Strangers in Our Home
Strangers in Our Home
For the past decade my family and I have lived in a hospitality house that welcomes guests who show up at our door as if those guests were Christ. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” is engraved on our door knocker. But strange as our guests may be, we’ve learned over time that many of them have a good deal in common. Indeed, prison is such a common factor in the stories of folks who become homeless that we see how it draws a line between people, separating us like sheep from goats. There are, on the one side, those for whom prison is unimaginable, unreal. On the other side are people for whom prison has long been part of their life. Most of us are on the first side. Here at Rutba House most of the guests who show up at our door live and move and have their being on the other side.
Early one Sunday morning, I drove to the Durham Correctional Center to pick up Greg. Greg had spent the past 16 months at a state prison, working overtime in the kitchen so he could get out six weeks early. A few days before, the Department of Corrections transferred him to this local minimum security facility. Greg knew the place well. He had been released from there before.
"Feel good to be out?" I asked as we walked through the gate of the chain-link fence, nodding good-bye to the guards. "You know it does," Greg said, his back straight and his eyes fixed on the horizon, smiling from ear to ear. (I remembered another friend who once scrambled to roll down the window when I picked him up from another minimum security prison. He was not being released, just let out on a four-hour pass, a taste of freedom meant to prepare him for his return to society. He held his hand out the open window as I drove along the state highway at 55-miles-per-hour. “You don’t know how good it feels to touch free air,” he said, relishing this little taste of freedom.)
As good as it might feel to walk through the gate, hop in a car, and put a hand out in the breeze, guys like Greg know from experience that leaving prison does not mean you get to leave this part of your life behind — not even if you are released from among the 2.4 million Americans locked behind bars on any given day. Three times that many people are still under criminal justice control after prison, checking in with a parole officer who has the power to carry them back to jail any time they do not pay their monthly fees. That’s three percent of the adult population in this country. In a neighborhood like ours, someone from every family is among that population.
Even after walking out of prison with time served as Greg did, a released prisoner will have to check the “convicted felon” box on every job application, face the debts and ruined credit that piled up while he was locked away and figure out what to do with relationships that were cut off because of a decade behind bars four counties away.
Maybe it was because he was our neighbor’s son or maybe it was because he was so likable, but it did not occur to me when we welcomed our first guest coming home from prison that we were crossing some kind of line. When a reporter called to ask if we had seen his record, we began to understand that some people consider living with a convicted felon as peculiar, offensive and dangerous. Years later, after we had welcomed a dozen ex-cons into our home, we still received an occasional anonymous email saying, “You should think of your children. You should think of our children. You’re not just endangering yourselves. You’re putting us all at risk.”
As much as such a note would make my stomach clench—as angry as I am that this “neighbor” would not talk to me directly, would not even sign his or her name—I know that they are right about this much: There is a risk in welcoming people coming out of prison. You might come home after a Thanksgiving celebration to find that all the laptops in your house are gone. You might learn, only years after it has happened, that another guest’s social security number was stolen—that he had been listed for years as a dependent on the tax return of someone he never knew. When you learn these things, you pray with everything in you that worse has not happened—that people you love are not carrying unspeakable wounds. But even when you have contemplated the worst, you will know this: These dangers are not peculiar to the formerly incarcerated. Yes, the risk may be greater with some people than others, and you would be foolish not to account for that. But the dividing line between good and evil does not run just between those who have been to prison and those who have not.
Living with guys like Greg has taught us that people are not that different, even though the prison experience separates people marked as “criminal” from the rest of society. The condemned are essentially not very different from the rest of us. While in college, I read a line from Dostoyevsky: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Here at Rutba House, I suspect that Dostoyevsky was right because he, like so many of the people we host, actually spent time in prison. From the inside, prison is a particular sort of window on our world.
Befriending people on their way out of prison turns out to be its own way in. “Recidivism” is the official label given to the tendency of people who have been in prison to end up there again. Most efforts to curb this tide are focused on helping individuals make better choices. Greg got arrested for stealing a paint brush one night and I thought: Why the heck would he steal a paint brush? But recidivism is about more than stupid choices. There are plenty of places where picking up a neighbor’s paint brush when drunk would not to land you in jail. But for Greg, he faced 12 years in prison as a “repeat offender.” Twelve years for a paint brush?
Greg’s first letter to us after this event, as every friend’s first letter does, told us which visitation day Greg had been assigned. Each inmate at our county jail can have four people on his visitation list at any time. Once the inmate is sentenced to serve time in prison, the limitations are similar. A visitor cannot be on more than one inmate’s list unless they are immediate family, so Leah and I usually sign up for different inmates. Eventually, everyone in our little community of a dozen or so people write or visit someone who is locked up. We call their names at morning prayer. We send them books. When we can, we try to see them. These are our small steps across the prison line.
It is not a single relationship, nor any one particular incident, but rather the cumulative effect of living back and forth across the prison line that begins to affect us. Whatever abstract thoughts any of us once had about prison are distilled by the difficult stories of people we cannot ignore — people who have eaten at our table and gone on vacation with our families. Yes, they can be frustratingly selfish and annoying. Some of them have done terrible things; and as much as they regret it, they might well do them again if they were put in the same situation. These people are not angels. But they are people, for heaven’s sake.
Once our friend Marcia called to tell us about a guy named Al whom she met through a re-entry ministry that she helped to start. She had made it her personal mission in life to stop gun violence in our town. Rarely do you find in a determined activist someone with a heart as big as Marica’s. She is the sort of mother who, having raised her own children, now sees them in anyone who has a need. Al is just wonderful, she tells us, but he is sharing a room with a guy who is using drugs. She would just hate to see anything happen to him. Is there any way we might help? It is hard to say no to Marcia. Matt made room on his top bunk and Al moved in with us.
Marcia was right: Al’s great. He cleaned up after himself, was always courteous, helped out around the house, even landed a job a couple of miles away within walking distance. When I saw Marcia at a meeting downtown, I told her she had sent us the model guest. “Oh, I know,” she beamed. “Isn’t he just wonderful?”
How did a guy like Al end up in prison? One night at our kitchen table, he told me the story. As a young black man in New York City, he had struggled to find work that would pay the bills. He kept his eyes open, of course. Al wasn’t lazy; he was always on the move. But his options seemed so limited. A friend told him about a place where he could sell a lap top computer for $100, no questions asked. “Are you serious?” he asked. Al’s the type of guy who notices things. “Every coffee shop in Manhattan is full of lap tops.” Al started making a good living off college students who thought they could just run to the bathroom real quick while writing a paper at Starbucks.
After several months of this, Al was sitting in his apartment one night, looking at a lap top he had stolen that day, when he noticed the sticker on the bottom had a phone number to call for technical assistance. He dialed the number, asked a few questions about hardware, and then asked, just as casual as that, “Where are these things made, anyway?” He jotted “Research Triangle Park” on a piece of paper, and his wheels started spinning. The next day, when Al took the lap top to his buyer, he asked him, “What would you give me if I brought you a whole truckload of these?”
“Same price,” the guy said. “A hundred bucks apiece.”
Al had a plan. He worked on it for several months, recruiting friends he could trust to help him and doing his research to find out what security was like at this factory and who would be in the building when. He rented a U-Haul truck, picked up his three co-conspirators, and drove to North Carolina, arriving at the factory late on a weekend night. Wearing a ski mask and wielding a hand gun, Al burst into the factory, got all the employees together in one office, and tied them to their chairs.
In the chaos of these intense minutes, a middle-aged African-American woman started freaking out. She was screaming, “Please don’t kill me,” and starting to hyperventilate. Al could not help but think how much she looked like his mother. He wheeled her to the side, pulled back his ski mask, and said, “Look at me. I ain’t gonna hurt you. Please just sit in this room until we’re gone. The police will come in a few minutes and let you out.”
She quieted down, Al and his friends loaded up the truck, and in 30 minutes they were headed north on I-85, blowing off steam and laughing about how they’d pulled off the heist of their lives with hardly a snag. Just after they crossed the New Jersey line, Al noticed the blue lights in his rearview mirror. He looked down and saw that he was speeding. “All right, everybody stay calm,” Al said. “I’ll handle this.” But before he could stop him, one of his buddies was rolling out of the passenger side door, jumping the guard rail to make a break for it. The officer called for back-up, and it was game over. Al went to jail and ended up doing 10 years in prison.
I felt myself leaning forward, caught up in the story. “What an idiot his friend was,” I thought to myself. “They almost got away.” But this is not an action movie. It is Al’s life. He had 10 years to tell and re-tell the story, and he had the timing down just right. It is entertaining. “You should write a novel,” I told him, and he smiled. But the fun of telling his story is bittersweet because Al also knew it cost him everything; he is marked for life.
I could not help but think about the crazy things I did as a kid. Al is a convicted felon; but he is more than that, just as all of us are more than the stupidest thing we ever did. At our best, we don’t forget that. At our best, we can even tell the stories and laugh.
Knowing people like Greg and Al moved us to start Project TURN (Transform, Unlock, ReNew) in North Carolina prisons. The idea was simple: People who have never been to prison can cross the line by taking a class once-a-week, behind the walls, with incarcerated folks as their classmates. The prison system agreed that these sorts of peer-to-peer relationships might help with re-entry for inmates who are being released. We hoped so, but we also suspected that getting people from the outside in is also a way to begin to imagine some alternative to our system of mass incarceration. We launched the program in 2007 and now host classes each semester at two state and one federal institution. (You can learn more about Project TURN at www.newmonasticism.org/turn.php.)
One afternoon, Julie, a woman who had been incarcerated for 20 years, a woman who had taken a number of our classes, learned that she was being paroled. Of course, she knew that her release date was near. She already had a spot in a re-entry program that would start in three months. But the word she had just received was that she has to leave…that day.
Our system of mass incarceration is not set up to care for people like Julie. Though nothing of this exit plan had been communicated to her until that day, it was all within the law. No one had broken any rules. She was expected to get in a car, ride to the county of her infraction, a place she had not visited in 20 years, and get out on the street corner. This, according to the system, should be good news. Julie was going home early.
But it was not good news. Julie’s particular case was complicated by the fact that, due to the nature of the plea that she agreed to sign when she was taken to jail after reporting her husband for child abuse, Julie is registered as a “sex-offender.” This does not mean that she sexually abused her child or that she would ever think of hurting anyone else. But it does mean that her name is on a list that makes everyone think she did. It means she cannot live in a household with children or within 1000 feet of a school or daycare facility. That eliminates all of our houses in Walltown, as well as most of the friends we know who are willing to welcome prisoners into their homes.
Fortunately, we found two roommate graduate students who had taken classes in our prison program and were willing to welcome her into their home until permanent arrangements could be made. But Julie is an exception. Julie is someone who had folks advocating for her. She is, as much as anyone, a reminder of the problem of the prison line. But she and those women who were ready to welcome her are also an interruption to our broken system. They are a sign that something new becomes possible for those who cross the line. Christ is indeed present when we welcome the stranger—present in the peculiar new community that forms, which is the body of Christ.
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