Life Without Parole

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Sept. 21, 2008

Back in 1980, a man we’ll call Aaron Bateman was a youngster, full of life and boundless energy and raging hormones and a teenager’s sense of immortality.  His life had not gone particularly well – school had been difficult and seemed like a waste of time.  His family, while loving enough, did not have the kinds of resources it often takes to keep a boy like Aaron on the straight and narrow.  After dropping out of high school and bouncing around town for a while in a series of dead-end jobs, Aaron signed on with a military service that sent him off to basic training on a military base, still stateside but far, far from home. 

On the little time he had off, he and his friends went looking for some youthful fun and a few laughs, and Aaron met an older woman and promptly fell in love for the first time in his life.  There was a hitch, though:  the woman was already married and one night, in a haze of hormones and hemp, Aaron committed a murder – one of fifteen that month in the urban center near the base, and a mere tic mark in a rising tide of violent crime in the America of the late twentieth century.

Aaron was ushered through the state court system slowly and heard his sentence pronounced - life in prison – at the tender age of twenty-one.  At the intake center of the state penitentiary, the counselor on duty gave Aaron a heartfelt lecture about hope.  The counselor knew that things seemed pretty dark for Aaron right then, that he was probably feeling pretty hopeless.  But the counselor told Aaron that if he kept his nose clean and played by the rules, if he worked on improving himself and learned a decent trade, that all was not lost.  Like everyone else beginning a life sentence, Aaron would come up for parole in fifteen years or so – a long time to a 21-year-old, but hopefully not his whole life.  Of course he’d be turned down for parole his first time up – murder is a serious crime, after all.  But on his second or third trip before the parole board, he had a good chance of being released, and by that time he would not yet be 40 – and he could spend the rest of his life in freedom.

America’s prisons are awash in despair, and in ways to indulge that despair.  Sex, drugs, homebrewed alcohol, gangs to suit a variety of tastes, protection rackets, gambling, amateur tattooing, bodybuilding night and day.  Aaron spent his first years trying to block out his ugly reality and indulging in the seamier sides of prison life.  At times, he could feel the darkness descending.

And then a miracle happened.  For some it comes through a spiritual epiphany;  for many, a religious conversion brought on by contact with a prophet or a guru or another true-believer.  For Aaron, it was through a book that he found a savior – not the Jesus of the Bible, but Ben Franklin, whose autobiography shares the exploits and the anecdotes and the homespun wisdom of America’s quintessential self-made man.  Pick yourself up by the bootstraps, Mr. Franklin intoned on his pages.  You can be virtuous and you can better your place in life and all it takes is a commitment to hard work and a practice of learning throughout your life. 

Aaron took the recommendation to heart, signing up for junior college classes (free and available, back then).  He worked hard enough to become a journeyman electrician, dabbled in languages and science, and offered to teach classes for his fellow inmates.  When desktop computers began to show up in prison offices, none of the administrators wanted to have anything to do with them.  Aaron taught himself programming and publishing, and showed the warden how useful the new tool could be to the efficiency of a prison.  In reward, Aaron was asked to produce a monthly newsletter for inmates, and began to share Franklin’s wisdom to a wider audience with deep needs.

Aaron had remade himself.  Without recognizing it, he had lived out that counselor’s advice on his first day in the intake center.  He had improved his body and his mind and his attitude, he had learned a trade, he had kept his nose clean and played by the rules.  And he had every hope that the parole board would see fit to release him someday soon.

Not so fast.

In the 1990’s, a new criminal justice movement rolled through the United States.  “Truth-in-sentencing” is a euphemism for the abolition of parole statutes.  Forty states enacted legislation that forces most felons to serve at least 85 percent of their prison terms;  those given life sentences will now be kept locked up their entire lives.  It’s hard to blame the public:  “we want to be safe, we want to keep our streets clean,” they seem simply to be saying.  But in an effort to keep people safe, the system has gone way overboard, locking up violent offenders for up to four times as long for similar offenses as under the old parole system.  Are we safer?  The statistics don’t show it, and our paranoia has only increased after 9-11.

It’s bad enough for those entering the system now.  But for the thousands of Aaron Bateman’s and Antonio Batista’s and Antwan Bell’s that were ushered into the system decades ago, hope of release has been all but obliterated.  The Sentencing Project, a research and reform advocacy group, calculates that in 2004, there were almost 128,000 people serving life sentences in American prisons;  of those, only a few dozen receive parole each year.  This, while the Bureau of Justice Statistics says that lifers paroled before 1995 had the lowest recidivism rate among all offenders - less than one-third the rate of drug offenders, for example.

Remember Aaron’s age.  Twenty-one when handed his life sentence, he has now aged out of the important 18-to-32 demographic when most serious crime is committed.  Statistically , as he grows older, he poses less of a risk and presents less of a threat.  Not only that, he will continually need more and more health care inside the big house at public expense.

Ah, public expense.  What role do you imagine money might play in this drama?

When the American Legislative Exchange Council dreamed up the concept of “truth-in-sentencing,” it received huge federal support.  On the committee that wrote the preliminary statute that was most often copied by state governments sat representatives from the Correctional Corporation of America (CCA), a private, for-profit prison operator.

H-m-m.  If individual taxpayers look at this problem and see concerns over the high cost of incarcerating so many offenders, corporations like CCA see only a treasure chest full of public monies.  With 2.3 million convicts in the U.S., at an average per capita payout of $22,650 annually, do the math and you see before you a vast pie of more than 50 billion dollars to be shelled out to prison operators eager to do business.  Not only that, but further down the line in the public trough are the companies – just to name a few - who construct the prisons, the companies who feed the prisoners, and the companies who provide health care, especially for the aging prisoners who used to be paroled but now can reasonably expect to leave prison only in a pine box.

With so many aging prisoners, health care inside has had to change drastically to provide for the usual age-related illnesses.  But CCA and the other companies don’t mind so much:  their annual asking price for housing the elderly incarcerated jumps to almost $70,000 per prisoner (I almost said per person, but ‘prisoners’ are not granted personhood in many quarters).  Think the correctional company wants to release these old guys, or do you think they might have a financial incentive to lobby for even harsher sentencing laws?

 

Now there are arguments for keeping offenders locked up and I won’t deny that some prisoners should be behind bars and should remain there for very good reasons.  But the ones who committed a crime in their youth and are now in middle age or beyond and have good records of behavior are still there simply because of the vicissitudes of voters and the changing moods of public opinion.  Mark Earley, former Attorney General of the State of Virginia and previously a Republican candidate for governor of that state, says he spent most of his time in office putting more and more people in jail and keeping them longer and longer.  “I had the view,” he says, “that prisoners were at the end of the line.  If you were in prison, you had no hope, you had made a mess of your life.  And it was better for me if you were there so that my family could feel safe.”

So you don’t want the hardened criminals of the world wandering free on our streets, and neither do I.  I get it - I want our kids to be as safe as possible, too.

But let’s look at this another way and through another lens.

We read Psalm 142 earlier, a prayer of longing, lament, hope from one who has given himself up to one of the powers of the universe:  “You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.  Attend to my cry, for I am brought very low…” 

Theologian and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann discerns a thread running throughout the Hebrew texts that presents two ways of being on the world:  you can ally yourself with either the state or the spirit:  the political nation-state or religious/spiritual faith and conviction.  One is constantly given the choice to live within and for either the kingdom of Pharaoh or the kingdom of God.

Consider the meltdown of the world financial system we’ve witnessed this week:  Wall St. in turmoil, the bankruptcies and government by-outs of huge financial conglomerates, the very people who’ve deregulated the financial institutions up in arms and now calling for new and more intrusive government regulation.  Now we know it’s broken.  Now we’re scared to death.  And maybe we have reason - our nation-state is at risk.

Before the crash, however, we could have imagined we were on solid footing. Before the crash, we tended to think about the success or failure of our nation-state in terms of how that state treated those of us at the top of the food chain, in terms of how the state propped up its most powerful stockholders, in terms of how safe the state could keep its most privileged citizens.

We could have taken  - and often did take - the expedient and politically correct viewpoint:  as members of the privileged classes in arguably the most powerful nation-state on earth, we could say, “Gosh.  Aren’t we good?  Look how well we’re doing;  look how much we have;  look how safe we are.”  By many measurements, we were good, we were doing well, we did have a lot, we were safer than most people on earth.

We relied on Pharaoh and his minions and the powers brought to bear by our allegiances to him to take care of us, and it worked well – for us, for our friends - for a time.  But when the kingdom of Pharaoh breaks down, when the stores of grain are found to be empty in the face of famine, or when the curtain is pulled aside to expose a financial system of smoke and mirrors that prop up the powers that appear to be, then we have to wonder if we’ve thrown our lot in with the wrong bunch.

Now you can say that this is only window dressing, just a belief system, and it’s only about a shift in worldview, not really anything that could change the world.

But it does change things.  When we shift our allegiances from politics to religion, we become not so concerned with those at the top of the food chain but with those at the bottom who have nothing to eat;  we become not so concerned with propping up the most powerful stockholders but with providing for the powerless who own nothing;  we become not so concerned with how safe the most privileged already are but with justice for the underprivileged and the expendables and the powerless.  We start to see that the strength of our nation-state should be measured not by how the most powerful among us are doing, but by how the most vulnerable among us are doing, including the poor, including the hungry, including the mentally ill, including at-risk kids, including hurricane victims, including all the most vulnerable - including prisoners.

Mark Earley, again, the former Republican attorney general I mentioned a moment ago, once served in the high courts of Pharaoh but now serves the lowest of the low.  Earley is now involved with an organization called Prison Fellowship Ministries.  He ministers to and with the very people he worked to put behind and keep behind bars.  He is no liberal do-gooder, and no Pollyanna, either.  But he meets a tremendous number of prisoners who committed crimes in their late teens or early twenties, committing terrible acts of misguided youth.  “Now they’re in their 40’s or 50’s,” he says, “and they shouldn’t be in prison anymore.  After serving significant portions of their sentences, shouldn’t we provide some opportunity for a look back?”  Shouldn’t parole be a possibility?  Isn’t hope the least we can offer people?

In reality, the choice between politics and religion, between Pharaoh and God, is one we make, sadly, without giving it much conscious thought.  Most of us serve both masters to some extent and float back and forth seamlessly between the two.  It is in crisis, however, when the questions become most stark:  Whose are you?  Whom will you serve?  What do you most value?  How will you treat your neighbor?

As this and other crises unfold around us, I wish you courage to wrestle with these and other questions.  And I wish all who are in prison, whether physically or mentally, emotionally or spiritually, a hope of parole and eventual freedom from bondage.

So may it be.