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Sister Helen Prejean

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She is one of the most courageous and honorable individuals I have ever met. I first talked to her at the Louisiana State Penitentiary where she was visiting an inmate. And I saw her again following my release from prison in 2006 at a lecture in Houston. She wrote the Preface to a book about the death penalty co-authored with my wife, Jodie, published in 2009.

She also wrote the Preface to Jodie’s memoir, “Love Behind Bars: The True Story of an American Prisoner’s Wife,” officially released today. The links below are from Sister Helen’s twitter account supporting the book. In one twitter post, she writes:

“I wrote the preface for Jodie Sinclair’s new book—Love Behind Bars—because it’s an extraordinary story of love that endures. The writing is excellent and the story is gripping. Please order it from your local bookstore or on Amazon. You won’t be able to put this book down!

“Jodie’s book is gripping on two levels: (1) It’s a story about her husband, Billy Sinclair, having the courage to blow the whistle on prison corruption; and (2) It’s a story about the love between two people, a prisoner and a woman on the outside.”

Sister Helen says I am her inspiration—a success story that proves no one is beyond the “pale of human salvation.” She is my inspiration because she, and so many others along the way, gave me the courage to change—as she has with so many other inmates.

God bless her.

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Prisons

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They are hard places in which to find a survival niche. There is not a lot of generosity, compassion or empathy in this caged world.

A 40-year incarceration scarred me, just as it does most every person compressed into the prison world. The experience creates its own peculiar PTSD. It takes years, sometimes, to cleanse its wounds from the soul.

I actually thought I had put prison behind me, buried in the recesses of past experience. The nightmares that once invaded my sleep in those first years of life in the free world faded away.. Apprehension, uncertainty, and suspicion became part of a lost memory. A new life, with its many horizons, subdued the nightmares as I became a “normal” person again.

Then the coronavirus pandemic struck.

My life, along with that of my wife, suddenly changed as have the lives of most every other person facing this pandemic. Fear of the spreading disease, thoughts about future survival, and the pain social distancing created a new life style—in much the same way as prison once had.

The ugly specter of death now grips the soul of the nation. Nightly newscast keep us abreast of the number of people who have succumbed to the disease, too many of whom died alone as fear squeezed the life out of their hearts. Thousands of the dead will be buried unclaimed, unknown in mass graves–their final dwelling place a cheap pine box that the forces of nature will quickly consume.

I knew early on the pandemic would be worse in prison. My wife and I posted a piece weeks ago on Facebook, long before the media recognized the story, about what lay ahead for those 2.3 million people locked away in the nation’s prison and jail systems.

The prison horror we spoke about has arrived – thousands of prisoners have been infected, and they in turn will infect tens of thousands more. The elderly and the immune compromised will be the first to succumb. There will be no ventilators or compassionate care medicine to either save or make their deaths easier. The prison medical staff cannot deal with routine bouts of food poisoning, much less a full blown pandemic that inflicts a horrific death on those it infects.

States have been forced to release thousands of inmates, proof positive that there are hundreds of thousands of non-dangerous prisoners who should not even be in prisons or jails. These sensible release decisions, although rooted in the self-interests of the states, will reduce the nation’s staggering prison population. The deaths of thousands more among the ranks of the sick and elderly will add significant reductions to the nation’s prison population.

The only upside to the Covid pandemic is that it may shut down the brutal, inhumane “private prison” industry. It will no longer have an excess of prisoners to exploit.

But that does not change what is happening in the nation’s prison system at the moment. Fear permeates every cellblock and dormitory. The meanest, the most incorrigible in the cellblocks have been reduced to ordinary beings struggling to survive. Covid does not give an ounce of concern about their dangerousness.

Prisons will see a strange transformation in many respects.

The “strongest” in the group will be reduced to the weakest while the “weakest” in the group will rise to be the strongest. The weakest will demonstrate to the voiceless group the courage needed to face death and accept its finality without crying out, without begging for mercy. They will show others how to die under the worst of circumstances.

There are no heroes to save the imprisoned. They are alone with each other. Family visitation has been cut off. Contact with love ones has been reduced to a minimum. The prospect of dying is now their only companion.

Prison nightmares have once again invaded my sleep.

I understand what is going on in the caged world. It is like the terror of the lost souls in that world has scaled the fences to once again ensnare my sleep with its ugly grip.

A few weeks ago I had the luxury of laying my head on my pillow and letting sleep take me peacefully to some distant place where there is no fear, dread, or terror to face.

Now, as I lay my head on my pillow, I must hope the prison nightmares will not again visit my sleep. As a matter of personal solace and with the hope of warding off the night demons, I must say a silent pray for those locked away, those facing the worst possible fears about dying terrible deaths, alone and with little, if any, compassion to comfort them in the final moments.

That is part of my “new normal.”

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Choices

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We all make them. They rule our lives, often throughout our lifetime. Some are hard and difficult; others are easy and made on the spur of the moment.

Some choices can cost a person their life.

That’s what happened to a Michigan inmate named William Garrison.

Earlier this year, according to a CNN report, the Michigan Department of Corrections offered Garrison a chance at parole. He was in his 44th year of doing time for a 1976 murder committed during a robbery when he was 16 years old.

Garrison was nearing the end of his sentence when given the parole opportunity. At the time the Covid 19 virus was creeping into the Michigan prison system as it was in other states. He chose to turn down the parole opportunity, preferring to serve a little more time to reach his mandatory goodtime discharge date. He did not want to be under parole supervision.

That was Garrison’s choice to make.

As the outbreak of the Covid virus spread throughout the nation’s prison systems, Michigan corrections officials three weeks ago offered Garrison a second opportunity for parole release. The corrections officials told him that given his age, he should seriously consider taking the parole release.

This time Garrison accepted the parole release opportunity.

That choice came too late.

Five days later the 60-year-old inmate died from the Covid virus.

That was April 13, 2020.

I understand the difficulty of the choice made by William Garrison.

I was paroled from the Louisiana prison system on April 25, 2006. I was 61 years of age and had served 40 years. At the time I had a mandatory goodtime discharge date of April 11, 2011.

I had a choice: accept the parole and live under its supervision until 2055 (my full term discharge date) or serve five more years to April 11, 2011 at which time I would have been discharged without any supervision.

I chose the parole over discharge.

As it turned out, on April 11, 2011 I lay on a bed in a prominent Houston hospital undergoing a major open heart surgery to replace a heart valve with a metal valve. My normal heart valve had ruptured a few days earlier bringing me as close to death as one could possibly get. A renowned heart surgeon saved my life.

Had I chose in 2006 to wait for my 2011 discharge date, I would have died in prison. The heart valve problem had been diagnosed as far back as 1995 but the prison medical staff had been advised that the kind of surgery I needed was too complicated and too expensive to perform on an inmate.

William Garrison and I faced similar choices.

He turned down parole and died; I accepted parole and lived.

Choices are the byproduct of the free will embedded in the human species.

Whatever the choice, each of us bears the responsibility and consequence of it.

My metal valve heart bleeds for William Garrison’s family. May God soothe their loss.

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Old folks; Colored folks

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The Covid 19 virus has ravaged the nation’s elderly population, especially those in nursing homes, and people of color, particularly those residing in lower income communities.

Some U.S. Senators, Congressmen, governors (mostly in the so-called “red” states), local officials, and a host of Looney-bin pundits taking a break from the Tiger King have peddled the notion that the economy is more important than human life.

The notion that rescuing the nation’s faltering economy is more important than saving lives from the Covid pandemic presupposes that the economy is fueled by a younger, more vigorous generation,

This nation, and its free market economy, exists because of the wisdom, experience, and human decency of the older generation.

Youth unchecked by wisdom is as useless as “tits on a boar hog,” as my grandpa use to say.

Youth, standing on its own two legs, guided by its own developing instincts, tends to be foolish, and too often dangerous. Age, and the maturity it brings to the table, is as essential to both a safe society and a thriving economy, as tires are to a motor vehicle.

Youth may be the GPS in an F-150 but it is age that is the motor of the truck.

I guarantee one thing: that truck is not going anywhere without a motor.

And while I may be overreaching here, I have a pet theory about the increasing volume of calls to “reopen the economy” after it became known through media reports that people of color represent a disproportionate number of the Covid deaths, especially since most of the folks making these calls are white and generally come from the politically conservative community.

Roughly, 80 percent of the people who contract the Covid virus survive it relatively unscathed while the remaining 20 percent suffer more serious medical consequences, particularly if they are aged 80 or older and are people of color.

There are a significant number of people who really don’t care of these folks die for whatever reason—some of them recently gathered en masse at a Michigan rally where they demanded that the governor reopen the economy while waving their Nazi and Confederate flags, shaking hands, and slapping each other on the back.

Granted, most of the people issuing “reopen the economy” calls do not fall into this hate-driven class of idiots, but they are driven by this draconian ideology: the loss of 50,000 or 100,000 or one million lives is okay so long as the local bar and Nascar race track remain open.

These “reopen the economy” folks believe pretty much what conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly recently expressed—that people succumbing to the Covid virus are on their last leg in life so they are really expendable in order for the rest of society to see what the Patriots can do without Tom Brady.

It comes down to this: money over human lives. That has always been the driving force of capitalism. It’s always been loosely described as “profit before people.”

Decent people believe, and thank God for them, that both the economy and lives can be saved at the same time; that people in this country can have their Popeye chicken sandwiches without stacking the bodies of nursing home patients in a closet.

This nation has both a moral and social obligation to take care of the most vulnerable among us while simultaneously preserving the political necessity to get the economy reopened.

And if this nation lacks the courage to accept these moral and social obligations, then those hate-driven folks waving the Nazi and Confederate flags will soon own this nation.

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In My Underwear

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When I was in prison—a famous prison journalist, published author and statewide renowned jailhouse lawyer—I would tell my wife (and most anyone else who would suffer through the listening) that if I was released from prison in my underwear in the middle of New York City, I would find a way to survive.

As Dierks Bentley’s song says, “what was I thinkin’”?

I was finally released in 2006 after serving more than 40 years (in some pretty dark, dangerous places) and I didn’t have on much more than my underwear when I walked out of the prison into my wife’s arms.

But what I did have was an upscale high rise condo (beautifully decorated) in which to live, a network of middle/upper class friends of my wife that embraced my reentry into the free world, and the financial resources to get the computer and legal skills at a local community college I so desperately needed to secure employment in the legal profession.

In effect, I virtually had every opportunity for a successful reentry into the free community made available to me by my wife. I didn’t have to worry about surviving in New York City in my underwear.

Still, after 40 years in a confined environment, surviving in the free community was no easy task—psychological adjustments had to be made, learning how to work in a professional setting had to be achieved, and developing the personal and social skills necessary to navigate in and about the nation’s fourth largest city had to be honed.

Believe me that free world adjustment was much harder than the ten years I spent in a maximum security cell or the five years I spent in a general prison population in what was called “the bloodiest prison in America.”

That brings me to the heart of this post.

ABC News carried a report on April 10, 2020 about inmates being released from “Locked Up to Locked Out” – inmates walking out of prison into a society in virtual lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. Some were released just weeks before the Covid virus effectively shut the free world down causing them to lose those initial successful reentry gains—job, place to live, and the prospect of a good, decent, law-abiding future.

Then Covid arrived, and the bottom of their world suddenly, and without much warning, fell out—no job, no place to stay, bills to pay, and a truck load of other concerns staring them in the face. Granted, the average person firmly established in the free world before Covid is now facing the same problems and concerns, but at least they have a network of friends, family and resources that allows them to  face the Covid challenges with some support.

The fresh-out-prison individual does not have these personal and psychological support mechanisms. They are pretty much alone—alone like being in a foxhole in the middle of a war without a gun. They do not even have the “going back to prison” option. Those facilities are now, or will become, human death traps. At least in the free world there are masks, surgical gloves, halfway houses, and the local food bank the help the newly released inmates survive the Covid pandemic.

I feel empathy for these guys. I still pray for those I left behind and will now pray for those who must face the challenges of surviving in a world being ravaged by a deadly pandemic.

Think about being in your underwear in middle of New York City, alone, and you will know what these guys are up against.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author