Welcome to the PrisonCare Podcast!
I’m Sabrina Justison, founder of PrisonCare.org, equipping compassionate people to support the often-invisible people groups who make up a prison neighborhood - the inmate residents, correctional officers, staff, administration, and the families of all of these folks.
Join me for this week’s episode, and be encouraged to think, care, and respond as we explore the challenges facing prison neighborhoods everywhere.
Let’s support positive prison culture from the outside, because EVERYone on the inside matters.
(0:49)
Well hello, this is Sabrina and we're going to do a little quick storytelling today. I have been challenged by actually some members of the PrisonCare Incorporated board to do more storytelling. I have not shared enough stories from the inside… testimonials, if you will. And I get to hear these things regularly because well, I read them in letters from people that I am corresponding with. I get to hear things in phone calls. I get to hear from other people who are penpal encouragers and who have gotten a cool story, testimonial, whatever from someone that they’re writing to and they share it with me and that's fabulous. But I have been selfishly keeping it all to myself and not sharing enough with others. So I'm just going to tell you a few stories today. Some of the… some of the impact that PrisonCare is having inside facilities.
(1:52)
Let me tell you about one guy. He is a mentor in the 7 Habits on the inside program. Now, Seven Habits of Highly Effective people is a book by Stephen Covey. A lot of you have probably heard of it. Many of you have even probably read it work through. It’s a wonderful book. There is a version of Covey's material that was created specifically for people who are incarcerated. And it is a tool that is used in a lot of prisons to help people work on personal growth issues and whatever. So, it's 7 Habits on the inside.
And so this man, we're going to call him, Steve. Steve is a mentor in the 7 Habits program and he is responsible for helping to plan and lead large events that bring together all the different small groups that are working through seven habits for an evening or afternoon or whatever… like a two-hour event. Something bigger. Something that builds on what they've been learning.
So one of the events that they had was to essentially stage a pretend funeral for someone. And the idea behind this was, what is the legacy that you're leaving? What are people going to say about you when you're gone? And they staged a mock funeral and they had four people who were connected to the imaginary deceased person, you know, they had a family member and they had a friend and whatever who stood up and gave short eulogies about how this person had impacted their lives, right? And then they broke out into small groups, table groups for discussion and they had a series of questions that helped lead them into understanding the legacy that they will leave when their life is over… looking at the things in their lives that are not going to leave a good legacy and re-evaluating those and making changes and looking for ways to live more intentionally with the desire to leave a positive legacy.
Okay. Long story. Steve was working on this. He was preparing for this event and he mentioned it to me and he said that they've been working on writing personal mission statements. And I was able to share with him a piece of curriculum actually that I had written for high schoolers many years ago and said, “you know if this is helpful if you want to pull anything out of it go right ahead. I don't I don't know if this if this might be a help.” Well when this was all over with he sent me copies of the program from this event and there was the English version and the Spanish version because there are English speakers and Spanish speakers in this larger group. And so there were two tables that were all Spanish-speaking and there were, I don't know, ten tables or something that were English-speaking and there were questions that they had pulled from the curriculum that I had sent him, things from the book, and a couple of things that they come up with on their own.
They apparently got incredibly good feedback on this event. And the guys in the group told Steve that it was this, it was this interactive thing of talking through with others. Okay so but what about this and have you ever considered? And in the wake of this essentially, little drama piece that they put on for them of the mock funeral, that really made it real to them and that it really made them rethink some of the things in their lives that they just sort of not been paying any attention to at all, okay?
Now, all of that would have happened, I guess without a PrisonCare penpal encourager. I mean, I guess Steve never would have gotten the extra curriculum for some of the extra questions that they used for the table discussion groups. But part of what is so lovely about this is that PrisonCare was a part of it because Steve had a pen pal encourager, who heard about the work that he was doing as a mentor in this group who used virtues language to affirm that in him to say, “wow, I respect that” to say, “good for you for pouring into the lives of other people around you and not just put your head down and taken care of your own life. But to be to be building community like that and to be building up other people's lives too. And is there anything that I could do to support that? Here… Hey, could I send you something that maybe, you know, would be helpful?”
And then when it was all over with Steve, had somebody to celebrate with. He had somebody that he wanted to send the program's out to so that they could see because he knew that they would be excited for him. He knew that they would be proud of him. He knew that they would feel like something really good happened and we kind of worked on it together a little bit sort of. I mean, you know, the pen pal encourager didn’t go into the facility and actually get involved nitty-gritty, but there was still a sense of shared collaboration or whatever, on it. Really cool connection, really cool connection.
(7:08)
Let's talk about somebody else. Another story. So there is a guy, we're going to call him Sean. And he has been working very, very hard on college courses, through correspondence at a university that supports prison education, through correspondence materials. And after lots, and lots, and lots of hard work, Sean completed his bachelor's and when the PrisonCare team that had adopted his facility heard about it, they threw him a graduation party. He wasn't able to come to it. They would have given anything to take the party into the facility and of course they couldn't do that but they did the next best thing. And they wanted him to know that people on the outside thought that he had kicked butt and done something awesome and they were going to celebrate him. Even if they couldn't celebrate with him. They had a cake with his name on it. They had balloons in the school colors. They made a little diploma, they got their pictures taken with the diploma as if they were standing, getting their picture made with him. They celebrated because Sean deserved a party. He deserved to be celebrated. They took pictures of everything. They sent him the pictures. They sent him the diploma and everyone signed a giant card and messages of encouragement and celebration all over that and they sent him those things. And that was an amazing moment for PrisonCare to reinforce the decision for hard work and personal growth that Sean had made.
And think about what that communicated to the people around Sean too when they heard about it. When they heard this team of people threw a party for you because they were that excited for you. Wow. Like there's people who care what happens to us in here? There's people who want us to do hard things and to succeed and they get excited about it when we do, really? We matter? That's a powerful message. That's a powerful message. Wow. Okay.
(9:24)
There is a man. We will call him… What will we call him? Matthew! That's a good name. We'll call him Matthew. And Matthew began writing to a penpal encourager. And some people who are incarcerated want to tell you why they're in prison and some people don't. And one of the pieces of advice that we give in the writing the awkward first letter and how to get started with this relationship with a person you've never met thing, you know, is don't ask. Don't ask why they're in prison. If they want to tell you, they will. Some of them write it on their request for a penpal. They will send it like, you know, let me just get it out there in the open. You know. I'm doing six years for armed robbery and I would really like a pen pal. And other people you'll been writing to for a couple of years and you still won't know what they're down for.
Well, so this guy, Matthew, he within a couple of letters wanted to talk about why he was incarcerated and it was a really heartbreaking story of domestic violence and Matthew fully owned and took responsibility for the fact that he was in prison because he was a perpetrator of domestic violence. Right? He had been violent against his intimate partner. But in telling his story and not in any way justifying his part in it, he shared that he had also been a victim of domestic violence. That his partner had beaten him unmercifully for years and he never told anyone because he was a man and you don't tell. It's humiliating that your wife beats you up. He didn't know who to tell. He didn't know how to ask anyone for help. He didn't know… who do you go to when you're a man and you're being beaten?
Once he began serving his prison sentence he started noticing little hints of the same story in some of the other guys and he got brave and he started talking to people. And he started saying, “hey, look, this is what happened to me and eventually I flipped out and did something horrible to her. But I think maybe we need to talk about what does it mean for us as men when we are the victims of intimate partner violence and when we don't know who to go to for help. What can we learn about this? What can we do to figure out how to help each other and how to help ourselves?”
There are no resources for this at least in the facility where Matthew is being held. I have not heard about a lot of resources for that in any facilities. There are domestic violence prevention classes as a part of things like The Anger Management program and stuff like that in a lot of Prisons. But for there to be a support group and a learning group for men who have been the victims of women who were violent against them, that's a need. And what’s so beautiful is as Matthew shared his story with his pen pal encourager what he said was, “I have realized that it's my job to create a support group like that, to create a place for men like me to learn from our experiences and from each other's experiences and to learn how to put a stop to this in our society.” And his penpal encourager was, was able to encourage him to say, “wow, please do that. That is amazing that you don't want the tragedy of your story to get the last word, but that you want to create something healing and beautiful and good in the wake of tragedy and pain and fear.” Really cool. Really cool.
(14:00)
People say things like… and I’m not even going to put a fake name on this one because we get this from so many people. Some version of, “thank you so much for writing. It makes a world of difference to matter to somebody even a little bit.” It's not always in those exact words but it's usually pretty close and this is again and again. “I never thought that something like PrisonCare would exist. Having the chance to be heard is absolutely incredible. What you guys do means the world to me. Thank you for taking a chance on all of us on the inside.”
So one of the pen pals on the inside lost his brother and it really was tearing him up and because he had a penpal encourager on the outside he had someone to ask for resources on grieving. Now on the outside, you know, if we went to go see a counselor, we go see a counselor and if we don't want to go see a counselor, we google it, right? We use the internet to get access to self-help resources when we need some mental, emotional healing, right? And it doesn't work that way for people who are incarcerated. They don't have that easy access to things like grief counseling, and to understanding what grief is doing to you and why maybe you're acting in ways that are really unlike you really feel like you're walking around in somebody else's shoes. You don't even know yourself. You look in the mirror and you're like, “why am I like this?” And if you had the access to good resources on grief, you would know, “oh, this is really common. This is me going numb to some things that are too big and scary to feel and to think through and because I'm having to shut down, to be numb there, I'm also behaving weirdly for me in other areas of my life.”
You know, grief changes people and in particular grief that has to be squished down. It interferes with your ability to do normal life, to do relationships the way you normally would. Well, this guy was feeling all those things, but not knowing what to do with any of it. He wasn't understanding it. He didn't have a counselor that he could go to and he couldn't even Google it. So, he asked his pen pal encourager, “can you get me something? Can you get me some resources?” And his pen pal encourager googled it and cut and pasted together some good stuff from some different resources that looked good printed it off, and sent it into him. Because PrisonCare penpal encouragers were in place he had someone to ask for the resources he needed.
(17:08)
You know, there's lots more. I'm going to just close with one last one. At one facility that was adopted by PrisonCare Compassion team funds were raised. This was a facility where there was a pretty long standing relationship with a couple of people on the inside who were considered to be pretty trustworthy and that does not come easily and you can't just make that happen right from the starting gate. But over time there will be people that you've been writing to long enough that you hear about from others that you're writing to within the facility. And you know the way they carry themselves and the way they're living their lives and you find that they’re pretty trustworthy. And so, in this situation, there were two people on the inside and there were two people from the Compassion Team, on the outside, who put some money on their books for them to buy ingredients through commissary to make prison quesadillas. And they ordered all the flour tortillas and the sausages and the cheese and all the things and they got a team together that was going to do all the cooking. And these guys because the Compassion Team on the outside funded it the team of guys on the inside had a… what do they call it? The casa de quesadilla day and they made quesadillas and gave them out to all 100 guys in their pod. They put little handwritten posters all over the place that said these quesadillas were a gift to you from the PrisonCare Compassion team that adopted our prison and it was the talk of the unit.
The staff were like. “what, you guys cooked for everybody in the pod? Like, you're kidding me. And what is it? Why is everybody eating Quesadillas, what? Where did you guys get this? It was a gift from what? A compassion… Somebody adopted the prison?” It was all the talk. It was all the talk. The guys who headed it up, who did all the cooking and all the distribution were so incredibly proud of themselves. They were owning it. They were like, "yeah, that's what PrisonCare is about. You know, we look out for each other and this is, this is not… we're not just going to lay back and let this be the toxic place that it wants to be. You know, we're going to build some positive culture in here.” And yeah it's a success story for sure.
(19:43)
So friends, that's a tiny little sampling of the beautiful stories coming out of prisons, where PrisonCare is involved. I'm going to try to sprinkle those stories in every few podcast episodes going forward because as my board members pointed out, that's probably the best recruitment tool I guess, for more people adopting a prison, for more people forming a Compassion Team. It's to hear the real stories of people on the inside whose lives are being changed and who are being empowered to change the lives of those around them for the better.
So I'll be sharing more of those with you in the future. If you liked what you heard today, if something warms your heart, if something inspired you, if something brought a tear to your eye, I would love to hear about that. There's a Facebook group for PrisonCare. I would love for you to join that and enter into the discussion there with other compassionate people with the heart for caring for prisons. You can also always email me, Sabrina@prisoncare.org. And if you have a story, if you are someone who is a penpal encourager, who is a Compassion Team Leader, if you have adopted a prison and you want to share some of the beauty in the stories coming out of your prison, please share those with me and I will add them to a future episode if you would like for me to and share what's going on in the prison that you're caring for.
And as always, you can learn more, you can do more, you can connect more, you can get more resources, you can get involved in financially supporting PrisonCare. All of that information is available at our website, PrisonCare.org. Thank you for listening to the stories that I was able to share with you today. And thank you as always for caring.
Thanks for listening to the PrisonCare podcast. Be sure to visit us at prisoncare.org. PrisonCare, equipping compassionate people to support positive prison culture from the outside because everyone on the inside matters.