About three weeks ago, I was privileged to keep a circle for the family of a young man who is serving a recently-imposed sentence of 7 years in prison. I am friendly with the young man’s sister and she was the one who asked me to organize a healing circle for the family. I was really blessed that a friend of mine who is a wonderful circle keeper partnered with me. The key to keeping a good circle is preparation and it took us almost a month to set this one up. We had to talk to everyone who was going to participate before we could actually keep the circle.

After speaking to everyone involved, it became clear to us that the main emotions that folks wanted to process were grief and anger. I want to talk a bit about both.

I haven’t written about this particular circle because I needed time to process it for myself. Also, I had to get permission to write about this circle (even though none of its participants would be named). I received permission from everyone involved last week.

There were so many tears shed.

The emotions almost could not be contained in the circle. Family members and friends of the young man shared the anger that they felt towards him. They were furious that he would do something “to get himself locked up.” Sobbing, his best friend raged: “He knew that they were out to get us. They want to put all black men in the pen. Why help them do it?” So there was anger.

However this anger was rooted in a deep sense of hurt and of grieving. The incarcerated young man is locked up far from home. It won’t be easy for his family members to visit. There was so much sadness about this. Sadness about the disconnection that would be experienced. Fear that this lack of connection would deeply alter the family. How would he be able to reintegrate once he is released? Would he come back home a “hardened criminal?” his mother asked. His younger sister worried that prison would “take his heart.”

Part of what we discussed towards the end of the circle was how family members might constructively and simply support each other and the incarcerated young man through this ordeal. A decision was made that two people from the circle would arrange to visit him once a month at minimum. We made a plan for this together.

We also strategized about how his younger siblings could talk about their brother’s incarceration. His younger siblings are 9, 12. and 15 years old. Everyone offered their ideas for how they might address their brother’s situation with their peers and others. We practiced talking about what had happened and encouraged them to use their own voices to describe this circumstance.

Finally, I want to say a few words about shame and incarceration. As we debriefed the circle, my co-keeper mentioned that she felt that we had dropped the ball in not introducing the idea of “shame” in the healing circle. I have thought a lot about this over the past few weeks and I am very ambivalent about this criticism. Michelle Alexander often discusses the concept of “shame” in her presentations about mass incarceration as the new Jim Crow. I agree that incarceration is indeed often enmeshed with shame. However, in the case of the family that I was working with, I don’t know that our particular healing circle could have really properly addressed shame. Frankly, I don’t think that the family was feeling particularly ashamed. I think that they just needed space to vocalize their fears, hurt, anger, and grief. And perhaps even more importantly, I think that they needed a place to start making concrete plans to help lessen those fears, that anger, and hurt. So I am still mulling over my friend’s constructive criticism.

I am writing about this experience here on the blog because I think that these are stories about incarceration that are obscured in debates about policy, systemic change, and social justice. These “small” stories of individual people who are struggling daily to repair their families which have been ravaged by the “plague of mass incarceration” are central to the experience oof incarceration in our communities. Yet we think of them as “collateral damage” if we think of them at all. Here in Chicago, these people are our neighbors, co-workers, family members. They are us… It seems important to point out within a landscape that can appear bleak and hopeless that we can all still be “keepers” for each other.