Living Where You Don’t Want to Live

November 2007

I have done volunteer work in prisons for almost forty years—from Tijuana just south of the border to San Quentin just north of the beautiful Golden Gate.  I have worked in a lot of prisons and have yet to find one that I like!

I have worked in federal prisons and state prisons and city jails—and I’d rather not.  But I am willing to do it, because it is an important apostolate, for priests and especially for lay people.  There is a lot of God-work to do inside those walls.

The Tijuana federal prison had the furthest extremes in my experience: it had outside cells called Las Tumbas that were six by three containing six men each reserved for trouble-makers, but there was also an area for families, where there was respect and quiet at night.  On my first visit there, a number of men from various parts of the prison were spending the weekend in the chapel section doing a weekend retreat.
    Maximum security prisons are filled with clanking barred portals that clank in my heart and inspection posts, it seems, every few feet to make sure I was legit, but minimum security prisons almost let me in to wander as I would.

Guards are in the unenviable position of having too much power.  Lord Acton said that power corrupts.  I’m not so sure I agree with him (subject for another article), but there is no question that it provides such a temptation.  In Honolulu, a female volunteer and I were subjected to intolerable abuse from a guard, but the system corrected his abusiveness.  And in the same prison a mistake I had made on my very first visit was corrected by one of the guards, which permitted me to end up doing more than I had planned to do.

Our judicial system is not perfect: there are some inmates who are innocent.  The majority, however, are incarcerated legitimately—they did do something that contravened the law.  (Whether they are sentenced justly is also a subject for another article.)  There are inmates whom I will never meet, those who are simply not interested in spending time in a chapel.  It is among these, presumably, that I would find the worst of inmates.

The ones I do meet, however, quite often touch me with their stories.  None of them has ever pretended to me that he was not guilty.  Sometimes they tell me their crime but usually they talk about the way they feel down: their sadness because they miss their families and friends, their low spirits because of occasional problems inside and their shackles both physical and non-physical.  They also talk up; they talk about their growth in self-acceptance and they tell me about their sense of spiritual things and their increasing ability to see God even in their incarceration, they tell me about their growing love.  One told me that he deliberately broke a rule so that his sentence would be extended a few months so he could finish a retreat he was making with the chaplain!

Another was telling me such a sad story that tears welled up in my eyes.  He saw it and told me not to cry, that he had cried it all out like a child and now he had to learn how to live like an adult.  Others have mentioned their children and, expressing a sense of hope, would add something like, “But, Father, I only have two more years and then I will see them again.”

Prisons are not nice places.  I don’t like them.  They are too crowded and racially unbalanced.  They don’t treat psychological problems well or addictions.  But God is there.  Remember his Son was in a prison, even went to Death Row and through it!  Many of the inmates see God in their lives and—I hate to say this—they are able to become better people for their experience.