Humanity for Prisoners

Somehow it felt like worship.  There was no sermon.  There were no prayers.  Religion wasn’t the topic for the day.  Perhaps it’s just that God was there. Former HFP Board Chairman Dan Rooks and I were in prison yesterday.  We made the long drive to Gus Harrison Correctional Facility in Adrian, at the request of the local chapter of the National Lifers of America.  We’ve done this presentation quite often now, and each time it’s a pleasurable experience. I talk about HUMANITY FOR PRISONERS, what we try to do for prisoners and also what we absolutely cannot do.  Dan, a clinical psychologist, takes the podium for the second half of our dog and pony show with an actual heavy-duty lecture on anger management. Now one would suspect that putting together nearly 100 prisoners on a Saturday afternoon, sitting on hard bleachers in a noisy gymnasium, there might be a problem keeping the attention and the interest of the audience.  Some guy...

Some people think that all we do at HFP is put out fires.  Honestly, we do that quite a bit.  But something happened this week that proves that we are also proactive.  More than 1,000 pounds of yarn were delivered to prisons.  And that wasn’t the first time.  We’ve been doing it for years. Here’s the story.  A member of the HFP Board of Directors, Judy VanderArk, has friends who know people who operate a carpet manufacturing company.  These names may not be revealed. Anyway, this carpet company is willing to give away the unused spools of yarn that go into the creation of beautiful carpeting.  Needless to say, this is expensive, high quality yarn.  Judy has been on our Board for a long time, and she knows that several of the prisons in Michigan have hobby-craft programs that involve knitting and crocheting.  So she made work of asking these prison program coordinators if they would like free yarn.  The response was positive...

My daily calendar of funny sayings joked the other day about a bridge engineer who, on the stand in a court room, was unable to subtract two simple numbers because he didn’t have his calculator with him. I think about my father’s neighborhood grocery store back in the 1940s.  There was no electricity to the checkout counter, because it wasn’t needed.  We used a hand-operated adding machine to tally up the prices.  And then when the customer paid, we had a hand-crank cash register.  It was up to the cashier to figure out how much change to return to the customer. The next time you make a purchase in any kind of a store I’m sure you’ll notice that the cashier cannot figure out how much money to give back until he/she looks at the machine.  If the total isn’t there electronically, the cashier is stumped. Marcia and I just returned from a trip to Alabama.  We didn’t need a road map, like in the olden days.  My little I-Phone gave us instructio...

Best-selling novelist Michael Connolly is putting one of my favorite detectives on TV:  Harry Bosch.  I don’t agree with Harry when it comes to the death penalty, and I find his attitude toward criminal defense attorneys distasteful, but I love his dogged determination to solve cases!  I especially like his feelings re the murders of people who don’t rank very high socially.  His slogan:  Everybody counts or nobody counts! That slogan came to mind this week, as I was working on some copy for a book I’m trying to write.  In a chapter dealing with the work of HUMANITY FOR PRISONERS, this very subject came up. I cited two cases where, by all outward appearances, HFP failed.  Two prisoners who we worked so hard to help reach freedom dropped the ball after they got out.  One was immediately recaptured by the addiction demons that got him in trouble in the first place.  He died in a drunken stupor, frozen to death in the middle of a field ...

Maurice Carter would be 72 years of age today.  Thanks to the State of Michigan, his life was cut short.  We lost him in the autumn of 2004, after only 3 months of freedom.  Maurice had served 29 years for a crime he did not commit, almost one half of his entire life here on earth. Yesterday, one day before Maurice’s birthday, I spoke to a group of high school seniors in Grand Haven.  As we neared the end of the hour, one beautiful young woman who was completely getting the picture asked me, “After 15 years of working with the system, do you see any improvement?”  The question caught me a bit off guard.  That’s not one that I’m used to hearing.  And my answer reflected that…I stumbled and bumbled.  As I recall, I think that I answered that I haven’t seen much improvement, but that I was cautiously optimistic. I’m wondering what change Maurice would see if he were sitting beside me this morning. I don’t think the number of wrongful con...

Criminals and criminal activity make us angry! Even those of us with strong views against capital punishment entertain second thoughts on the subject when we hear or read of heinous crimes.  Just when you think you’ve heard it all, mankind seems to devise new and more dreadful ways to torture, maim and kill fellow human beings.  Some days revenge sounds pretty good to us, even those of us who claim to follow the risen Christ. Sometime that anger even rears its ugly head against those of us who work with criminals…again, even among those of the Christian faith.  It is not uncommon for us to hear that prisoners do not deserve humane treatment.  Those opinions will be expressed with the question, “How humanely did the criminal treat his/her victims?”  The rationale seems to be that the person who commits an inhumane crime deserves inhumane treatment while incarcerated. I was invited to discuss my book SWEET FREEDOM with members of a Christian book club...

It happens so often.  A problem is perceived, and as a result, a new rule is created.  We have a feeling that’s what happened in Michigan’s prison for women, located in Ypsilanti. According to our sources in the Michigan Department of Corrections, the prison warden wanted to make sure that the dayrooms, where prisoners gather during down times, weren’t used for religious services which, under a specific corrections policy, are to be held in specific areas in the prison.  And so a rule was created, and this is the exact wording: IX.  DAY/GROOMING/TV ROOMS 6.  All religious studies must be done in your cell or at specified times in programs. Armed with that new rule, Corrections Officers began immediate enforcement.  One of our friends immediately contacted the HFP office:  “We can no longer do Bible studies outside our cell.  We cannot bring our Bibles into the dayroom and read them, discussing with our fellow believers.  We can...