Too much humanity?
By Brandon Astor Jones
"And homeless near a thousand homes I stood
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food." — William Wordsworth
A friend who live in England has asked me, "What is it like to live on death row?" If she had befriended someone other than me, she might have had an easy and direct response. However, for me the answer is very convoluted. It is difficult for me to write about where I am without flashing back to where I have been before being brought to this place of death.
Things were different two decades ago in the USA. For me, employment was difficult to find. I was forced to loiter on the streets. I was but one of many.
I once overheard someone quip, "When a person goes to prison, his life stops at that particular place in time". While that is clearly an oversimplification, it is not entirely untrue. So, in response to my friend's query, I must say that living on death row is like dying daily from a painfully slow hunger that, for as long as I live, I will always know could easily have been fed 20 years ago with the food of employment.
I have personally examined the pre-arrest situations of other men here on death row. No less than one out of four of them were homeless. (These are men who have been on death row for 10 or more years. Those here a shorter time tended not to be homeless at the time of arrest.)
Consequently, our group here shares a kinship with the homeless, and somewhere along the line we began brainstorming to figure out a way to help them.
We found a way to help through the prison's crochet program. In this program, a prisoner — if he is fortunate to have someone on the outside who cares enough to send him money — can purchase up to three dozen skeins of yarn each month. Several prisoners have become experts in crafting sweaters, bedspreads and afghans. They spend days, week and even months creating intricate and beautiful patterns.
I cannot crochet; I lack the talent and patience it requires. Once or twice a day a group of us are allowed out of the cells for three hours. During this period of interaction, I have frequently been asked, "How can you sit there and write all day and night?" My standard response is a question of my own: "How can you sit there and crochet all day and night?"
The crochet program's rules prohibit us from engaging in any kind of commerce: no crocheted items can be sold. Within these limitations, five years ago the Afghan Project was born. We give the afghans away. When supporters of this project send donations that exceed what is needed to purchase more yarn and to ship afghans (postal costs are considerable), we use their contributions to provide hot meals for hungry people. In recognition of our good intentions, most supporters kindly make their donations in advance.
There are prisoners who think that those of us who care about the homeless are crazy. Their point of view is a product of their lack of understanding of the homeless experience.
There was an occasion recently when some of those same prisoners were involved in a turnaround of compassion. They were eager to sign their names to a card bearing condolences for the grieving family of a corrections officers who had died here. The officer was known for his fair and respectful treatment of prisoners even when his fellow officers were disrespectful and unfair.
The prison's administration would not allow us to give that card to the officer's family, saying that our condolences were "inappropriate". Talking among ourselves, we concluded that we were demonstrating a little too much humanity. One of the ways the death penalty is promoted in the USA is by the routine political dehumanisation of those of us who are subjected to it. Politicians cannot get elected if we are humanised.
At the time the Afghan Project was conceived, I contacted local ministers by mail seeking their participation to receive our financial offerings and take groups of homeless people to restaurants. I got no response. I wrote no less than 17 letters to an assortment of so-called "men and women of God" for more than a year. Not until one of my Australian correspondents came to visit me, several months later, did a minister — at her request — offer to help.
Not long after, donations began to trickle in from Japan, Australia, France, Norway, Canada and the United Kingdom. All were contributions of $100 or more. In turn, I began sending afghans to those people. I am sad to report that not one dollar came from anywhere in the USA even though those we were helping lived here. The politics of the death penalty reign supreme.
I doubt whether those we fed cared where their meals came from. An empty stomach is usually apolitical.
In late 1996, the project was necessarily discontinued as I prepared for re-sentencing. The legal process took more than a year. My appeals were not successful. Now I would like to start up the Afghan Project again. My fellow prisoners have agreed to participate, but we can do nothing without your support.
If you would like to help, please write to me for more information. I can be reached at the address below. Be sure to print clearly your full name and address, because if both are not on your letter's envelope, the prison's mail officer will throw your letter away and I will never see it. Will you help us?
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns (include your name and full return address on the envelope, or prison authorities may refuse to deliver it). He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-77, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]