i have asked people their views but think it would be helpful to get the views of people that have actually been in prison and whether you believe you had the right to the education or whether it was a prvivledge, and why you chose the view you did.

it would be much appreciated thank you

i have asked people their views but think it would be helpful to get the views of people that have actually been in prison and whether you believe you had the right to the education or whether it was a prvivledge, and why you chose the view you did.

it would be much appreciated thank you.

Some of us live with many more options available to us than others and that to me is the heart of the problem.

Just because I suffered and no one helped me – not true by the way – does not mean that I have to choose to refuse help to others. Each of us has the choice to reach out a hand and pull others up to where we are, just as we depend on the others to do the same for us. Whether we like to admit it or not, we each live on the backs of those below us. We can either ignore that fact or make conscious choices that recognize that fact.

I have no clear alternative to prison. But I choose to engage with the reality of the institution, its security, comfort, horror, grinding boredom so I remain conscious of the price we pay for our comfort and security.

Without that consciousness it is too tempting to regard prisoners as other – lock them up and throw away the key. And once they come out why should we regard them at all? They are our brothers and sisters. Our Uncles and Aunts. Our sons and daughters. Our nieces and nephews.

Perhaps that is the biggest choice facing us: can we create a society that helps us include in our awareness every member of that society?

Once they are out of prison, however, they have supposedly paid their dues. To continue to punish them by refusing them jobs, places to live, etc, etc is nothing more than vigilantism. If you do not think they deserve to be free then change the system and keep them in jail. Otherwise, once they have served their time they are citizens like the rest of us and deserve all of the same rights.

Many years ago, my family and I became victims of a sociopath who tried several times to kill me, among other crimes. Yet, he was able to manipulate the system so that he received only three years of probation. My family and I were deeply traumatized, and I experienced the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder for years, at a time when there was little support for victims.

I give you only enough detail so you can understand why I think programs like those at the Fortune Society are so important for all of us.

Several years after these events in our lives, an organization at the college where I was working sponsored a three day Prisoners’ Rights Conference. I was assigned assist the sponsoring organization in setting up.

It was a life-changing experience for me. I listened to people who worked with parolees, people who ran half-way houses, people who had struggled to recreate their lives after prison. I listened to former cops who talked about how they targetted certain people by their looks, their economic status, or just because. I listened to stories similar to those told by the guests on your program. That familiar wall in me began to dissolve. I felt profoundly moved. I began to see them in me, and me in them.

But the one that stands out vividly in my mind is this one:

Some of the people who spoke the last day were prisoners who had been furloughed from prison long enough to attend the conference. Each was accompanied by a corrections officer (who I later learned had volunteered for the duty). One of the prisoners who spoke was a Native American man. He spoke humbly about what he’d done and his feelings of shame and contrition. He spoke of his struggle to maintain a sense of his humanity in the harsh, racist environment of the prison.

Last of all, he spoke of the day that his sister brought her new baby to the prison for him to see. He spoke of holding that baby, and as he spoke, his hands made the shape of the baby in the air, and his arms cradled that shape next to his heart. His voice grew soft and wondrous as he described his feelings of holding the potential that new life represented, and how he felt he’d let his family down by squandering his own. Then, his voice caught as he realized how tremendously isolated from real life prison made its inmates, so much so that they turned off their emotions in order to survive. Tears were running down his cheeks, and down a great many others in that room. Including mine, and I think that was when I began to heal.

There is more, but this is the story I wanted you to know: It is important for these stories to be told, not only so the people convicted of crimes can begin to heal and to recreate their lives, but so that those of us who have been victims can too. And so that prisons can become the kinds of places that people are able, when they are ready, to heal themselves. And so our society itself can become a healthy one.

A program like this can never really change the person who victimized me and my family. He is what he is. But I saw in that conference, and in the stories told on your program, the profound possibility of damaged people to surmount their pasts, and for their hunger for the ordinary things of life to heal. Theirs is real courage, and the stories I heard that day several decades ago helped me begin to heal too.

Thank you.