We expect God to do great things but we don’t take it for granted: the Lord is always more ready to help us than we are to receive. One of the participants this week had previously completed an RJ, been released but then reoffended. He was asked what happened and why he’d wanted to go through RJ again. He admitted that the first time all that was said had gone in one ear and out of the other, he’d still been lying to himself and others. This time he was listening and on the Family Reconciliation Day later that week he told his family that he wasn’t going to look for parole but would serve out his sentence, staying incarcerated so that he could learn more.
The RJ team from Hope Prison Ministry spend 30 hours from
Monday to Friday helping the men face up to themselves, what they did and how
they can change their lives to become the men they have the potential to be.
The criminal mindset is particularly self-centred; the human mind in general is prone to make up its own narrative and believe it. RJ participants are encouraged to face the truth, especially about the harm their actions cause to victims. So many men say, “I never thought so many people were affected by my crime. I never thought victims were hurt so much and for so long.” As few are actually hardened psychopaths, this realisation hits them hard and that’s one of the things we want to do – change thinking patterns in a way that’s respectful yet challenging. There is no wriggle room, no excuses. It wasn’t the alcohol or the drugs that caused the rape or murder, it was selfishness, desire for power, greed – call a spade a spade and there’s more hope for change.
The week culminated in the Family Reconciliation Day on Saturday. It’s restorative justice, not punitive, and the first stage of restoration is the family relationship. Each man is encouraged to invite three family members or close friends who have been affected by his criminal behaviour. They are then given the opportunity to confront him openly with questions and how his behaviour made them feel. All of the men are pretty nervous about this but when the time comes, all of them answer honestly.
What comes across most strongly is not condemnation. There is anger and hurt and sorrow but overwhelmingly there is love. Grandmothers left to bring up the children and support the incarcerated man with their meagre pension; wives who have to be mother and father to children, often with very little income; parents who wonder what they did wrong; sons and daughters who cry out why did you leave me? – all express their love, their desire that the man turn around and change, the welcome that’ll be awaiting him when he comes home. It shakes the men up.
As do the most common questions: Are you guilty? What did you do? How long is your sentence?
One of the lessons we do during the week (on Wednesday) is about four core values to live by: Trust, Respect, Integrity, Honesty. As part of this, four men who feel they’re not trusted are asked to go to the front. There they are entrusted with a bar of chocolate, signed by the main facilitator, and asked to keep it to be returned on Saturday.
A bar of Cadbury’s chocolate in prison is a rare and valuable item. There’s a lot of pressure to sell or eat it. Two of the men were so conscious of this and so lacking in trust of themselves that they pleaded to be allowed to give the chocolate back straightaway. They were told to keep it.
I was mentor/facilitator to five men around my table last week, from three different correctional centres, different backgrounds, different crimes. They gelled amazingly quickly; we became a family. One of the men who’d been desperate to give back the chocolate came from our table. It was so encouraging to see how the other men supported him and promised to help him resist the temptation to eat it. As one said, “It’s the table’s chocolate, we will help you.”
I hadn’t experienced this in any previous RJs so I wanted to show appreciation for what they were doing by buying each man a chocolate bar to be given when the trust was fulfilled. Quite rightly, Jonathan Clayton, lead facilitator and Hope Prison Ministry co-founder, said that, for men who had already experienced much unfairness in life, singling out one table wasn’t ideal in an RJ process so, with the help of supporters in Scotland, I went out and bought 35 bars of chocolate. Another lesson – the trustworthiness of one man, supported by good friends, can benefit the community at large.
On Saturday all four original bars of chocolate were returned intact, despite pressure from some other participants to “share the chocolate with me and you’ll be as wise as Pastor Clayton”!
Being trusted with little is the first step to being trusted with larger things. Faces lit up as the unexpected gift of chocolate for everyone was distributed just before the heavy business of facing the loved ones with honesty.
What happened next brought tears to my eyes. Chocolate is like gold inside prison, and a rare treat to families with little outside. After seeing the pain they’d caused their loved ones and realising the fault lay with their lifestyles, choices and bad behaviour, many of the men gave their bar of chocolate to their wife, mother or daughter – a token of love and remorse in earnest of the desire to change. A small gesture but huge.
Sometimes a bar of chocolate is so much more.
