[ hold :: this space ]

I’ve been working over this last week to get ready for NCYC, a national youth convention organised by the Uniting Church, and few other things happening in the women’s prison and in the basement during the next 6 weeks. We’re curating a sacred space for 1400 people next Wednesday evening at NCYC - an extraordinarily tricky event that is waking me at 3 each morning with its impossible permutations - and i’m also doing a workshop on Lament on Monday afternoon. I’m not sure i’ll get to much else during the week, disappointingly, but Shane Claiborne is speaking and he’s always brilliant…

So there’s not much time for writing here, but before i forget it all I wanted to get down a few things from the last couple of weeks… It’s a bit disjointed, and i’d keep it as a draft but maybe it’ll make sense to someone else too!

Christmas day in the prison was lovely, but very, very sad. Like last year, there was ten minutes of absolute silence at the end of the service, out of which the men gradually came and started telling their stories - speaking of families who would be visiting them the next day, or those who would be conspicuous in their absence; of things they wished for, prayers they wanted.

I’ll put up the service because it worked, though the words don’t communicate what it was like [download it here: ptphilipxmas]. The service again was evidence of how words are always changed and interpreted by the context in which they are spoken. What seemed pretty optimistic in the planning was actually very subdued and melancholic in reality. But then the story of christmas isn’t actually about happiness, and to make it such turns it into a story for everyone else.

I’ve been thinking about that while I’ve been watching the news this week as the situation in Gaza unfolds. It seems ironic that this is all happening at a time when many churches are telling the story of Jesus’ escape to Egypt - which has to be one of the most fraught passages in the New Testament. For some reason it’s all been bringing to mind a phrase I read in an article last year written by a Rwandan community development worker: ‘God spends each day travelling the world, and comes back to Rwanda to sleep’.

The absence of God has been a theme of the last year - unintended, as these things normally are. I began the year inspired by the story of restorative justice in Rwanda, and have used that as a foundation for some of the work we’re doing here. It’s perhaps appropriate, given how difficult all that has been this year - how unending and complicated the task is - that i read this article last week. I’m so profoundly grateful for the way the article ends because, you know, that’s the truth of so much of what we do. Just turning up and being faithful doesn’t guarantee success. Quite probably most of what we are trying to do will fail. And we’re playing with heart-breaking stakes.

If the beginning of last year was defined by hope and great dreams, this year it’s coloured with a prayer that hope isn’t what’s needed to survive or keep going. I think i ended last year feeling pretty flattened by reality, but with some perverse instinct to keep doing what we’re doing. Hope doesn’t factor into it; just a knowledge that it’s only by doing this that we find - and keep - our humanity.

i can’t remember an advent quite this busy or complicated. It was partly self-induced, but other things ended up on my desk or in my calendar that were quite out of my control.

Last night was the last of the things I have to ‘perform’ before Christmas Day. I was in Port Phillip Prison with Ross, the UCA chaplain; we were leading worship in the Marlborough Unit, which houses men with intellectual disabilities and acquired brain injuries. I saw some old friends there, a few who had been out and come back, and met some new guys. The very best thing was seeing Alf and Trevor who wrote a couple of psalms when we did that last year in the unit, and giving them copies of the ‘Hold This Space’ book [available through Proost] in which they are published. They were a bit chuffed.

We arrived as the men were finishing dinner, just after 5pm, and worship started around 6, so we chatted for a while. The men would come up one by one and tell their stories of what was happening at home, of lawyers and appeals, of loneliness and longing. For some of the men, the Marlborough Unit is the best and safest home they have known. For them, getting out of prison is a terrifying thing. The world isn’t safe.

We’ll be back there to do worship on Christmas Day next week. I woke up with an idea for that service in the middle of last night, which I wrote down at the time, but I’m too scared to look at it in case it’s crap!

I got home and was flicking randomly through some websites, something i haven’t done for weeks. There’s lots of talk about the Advent Conspiracy stuff, which looks brilliant… and which I’m all for in theory. But you know, I just felt guilty. I’ve got nothing left of myself to give to anyone this year. I just thank god that christmas presents are an option.

Three of the four men who wrote the psalms that were part of the collection of Hold This Space liturgies published by Proost are back in prison, after short periods on the outside. The men were part of the Marlborough Unit at Port Phillip Prison, the unit which houses those who are intellectually disabled or have acute psych conditions.

I was walking next to someone today on the way into work who looked like he was only just holding his demons at bay, talking himself back into sanity with muttered entreaties. That could so easily be me, i thought, aware again that i felt i had much more in common with him than with the other professionals walking around us. i thought again about how much i dislike the phrase ‘except for the grace of god’, which i always think comes awfully close to being another version of prosperity gospel… i know i’ve not unravelled because i’ve had the money to get help when things could have gone either way; because i’ve had education and jobs that have given me confidence, resilience and options; because i’ve got people around me who are honest about their own fragility and who give me courage to understand my own… to say i have those things by the grace of god places the blame back on god for those who don’t.

If you get the link in all of this, the Port Phillip West Communal Justice Network is next meeting this friday morning at the Judy Lazarus Transition Centre. This meeting is to discuss with staff at the centre how we can work together to offer practical help and advocacy to prisoners in transition, and to begin formulating proposals for conversations with Corrections Victoria. Email if you want to know more.

We had the PPW communal justice network meeting today in DPFCC [the women's prison]. Janey Muir-Smith, director of the Judy Lazarus Transition Centre, met with us to talk about transition and post-release issues, and what we might be able to do to help. The primary issue outside the prison is housing, the primary issue inside the prison is mental health.

There was another conversation about the rental crisis on the radio on the way home - the vacancy rate in melbourne is the lowest on record, and it’s only going to get worse as there are more foreclosures, etc. Not only does this mean that the cost of renting is at record levels, it also means that the competition for each property is fierce. The program host was interviewing people - employed professionals - about their lack of success in finding places to live. What they didn’t talk about was what that means for those who are much further down the pecking order: when the applications for each property number in their hundreds, and include accountants and lawyers, who would pick someone fresh out of prison?

The uniting church is short of ministers. i suspect there are a number of congregations who are renting out manses. perhaps the church should ask them to rent their manses to those who will get housing nowhere else. i’m going to find out a bit about this during the week…

The next meeting of the Port Philip West network is on Sunday afternoon, at the Dame Phyllis Frost Correctional Centre. We can’t take any more into the prison this Sunday, but if you are interested in being part of the ongoing work of the network, let me know. The network is working in three particular areas: advocacy [in government and communities], post-release integration [mentoring, housing and employment], and post-release support [metcards, phone cards, toothpaste, clothing...].

Word on the street is that the next state election [which is not due for a couple of years] will be fought on law and order.

We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations… We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil. On one side are Us, Our Kin, and Our Kind; on the other side of that line we cast Them, Their Different Kin, and Other Kind. Paradoxically, by creating this myth of our invulnerability to situational forces, we set ourselves up for a fall by not being sufficiently vigilant to situational forces.

The SPE [Stanford Prison Experiment]… reveals a message we do not want to accept: that most of us can undergo significant character transformations when we are caught up in the crucible of social forces. What we imagine we would do when we are outside that crucible may bear little resemblance to who we become and what we are capable of doing once we are inside its network. The SPE is a clarion call to abandon simplistic notions of the Good Self dominating Bad Situations. We are best able to avoid, prevent, challenge, and change such negative situational forces only by recognizing their potential power to “infect” us, as it has others who were similarly situated…

Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us - under the right or wrong situational circumstances. That knowledge does not excuse evil; rather it democratizes it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province only of deviants and despots - of Them but not Us.

from the truly chilling Lucifer Effect: How good people turn evil, by Philip Zimbardo

The more reading i do on the prison system, the more horrific it gets.

this is an article worth reading on Victoria’s prisons, from the Age today. It’s a frightening description of the abuses of power that are going on within the system. One of the more sickening paragraphs:

In February, Australia’s only independent prison watchdog criticised the lack of transparency of Victoria’s prisons. The Western Australian Inspector of Custodial Services, Professor Richard Harding, described the system of monitoring abuse and corruption in Victoria’s jails as “well short of what a democratic society is entitled to”. Against this backdrop, prisoner abuse keeps occurring. In 2005, asthmatic remand prisoner Ian Westcott died in his cell after scrawling a note that read “asthma attack. buzzed for help. No response”. The intercom in his cell was broken.

I’ve been reading The Lucifer Effect: Understanding why good people turn evil this week. It’s written by Philip Zimbardo who led the research project the Stanford Prison Experiment. He’s exploring in the book the situations and dynamics that lead to good people turning evil. I’ll blog more about it when i’ve finished, but there are two things from what I’ve read today that resonate with the article from the Age:

Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special. These self-serving protective shields allow us to believe that each of us is above average on any test of self-integrity. Too often we look to the stars through the thick lens of personal invulnerability when we should also look down to the slippery slope beneath our feet.

And then, talking about what it is that happens to make good people [like you and me] turn evil:

Dehumanisation is one of the two central processes in the transformation of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil. Dehumanisation is like the cortical cataract that clouds one’s thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. It makes some people come to see others as enemies deserving of torment, torture and annihilation.

I’m finding the article and the book chilling. We began the communal justice project as an issue of justice for the prisoners. I’m getting more convinced though that prisons aren’t just destructive for those who are sentenced to live there, but that they are slowly and insidiously corroding our society.

i’ve written a faith column for the Age today.  It’s about restoration. i don’t think it’s on line… so it goes like this:

–

A few months ago I spent some time visiting Port Phillip Prison, working with a chaplain to design worship for some of the men who are serving sentences there. Over the course of a few weeks we invited the men to write psalms of lament, anger and boredom, giving voice to their longing for redemption and forgiveness; the chance to start again, to prove they can be more than the headlines the world knows them by.

‘I need God to show me strength, to show me the way, so I can get out of here’, wrote Phil. ‘God hasn’t shown anything back yet. I pray a lot. I pray most days to get the strength to go on, but I’m still waiting to be shown the way to believe. My deepest desire is to start a new life.’

It seems to me that faith has its hardest task in prison. Shame collides with compassion. Promises of hope are mocked by a system that relentlessly grinds people down. Well crafted theologies of redemption are given lie when our community doesn’t believe people can change. While the Christian story tells us to have confidence that God has already answered Phil’s prayer, the truth is that makes very little difference if the world doesn’t answer it as well.

I’m predictably cynical about divine miracles, but sometimes as I read the newspaper and listen to talkback radio it seems much easier to believe that God would raise someone from the dead than to believe that we would want someone who has served their time for a crime to be given a place in our community again.

It’s easy to understand why. Those of us who have been victims of crime never want to be faced with that horror again. It’s a natural instinct to separate the parts of ourselves and our communities which bring shame. And, if we’re honest, most of us think that those who have inflicted damage and pain on others are dispensable to our society. But psychologists and theologians would tell us that all of us are diminished when we do that. A healthy community isn’t one that cuts off the parts that hurt it, it’s one that seeks restoration. Our natural instincts aren’t always right. If the hardest task for those in prison is to look for a new way of living, it also seems the hardest task of a community is to let them live it.

The Christian faith is pretty uncompromising about how its followers treat people. At the heart of the faith is a belief that everyone can start again, that we are all more than the story the world knows of us. Christians give up the right to judge, and take up the responsibility to liberate.

It takes us becoming more than who we are, in order to allow others to become more than who they are. It requires us to have unfaltering belief in people who will often let us down. It’s an impossible act of faith. Yet every time I think it’s too hard, I’m haunted by the words of Phil, ‘God hasn’t shown anything back yet’, and I pray forgiveness for the world and for me, for the times we have stood in God’s way.

Cheryl Lawrie
First printed in the Sunday Age, August 10 2008

This video was shot by Jenn Ackerman in a US prison… it could have been shot here. It’s hard watching, but it tells the right story - the feeling i get in my gut when i watch it is the same feeling i get when i go into some of the prisons here. There’s some text that accompanies the video. you can read that here.

Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons from Jenn Ackerman on Vimeo.

In our research into communal justice we’ve heard of judges here in Victoria who have been giving prison sentences to people with mental illness because there is no other way they can get them access to mental health services. That’s an indictment on our community.

The three areas we’re focussing on with the communal justice project are mental health in prison, alternatives to sentencing, and post-release support. One of the reasons i value being part of a denomination is that we have some voice within political circles. Maybe, just maybe, that means we’ll be able to influence some policies about all of this.

The thought that echoes through my mind as i watched the video is the same one that i have each time i go into a prison… we all have only this one fragile, precious life… it is unspeakable tragedy that this is how someone’s unfolds.

Due to the vagaries of the prison system [we can't get access for the whole group into Marnganeet prison] we’ve changed the location of sunday’s gathering for those in port phillip west who are wanting to take the communal justice stuff another step. We’ll now be meeting at Werribee UCA, cnr Synott St and Duncans Road at 2pm. We’ve got in touch with everyone who had registered, but as numbers are no longer limited, feel free just to turn up on sunday afternoon. Email if you want more details.

We’re off for the next couple of days at a CFM [commission for mission] staff gathering. This year’s conference has been focussed around introducing the broader staff of the CFM to the concept of communal justice. Elaine Enns will be offering input, which i’m really looking forward to - she’s been working in the area of communal justice for nearly 20 years. Elaine’s in Australia with her husband, Ched Myers, and they’ll be leading a school of discipleship in Canberra this weekend.

On sunday afternoon the Port Phillip West communal justice task group will be meeting again in werribee, planning a media campaign and a few other things as well…