I wasn’t surprised when my prison ministry colleague, Tim Putnam, told me that a guard wouldn’t join us in the minimum security chapel. He said minimum at the A.C.I.—Rhode Island’s state prison is called the Adult Correctional Institutions—didn’t have a lot of locked doors, and the inmates were given a fair amount of freedom.
In my first visit to the A.C.I., Tim, Veronica, and I sat in silence for forty minutes with a small group of inmates. The silence was as reverent as it was on Sunday morning in the Providence Quaker Meeting House. I left feeling hopeful about the journey I was about to embark on.
Medium security was a more modern facility and more unforgiving. We passed through nine locked doors and had to be escorted to the chapel. Surely, I thought, a correctional officer will join us.
Again, my Quaker colleagues and I were alone in the chapel with the inmates. The men were quiet and respectful. One inmate, Ralph Maloney (I have changed all names in The Honey Locust Tree), was eager to see us and seemed to derive deep satisfaction from sitting in silence and seeking inspiration in the quiet.
Of all the inmates I met, Ralph is the one I remember the most. He embodied the Quaker “inner light.”
The maximum security building was over one hundred years old. It was dark, grim, and forbidding. A guard escorted us through a noisy cellblock, and a second guard brought us to a modern classroom on the perimeter of the unit. The inmates in maximum burst into the chapel like a gust of wind. They were younger and more restless than the men in minimum and medium, and rushed to find a seat next to their friends.
A guard will definitely join us in maximum, I thought, but no correctional officer showed up.
The inmates in maximum took longer to settle and had more difficulty maintaining a lengthy silence than the men in minimum and medium. If it weren’t for the patience and compassion of my Quaker colleagues, the silence could have devolved into chaos, but it never did.
Prisons are among the noisiest buildings on earth. The inmates who joined our Quaker Meetings drank deeply from the salutary well of silence.