I received an e-mail last week from a young woman who wanted to let me know just how she felt about this blog. She wrote many things but what stood out most to me was the following question: “Why do you try to sanitize prisoners?” She went on to say that “people are in prison because they did wrong.” Her e-mail suggested that I should concentrate on the people who have been victimized instead of those whom she characterized as the “offenders.” Her communication basically accusing me of romanticizing prisoners is not the first that I have received over the past year since I started “Prison Culture.”

I have struggled to find the language to express how I feel about this critique. Truthfully, sometimes words can be limiting. What I want to say is that there are plenty of other places where people can turn if they want to hear from and learn from victims of crime and survivors of harm. While Prison Culture does not expressly focus on victims of crime, the blog posits the experiences of those harmed by violence and crime as central and important. [Incidentally many who are locked up have also been “victims” of something in their own lives.] My interest in restorative and transformative justice is precisely because I want to be part of creating a system of accountability that truly does meet the needs of the harmed. I just want to do that without relying on a broken, immoral and oppressive prison industrial complex.

“Why do you try to sanitize prisoners?” There is so much wrapped up in these seven words. In reading the young woman’s e-mail, I could feel the fear and hurt dripping off my computer screen. A couple of years ago, I saw a TED TALK by a writer who I really enjoy. Chimamanda Adichie is a Nigerian-born and American educated fiction writer. She spoke at TED about the danger of a single story. Below is a video of that talk. It is about 15 minutes in length but packs an enormous punch.

Basically, Adichie is telling her audience that we must open ourselves up to multiple stories about people, countries, and continents. None of us is just one thing. Stereotypes can have small kernels of truth in them but they basically offer incomplete and often distorted information to the public. So as I struggle to respond to the critique of my “romanticizing” prisoners, I think about Adichie’s admonition.

A large part of what I try to do on this blog is in fact to provide a platform for insisting on the HUMANITY of those who we lock in cages. I don’t want to “sanitize” prisoners, what I do want is to intentionally complicate their portrayal in our culture. I want to move away from telling the accepted, one story of prisoners. I don’t want bad deeds to come to define prisoners as “bad people.” I reject that characterization. Naturally, I will get some e-mails now asking me if I disagree that Charles Manson is a bad person… Please save those e-mails. Those concerns are red herrings. The reason anyone knows Charles Manson’s name is because he is actually unique among those imprisoned. The millions of other nameless and faceless people behind bars then still deserve our attention and our intervention (in spite of the fact that a Charles Manson exists). Manson has been found to be mentally ill. In a world without prisons, mentally ill people who commit harm would be treated for their illness just not by being locked in cages.

So to the young woman who wrote to me, I want you to know that it is not my intent or desire to “sanitize” or otherwise romanticize prisoners. I do want to make sure though that people remember that prisoners are HUMAN and COMPLEX, as we all are. I want people to remember that we can all do bad things and that this does not necessarily make us “bad people.” I want people to know that “crime” is socially-constructed and that to a large degree we are all “criminals” of some sort. I want people to understand that we have to move away from the current unjust criminal legal system that we have. We need to focus instead on building a new system that provides true accountability and repairs harm. I don’t think that we can do that through prisons. My point is to say that we are all saints and sinners and that we deserve a real chance to make right those things that we have done wrong.

I thank one of my readers, Marissa, for sending along the link to an amazing story of restorative justice. A woman named Mary Johnson literally put her arms around a young man named Oshea Israel who killed her son. You can listen to their story HERE. Their story is a reminder to all of us that prisoners (or any of us for that matter) should not be defined by their worst mistakes and that ultimately when we account for harm transformation is possible.