A central theme of the memoir I’ve written, The Honey Locust Tree, has to do with mistakes. How do we recover from our mistakes? Do we need help—from a parent, friend, society, a prison—to recover from our mistakes? Who can doubt the pain, and the power, of a major mistake?
From 1994-1997, I was part of a group that conducted evening services for the Religious Society of Friends at the Rhode Island state prison. Quaker Meeting, as it is called, was a quiet gathering where we sat in silence, “listening inward” for messages. Anyone could speak if they felt led and the meeting concluded with a simple handshake. Sometimes, inmates spoke. Other times, no one did. I started out attending Quaker Meeting in minimum security, moved on to medium security, and then visited maximum security. Waiting in silence with inmates was unlike anything I’d ever done.
When I first started going to the A.C.I.—in Rhode Island, the prison is called the Adult Correctional Institutions—my Quaker colleagues told me that I could not ask the inmates about the nature of their crimes. Unless they confessed, which they almost never did, I didn’t know why they were in jail.
At the time, I was a middle school principal at a Quaker institution in Providence. As with the A.C.I., the students’ mistakes fell into three levels. The teachers handled minor errors on the spot, such as when students passed notes in class. Medium level mistakes—homework “amnesia” or talking too much in class—might involve a call home. When a rare but major mistake occurred, I was always involved. I looked the hardest for the light within when a major incident happened, but I had my blind spots.
Sometimes, I’d chat with a student about his or her mistake and find myself going back to my own middle school mistakes. I don’t know if this made me more lenient or less. After I started volunteering at the prison, I often asked myself this question: Was there an age when it began to be hard to recover from one’s mistakes?
I never talked about prison ministry at work, but every so often a colleague would ask: “What’s it like, going from the school to the prison?” I tried to explain how odd it felt to travel from a world of youthful mistakes to the closed-off compound of grownup, hardened ones, but my colleagues seemed to find my volunteer work so unfamiliar that it was just too hard to discuss. The school and the prison were vastly different places, but for me, at least, a quiet line connected them.