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Bad stories make good Christmas gifts

There’s a new book on the market, and everyone should read it.   I must admit that there’s a selfish goal as I write this column…I want to promote an old book, as well. It’s gift-giving time, so please think about these books.   The new book is called FRAMED, and its co-authors are John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. Grisham has written numerous legal fiction novels. He also published an outstanding book in 2006 that tells a true story: THE INNOCENT MAN. McCloskey is the founder of a fine, faith-based innocence project called Centurion Ministries. As of today, some 70 wrongly convicted people are free, thanks to their excellent work.   The new book tells ten dramatic stories, and it’s a must read!   In the book’s preface, Grisham says: …every wrongful conviction deserves its own book. He goes on to say: Our goal with this book is to raise awareness of wrongful convictions and in some way help to prevent more of them.   That is exactly the position I took some 15 years ago when I
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Elephant in the room: Child support!

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal highlights a serious problem facing prisoners : child support payments.   Writer Howard Husock focuses on Black men behind bars, and chooses to blame Kamala Harris for overlooking the problem.   We take a much broader approach. This is a problem facing all incarcerated men, regardless of color, and attention to this serious problem should be extended to more than just political candidates.   Here’s the situation in a nutshell. Fathers have no way of making child support payments while incarcerated. Then, when they get released, reality hits them in the face with a frustrating combination of a prison record plus child support payments. The National Institute of Justice reports that, “one of the biggest obstacles to reentry is the size of a parent’s child support debt, which averages $20,000 to $36,000, depending on the state and the data used.”   So, these guys get out of prison, and if, with a stroke of luck they’re able to get legal e
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Maurice Carter: dead. Maurice Carter’s legacy: alive and well!

" When I get out, I’m going to get me a Cadillac just like that one! Maurice Carter and I were standing on a beautiful site along Michigan’s longest river: the Grand River. He was living in a nearby senior care facility, and he was in bad health.   Pointing to the car in a nearby parking lot, he said, “Not a new one. Just a nice used car!”   Melancholy hits me every year on October 24 and 25. That’s when Maurice died. It marked the end of an emotional decade in my life. It marked the beginning of an amazing final chapter of my life!   I first met the man in the mid-1990s when a Michigan prisoner said to me: “I’m not the only person who was wrongly convicted in Berrien County! I’d like you to meet Maurice Carter.”   Here was a dear Black man, financially indigent, no support group, only a few family members…unable to attract anyone’s attention, claiming innocence.   As an experienced journalist, I looked into this case, it was true!   So, I joined up with him. Maurice Car
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Prisoner reentry: The punishment continues!

A couple of former prisoners sat in our office the other day. One of our clients, a friend of mine who had served 16 years (all the while claiming innocence), was finally paroled a few years ago. He and I met with our Executive Director, who also served time for a crime he did not commit. But, the frustration being shared was not over innocence or guilt issues. The topic was reentry.   Al had a difficult time getting a driver’s license. Even though he had maintained a high grade-point average in community college courses during incarceration, he found it difficult to get a job upon release. He had been approved for some good positions…that is, until his prison record was discovered. The same thing happened when he wanted to continue his education. Even one of the fine Christian colleges in the area turned him down…donors might not like it!   And that reminded me of numerous unpleasant reentry stories.   Maurice Carter was seriously ill after 29 years of incarceration. He was appr
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Hellish reports from WHV!

A headline in the August 30 edition of the Detroit Free Press shouted: Violence on rise at women’s prison! Veteran Freep writer on prison issues, Paul Egan, led off the article by saying, “Violence and turmoil are on the rise at Michigan’s only prison for women…”   For background information, some 2,000 women are housed in Women’s Huron Valley, located in Ypsilanti. They were all moved into one facility in the early years of HFP. I have personally been a champion for these incarcerated women from the very beginning. A check of our blog posts over the years will show a continuous battle for improvement. One of the times when I went there to speak with inmates, I was given a standing ovation. It wasn’t because Doug Tjapkes was so great. It was because HUMANITY FOR PRISONERS cares!   When Heidi Washington assumed the position of Director of the Michigan Department of Corrections in 2015, she assured me in a private session that she had a personal interest in WHV. Personal interest or
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Executions. Will they never end?

An item in the Washington Post last week caught my attention. Here are a couple paragraphs:   Death row inmates in five states have been put to death in the span of one week, an unusually high number of executions that defies a years-long trend of decline in both the use and support of the death penalty in the U.S.   The United States has reached 1,600 executions since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, said Robin Maher, the Death Penalty Information Center’s executive director. The story struck a chord with me because, as many of you know, I witnessed the execution of a friend who, I believe, was wrongly convicted in Texas. That experience gives me much appreciation for this quote from Clint Smith:   The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us. This will not be a long piece. I’ve been beating this drum for years. I am not optimistic in the least th
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Will we ever learn from Norway?

Several years ago representatives from the Michigan Department of Corrections visited Norway to learn about the country's criminal justice system and correctional facilities. And, for good reason. Norway's criminal justice system focuses on restorative justice and prisoner rehabilitation, and the number of prisoners keeps dropping!   Correctional facilities in Norway aim to make prisoners functioning members of society .   But, and we cannot stress this enough: Something else is incredibly important in the Norwegian System. Leaders there claim that their success also hinges on two other critical components: dedication to staff training and staffing ratios.   I was prompted to write about this after our good friend Carol Myers sent me an article from The Seattle Times. The State of Washington is in the middle of a multimillion-dollar effort that some advocates hope will make Washington’s prisons safer. It has nothing to do with tighter restrictions or heightened surveilla
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