church. So he merely dropped hints, even postrelease, while he worked grueling hours driving a truck for a bakery and they spent every day together. Even, too, after he set his hand on her leg and she didn’t remove it. And even after he took her to dinner, hid a diamond ring in her dessert, yet couldn’t bring himself to propose. Finally, in 1991, Jenny turned to Jonathan and said, “The answer is yes. Do you remember the question?”

  The prisoners gaze at Jenny, awed, as she narrates a slide show: The Claytons. Amy Joy is eighteen, Kara Chloe fifteen. “I never told them to serve God. They choose to live righteously as they do,” she says. Here they are going to prom, in dresses resembling red-velvet cakes. Here they are in their church best, all smiles and grace. Jerome and Gerswin’s eyes grow wide as they behold the picture-perfect family that neither they nor a single man in this room have been privileged to have.

  “And these girls,” Jenny continues, glowing with smiles, “they are not shy to say their daddy was in prison. You know why?”

  Why? The men, entranced, practically shriek.

  “Because what you are today is more important than the past. This is what I say to you, my friends. Every day is a new chance to make a correction for yesterday.”

  ———

  That ultimate day of correction finally arrives. It’s a moment of reckoning. The men in orange will put their week of soul searching to the test by confronting those most acutely impacted and victimized by their deeds, their families. Anthony greets me with the news that he’s been denied parole yet again. I tell him I’ve recently gotten the same news from America, where a parole board consisting of political appointees has decided that twenty-three years is not enough punishment for one of my most promising students, who’s been in prison since age eighteen. “The victim wants more time from you,” they’d told my student. Do they also want a pound of flesh? I’d angrily wanted to shout at the board. What kind of justice system cultivates such profound levels of vengeance?

  “There isn’t much out there”—Anthony gestures toward the window, the barbed wire, the Constantia mountain range, with a shrug—“for someone like me. I’m probably—I probably belong here. I’m old.” He shrugs again. “Maybe I will die here.”

  Anthony’s family members did not make it today. But many others did. Wives, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, grown sons and daughters trickle in and take seats on benches in the middle of the room. It’s a reunion scene of awkward handshakes and suspicious once-overs in lieu of warm embraces. Jerome, whose phone call with his mother had taken a toll on him days earlier, looks nervously around the room and strokes his chin, where faint traces of a beard have begun to sprout. Will his mother show up?

  “Welcome!” Jonathan booms. “Welcome to your opportunity to restore broken relationships! It is your time. Come forward and make statements. Tell them, tell us, how you feel, eh? You can say, if you want, ‘I am sad.’ Or ‘I am angry.’ Or maybe you want to ask questions: ‘Why?’ ‘How long is your sentence?’ This is your chance to have them answered, everything you wanted to know. Not to degrade, but to restore. Come forward!”

  They come. Eagerly. First, big sister of Yahiya. She faces the gangster who is her brother, who stands with hands on hips, shifting his weight from one leg to another. Yahiya has spoken all week of being hated, rejected by his broken family. During public sessions he has animatedly detailed the feelings of rage that this caused him.

  “I don’t know you. We weren’t raised together. I never wanted to know you because I thought, he is a criminal.” She sizes up her brother. He adjusts his shades.

  “But now I say to you: You are loved.”

  Suddenly the gangster collapses into sobs. He hides his head in his hands and cries uncontrollably as his sister goes on. “We will try now to restore that bond. My brother, we will try.” They are both sobbing now. Then, at Jonathan’s command, they are embracing.

  The white prisoner hasn’t seen his mother in five years. Mother, widowed just weeks ago, grips his face with both hands. “Look me in the eye, my son,” she says. “I unconditionally love you.” Son falls, tearfully, into mother’s arms.

  Watching these narratives broaden before my eyes takes my breath away. It happened when I sat with Gerswin and his mother, too: “apology” in the root sense of the word, from the Greek apologos, meaning “story.” I’ve been listening to stories all week, confessions about childhoods, criminal acts, family wrongs, but when offender and victim are reunited, these stories are suddenly infused with fresh dimensions, supplied by family members who were critical protagonists in them, too. In Xhosa, in Afrikaans, in English, the prisoners are solicited, one by one, by the people they love. Tell me the truth.

  You have made me a failure because I cannot raise my own son.

  How could you have stolen from your own wife?

  “Resentment is a story-telling passion,” writes philosopher Charles Griswold. Restorative justice involves widening and deepening that narrative to include the narrative of the wrongdoer, which does not excuse but does explain. Two architects of restorative justice, Barb Toews and Howard Zehr, propose that the meaning of a given crime must be actively determined through dialogue, and meaningful justice can only emerge when “co-authored by the victim and the offender.”

  Today’s tears thus have a reddish tint; they’re a bloodletting. Again and again comes a resounding chorus of those tremendous words. I am sorry.

  Hardened gangster
s collapse, bawling, in their mothers’ arms. Fathers confess love for sons they never really knew. Tattooed faces grow puffy and damp. Shame is rife and hours pass; the line grows longer as family members decide that there’s more to say, more to ask. Some extrasensitive confrontations, like the wife facing the husband who raped her, are relocated, to be handled privately. But the rest are public acts, a cleansing ritual like nothing I’ve ever witnessed.

  Will you buy me that bicycle, Papa, so we can ride together, like we used to?

  Jonathan halts the proceedings. “We can spend all day here,” he says. “I can spend the next lifetime here, restoring. But I want everyone to have one hour with family, just to spend time. Don’t talk about the weather! This is your quality time. Continue to connect.”

  Jerome’s mother never made it. Jonathan later lets me know that when the car arrived to carry her here, she was too much under the influence to take the ride. He’s slumped at his table, disappointment and emotional exhaustion having annihilated the gangster swagger he once exuded. I sit with Gerswin, who makes a declaration.

  “Baz, I have decided I will not take parole,” he says, nibbling on a meat patty. “I am not ready. I know now that I will react badly. I need more time to work on my anger. I need to work with my family. I will cause trouble if I go home now.”

  I ask him if he’s heard of Malcolm X.

  “Is that a rapper?”

  I give him the rundown on the gangster-turned-leader who educated himself behind American bars.

  “Baz, I will make you a promise,” he says. “I will learn to read. I will enroll in the literacy classes. I promise … I feel sorry, Baz. For my family. For my life.”