Tag: Just Mercy
Mental Illness and Torture in American Jails
Yesterday I finished reading Bryan Stevenson’s brilliant book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. I highly recommend this book to everyone I 
meet.
As I read about the many poor, abused victims of America’s broken justice system in Just Mercy, I was reminded of stories told to me by one of my dearest friends. Let’s call him John. John is a convicted felon, now out on parole.
If I introduced John to you, you would quickly come to know one of the kindest, gentlest men you would ever meet. A tall, gentle giant with a ready smile, John would give you the shirt off his back if you asked for it.
Yet, somewhere in his early to mid-twenties, John’s brain began to malfunction with the defective neural-circuitry of the illness now called bi-polar disorder.
Trying to relax in a large public lobby, John was working hard to ignore the loud, commanding voices that only he seemed to hear. Speaking with ominous authority, the voices kept shouting that it was up to him to eliminate the evil demons preparing to murder everyone around him. Only he could see them. Only he knew who they were. If he didn’t act now, the innocent victims’ blood would be on his hands.
So, John screwed up enough courage to attack the demons himself.
By the time local police officers had tackled John and restrained him, face-down in handcuffs on the lobby floor, two men were seriously injured. John had attacked and beaten them, as the voices had told him to.
John was arrested and jailed in one of America’s southeastern states. He is not white. He was sent to a psychiatric facility for treatment, but John’s public defender apparently didn’t know how to argue a defense based on mental illness.
John was convicted and sent to the county jail to await sentencing. He would wait for seven years. Seven years – before he was ever sentenced! – while his family scrimped and saved to find enough money for a decent attorney and another trial.
In the meantime, John endured the some of the most brutal, inhumane treatment I have ever heard about.
John’s small cell had two metal benches set against opposite walls. On his first day, two of John’s jailers introduced him to the benefits of having two benches, rather than one, by making him lay across them face down. With his face and shoulders on one bench and his feet laying on the other, the jailers sat on John’s back while beating his shoulders, legs and thighs with their clubs.
I remember the tears in John’s eyes as he told me about this introduction to his new “home.”
As John shrieked with pain, screaming that his back was breaking, the jailers would periodically show pity by standing up, relieving what I can only imagine as unbearable stress along John’s spine.
But they weren’t finished.
John was forced to stay in that vulnerable position as the guards continued beating him with their billy clubs. They pounded the flesh and muscle up and down his shoulders, arms, back, thighs, calves and feet. During it all, he wept, begging them to stop, crying out for mercy.
But they didn’t show mercy.
This was only the first of John’s many beatings. Beatings, as well as other physical and psychological abuses, that became a regular part of life in the county jail. The guards seemed to invest what little creativity they had into devising new ways to inflict pain on other human beings.
Finally, after seven long years of effort, John’s family had gathered enough
money to hire their first lawyer. When a new, more competent judge heard this story about my friend waiting seven years for the completion of his trial, he set a hearing date immediately. For the first time, the court learned about John’s bi-polar disorder. The doctors who treated him at the state psychiatric facility were finally able to testify about John’s mental condition, and how it remained undiagnosed and untreated at the time of the attacks.
Thankfully, John was released from jail with time served and very restrictive conditions for his parole. He is now raising a beautiful family with his wife, takes his daily medication and has not had a single run-in with the police.
To the best of John’s knowledge, no one at the jail was ever punished for the ways they had tortured my friend.
No one took his complaints seriously. They all kept their jobs and continued to abuse other prisoners whenever they felt like it, which was most of the time.
Byran Stevenson writes:
“America’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill…the internment of hundreds of thousands of poor and mentally ill people has been a driving force in achieving our record levels of imprisonment…
“Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population. Nearly one in five prison and jail inmates has a serious mental illness. In fact, there are more than three times the number of seriously mentally ill individuals in jail or prison than in hospitals; in some states that number is ten times. And prison is a terrible place for someone with mental illness or a neurological disorder…” (186, 188).
When will a genuine “pro-life” movement arise in this country? A movement that values and defends the lives of the living as much as the unborn? Every Christian pledges to follow and obey a poor, homeless, tortured savior; a savior who was said to be mentally ill by his family, arrested on trumped up charges, jailed by corrupt officials, beaten and executed by an occupying military power.
When will we see a truly Christian pro-life movement that works to defend all life, no matter how old, regardless of race or circumstances, no matter the type of death being threatened.
When?
The Poor Go to Prison First and Stay the Longest
I have almost finished reading the amazing book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, located in 
Montgomery, Alabama.
The EJI is a non-profit organization that provides free legal services to poor people, especially those sitting on death row, many of whom have never had the benefit of being represented by a competent lawyer.
The next time you hear someone say that America no longer discriminates
against people of color, that racism has been eliminated in this country, that our court system works equally well for everyone, that justice is blind, that only criminals need to worry about law enforcement policies aimed at “getting tough on crime,” hand them a copy of this book, get out your day-planner and set up a meeting to discuss it.
BE WARNED: Reading Just Mercy will probably induce long episodes of heartbreak, fury, shock and tears.
America’s evangelical Christians have a special need for such intervention.
The vast majority of evangelicals are conservatives who typically vote Republican.
Republicans have long been the proud party of tougher sentencing laws like “three strikes you’re out,” lengthy minimum sentences and tougher laws for minor drug offenses like marijuana possession.
Conservatives are also the loudest defenders of the death penalty. An abhorrent position that no Christian should touch with a ten-foot pole.
We have no idea how many innocent people have been tortured to death by state-sanctioned execution (often mishandled) in this country. The Death Penalty Information Project offers easy access to the long list of innocent people, mostly African American men, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit.
Republicans are also the privatization party (although Democrats have
jumped onto this bandwagon, too). Viewing every area of life through capitalism’s money-making tunnel-vision has led to the rapid expansion of America’s private prison system.
The system includes a growing hoard of prison lobbyists – like sucker fish clinging to a prison-shark’s soft underbelly – urging harsher laws and lengthier punishments, all aimed at keeping more and more people in prison for longer and longer periods of time.
All for the love money – the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10).
Hear are the final two paragraphs from the introduction of Just Mercy:
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.
“We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and – perhaps – we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
Sounds a lot like Jesus, doesn’t he?