To hear these eight white women and two white men tell it, they have journeyed into a heart of darkness.
The horror, the horror!
The lack of respect. The sight of handcuffs. The restricted visiting hours. The rules on appropriate visitor’s attire. The guards who don’t smile. The dreams of college and career interrupted.
What you won’t hear from the eight women and two men in a series of monologues called “With You on the Journey” are the hard facts about why their sons, brothers, fathers and spouses are in prison.
I sat through a recent two-hour performance of “With You on the Journey” at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland. The event had been publicized by OPB radio as a look at what families of prison inmates go through.
Not surprisingly, since these family members don’t detail the crimes involved, they make no reference to victims. It’s as if they see themselves and their incarcerated loved ones as the victims.
These mothers, fathers, sisters, daughters and spouses are very indignant that someone they love has been sent to prison. How could this happen to them?
There’s Gretchen, (most of the storytellers used only their first names), a middle-aged mother with long brown hair parted down the middle. She did not raise her three sons to go to prison, she said, but “circumstances happen,” and one son turned out to be “a follower.”
Gretchen doesn’t reveal much more than that about her son’s crime. She does disclose “the look of disbelief and shock on my son’s face” when he stood in court and learned that he would be sentenced to 13 years and would be 34 when he got out.
“I realized my son’s life would not be what we hoped for…,” Gretchen said.
She recited some of her concerns: Was his pillow soft enough? Was he being bullied? Was he safe?
As an audience member, I listened with my own concerns. According to Oregon sentencing guidelines, among the crimes that could elicit a 13-year sentence are first-degree assault, manslaughter, robbery, rape. Among the more serious drug crimes would be repeat offenses for manufacturing meth or selling heroin.
Chances are that if Gretchen’s son had been convicted of dealing drugs she would have gladly offered up that harmless-sounding catchall “drug crime,” and let sympathizers think her dear boy had been caught using marijuana before it was legalized.
Gretchen now belongs to a group called CURE (Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants).
Errant. Such a nice old-fashioned term. Here are some dictionary definitions: “Traveling, especially in search of adventure … straying from the ordinary … wandering outside the established limits.”
If Gretchen wants to lie to herself, if it helps her get out of bed in the morning, that’s fine. But she, as well as the other storytellers, are part of a movement to reform the criminal justice system for the most self-serving reasons.
The church program handed out at the performance I attended (which will be broadcast in segments on KBOO-FM) included urgent pleas to contact federal congressional representatives and senators and ask them to support various laws to assist prison inmates. Along with CURE, the program listed eight organizations, such as Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Mothers of Incarcerated Sons Society and the deceptively named Partnership for Safety and Justice (formerly the Western Prison Project, a more honest description of their advocacy work on behalf of inmates).
There was also this note in the church program: “Special thanks to … The Ending the New Jim Crow Social Action Group at the church.”
Yes, these good white folks have latched on to the “New Jim Crow” label as if their white sons, brothers, fathers and spouses, who have committed crimes serious enough to land them in prison, are the moral equivalent of the black men and women who suffered under the Jim Crow-era segregation laws from the 1880s to the mid-1950s.
Of course, “New Jim Crow” is also a rallying cry on behalf of 21st Century black gang members and “nonviolent” drug dealers – those men who have done so much to spread drug addiction.
About 6,000 of these “nonviolent” offenders are currently being released from federal prisons, courtesy of President Obama. It’s not surprising the eight white women and two white men telling their prison stories figured they could evade the crimes their loved ones committed, or ignore the victims left behind. They have good reason to assume a change is going to come.
In November, a rally is planned in Salem to urge the legislature to reform Measure 11, the voter-approved initiative that requires minimum-mandatory sentences for the most serious crimes.
Here’s an excerpt from Cheryl in her monologue entitled, “The ‘Justice’ of Mandatory Minimums:”
“Before our son’s arrest no one in our extended family had been arrested and sentenced to prison. … Now in his second year of a 20-year sentence, he is a father, stepfather and grandfather … he gets no time off. He will serve every single day. … We were stunned when we heard the charges and amount of bail. … He knew he had to pay for what he did … we knew there was a debt due.”
What could this man have possibly done that merited a 20-year sentence? Cheryl tip-toed delicately among words like “inappropriate touching,” “granddaughter,” “a single occurrence,” “a perfect storm.”
She tried to build a persuasive case: “Take out one event, and it does not happen, and it is unlikely to ever happen again. … A restored family in less than a year. … State will pay $1 million to warehouse Mark. State pays for public assistance for his family. … Measure 11 did away with unifying whole family. … With Mark’s incarceration, public is not made safe. … DA took one charge and turned it into five… .”
Despite what Cheryl believes, the public is made safer when laws are enforced with punishment. Other people’s granddaughters may not look like such easy prey to other grandfathers.
Personally, I’m concerned about how Cheryl’s family now treats the granddaughter. Do they blame her for the “inappropriate touching.” (Expecting a family member to endure sexual abuse for the sake of “family restoration” is nothing short of pimping.)
What Cheryl has forgotten, or perhaps never knew, is that one of the reasons why voters passed laws like Measure 11 is they were fed up with offenders being let off – especially those who were perceived to be privileged in some way. So what if no one in her extended, middle-class family has never been arrested before?
One of the storytellers — retired Tillamook County Judge Neal Lemery — had personal, professional reasons for opposing Measure 11: It took away some of his sentencing power. Prior to Measure 11, had Lemery sat in judgment on Cheryl’s son, he might very well have looked at the family background and let her son off with a light sentence — if that. Under Measure 11, judges lost much of that discretion.
Lemery, though, has found a new source of power – trying to save young men who need a father figure. It’s a worthy goal, but his own ability as a father is called into question when one of his foster sons ends up in prison.
Lemery gave two monologues, one about visiting his incarcerated son and the other about helping another young man on his first day of freedom after being incarcerated.
About the visit with his son, Lemery complained that the inmates were treated like numbers not names, that nobody smiled, that it was impersonal, there was a smell of disinfectant and stale sweat.
“We had left the real world,” Lemery concluded.
As a former judge, he has to know that inmates sometimes share same or similar names. That’s why the SID number is important. As for the impersonal environment, prisons and jails are not recreational clubs. Even in the real world there is a smell of disinfectant and stale sweat.
There’s nothing wrong with Lemery wanting to help these young men. However, there is something very wrong if he leads them to believe they are not responsible for their behavior. How does Lemery explain the fatherless sons who don’t turn to crime?
Or the son of an intact Lake Oswego family who does turn to crime?
That was the case of Marilyn’s son, a 17-year-old youth, who had been in and out of trouble and was arrested last April. He is now in the custody of the Oregon Youth Authority until he’s 25.
“We are now in a very dark, deceptive phase…,” said Marilyn. “We are losing a battle for my son’s soul.”
It’s a battle that can’t be blamed entirely on the criminal justice system. There’s another element, and she briefly touched on it — crime as a form of entertainment.
Her son had been a high-strung but talented student, and in 7th grade he became infatuated with TV shows like “Gangland.” By the 9th grade, she said, he had spun out of control and was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
“We pleaded with DHS for a year-long placement in some therapeutic setting. Our pleas went ignored. … He has lived in 14 different facilities in the last three years.”
Her son was recruited into the Surenos, and his crimes became more serious. He probably joined the gang, Marilyn said, to meet his need for excitement.
He was a student at Portland Community College, only one credit away from high school graduation last spring and off probation when “10 days later he hooked up with his gang buddies. … This time the crime was much more serious and came within a hair’s breath of costing a life.”
Marilyn and her husband are relieved that their son is off the streets, but they worry he’s getting more indoctrinated into gangs while in the Oregon Youth Authority.
During one visit she found her son wearing a rosary, which has become a gang symbol. She complained to authorities and was told the state takes pains to avoid lawsuits so they have to be careful restricting religious symbols.
“I can’t help but wonder, if he’d had that long-term treatment when we asked for it if he would be in a gang today,” Marilyn said.
Perhaps. It’s unrealistic, though, to expect a state agency to compete with the lure of popular culture. Consider how many Portlanders might be amused at the tale of a son from affluent Lake Oswego joining a street gang that originated in Southern California barrios.
Mention “Lake Oswego,” and to some people there will be instant disdain of American suburbia. Mention gang, and there will be intrigue, even sympathy.
The storytellers in “With You on the Journey” fuel these misguided sympathies. The worst offender is Carol Imani, who coordinated the project with a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
Her monologue is entitled, “I Was the One,” and it is a litany of all that she did during her son’s 10 years of addiction to protect him from the out-patient counselors, the in-patient counselors, the recovery caseworkers, the psychologists and psychiatrists, the public defenders and the district attorneys – “especially the district attorneys” – the police, probation officers, the judges.
All of them “always point fingers at the mom,” Imani said.
“In jail he decided to get clean. … He was determined. Last spring he finished PCC on the president’s list and has just started at PSU (Portland State University). … A while ago he said, ‘I did it Mom. I got myself clean, but you made it possible.’ I tell you that not to blow my own horn,” she said.
But she does want to blow her own horn. She’s still upset about the lack of empathy and respect she was shown. She teaches creative writing to prisoners, after all. She’s been to college.
Imani did not single-handedly get her son off drugs. How many of the anonymous people she dismissed in her monologue contributed to his life? They did not birth him, but they helped raise him when her efforts failed.
The only credit given to these anonymous people in “With You on the Journey” is when some of the mothers acknowledged that their sons were safer in prison than on the street.
As if to underscore that point, seven hours after the storytellers ended their performance at the First Unitarian Church, a mile away, Dion Anthony Matthews Jr., was killed in the parking lot behind Dante’s nightclub.
The 23-year-old man was on parole from a 2009 robbery conviction and was awaiting trial on new charges of being a felon in possession of a handgun. Meanwhile he was released from custody.
Matthews might have been safer had he continued his journey inside the criminal justice system.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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I have nothing against the Unitarians. This event was as classic Unitarian as the bathrooms. I attended as a favor to a friend and left after the intermission. My suggestion to this group is to take their act into the prisons and let your loved ones know how they hurt their families with their fuck-ups. I know what I’m talking about. My kid brother was in and out of jail. The money that should have gone to college went to treatment. Old story, I know. He didn’t care about his family. He cared about what he wanted. He finally grew up when we stopped rescuing him. Since I didn’t sit through the whole thing I don’t know if Carol was the worst. I did get tired of her “I was the one …I was the one…I was the one…I was the one…I was the one…I was the one…” We get it, you suffered.
I take it you’re referring to the signs outside the restrooms at the church. Under “Women” it says “And those who identify,” and under “Men” it says “And those who identify” (if I recall correctly).
The signs did make me smile. I was feeling a little aggressive after sitting through this event and wondered if I shouldn’t use the men’s room.
Garrison Keillor went after the Unitarians several years ago for, among other things, changing the lyrics to Christmas songs, including “Silent Night.” “Son of God” was changed to “child of God.” So … what bathroom would Jesus use at the First Unitarian Church?
Thanks for that little digression. Now to your main point. I don’t think we were the only two in the audience who felt that way. There were about 90 people attending, and I noticed after the intermission that it looked like maybe 20 had left. I stuck with it even though I found the monologues repetitious. Some in the audience seemed genuinely moved; one women sitting near me dabbed at her eyes during Marilyn’s monologue.
I couldn’t stay long for the reception afterwards, but one woman I spoke with, who said she worked with the mentally ill, was very enthusiastic about the performance until I offered her a brief critique. Then she whispered almost apologetically, “There were a lot of excuses.”
I’m increasingly of the “It’s hopeless” school of thought: The embrace of censorship by press and universities, diversity means intellectual lock step, rational thought is white privilege, “trigger warnings” legitimizing cowardice, sloth, and hypocrisy, the evils of “heteronormativity,” Europe importing a vast population of rapists and cultural antagonists under the guise of humane outreach. It seems overreach is impossible.
Their exists an old British tune titled “The World Turned Upside Down.” A version of that that song’s lyrics below:
If buttercups buzz’d after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.
A jittery Paglia gave an interview that was excerpted today in which she made some clear-sighted observations about the “trans” fad, alt reality, brouhaha, contrived issue, or …I have a stronger term ready to hand
“Nothing… better defines the decadence of the West to the jihadists than our toleration of open homosexuality and this transgender mania now,” Paglia said during an October 22 interview on the Brazilian television program Roda Viva.
Paglia also said during the interview that “transgender propagandists” are overstating their case.
“I think that the transgender propagandists make wildly inflated claims about the multiplicity of gender,” she said.
“Sex reassignment surgery, even today with all of its advances, cannot in fact change anyone’s sex, okay. You can define yourself as a trans man, or a trans woman, as one of these new gradations along the scale. But ultimately, every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that cell, remains coded for your biological birth.
“So there are a lot of lies being propagated at the present moment, which I think is not in anyone’s best interest.
“Now what I’m concerned about is the popularity and the availability of sex reassignment surgery, so that someone who doesn’t feel that he or she belongs to the biological birth, gender. People are being encouraged to intervene in the process.
“Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse. The hormones to slow puberty, actual surgical manipulations, etcetera. I think that this is wrong, that people should wait until they are of an informed age of consent.
“Parents should not be doing this to their children and I think that even in the teenage years is too soon to be making this leap.”
Freeing drug criminals and concealing felony convictions? Yeah, why not?
About 20 years ago — long before all things transgender had been adopted by the media and liberal leaders as a major civil rights issue — a male friend and I went on a double date with another couple of whom the female half had once been a man.
That wasn’t the most extraordinary fact about this couple. She had worked as an engineer at Boeing in Seattle, had multiple sclerosis and used a walker, and she was quite a bit older than our male friend. They had met online (this was when online dating was catching on), and he was going through a divorce because it turned out that his wife, who also managed his law office, had been surreptitiously sending large donations to Oral Roberts. (Truly, the human race is cable TV for the gods.)
Anyway, this woman had gone through the surgery and was no longer equipped like a man. We were in L.A. attending a live theatre presentation, and during intermission we went into the ladies’ room. The only thing about her that was remotely masculine was the size of her hands gripping the walker. She drew no attention to herself.
Earlier at dinner I had asked her about the surgery and how her family handled it. She said that going from male to female was much easier than female to male: “It’s easier to dig a ditch than grow a tree.” She and her then-wife had decided that for the sake of their two children, they would wait until the kids were out of high school before springing a divorce and Dad’s sex change on them. In the meantime, their dad remained a man.
In retrospect, what was so unusual about her story was that she did not expect the rest of the world to accommodate her particular situation. Her lack of narcissism was striking compared to today’s high-profile trannies who go out of their way to adopt androgynous appearances just to make people uncomfortable. Supposedly, this is their way of declaring, “Gender doesn’t matter!”
Well, if gender doesn’t matter, why does race matter? If race and gender don’t matter, then we don’t need Affirmative Action, and we don’t need protected classes.
Those Unitarians and the transgender sympathizers NEED a male-looking person to enter the women’s room or a female-looking person to enter the men’s room. Otherwise, they can’t show off the goodness of their politics.
Yes, the world has been turned upside down. Since everything is cyclical, perhaps it will turn again and in ways Americans, their political leaders and media are not prepared for.
One of my favorite writes of abroad has long been Jan Morris. The tenor of her writing I believe reflects the tenor of her character.
Having made a mark as a soldier the touching love held for her wife is, for me, inspirational. Morris is tender, humble, and quietly resolute and clear about what he understands.
However, your line”… perhaps it will turn again and in ways Americans, their political leaders and media are not prepared for” does have the power of polite but practical prophecy.
I suspect that the yielding of the Europeans and the subordinating of their continental cultures and identities to the tyrannical tolerance program of the left may result in an exaggerated and bloody rising. Indeed, something similar is possible here, too. The sad part is that it is not necessary. People do come here for the freedoms.
My own family I imagine to have experienced something like that depicted for the father and son in the film “Pelle the Conqueror.”
This weekend I read a goodish book by an Australian smart ass, “God’ll Cut You Down.” A complex narrative that swerves around as it finds reality’s curves. The young Jewish guy who’s investigating the race/murder in the story mentions the essayist Doctor Theodore Dalrymple and centrality of the family.
I was surprised that this very hip young writer would invoke Dalrymple. Below is an apt if extended quote from that man:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Almost every teaching job and city job I have ever held and far too many corporate jobs have compelled me to not only lie and to state things that I did not believe but also often thought were evil: all of them under the PC banner.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/67950.Theodore_Dalrymple
Every newspaper reporting and editing job I ever held required me to withhold facts — sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not (political correctness). I don’t think my experience was unusual. Fortunately, many readers suspect they’re not getting the full story.
Thanks for the Dalrymple quotes. What a fascinating bio — retired prison doctor. He’s the kind of writer NPR should take note of.
Sometimes, as seen above though, it is hard to get your gender consistently straight. However, my absentmindedness and confusion do not a hate crime make.
I will give you 20 bucks if Dalrymple is EVER
allowed to voice an opinion on any American public broadcasting program.