Severe and Comfortless and Beautiful

My sister spent the last few weeks of her life in a hospice unit in a busy urban hospital.

The staff were friendly enough, and they did what they could to make her comfortable and ease her physical pain.  She had lots of visitors.  She carried on with her work as best she could.

It was horribly depressing.  Not just because she was dying.  But because it was, in every way, a damned hospital.  Which is exactly how it looked and felt.  The staff were hospital people, nurses and orderlies and nutritionists and doctors and clergy who stopped in when called (almost never by her) or when it was time on their rounds because they were nurses and orderlies and nutritionists and doctors and clergy and they had other duties on the parts of the floor that weren't in the hospice unit and there was all the record keeping and the . . . . 

And, as I said, it looked like a fucking hospital room, with all that entails, and none of which is cheery, no matter what.  Hospice unit be damned.

So my initial reaction, just a few minutes into watching Edgar Barens' (Oscar nominated - and deservedly so) documentary following the last days of Jack Hall in an Iowa hospice was to note the remarkable irony that the hospice unit in that film seemed far nicer.  The room was brighter and cheerier, the staff more obviously caring and attentive and focused not just on Jack's medical care but on Jack, on him, as a person.

Jack's 83.  He had a heart attack in 2001 and hasn't been the same since.  After a bout of pneumonia, his breathing falters.  He can barely get across a room.  Speaking leaves him unable to breathe.  Hell, he's dying - which doesn't stop him from having a cigarette at one point.  But by then, why not?

He's also a decorated veteran from WWII, and a survivor (yes, that's a proper use of the word) of the Nazi POW's death march from the Russian front to the American front.  

He's also, and (here I get to the "remarkable irony" part) a prisoner.  Iowa State Penitentiary. Maximum security.  Locked up for 21 years.  For murder.  And the hospice is in that maximum security prison.  It's staffed by a prison nurse and, more importantly, by some of Jack's fellow prisoners.  Black guys. Themselves serving life sentences.  In the same maximum security prison as Jack (who was, his son tells us, a "segregationalist").

Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall is nominally about Jack, and substantively about the very idea of a hospice program in prison, what it's really about, what makes you wail and cry - especially when (spoiler alert) Jack dies, is the other prisoners.

It's the ones who made the curtains over the window and the cabinet Jack's TV sits on.  It's the ones who tack Jack's photos on the wall facing his bed.  It's the ones who lift him into the wheelchair and then into the ambulance when he goes to the hospital. The ones who change his sheets and shave him and wash him.  

Who hold his hands.  And who, when he breathes his last, hold each others' hands over his body and pray together.

 --Excuse me, I had to pause for a minute to wipe away some tears even as I type this --

Whoever they are, whatever they did . . . .

Barens' camera takes it all in.  Day by day.  He has Jack speak - not surprisingly, his words are somewhat self-serving, acknowledging while at least half attempting to justify.  One of Jack's son's is there, visiting regularly.  Talking about the quality of their relationship - developed only after Jack had been in prison for 8 years.

Jack is, ultimately, pitiful.  You can't help but feel for him; Barens sees to that.  But it keeps coming back to the others.  The ones who take care of him and care for him.  Who tell him, finally, to let himself go.  Who zip up the body bag, and then unzip so the prison guard can be sure it's the dead guy leaving at the end and not some ringer working an escape.

The camera work is steady.  Close-ups when the person is speaking to it.  More distant (two shots or further) when we're to observe.  We meet Jack with several day's growth of beard as he speaks to the camera and tells his version of the story.

Well, my name is George William Hall, nickname Jack. Me and my son was-- younger son was livin' in Quincy. That's when the old boy got him on dope. He was about 14 years old. And he finally hung himself. And one day, this dope dealer was braggin' about how he made his money. He didn't make no more. I stopped him. So I got life up here. That was 21 years ago. I'll get outta here one of these days, in a box.

We see Jack being shaved, and clean-shaven.  Close up on the face as he speaks.  So to the men who care for him, bad teeth (missing teeth) but soft-spoken, gentle in manner.

There's some pedantry when the camera steps back and on-screen text tells us that 20 percent of the inmates in our prisons are elderly, that 100,000 will die mostly alone, in their cells, over the next decade.  Barens doesn't add that this is a change, that increasingly harsh sentencing over the last 30 years or so has been turning prisons into geriatric wards.  He doesn't need to.  

The question he asks isn't how we got here.  It's what to do now.  And he shows us a compelling answer.  

Of course, the answer raises its own question.  Just what's the point of this status quo?

"In everything that can be called art," Raymond Chandler wrote, "there is a quality of redemption."

I've quoted that often in this blawg. Edgar Barens shows it to us in Prison Terminal.

* * *

Prison Terminal is an HBO Documentary, available on HBO (or HBO Now - which offers 30 day free access (as a trial - they want you to pay after that) through March of this year.

My thanks to Edgar Barens for making the film available to me.  He asks (and who am I to refuse) that I give the film's website, which I did with a link the first time I named it, and also his twitter feed (whatever that is, I don't twit):  @prisonterminal

* * *

The title of this post is taken from Mary Oliver's poem "Snowy Night." 

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed
an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

On Mercy Considered As One of the Fine Arts: Part the Second

Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins won't remember the time I met her.  I'll never forget it.

It was 2003.  She was coming to Cleveland to speak at at the ACLU about the death penalty.  I was to give some general comments and then introduce Jennifer.

She was, at that time, chair of Murder Victim's Families for Reconciliation.  Her pregnant sister Nancy, and Nancy's husband had been murdered, shot to death in a Chicago suburb.  She opposed the death penalty and had, as I understood it, forgiven the killer.  I didn't know much more than that. I was eager to hear her speak.

I gave my comments, introduced Jennifer, and was quickly reduced to tears.

I write a lot about forgiveness and mercy and grace in these posts.  They are, I say, about those who give, not those who receive.  They define those who bestow them ("bestow" for they are gifts) as surely as the bitterness of hatred and vengeance define those who cannot get past them.  They aren't things that can be earned, they're not about what's deserved.  If they were, they'd be about the recipients rather than the donors.

I'd understood that in a generic way before that night in April.  I understood it in a visceral way after hearing Jennifer speak.  Stories will do that.

So, when I learned that Nancy's other sister, Jeanne Bishop, had written a book about her journey to forgiveness and reconciliation, I just naturally asked the publishers to send me a copy.  Which they kindly did.

The book is Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister's Killer.  I finished it Sunday morning, right before reading Antjie Krog's op-ed in the Times on the parole of Eugene ("Prime Evil") de Kock in South Africa.  The coincidence of mercy and mercy - and the question of whether anyone is irredeemable - are what turned what was going to be a book review into this two parter.

The crime was brutal and callous.  It was the night before Palm Sunday, 1990.  Nancy and Richard had just returned home from a family dinner.  They walked in the house and there was this kid, David Biro.  16 years old.  Sitting in a chair in the darkened house.  With a gun.  He forced them into the basement.  Shot Richard in the back of the head.  Shot Nancy twice, in the side and abdomen as she "huddled in a corner, protecting her head with her arms."  Biro fled.  Nancy lived another 15 minutes or so.  

Nancy dragged herself by her elbows again, to where her husband lay dead.  Next to his body she wrote a message of love in her own blood: the shape of a heart and the letter u.
Love you.It was the way she had signed letters to Richard over the years.  She died there next to him.

As I said, brutal and callous.  

Jeanne was, of course, horrified when she learned.  The heartsick family gathered at the police station.  They tried, Jeanne tried, to understand what could make someone kill like that.

As I did, I spoke for the first time since arriving at the station.  It wasn't a thought I had formulated; it just emerged.  I heard myself saying these words to the assembled group: "I don't want to hate anyone."

Not hating was a start.  it wasn't a finish.  

They caught David Biro, of course.  Put him on trial.  He tried to blame a friend.  The jury didn't buy it.  LWOP.  

And though Jeanne came to forgive Biro, her number one goal was to never have to hear of him.  In fact, she didn't speak his name.  For years.

But, and here's where this gets tricky.  That has to change.  She can't run from the fact of him.  For her to heal, she has to reconcile herself to him.  That means coming to speak his name.  And then, praying for him.    

I need to pause here, for a moment and consider, as she does, David Biro.  "Who was" he, she wonders when she starts praying for him.  She reports.

• One of his high school counselors:  "Biro wasn't the worst kid I had.  But he was the scariest."  When other kids did something wrong, they'd feel bad about it.  "He didn't even understand why he should feel bad."
• A psychiatric social worker "described him as charming, manipulative, and utterly without empathy."
• A cell mate:  "wrote from prison to tell me that David had casually discussed the murders with him, expressing no remorse.  When another high-profile, multiple murder occurred while they were in custody together -- the shooting deaths of women shoppers at a local Lane Bryant store -- one of the victims happened to have the same name as my older sister.  The cell mate said David had hoped that it was she who had been killed."

Jeanne turns to Biblical parables to understand possibility.  Jesus, she concludes, can heal.  And apparently he does.

Praying for him isn't enough.  She has to meet him, to apologize to him for not forgiving him more openly and fulsomely sooner.  This person who has never even hinted at accepting responsibility, let alone feeling remorse for what he did.

And so, to the prison, where it seems he's no monster.  He's thoughtful.  He feels badly for what he did.  They discuss.  They see each other every couple of months.  And she sees that he's been heeled from his budding sociopathy.

Or, of course, although she never mentions this as a possibility and appears not to see it, he's canny enough to understand how to make her support him, how to manipulate her with lies and false professions.

I am, perhaps, being too cynical.  I believe in redemption.  But it's mostly not that neat.  And prison isn't a place where those with serious psychological problems tend to get better.  

If I'm too cynical, Jeanne seems insufficiently so.  Biro expresses remorse.  Hence, he's remorseful. He didn't plan to kill anyone, he says, so clearly that's the case.  She attributes all to God.  (It's no accident that Change of Heart  is published by Westminster John Knox Press, a religious publisher.)  She's deeply religious.  She turns repeatedly to the Bible and to priests and Biblical scholars and lawyers.   Folks like Mark Osler, a law professor, former prosecutor, devout Christian, anti-death penalty activist, who himself wrote a curious book, Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American Capital Punishment, arguing that the prosecution, trial, and execution of Jesus follow a process very like that the capitally charged and ultimately executed in this country experience.  Somehow we're to find in that parallel an understanding of why killing people here is like killing the factually innocent Jesus and is, therefore, wrong.*

There were times I wanted to toss Change of Heart across the room.  Enough with the Christian sermons.  Enough with what God can do and Jesus does and how the Bible's lessons . . . .

But you know, the book is, ultimately, deeply moving.  Jeanne Bishop's story - and this is very much her story - is remarkable.  She became a criminal defense lawyer, a public defender, because her sister was murdered.  She ultimately became an activist in the movement to abolish LWOP sentences for juveniles.  She became, if not a friend, exactly, a force for the man who coldly murdered her loved ones.  Not because she loved them insufficiently, but because love is transcendent.

And because, finally, redemption for Biro is about redemption for her.

She went to speak to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders at a Catholic school.  Her topic: forgiveness and reconciliation.  She went to mass with them.  Then gathered with them and spoke.

I told of Nancy and Richard, who had lived in an apartment only a block away from the church as a happy young couple, of the murders, the arrest, the sentence, the change in me, my visits with David.  The student's faces changed; you could see them pondering. The room was quiet as I finished; you could hear the slightest rustle of the wind on the snow outside.
The principal of the school, a lively, white-haired nun, came forward at the end to than me.  She turned to address the children: "Let's dismiss Ms. Bishop with a blessing."
A blessing? For me? I had never been given such a treasure before, especially not by angels in plaid skirts and khakis.

It's a lovely moment.  But what matters is what follows.

This is what led me to that moment: the story I had lived and told.  The tears.  The cost.  Like every blessing, every grace, it was unearned.  I had as much to atone for as anyone, and many of my scars were self-inflicted.  Much of my life I have been a striver, the girl who wanted (and got) the best grades and the best job, who cringed when she failed.  Part of that, perhaps, was the idea that I had to earn the blessing and affirmation of others and of God.  In that moment, surrounded by children, I saw the deeper truth: grace is given, not earned, a function of being loved rather than of worldly accomplishment.

So let me come back where I began, in Part the First.

The essence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was that knowing the truth, hearing it from those who inflicted pain, brings peace.  You can't force remorse.  It's there or it's not.  But speaking truth has healing power to those who hear.  And, ultimately, to those who speak.

And they gave amnesty not because it was deserved but because it served two goods:  it led to the speaking of truth.  And it put to an end having to deal with the bad guys.  They could be, as the word suggests, forgotten - even as their evil could be remembered.

And de Kock's parole - he did good, regardless of motive.  And while he could never do enough good to make up for the evil, releasing him was, at some level, enough.  

Jeanne Bishop's take is broader still.  David Biro tells what happened, expresses remorse (real or feigned) after he's forgiven.  The reconciliation may help him, but ultimately it helps her.  She grasps from the beginning the lesson others never do.

From the moment the police told me that Nancy and Richard had been murdered, I sensed in my deepest core that hating the person who did it would affect him not a bit, but it would destroy me.  I'd heard this saying: Hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.  I refused to give him that power over me.

And there it is again.  It's about us, not them.

Change of Heart is not without flaws.  But insofar as it teaches that lesson, it's a winner.

----------------
*I'm not being quite fair to Osler, but I thought he stretched his analogies further than they wanted to go, and his repeated claims that Jesus was innocent strike me as flawed.  He was, certainly, if you believe him to be the Jesus of Christian faith, the son of God who killed and thereby (and by choice) took upon himself all human sin, innocent in the sense of pure.  But if the reference is to legal guilt . . . .  He was charged with blasphemy for holding himself out to be the son of God.  He did that.   Caveat:  I'm a lawyer and an atheist.  I was not raised Christian.  I've read the New Testament, studied it as a work of literature.  But I'm no Biblical scholar.  Take my readings with a large dollop of salt.

A Large Dollop of God's Grace

Shon Hopwood was 22 in 1999 when he pled guilty to five counts of bank robbery and one count of using a firearm during a crime of violence.  Judge Richard Kopf sentenced him to just over 12 years in prison. 

Hopwood was, he says now, "a reckless and selfish young man back then."  But, he adds,

I changed. I think most of us change from the age of 22 to 38. And many, like me, outgrow the irresponsibility and foolishness.

Hopwood did it in a fairly dramatic way.  Writing in the Times Monday morning, Adam Liptak explained.

Mr. Hopwood’s remarkable ascent began in the prison law library, where he became not only a good jailhouse lawyer but also a successful Supreme Court practitioner. Persuading the justices to hear a case is a roughly 100-to-1 proposition, but the court granted the first petition Mr. Hopwood filed.

The case, about whether the police had crossed a constitutional line in questioning a suspect in a drug conspiracy, caught the attention of Seth P. Waxman, a former United States solicitor general. He said Mr. Hopwood’s petition, on behalf of another prisoner, was one of the best he had ever read. Mr. Waxman agreed to argue the case before the justices on the condition that Mr. Hopwood stayed on the team.

They won, 9-to-0.

Hopwood wrote another cert petition that got accepted, too.  He was, as the title of an earlier Liptak column about him put it, 

A Mediocre Criminal, but an Unmatched Jailhouse Lawyer

He's been out for a few years now.  He's finished his second year of law school at the University of Washington.  He's written a book about himself.  He's getting set, when he gets out of law school, to clerk for Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  It's sometimes described as the second most powerful court in the country, and it often serves as a feeder for Supreme Court law clerks.

Oh, and did I mention the post on the Atlantic blog about mandatory minimum sentences?

All of which is, and this is something of an understatement, absofuckinglutely incredible.  And inspiring.

That's not why I'm writing about Hopwood, though.  What got me writing was the last line of Liptak's latest piece.

In all, [Hopwood] said, “I received a large dollop of God’s grace.”  

I'd actually read that before.  Hopwood wrote it, and I read it, in a comment to a blog post a couple of weeks ago by one Richard Kopf. That's Judge Richard Kopf, the same Judge Richard Kopf who sent Hopwood up the river for a dozen years.  Kopf is a federal district court judge on senior status. His blog, Hercules and the Umpire, is pretty much always worth reading as he speaks with honesty and clarity, and most impressively with humility about the experience and business of being a federal trial court judge.  

Anyhow, Kopf wrote about Hopwood and what he'd done.  And then he makes three points (which capture just why his blog is so good).

• Hopwood deserves all the credit in the world. I hope he makes the best of an astounding opportunity.
• Janice Rogers Brown is a hero. Although pilloried by the left when she was appointed, the woman I came to know while serving on the Codes of Conduct Committee for six years is a stunning combination of brilliance and perfectly centered good judgment. She is also a wonderfully humble, kind and decent person.
• Hopwood proves that my sentencing instincts suck. When I sent him to prison, I would have bet the farm and all the animals that Hopwood would fail miserably as a productive citizen when he finally got out of prison. My gut told me that Hopwood was a punk–all mouth, and very little else.  My viscera was wrong.

And Hopwood wrote a comment.  No, he said.  There was nothing wrong with your instincts.  And, anyway, you were constrained by the sentencing guidelines.  But see,

I made it because I grew up and because I received a large dollop of God’s grace in the form of: 1) a loving family that never gave up on me; 2) finding the law and helping others through the law, which gave me purpose; 3) a beautiful woman who encouraged me (and I later married once I was released); and 4) some gracious lawyers at WilmerHale who mentored me and pushed me to dream big (my original dream was to become a paralegal, not law school, and definitely not a future clerk on the DC Circuit).
. . .
I feel fortunate that I have been given so many second chances, including the sentence which allowed me to be released at a fairly young age. That doesn’t always happen. 

And there was that thing about grace.  Which, frankly, didn't catch my eye at the time, as it did when Liptak quoted it today.  If you're even a semi-regular reader of this blog, you know that grace is something I take seriously, even if I don't believe in a god who can deliver it when she likes.

I usually talk about grace (and its companion, mercy) in the context of the death penalty.  Offering the condemned grace and mercy isn't about them, I say.  It's not something they earn.  Not something that can be earned, really.  Grace and mercy are gifts, not rewards.  As gifts, they reflect on the giver, they say something (quite a lot, actually) about the kind of people we are.

What I don't so often do is reflect on what you might think of as grace's first cousin.  The great detective novelist, Raymond Chandler, in The Simple Art of Murder, his 1950 essay on writing crime fiction, said

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

The thing is, the artist can control for it, can build it in.  In life, it's tougher.  But when we give the gifts of grace and mercy, we give possibility.  And with possibility can come redemption.  It is, as I suggested, the first cousin of grace.  And the reward we receive for our generosity, our gift.

Richard Kopf, the judge, listened to Shon Hopwood's promise to turn his life around.  He knew better, knew it was likely bullshit, more of the same that he'd heard for years from the about-to-be-sentenced when they beg for leniency.  Liptak quoted his response.

We’ll know in about 13 years if you mean what you say.

It turns out that he did mean it.  More, he did it.

There are, of course, those who will not forgive.  He did a bad thing, they say, he must forever be tortured, banished, made to roam the streets as a mendicant, forced to steal to survive so we can send him back to prison and ensure he'll never be out again.  They don't believe in expiation.  Only punishment.  The flames of hell, and whatever we can do to emulate those flames here.

For them, Shon Hopwood is no model.  He had a chance he didn't deserve and therefore should not have had.  

But just desserts doesn't quite cover the landscape.

There's also that dollop of grace.

And then redemption.