An Anguished Mother's Lament For Her Son

This is one of forty overcrowded state prisons in Virginia.

I post this slightly edited piece with the kind permission of two grieving parents who wish to remain anonymous.

A renowned Christian preacher once said, “The great Christian revolution was to convert pain and failure and difficulty into fruitful suffering, to turn a very bad thing into something good.” We do this in union with Christ, as He turned a supremely bad thing, the Crucifixion, into something supremely good, His Resurrection and our Redemption. This is impossible to understand without faith. Without faith it is supremely foolish.

I am not speaking in airy feel-good abstractions, for I am the mother of a young man, who like Christ, is a criminal; but who unlike Christ, sinned. His cross is to serve a life sentence for using child porn. However, he was never accused of harming a child, or an adult, or anyone; nor was he charged with a plan to abuse or harm anyone.

But I recognize that he is not without guilt. He acknowledges it himself. He began doing wrong when as a child of twelve he started viewing porn on the Internet. Many others like him began even earlier than twelve. Should we have noticed?

Now he is in prison for ten years,* which is the maximum sentence for voluntary manslaughter, given to someone for killing another in anger. But once out of prison, unlike the killer, his punishment is redoubled, he is branded for life. He is placed on the Sex Offender Registry, a pariah, restricted in his contacts with anyone under eighteen -- to be clear: punished for what he never did but for what some have decided he may do in the future. Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean (in Les Misérables) was pursued for life by Javert, here Javert is more relentless because “Javert” is electronic.

My husband, who at seventy-nine may never see our son free again, says our son has a mountain to climb, and that it is higher than any mountain on earth. Our son has no desire to climb it but he will because Christ commands us to take up our cross and follow Him. This means that against all the odds, with God’s grace, he will love God and his neighbor better than he ever did. Some will view saying this as worse than foolish, even as foolishly arrogant. But all things are possible to those who follow Christ. And he already does.  Beginning in wholly unextraordinary ways he is a positive presence in the prison system. He draws pictures for some of his prison mates to send to their wives and children; he gives math and language assistance to his fellow inmates who never finished high school; he is active in the Catholic prison ministry; when he gets out he plans to counsel others against pornography.

In the meantime, we pray not only for him but for the many others like him who are in prison, having been lured as children into using porn on the Internet. We tremble, though, at the thought of those men without Christ, facing a society and a legal system that is implacable in destroying their lives – heaping the sins of the many on the few. What seething bitterness is brewing in them without hope?

What is it about a society that views the sea of porn that we all swim in as harmless, making it easily available, then punishes so severely those who strayed, often unknowingly, into converging waters? We ask for your prayers: for my son, and for everyone who was victimized by the porn industry as children and who remain victimized for life as adults.

* Note: The ten year sentence was a part of a plea deal which the defendant took based on the fear that a jury trial might result in a far higher sentence. There had just been a similar case months prior in which someone received 170 years in a jury trial, with the judge assigning a state mandated number of years for each offense.