Prisons of our Own Making: Reflections on February at the Sycamore House
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." – Henry David Thoreau
I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot in regard to the work that I do advocating for criminal justice reform. Our English Teacher in the 9th grade asked us to write an essay about a character in To Kill a Mockingbird who was imprisoned unjustly. We were asked not just to consider Tom Robinson, wrongfully accused of a crime he did not commit, but Atticus Finch, Boo Radley, or, my personal favorite, Dolphus Raymond, who drinks Coca-Cola out of a brown paper bag and pretends to be drunk all the time so the townspeople don’t bother him. Under the politics of To Kill a Mockingbird, it seems many characters are living in metaphorical prisons. I’d argue the same is true of our current politics.
I shoplifted the other day. It is dangerous that there is a grocery store next door to my gym so when I’m on the treadmill craving Italian Ice I can instantly satisfy that craving. I walked in to Giant, went to the freezer aisle, grabbed the Italian Ice, and walked out. While in the car, I went to look for the receipt to record how much I spent and realized never recieved one, because I never paid… I proceed to go back inside the store and purchase my Italian Ices like a good citizen.
So I can add shoplifting to the list of minor crimes and misdemeanors that I’ve committed in my life. I’ve also: run a few stop signs and red lights, drank alcohol on the beach even though there were signs that said explicitly not too, vandalized property (signed my name in wet sidewalk cement in the fifth grade), trespassed (climbed onto the roof of a building using construction scaffolding to stargaze in college), and totaled my dad’s car immediately after getting my license when I turned 16.
My record isn’t clean. But I’m white, young, and a woman, all of which have worked in my favor when it comes to the law. I could have received a reckless driving ticket for my accident but instead was given “failure to yield the right of way” and the opportunity to enroll in a remedial driving class with a parent. My dad was able to take off of work to accompany me, so I had the ticket cleared from my record within a year. The money that the insurance company deemed the car was worth was enough to pay for repairs, so the car lasted another five years. I have been shown mercy and grace and forgiveness. And it’s not lost on me that much of this has to do with race and class privilege.
Often in advocating on behalf of people in prison I have been asked “What about the victims?” I believe we fall into one of the easiest traps humanity can set for itself when we believe that restorative justice has to be a zero sum game. As much as I have received mercy and grace and forgiveness I have also been a victim. Not of a crime, specifically, but certainly of trauma and abuse and interpersonal violence.
I spent three months in an abusive relationship in my first year of college. We had a complicated and messy breakup, and then lived together in the same dorm complex for the next three years. I then watched this individual enter into another romantic relationship with someone who lived in our dorm complex and repeat the same patterns of behavior, compounded by other traumas and mental health conditions. I felt compelled to file a Title IX complaint because watching this relationship implode while we were all still living together and sharing common spaces was triggering to me and disrupted my academic performance. In the end, this individual and I had a mediated conversation in the title IX office. It was very important for me to be able to look him in the eye and state the ways that he had harmed me, the person he was then dating, and those we lived with. I also wrote an anonymous article about my experiences hoping that if others saw themselves in my words they would know not to accept that kind of behavior. It was only then that I was able to forgive. Our mediated conversation probably did not do much to address the underlying causes of harm in our relationship (he needed counseling for that). But I do believe that this individual was seriously asked to consider the consequences of his actions in a way that other sanctions may not have.
So I understand what it means to be a victim. I also understand what it means to perpetrate harm.
My first year of college I was living with a Black roommate. At that point in time I operated under an assumption of Colorblindness. I figured that she and I operated on a more or less equal playing field. She went to a charter school for the arts, was incredibly smart, was from the suburbs, and her family seemed relatively well off financially. While we could agree that Abe Lincoln was not the hero to enslaved people that our elementary education brought us up to believe, I grew weary of her discussions about how she couldn’t escape her racial oppression. From my limited perspective, we were both at the same school, weren’t we equal? I said some things that I now know to be Microaggressions. While I wasn’t the person hanging the stuffed monkey in a noose or scribbling the N word outside of dorms, I was the person who felt as though their struggles and traumas were de-valued because they were White. My grandfather was dying. People in my hometown were dying of drug overdoses and gang related shootings. And then things came to a head when a good friend of mine from high school who I dated the summer prior killed himself.
The weekend following my friend’s funeral my roommate had her best friend from high school over to attend Black Ball. In my Colorblind world I did not understand the need for an all Black celebratory space. In my grief stricken world I did not understand how anyone could be doing something as normal as going to a party. I was jealous of her capacity to experience joy, and I was jealous of the fact that an organization at UVA existed to support her cultural identity. Never mind the fact that the entire institution basically existed to support MY identity... (since the 70s anyways)
As my roommate and her friends were getting ready for Black Ball one of them accidentally set their purse down on the keyboard of my open laptop, where I had stepped away from math homework. Under normal circumstances, I could have filed away my anger and had a conversation about it later but in my grief and frustration and fear and feeble attempt to do math HW that was messed up by this disruption of a purse on top of my property I was livid. I shot off an angry text asking my roommate to ask her friends to be more respectful, vented to a hallmate, went for a walk, and tried to calm down. But cortisol was still coursing through my veins. When my roommate came back later that evening the first thing I heard her say to her friend who was staying in our room was “Ems pissed me off” to which I replied,
You know I can hear you right?
I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say to your face. You made me angry. Let’s talk about this tomorrow. I’m tired.
You’re such a bitch.
You’ve been so disrespectful of me and my friends.
Oh I’m sorry, I’m not more hospitable but need I remind you, my friend killed himself a week ago and I’m just trying my best not to do the same thing.
Just because your friend made a stupid decision doesn’t mean you get to…
F*CK YOU! GO F*CK YOURSELF!
I’ve never said that to someone before and meant it, and I regret it every single day. I was afraid of myself and the power that I yielded that day. People who know me know that I don’t usually yell. My roommate and I had mediated conversations with our RA and Senior Resident and separate conversations with our Dean of Housing. And we managed to live out the rest of the year together relatively peacefully. I have the utmost respect for her. We would still wave to each other and check in if we ran in to each other on grounds. But our relationship was never the same. There was a level of trust that I broke that day and could never quite repair.
Something she said in our conversation with our RA was put in to a new perspective for me this October. She said her parents were more concerned about the comment I made about trying not to kill myself than they were about their poor daughter who was just screamed and sworn at. At a racism training I went to this October we were discussing the ways in which White and Black people internalize racial superiority/inferiority respectively. One of the ways Black people internalize racial inferiority is through Protectionism. Things go better for Black people when White people’s feelings are protected. So my poor roommate had to deal with her parents protecting my feelings in a situation where I was in the wrong and I had harmed her.
So I know what it is to perpetrate harm.
I have been thinking of these things a lot this Lenten Season. In my experiences as perpetrator and receiver of harm, no one was ever physically hurt. No one’s property was destroyed. No one was robbed of anything of material worth. But the pain carried was just the same. The root of the interpersonal violence was prior interpersonal violence or trauma. So when I hear the stories of the formerly incarcerated individuals I work with, all I can think is, “But for the Grace of God go I.” The Grace of God, and, it is worth mentioning, White Privilege.
I find myself comforted by the idea that Jesus did not come only to save the Lepers and the Widows. He came for the Tax Collectors and the Pharisees. He came for the prisoners AND the politicians. He came for those who uphold systems of White Supremacy. In other words, he came for me. To free me from the prisons of my own making. The prisons of jealousy, pride, anger, denial, and self-righteousness. Maybe one day our Mercy will be Just. That’s the promise of Easter to me. May it be so.