Inmate Dies While Officer Stands By

Buckingham Correctional Center

Two prisoners wrote me recently about the untimely death of their friend Ed Stewart, an inmate at the Buckingham Correctional Center near Dillwyn. Mr. Stewart died February 18 of an apparent heart attack while working at the facility's metal shop.

One of the prison guards called for medical help, but did nothing to offer emergency first aid to the victim, in spite of having been trained in CPR, something mandated for all officers every year. There is apparently no policy regarding security officers being required to apply the life-saving procedure, only that they know how to do so.

Meanwhile, dozens of other inmates and staff members also stood helplessly by until the medical team arrived. But by then it was too late.

Sadly, Mr. Stewart is just one of many incarcerated citizens who will sooner or later die in prison.

One of the persons who described Ed's death also wrote this:

I was 17 when I was jailed on a breaking and entering and theft charge. My public defender told me if I would accept an Alford Plea I would just have to go to prison, take all the classes and treatment offered and that I would then earn first parole. I have been a model prisoner since January 24, 1993, and have yet to be granted parole. Why do they have us take educational and vocational classes and programs if they are going to punish us until we die? 

I do not understand why churches are not trying to help us. I grew up in a Nazarene church. I know I will never commit a crime again. Many of us are praying that we can be released on parole while we are still able to get a job and take care of ourselves, while Virginia is just waiting for us to die.

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A House Full Of Angels

Parable of the Banquet

“When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed."

 - Luke 14:13

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels without knowing it.”                  

- Hebrews 13:2 (NRSV)

In Reta Halteman Finger's book, “Of Widows and Meals,” she writes about the Witmer Heights Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which has a designated member of the congregation invite visitors and other guests to a meal in their home each Sunday. When it is member Miriam Eberly's turn, she always sets a table for twelve and tries her best to fill it.

One Sunday Eberly’s guests included the following: the visiting pastor and her husband, a Seventh Day Adventist neighbor, a couple and their daughter who recently went through a house fire, a member of a home for mentally challenged adults, two government employees from Washington, and the son of a local Presbyterian minister. Since there was still room for one more, Miriam invited a young, disabled African-American from her church as well.

When they sat down to eat, she had a moment of anxiety about how a group this diverse would find things to talk about, so after the blessing and before the food was passed she had each person tell their name and say something interesting about themselves. From then on, everything went just fine. The conversing around the table completely took care of itself.

Halteman Finger's point in her book is that there is a kind of sacred, barrier-breaking quality in sharing our food around a common table, one that is too easily lost in a day of fast-food-to-go at the nearby McBurgers. 

A Sunday Of Sacred Rituals

Mt. Olive Church of the Brethren

Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf. 

- I Corinthians 10:16-17 (NIV)

Yesterday I felt blessed by observing four sacred church practices, each reminding me of the importance of traditions and rituals in our faith.

Birthing Rituals

The first was at the 9 am service of the Mt. Olive Church of the Brethren in Pineville. I attended there at the invitation of my long time friend Curtis Herring, who told me five persons were to be baptized there that day. Pastor Fred Miller immersed them each in the baptismal pool in the front of the church as good Brethren have always done, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and as a sign of new believers committing themselves to follow Jesus together with fellow members.

O sinners, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
O sinners, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the robe and crown?
Good Lord show me the way  

Bonding Rituals

On my way from there to attend an ordination at the Harrisonburg Eastside Church I listened to a part of the worship service at the Park View Mennonite Church being aired on WEMC. A number of people were transferring their membership to that congregation that morning, another ritual of welcome and belonging. Pastor Phil Kniss spoke of the miracle of having diverse, unrelated people united together to form a living incarnation of the loving and living presence of God in the world, a miracle the congregation was preparing to celebrate through a celebration of the Lord's Supper.

And we accept bread at his table,

Broken and shared, a living sign.

Here in this world, dying and living,

We are each other’s bread and wine.

This is the place where we can receive

What we need to increase:

God's justice and God’s peace.

- traditional Dutch Anabaptist hymn 

A Blessing Ritual

Arriving at Eastside, a recent church plant that meets at the Smithland Middle School, I joined some 3-400 mostly younger people, many of them JMU students, singing and celebrating their oneness as believers. Even they, casual and with few of the formalities of traditional worship services, have their own forms of ritual and order.

Yesterday one of their pastors, Matt Swartz, was ordained, a ritual that has its roots in the concept of "ordering", acknowledging that some form of designated leadership is necessary for a stable community. District overseer Roy Hange led that part of the service, emphasizing the need for serving humbly and from the position of a servant of the people. In Hange's ordination blessing he was passing on to a leader of the next generation the responsibility of carrying on the church's best traditions and supporting its continuity.

Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—

not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be;  

not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve;  

not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.  

 All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because,

“God opposes the proud
    but shows favor to the humble.”

Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, 

that he may lift you up in due time.

- from I Peter 5 (NIV)

Belonging Rituals

Then at 4 pm yesterday our Family of Hope house church congregation met at Susan Campbell's home for our weekly worship and Bible study, with our traditional shared meal at six. We take turns hosting and teaching, and this Sunday Elly Nelson led us in an inspiring study of the lectionary texts for the week. This result is always more like a spiritual "carry-in" than having professionally prepared and catered fare, but the result is invariably nurturing and satisfying.

What a great culmination to a day of being blessed by a variety of church traditions and nourishing rituals--including, as always, good food and table fellowship together.

When you come together, each of you has a hymn, 

or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. 

Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.

- I Corinthians 14:16 (NIV)

(A house church paraphrase: "When you come together, each of you should also bring a salad, a casserole, a fruit or vegetable dish or a dessert to share!")

Reflections On Two Funerals

Beth-El, Harrisonburg

Yesterday at 11 am I attended the funeral and burial of Milton Perlman, a long time member of the Beth-El congregation in Harrisonburg. At 1:30 I was at a similar service for Irvin Koogler, a lifelong member at the Pleasant View Old Order Mennonite Church near Dayton.

One would expect a Reformed Jewish memorial service and that of a very conservative Mennonite congregation to be a study in contrast. But I found surprising similarities.

An Old Order graveside service

While the Older Order service was attended by hundreds rather than dozens of people, both involved many fellow members of the congregation and community who were not blood relatives. There was a sense of group identity and a shared faith that each of these minority groups celebrated, one that went far beyond family ties. There was also a community meal provided afterwards for mourners in each of the congregations. 

Both services were solemn and traditional in their own ways, and each included praise as well as lament, hopefulness as well as grieving. But the most notable similarities had to do with their burial rituals.

In each case the casket was of very plain wooden design. At the Beth-El cemetery, the coffin was laid in the grave without any protective vault, and as the rabbi read and sang words from the Hebrew Bible, friends and family members, by turn, each took a spade full of raw earth to cover the remains of their loved one. There was no attempt to shield mourners from the reality of physical decay, of dust returning to dust, earth to earth.

The Mennonites did use a simple wooden vault, also very subject to decay, and members likewise took turns covering the grave, surrounded by several hundred attenders singing songs of hope and resurrection--in four-part harmony--as they did so.

Needless to say, I was moved by these expressions of faith, hope and love. Though it may seem that the two faith traditions are worlds apart, and the deceased very different from each other--one a JMU professor and the other a poultry and dairy farmer--in death we are all laid to rest in common ground.

May the earth be soft under you when you rest upon it,
tired at the end of the day.

May the earth rest easy over you when at the last you lie under it.

May the earth rest so lightly over you
that your spirit may be out from under it quickly,
and up, and off, and on its way to God.

from An Irish Blessing, a Photographic Interpretation, by Cyil A. and Renee Travis Reilly

An Appeal From Buckingham Prison

Buckingham Correctional Center

This is a part of a statement I received recently from Charles E. Zellers, Sr., currently at the Buckingham Correctional Center. He is among those who were incarcerated before parole was abolished in Virginia in 1995:

Virginia still houses prisoners who are parole eligible who have been repeatedly turned down for parole for from twenty to fifty years. As of this writing all parole eligible inmates have been away from their loved ones for at least nineteen years.

Virginia's Department of Corrections is holding about 4000 men and women in prison simply because the Parole Board will not give these prisoners a second chance, even though the only reason to hold them is to punish them and to keep the prison system at full capacity.
Many of those who are parole eligible are model prisoners and are first time offenders. The Board is keeping prisoners who are suffering mental and physical conditions deteriorating their lives and making it extremely hard for them to obtain gainful employment at an older age.

As prisoners grow older, the cost of their medical care increases dramatically. Virginia has a conditional release law for “geriatric” prisoners who are sixty years or older and have served at least ten years, or 65 or older and have served at least five years of their incarceration. Yet the Board is still not releasing prisoners unless they are near death. Virginia has the lowest parole grant rate in the entire nation!

Virginia also houses prisoners from foreign countries, mostly Hispanic and Asian, who are suitable for release and deportation, thus relieving the state of another monetary burden, yet all too often these, too, are systematically denied extradition.

Think of the money that could be saved and spent on schools and other projects if we stopped having the taxpayer pay for unnecessarily long prison stays. The total cost to incarcerate an average daily population of approximately 38,000 is $748.6 million, of which 4.8 % is from costs outside the corrections budget.

Please contact your lawmakers, the Governor’s office and news media to help correct the injustices created by the Parole Board and the current corrections system.

Charles E. Zellers, Sr., 1036758
Buckingham Correctional Center, B1-113-B
Box 430, 
Dillwyn, VA 23938

Every Cash Register is a Polling Booth

Harrisonburg Farmers Market

"Deciding we won't drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers' market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in the eye of the industries that control us. Every act of refusal is also an act of assent. Every time we way no to consumer culture, we say yes to something more beautiful and sustaining. Life is not something we go through or that happens to us; it's something we create by our own decisions."

- Kathleen Dean Moore, If Your House Is On Fire

When it comes to making all of my purchases in light of my professed values, I still have a long way to go. Too often I am lured into simply buying what or where things are the least expensive. But I realize that every purchase is also a vote in favor of the kind of causes, people and policies I really want to support. Do I want to invest in more family-run enterprises or in Wall Street-related corporate ones? Do I want to support more locally produced (native) foods and other products or more of those imported from long distances (exotic ones)? Do I choose to support businesses that pay fair wages or those that exploit workers?

I wrote this little limerick some time ago:

Instead of our shopping at mall-marts,
and thus lend support to more sprawl-marts,
      Let's choose Red Front, local shops,
      The Little Grill and Friendly City Co-ops,
And shun box store chains like our Wal-marts.

As Justin Shull writes in a 1/14/14 Daily News-Record op-ed piece: 

"Our culture is focused on more for less. Most advertisements focus on providing the consumer with a greater quantity of a product for a lower price. There is, however, no mention of quality. Let’s say you spend $40 at a chain restaurant a week. A significant portion of that $40 is outsourced to major corporations from distant states (or countries) whose food is of a lower quality and whose employees may be severely under-compensated. The food and agriculture industries are a great example of the centralized power problem. By outsourcing our spending to large, distant corporations, we are personally dismantling our local economies.

"This may seem like a lofty ideal. It is well known that buying American-made products is more expensive. However, if we could withdraw our more-for-less attitudes and redirect even a portion of our spending into our struggling local economies, the politicians and their corporate counterparts would listen. Shifting these attitudes could lead to an economic Renaissance. Also, we could avoid the malignancies of our current super-capitalist system: unhealthy people and communities. It is time to regain control of our political system through our collective purchasing power."  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

"Strawberries were too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones bruised at even too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten--every piece of fruit--had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone's knees, someones aching back and hips, someone with a bandana on her wrist to wipe away the seat. Why had no one told her that before?"

- Alison Lauterman, What We Came For

CCT Issues Historic Statement Against Mass Incarceration

from CCT website

The following is a part of a 2/7/14 statement by Christian Churches Together, a broad coalition of Christian leaders in the United States, including historic Protestant, Evangelical/Pentecostal, Catholic, Orthodox, and historic Black Churches. This was released after their February 4-7, 2014, meeting at Newark, New Jersey.

For the past six years, CCT has educated itself and taken action on issues of poverty, racial justice, and immigration reform. This year, the group furthered its commitment to these issues by engaging the issue of mass incarceration in the U.S.

The message was clear from speakers that included formerly incarcerated faith leaders, a federal judge, a former prosecutor, a director of state corrections and a social worker, as well as the deliberation among CCT participants: Mass Incarceration is not just an issue. It is first and foremost about people created in God’s image with lives, families, hopes, and dreams ensnared within a web of personal struggles and choices exacerbated by social conditions, laws, structures, and historic dehumanization of people of color.

Mass incarceration is a destructive system of human control where certain ethnic minorities experience inequitable interaction with the nation’s penal system. Current realities include:

• With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S has 25 percent of the world’s imprisoned people. (The Sentencing Project)

• Incarceration rates have increased from 500,000 inmates in jail and prison in 1980 to more than 2.2 million in 2010. (The Sentencing Project)

• For-profit prison companies commonly demand 90 percent occupancy from the states that contract with them. (6 Shocking Revelations about how private prisons make money, by April M. Short on Salon.com)

• CCA and Geo Group, the nation’s two major private prison companies, “have had a hand in shaping and pushing for criminal justice policies such as mandatory minimum sentences that favor increased incarceration.” (In the Public Interest Report, September 2013)

• The “War on Drugs” dramatically increased the U.S. prison population from 41,000 drug offenders in 1980 to half a million in 2010. (The Sentencing Project)

• African Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population and use drugs at the same rates as people of other races, but represent 45 percent of those imprisoned for drug violations. (Drug Policy Alliance Report)

• Criminal prosecutions of immigration suspects in federal court districts along the U.S. southern border have increased by 1,475 percent over the last 20 years resulting in increased demand for prisons and detention centers to hold inmates (War on Undocumented Immigrants Threatens to Swell U.S. Prison Population, by Chris Kirkham on Huffington Post and TRAC Reports)

• 1 in 3 Black men and 1 in 6 Latino men are likely to be imprisoned in their lifetime. Only 1 in 17 white men will experience the inside of a jail or prison in his lifetime. (The Sentencing Project)

In light of these facts and others corroborated by the personal testimonies of several speakers, agreement among CCT’s leaders was palpable. The group declared: The church in the United States has a moral and ethical imperative to protect human dignity and must address the problem of mass incarceration in our nation.

First, we recognize that the legacy of the dehumanization of people of color has borne lasting effects in current-day society. These effects are perhaps most acutely experienced by our African-American brothers and sisters who were deemed non-human, “chattel,” by law in the days of antebellum slavery and whose human equality was challenged by the Jim Crow system of subjugation until passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 attempted to right it. We see the vestiges of these systems of human control in America’s current system of mass incarceration.

Second, we recognize that these systems are not only affecting African-Americans. They are now impacting all people of color, the poor, the marginalized, and the immigrant in the United States. Latinos and other immigrants, in particular, are experiencing the brunt of increased detention rates in the midst of their struggle for immigration reform.

Third, while there is a role for prisons to address violent offenses, we recognize that our nation’s justice system has lost the hope embodied by its historic vision to “correct” and restore broken people back to society. As followers of Jesus Christ, we believe in the redemption and reconciliation of all things, rather than retribution. This includes the prisoner and broken systems. This is the essence of the gospel.

As Christian leaders, CCT declared: “Mass incarceration must stop. We are challenging ourselves together with government and the nation to seize this moment when multiple forces are aligning toward positive action to correct the injustices within our ‘justice’ system.”

CCT in the U.S.A. is encouraging its member denominations and organizations to increase awareness, educate, and take action to oppose mass incarceration in the public square. CCT also committed to developing guiding principles for the Church in its efforts.

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