Book on Tranformation in Prison • Prospectus • Book Summary • Chapter 3   *** Chapter Three: Learning by Going Inside I decided to raise money for my own salary and start a parochial mission out of the Church of the Holy Trinity on East 88th Street. A parochial mission is a new parish initiated by another parish; it is not permitted by the Episcopal Church simply to start a parish on your own. The Rev. Clarke Oler was rector there, and I will be forever thankful that he was willing to take me under his canonical wing so I could move to East Harlem, fifteen blocks north of the mother church, and continue with what I wanted to do.     In the early 1960s drugs were overrunning New York City, and especially Harlem. Everything about drugs exacerbated the poverty and racism that already plagued that part of the city. I had seen drug addicts staggering around the streets of the Lower East Side, lost in a maze that seemed even deeper than that suffered by alcoholics. The newspapers continually talked about the drug epidemic; hospitals, police precincts, courts and prisons were faced with a rising tide that threatened all their regular work. But here, in the ghetto, the plague was truly pandemic. I was tantalized by the seeming ease of the solution: get people off drugs, and everything would be all right. I was hardly alone in this belief.     At first we talked about opening a regular storefront ministry that would reach out to anyone in the neighborhood, and bring in addicts that way. There would be an emphasis on helping men just released from prison, to connect them with jobs and to offer them a support community.     In the process of making these plans, Clarke and I recognized that it would give me more of a supportive framework to join the East Harlem Protestant Parish (EHPP), a group of clergy from various denominations who agreed that none of the staff, including themselves, would receive more than the average wage of those working in the community.     The EHPP had been started soon after World War II by Rev. George W. (Bill) Webber and Rev. Norm Eddy, clergymen with the idealism and determination of my mentor, Bishop Moore. They offered a ministry that strengthened individuals spiritually; but even more, they were politically involved in the community, trying to improve schools, housing and employment opportunities. Tackling the drug monster was a big part of the ministry.     The assistant directorship of the EHPP Narcotics Committee was offered to me. The Rev. Lynn Hageman, a Dutch Reformed minister, was the director of the office, on 103rd Street between First and Second Avenues. The program at that time was largely religious: pastoral counseling, Bible study and prayer. Lynn was a real scholar, a weight lifter with a huge chest and arms, and a strong interest in Karl Marx. In the little office on Sunday mornings we held Bible study with all the recovering addicts, followed by Holy Communion.     First a passage was read from the Bible and then "the guys" - there were no women yet - would retell the passage in the hip lingo of the day. The story of the life of David was especially rich, since it had plenty of sex and violence. "So David peeped this broad, Bathsheba, naked on a roof and he really dug her. But first he had to figure out how to off her husband, Uriah ... "     It was January 1964. I had $10,000 for two years' salary. I found an apartment on the 5th floor of a tenement and moved in with my wife, daughter and son, who were then four and two. Our neighbors were friendly. I took up layers of linoleum from the floor, built a double bunk for my children, made a new top to cover the bathtub in the kitchen-living room-bedroom, and we were ready for our new adventure.     As part of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, I worked with others to start a rehabilitation center called Exodus House, named as a reference to faithful people going out of slavery into the wilderness, seeking the promised land. We emphasized the troubles of wandering in the wilderness as we discovered the challenges of simply leaving the slavery to drugs. We all agreed quickly on the name as having great meaning for us --but looking back, we underestimated the challenges of the wilderness, for there was no promised land free of trouble. Robert M. Pennoyer, first Chairman of our board, helped raise money from foundations and individuals-$400,000- to build a handsome, modern four-story building with rooms for ex-addicts and classrooms. In those days there were many fewer hurdles like environmental permits and community approvals, and private money was easier to raise for this new problem. We just raised the money, built the building, and opened up. It has since become the East Harlem School, and continues to offer a way out of the troubles of East Harlem.     In the 1960's many of us were chasing a receding horizon: "sufficiency of care," which we believed would turn ghetto addicts into taxpaying citizens. Once we got someone off drugs, we believed, getting them a job would be enough. So we found them jobs. But often they failed to go to the interview and actually take the job. And if they went, they did not stay. Soon, more often than not, they were on drugs again, breaking into cars, mugging people and burglarizing apartments to support their habit. In other words, on their way back to jail. It quickly became clear to me that a lot more was necessary.     That was when I visited a program run by psychiatrist Dr. Efren Ramirez in Puerto Rico, and was much impressed by his sophisticated concept of "stages" of rehabilitation. Addicts came in for detoxification and lived in Phase One, dressed in diapers (literally) to emphasize that they were babies--focused only on themselves, psychologically very needy. The diapers also helped prevent AWOL departures. Now these practices are long discontinued and they have disturbing echoes in the scandals of the United States prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, though the residents in Puerto Rico were voluntary. They moved on up to intermediate stages, taking a year or two to become "grown up." The whole structure of the undertaking acknowledged that there was no fast track to curing drug addiction. Other agencies that later became big names in the field, including Synanon and Daytop, were coming to similar formulations at the same time, though minus the diapers.     It seemed clear to the board and staff of Exodus House that there was no quick fix; it had to be a process. Without process, we were aping the problem exhibited by addicts themselves, by seeking a simple, speedy exit from complex problems. So we tried to implement our own version of the Dr. Efren Ramirez process.     After a year, we stopped fruitlessly sending men who were not ready out on jobs, and insisted that they first have a period in a sheltered workshop, which included group discussions. I started a woodworking shop (stretching for one of my own earlier dreams, to be a cabinetmaker). I found commissions through friends, enough to keep us working. I did not have the level of skills actually to run the place, so I was fortunate to recruit Jay Wenk, a superb craftsman and a thoughtful, caring man, who was a freelance cabinet maker. The shop, we decided, was there to teach the process of building something as well as the woodworking skills involved in creating cabinets and shelves. We were teaching a trade, but more important, we taught good work habits: coming on time, showing respect for co-workers, and understanding the basics of running a legal business.     One of the most colorful characters in the shop was known as Cholo, at twenty-four a relatively young member. We were making one of our more expensive pieces, a cherry kitchen cabinet, for the actress Barbara Barrie, then famous for her role in the movie, "One Potato, Two Potato." To install the shelves under the counter, we cut grooves, and all was going well until Cholo realized he had put in one of the center dividers upside down, so the shelves could not connect. In his distress he literally fell over flat on his back into the sawdust of the shop floor, as if he had passed out. When I told him that we could fix the problem, he did not believe me. Then we started the actual process of filling the wrong cuts with splints and cutting new grooves with a router. Cholo was amazed. We all talked about it later. Virtually everyone in the shop said that they had almost no experience of "fixing" a mistake. For them, a fix was a shot of heroin to transport them away from the problem. Finding a physical way of solving a problem was a new experience - one I hoped could be repeated. The very concept of “process” was a revelation to them and it was a pleasure to watch them get it. That was what we were there for.     But we ourselves still had a lot to learn. The day for delivering the cherry cabinet arrived, and I suggested that all six of the men then in the group help deliver it. I assumed that they would like to see the cabinet in the place it was designed to fill, and that they would be proud to show off their work to Barbara Barrie, who was then appearing in TV shows like "Dr. Kildare." But not one single man came to work that day!     Maybe they could not manage success at that level. Maybe they were reluctant to part with something on which they had worked so hard. In any case, I knew I did not have everything figured out. I took a picture of the cabinet, resting it on top of the row of garbage cans outside the workshop on 103rd Street, even though it was not surrounded by the smiling faces of those who had made it. I delivered the cabinet with a couple of new recruits.     So when Mary Lindsay, the wife of Mayor John Lindsay, commissioned a walnut corner shelf, I made sure that the men and I had long talks about the feelings of parting with a beautiful treasure, of feeling proud of having made it and believing that we had a right to be visiting in Gracie Mansion where New York's mayors dwell. This time, everyone showed up to deliver that handsome piece, and Mary Lindsay served tea and cookies, chatting comfortably with our tongue-tied group as if she offered tea every day to ex-convict drug addicts.     Tony Rodriguez was another person who taught me a memorable lesson. We were having a group session one afternoon and he was silent, obviously upset. When pressed, he pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and said, "I saved all this money, $63, and I am supposed to give it to my landlord. All my life, some woman paid the rent, my mother or some other woman. I worked hard for this money." He had. He was a good worker. "I can't see just giving the man this money. I only live there! He doesn't do anything for me!" Tony had a little gray hair and he was not as stupid as these remarks made him seem. It was not intelligence he was lacking; it was experience. No one had ever succeeded in making clear to him how the world of housing worked. We got through only by saying that some day he might save enough money to buy a building with a down payment and use the rents to pay the mortgage. Finally he said, "No sonofabitch better try to beat me for my rent!" Then he laughed at himself.     Part of the work at the office on 103rd Street included visiting the prisons upstate, which I started doing in 1964. After Rikers Island, I was entering a completely different prison world.     Rikers was a place of perpetual transition. Prisoners there always had their eye on the door because technically, Rikers was not a prison, but a jail- a place where people were held pending trial, or serving out misdemeanor sentences of less than a year. If they were waiting for trial, there was always a chance they'd get off; if they were serving time, they knew for sure they would be out in a matter of months. Consequently, they were not able to be attentive to each other in a group setting.     State prison was something else. People there were doing five, ten, twenty, twenty-five years. This was serious. Yet when I met inmates doing real time, I was struck by their sense of humor and their loyalty to their families. They no longer had their eye on the door as they had on Riker's Island. They were not under the influence of drugs or drink, and had not been for some time. They looked a lot healthier than the guys at Rikers, because they were. For many months or years they had been eating and sleeping with some regularity and had at least minimum medical care.     But I had begun to realize that these same men seemed to vanish once they were released back to the City. Like leaves dropped near a whirlpool, they were quickly swept back into the downward spiral, and they returned to drugs. They seemed quickly to give up on the possibility of achieving a sober, crime-free life. They often showed up at the Narcotics Committee of the East Harlem Protestant Parish - after a new crime, arrest, incarceration and release. Then, soon enough, they would disappear into the whirlpool once again. I was shocked and baffled that anyone who had unearthed such treasure buried inside him while in prison would throw it away as soon as he was free.     When the men I had enjoyed visiting in prison fell to the distractions and temptations of the street, people said to me, "I'm glad you're finding out what they're really like." They meant, of course, that they were really only junkies, and the serious, earnest way they had seemed in prison was a con game. I chose to believe the reverse: it was in prison that those men were showing their real selves. There, they could be their best. Outside, utterly crushed by temptation, they fell to pieces.     I began doing a regular circuit: I would start at Sing Sing, travel north to Coxsackie, Comstock, Clinton, then west to Attica, turn back east to Elmira, Eastern, and Green Haven, seeing half a dozen men at each stop. It would take several days before I headed home.     Sing Sing, less than an hour out of New York City, had been built with stone quarried on site. Overlooking the Hudson River from a bluff, it was shaking with all the violence of an old-time James Cagney movie. Its famous Yard and four-tiered cell blocks constituted the set for a constantly unfolding drama of pain and despair. Guards beat inmates; inmates sometimes attacked and killed other inmates; some inmates committed suicide.     On my first visit, holding the list of prisoners who were known to us in our little East Harlem office (husbands and sons of people in the neighborhood), I entered Sing Sing. The hundred and thirty years of history fairly dripped from the walls. The visiting room was immediately on the right after entering the big gate, so it was not as oppressive in its first impression as some that would come later. I visited the list of prisoners in the old visiting room, which you entered through a low swinging gate. Inmates came into a U-shaped area to approach their visitors, who were waiting on the other side of a wire mesh barrier. A table separated them further, and neither prisoner nor visitor was allowed to touch each other through the mesh, under threat of losing the visit.     I vividly remember one inmate concluding a visit with his wife, then going to the low door. We were the only ones in the visiting room. The officer looked the other way as they kissed each other. I remember her brightly colored silky dress as the kiss continued for a long time, each of them squirming with longing. Finally the officer cleared his throat and they parted with difficulty, touching fingers as long as possible before they staggered to their respective exits.     That kind of unspoken understanding between officer and prisoner in Sing Sing impressed me because it seemed as if it would have been impossible at Rikers Island. Prisoners did not stay at Rikers long enough for officers to get to know them. At Sing Sing the prisoner clearly knew he was getting a break and should not push the limits. I was in an entirely different kind of institution here- slower, more intense. Life was deeper. I was eager to learn more about this new, complicated world.     The next stop as I continued on north was Comstock, its stone walls breaking the softness of the rolling hills. It was a shock, and still is today, to drive through the gentle, soft landscape of upstate New York and come upon the outcropping of concrete which is the prison. Then and now I have the impulse to pray, "God have mercy on them all: prisoners and staff, locked in together. Help them to a new place of peace where they can really see each other and feel close to You."     Comstock housed only young prisoners, up to twenty-five years of age, and had a reputation for being particularly tough. There were frequent confrontations between Officers and staff, since the youngest inmates were the most likely to rush into fights.     Even then, there were stories about the Gladiators at Comstock, a group of Officers who would challenge an inmate to fight with fists. They would go to the basement and one of them would strip to the waist to fight the prisoner. If the prisoner chose not to fight, he would still be beaten up by the Officers. If he fought and won, he would then be beaten up by the Officers. There were variations on that theme, but it was a tale retold for decades, a sad, long chapter in the book of macho mania. Bones were broken; prisoners were killed. This was partly about sadistic revenge, fueled by public acceptance of the belief that prison should be hell. There was little thought about the consequences when prisoners are released other than to “hope they learned their lesson.”     I should not have been surprised by the Warden at Comstock, John Conboy. I had written to him, requesting permission to visit and including my list of inmates (those known to us at the EHPP Narcotics Office). I was a little late because I had remained longer than expected at Sing Sing. It had been hard to break off interviews at twenty minutes each. The Officer at the Comstock gate told me the Warden had left word for me to go to see him when I arrived.     When I walked into his office, I extended my hand, but he just glowered. "Sit down," he shouted. I sat down. "Who the hell do you think you are?"     "I'm Stephen ... "     "I know what the hell your name is!”     "I realize I'm late and ... "     "You're goddam right, you're late! Do you think we are here to wait on you?!"     "No sir. I'm ready to stay over and come back tomorrow."     "This is a fucking tough place to run and I don't need jerks floating in from New York City to make my life more complicated."     "Yes sir, I understand, so I'll wait."     "You're goddam right you'll wait, maybe forever!"     "Yes, sir. 1 realize I'm here only if you ... "     "I don't know what the hell good you think you're doing visiting this human garbage in here. They aren't worth the powder it would take to blow them all to hell!"  He was standing, glaring at me, waving his arms.     "Their mothers, sir, have given me ..... "     "I don't think they have mothers, these sons of bitches, and you make me as sick as they do!" I started to get up.             "Sit down! I didn't give you permission to leave!"     "Yes, sir." I sat back down.     "You call yourself a minister."     " Yes, sir."     "What about all the good people you're supposed to be taking care of? What are they supposed to do while you're here wiping the asses of these rotten guys?"     "Sir, it's part of my job to ... "     "I don't want to hear your bullshit." I remained silent and let him go on talking. Slowly, he calmed down. Then, suddenly he said, "OK, you can see your list. Get the hell out of my office."     What had just happened? Did he need to determine if I would be sufficiently obsequious, or did he just need some personal ventilation while the 3:00 shift settled in and was able to pull out the inmates on my list? Maybe it was a visitor's version of the "greetin' beatin," then still being given as a warning to some prisoners tagged as troublemakers when they arrived on the bus handcuffed and shackled from another institution. The beating would be concluded with a warning: "That's for doing nothing. Don't find out what happens for doing something!"     After that first visit Warden Conboy always asked to see me when I came to Comstock, and he never duplicated the invective of the first visit. But he remained an angry man. He apparently operated on the philosophy that it was better to have inmates and staff more frightened of him than of each other. In some ways, it is a sound philosophy - but only if the person at the top is reasonably sound himself.     One of the inmates I got to see on that first visit was William Eldridge. We had his name because he had come by our East Harlem office occasionally. He had not seemed seriously addicted but he had been using drugs when he was arrested. He often seemed to be homeless. He was only nineteen, slim, short, with huge brown eyes, and he spoke so softly that I had a little trouble hearing him. He reminded me of a deer looking up from grazing. Like almost all of the prisoners, he seemed very glad to see me, eagerly poking his fingers through the wire mesh to approximate a handshake (as I said, those rules weren't always enforced). He asked anxiously about his mother. Unfortunately, I had no news of her. We talked about East Harlem and I asked how he was making it inside. I was anxious for him because he seemed to me to fit the stereotype of someone who might be raped in prison. But he said he was "doing OK" and seemed to mean it. It seemed inconceivable that this person would be capable of committing a felony. Finally, I said, "I don't usually ask guys about their crime of conviction, but it seems hard to imagine you committing any crime."     He looked down shyly and said, "I never was in trouble before." He hesitated and then said, "Homicide." He sighed heavily, put his hands together and went on, "I was in a bar. I hadn't even had anything to drink ... A guy called my mother a whore ... I got mad and said he shouldn't say that. He asked if I was going to stop him. He was a big guy, but I was ready to ... another guy slid a gun down the bar to me. I never had a gun in my hand before. I grabbed the gun and shot him dead." He looked down sadly. He didn't say  anything that conveyed the wish that he was expecting me to do anything to reduce his sentence: twenty-five years to life, the longest possible. He had made a full confession and had presented no mitigating circumstances to the judge. I later learned the sad truth: his mother was using drugs, and probably was a whore, at least part time, to support her habit. William's anger surely came from the simple, helpless shame at being confronted with the truth. He had no father in his life and no other family, so it would have taken way above-average courage and resourcefulness for him to make a life on the streets, never mind shrug off insults like that. I was sad when our time was up. I knew of no clear road for the Williams of the world to follow.     As I got in my car to drive on to Coxsackie, I could not stop thinking about William. It seemed a terrible waste to send such a gentle, lost young man to prison for twenty-five years. Ironically, I thought maybe he had a chance at life, not in spite of the fact that he was in prison, but because he was there, since life had been so cruel to him in the streets.     In Coxsackie, I met a young man named Tyrone, sentenced to five years for armed robbery. He was soft-spoken and, I thought, of below average intelligence - and he made perfect sense as we talked mostly about how bad he felt at having let his mother down. He made no excuses about the armed robbery he had committed, but the road to that robbery was similar to those I heard about many times in the years that followed. Tyrone had been struggling to stay in school, trying to please his mother and graduate from high school. He was having trouble because he needed extra academic help, and the school could not provide it. One evening at dusk he was standing with others on a street corner. An unmarked police car pulled up. Everyone ran, or tried to, except Tyrone. "I wasn't doing nothing bad," he said. According to him, one of the others dropped a couple of bags of heroin before he ran. The police took Tyrone and one other young man to the station house and slapped them around, trying to get the names of the other boys. Tyrone refused to cooperate and vehemently denied to them, as he did to me, that the heroin was his.     The district attorney had offered him a bargain. If he wanted to plead guilty to the lowest level felony - attempted possession of a controlled substance - the DA would ask for two years' probation and Tyrone would never have to go to jail. Tyrone did not know what any of it meant, but he thought he understood the part about not going to jail. Legal Aid was as overworked then as it is today so no one really explained, in a way he could understand, that he was making a devil’s bargain. Tyrone took it. He pleaded guilty and was sent to jail because he would not give up the names of the others.     Tyrone now had a felony record. He went back to school, but the principal gave him a hard time about his record. He dropped out and tried to get a job, but that record haunted him. Then he fell in love, and got in real trouble. His  girlfriend wanted to go some place nice on a date. That cost money Tyrone did not have, and would not get in the normal course of his life. So he borrowed a gun, and tried to rob a gas station. He was caught.     From what I could see, it all might possibly have been avoided by a little more help at school and good legal advice at the very first arrest. Racial profiling hurts most when the first "crime" is not a crime, and the plea bargain leads to the second crime, which then is a real one. Tyrone's story is familiar: guilty of the crime of conviction, but innocent of the "crime" that got him started.     Next came Clinton prison in Dannemora, New York, near the Canadian border, a visually dramatic location. Nicknamed "Little Siberia," the prison is in the heart of the small town, its enormous wall running for half a mile along Main Street. The entrance through that wall leads to a long walkway to the prison itself. That entrance has always had a reputation as a "tough gate," meaning that there they go by the book. It was a time before metal detectors, so I got a serious frisk, all pockets opened out, shoes off and shaken, shirt pulled out. I had tried to arrive an hour before the appointed time to allow for those procedures. I was finally put into a room by myself, an "attorney's room" as contrasted with the regular visiting room. So there was no bulletproof glass, no telephone or wire mesh. It was a good feeling to be able to sit and talk without too much to remind us of prison.     The inmate there I most strongly remember, Cedric Harrington, was striking in both size and intelligence. He was 6'7", physically fit, had dark skin and wore steel-rim glasses that looked as if he had made them himself. He had been "away" for four years and his family had stopped writing and visiting. As I sat, wondering what to say, he leaned forward and asked the most utterly unexpected question. "Father Chinlund, have you, by chance, read any S.I. Hayakawa?" His cultured voice and grave, direct gaze communicated immediately that he was serious.     By sheer coincidence, I actually had read enough Hayakawa in the not too distant past to be able to hold up my end of a conversation about the philosophy of language. This clearly delighted him. When we had to part, he shook my hand warmly as he thanked me for coming and said, "Father Chinlund, I cannot find words to say how much this human conversation has meant to me."     As I drove away I discovered those words coming back to me, and I reflected on what they implied. Cedric believed that he had no one with whom he could have a human conversation. But other inmates I had seen also seemed to me men who would have been grateful to have a human conversation. Their language was devoid of profanity or even rough talk (though it was clear that at least sometimes they were deferring to me because of my clerical collar). Now I was driving away, and it would be three months before my next visit. Why could those men not somehow all meet together and have human conversation?     Some others must be isolating themselves like Cedric, I thought, and reading books in every minute of free time---not in itself a bad choice. Others were probably just joining in the endless banter about past injustices, current complaints and engaging in random macho bravado. This kind of talk seemed to have a generally corrosive effect, since there was rarely any constructive dimension to it. I thought that if they could only have human conversation, they could be freer for a time, lifted out of the pain of the always-present fact of being in prison. Just listening to them had been mysteriously uplifting to me. I felt strongly that I was where I was supposed to be.     The shape of my work in prison was slowly beginning to take a more realistic frame. The men I had met inside appeared quiet and centered to the point that it was easy to imagine them being helpful to each other. They were respectful toward me - but I was sure that they would be more lively, honest and usefully tough in a group of their peers. It made sense to organize group discussions just as we had at our sheltered workshop, but at that time there were no such groups in prison, except for a few AA and Gamblers Anonymous meetings. If I wanted any such thing to happen, I would have to get groups going myself.     I decided to try at Green Haven, a maximum-security institution in Stormville, a little town an hour and a half north of New York City. It was much closer than either Clinton or Attica- eight hours north and west, respectively--and there were half a dozen inmates on our East Harlem Protestant Parish list at Green Haven.     On previous visits, I had met with the Warden, Harold Follette, on my way in and on my way out. I had sat in his huge office (now divided and again divided, into small cubicles) as he probed my purpose in coming, asked if there was anything that I discovered that he should know, and asked if I had any ideas to share. He weighed over three hundred pounds, and his balding head was buzz cut. At the time, I did not know his background and was later glad I did not, because I would have found it challending to work with him.     Follette had a reputation for being vicious. He had been the Principal Keeper, otherwise known as Deputy Warden, at Dannemora, and the prisoners were aware of his ferocious actions. In fact, when he arrived at Green Haven they went on strike by staying in their cells in the hope that they might somehow make him go away.     An inmate strike is a serious matter. The longer it lasts, the harder it is to end it. There is no mess hall; garbage piles up; tension fester. To break a strike, Follette chose the only method he knew: brutality. He had the officers form a gauntlet on each side of the corridor on one cell block. Then they pulled the inmates out of their cells one by one, forced them to strip and made them crawl naked down the line oinking like pigs, as the officers beat them with night-sticks. Then the officers went to the next block, and threatened the same treatment. The strike ended. Though I did not hear this story until after Follette died, it was not hard to believe.     But I did not know that then. Follette seemed to trust me and was intrigued by the new, but escalating problem of drug abuse. Since I saw him before and after each set of individual visits in Green Haven,  I had the opportunity to raise the question of meeting in groups in the normal course of conversation. It was better than trying to negotiate through a formal letter, which would surely have elicited a formal rejection.     In those days, there was much anxiety that inmates would hatch plots to escape or to take over the prison - a fear that continues to this day, but which is handled in more sophisticated ways. Inmates were not allowed to speak to each other except in the yard and from cell to cell when they were locked up. They were required to be absolutely silent in the corridors. They walked single file, on the right side of a yellow line. The yellow lines are still there, but silence is no longer imposed. In the few basic education classes that were held, inmates could speak only to the teacher. Group discussion of any kind was viewed as dangerous.     However, I was by then going once a week to Green Haven and had had several conversations with Follette. I proposed that I be allowed to meet with several inmates at a time. He said that we would have to have an Officer present during all the meetings. I readily agreed. He said he would check out my list of prisoners to see if there were any "trouble-makers." Again, I agreed. To my surprise, Follette then said I could proceed with the group meetings, but first, he insisted I get permission from the Commissioner himself.     Commissioner Paul McGinnis was like many of the wardens: a gruff man given to quick, harsh judgments. Once while I was in his office he took a call from his deputy, and talked with him about what to do with a prisoner who had hidden a very small tin can up his rectum, which could not be retrieved. Could he be transferred to the prison hospital? He laughed as he ordered that the can be removed as best it could. Presumably the inmate had inserted it with drugs inside, brought by a visitor. If his rectum went into spasm, removing it without hospitalization would cause tearing in the rectum, and possibly lead to infection or blood poisoning. But the Commissioner was unmoved, laughing during the brief conversation. I struggled to control myself from challenging his pointless brutality.     On this visit I simply told McGinnis that I thought the groups were beneficial, that an Officer would always be present; and that Follette had approved. McGinnis was sizing me up. He apparently decided I was not a bleeding heart and approved my request. Just that was a huge concession. But then I had to go back to him in later months to get successive approvals: first because I wanted people who had been in prison to come back inside to participate; then for someone still on parole to come inside; and finally again to get permission for people who had been in prison to lead groups alone - the only way we could involve sizable numbers of inmates.     Each of these moves, going up another notch in the level of perceived risk, was an adventure. I always feared that I was asking too much too soon. I was anxious that McGinnis would grow weary of my importuning and in a fit of pique, roll the program back, or abolish it altogether.     During one appointment, before I could speak, he threw in my lap a copy of an anti-Vietnam War pamphlet called The Seven Last Words of Christ, featuring photographs of the ongoing conflict matched with the seven phrases of Jesus as he was dying on the cross. I particularly remember one photograph, then circulating around the world, of an American soldier seated on top of a huge tank, looking back at the body of a Vietnamese being dragged by a rope. The caption was: "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." I could feel myself flushing with anger and shame: I was sure McGinnis knew I was passionately opposed to the war, just as I knew he was a particular kind of devout Roman Catholic who thought people of my persuasion were cowards and traitors.     I turned the pages slowly, though I had seen the booklet before. I asked myself what would be the honest thing to do. I wanted with all my heart to work in the prisons. I felt called by God to be there, and I knew McGinnis would probably be Commissioner for years to come. I could not change his mind about the war, and if I drew a line in the sand I would be out the door, program eliminated, inmates abandoned by one more person trying to make a human connection. I also did not want to lie about my convictions. It was an issue I would face again and again with wardens and even Officers. I found myself handing back the pamphlet, looking him in the eye and saying, "That really is something!"  I had ducked. He hesitated and changed the subject.     The last time I saw him in his office, he had returned after an illness of several months. I shook his hand and said, "You certainly look fully recovered!" He twisted my arm until I was literally on the floor of the office on my knees in the doorway and he said, "I guess I am in good shape!" Much laughter. I saw him in the years after his retirement eating dinner in the local Howard Johnson's, first with his wife, then alone. He always greeted me warmly, always asked about the program. The last thing he said to me was, "The whole system's going to hell. No balls."     I still marvel that these tyrants acceded to my requests when they could just as easily have thrown me out. But they did agree, I believe, because even they had their own buried treasures. Deep down, they wanted to believe that they too had more gifts of mercy and fairness than they revealed on the surface. They were, in effect, prisoners too; I was giving them an opportunity to be good people for a moment.      Back then, the distinction between staff and inmates was even greater than it is today. There was a deep racial divide as all-white staff from rural upstate confronted an ever-higher proportion of minority prisoners from New York, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. I wanted to minimize this divide, and to emphasize the fact that we were all human with human problems that differed only in size and detail according to innumerable factors - an idea that strongly contradicted the prison culture of the time.     It was not until the 1980’s that there was serious and effective recruitment of minority staff, a profound change in the prison world I had entered two decades before. It was clear that prisoners felt safer with Officers of their own race. On a more subtle level, many white Officers began to make friends, for the first time in their lives, with non-white people. Back then, it was almost unthinkable: “Where would they live, out here in the country?” And “They would not feel comfortable, being African Americans on an all-white staff.”         I started running the group sessions at Green Haven in 1964. The plan was to continue indefinitely, as long as the program was useful. In the beginning I ran the group in an "open" way. We would start by my asking, "What's happening?" and members would just say whatever they wished. One inmate might say, "I haven't had any mail from home and I'm really pissed." Another would respond, "When was the last time you wrote to them?" Or, one might say, "I can't get into the school program." Another inmate might challenge him by asking how many slips he had put in to request school. But invariably this open-ended structure also brought an airing of problems that no one could do anything about. I began to shape the exchange by asking that they limit their "distress talk" to issues they themselves could address - not problems at the institution that were the business of the people running it. The warden made it clear that he would entertain no talk about such matters. I was there only to help prisoners deal with life as they found it, not to modify their surroundings.     Furthermore, Follette always said he would not allow me to meet without staff present. In a way, I was happy to agree. The Officer obviously reported on what happened to the Warden, but as far as I was concerned we were only talking about being human. That included the Officer, and his presence would only reinforce the truth that we are all human, even prisonm staff. Follette introduced me to Wayne Strack, a fine, young, by-the-book Officer who was perfect for the assignment. He participated in the groups in a minimal way, enough to be "in," but not so much as to attract the focus of the group to himself or to reveal too much about his personal life (which was quite conventional; he was a happy family man).     Limiting the scope of our conversations was excellent discipline because it insured that we would have sessions concerned with personal transformation rather than gripes, however legitimate the gripes may have been - and there were many legitimate gripes. One of many attempts I made to try to focus the conversation came out of inmates' feelings that they had no recourse but to fight if they were insulted. Some said that they were in prison right then because of violent acts arising from just such insults. So we talked together about the "trigger words" that would infuriate the prisoners and trap them into answering with their fists, or worse. The simple repetition of the trigger words in the group meetings seemed to reduce, a little, the power of the insults.     One inmate said that he was currently serving a long sentence because someone in the street had called him a "scumbag." He had tried to kill the man and came close to succeeding. I asked him, "Would you do the same thing again if someone used the same word?"     "I'm afraid I would."     "Would you be interested in whether everyone here defines the word the same way?"     "I guess so." Then followed a pathetic attempt at definition that boiled down to three possibilities: a douche bag; a bag in a toilet stall to be used for discarded sanitary napkins; and many said they really did not know what the word meant. No one laughed.     "How do you feel about spending years in prison because of your reaction to a word of uncertain meaning?"     "I feel bad."     "Do you think you could learn to react differently in the future?"     "I could try."     "How about trying right now?"     "OK, what do you mean?"     Then I made a big mistake. We were holding our meeting in a crowded multi-purpose room. Some inmates, including the one in question, were sitting on top of file cabinets. I thought we had talked about this particular trigger word long enough for it to be effectively defused, so I raised my voice and said "Scumbag!" to him. He leaped off the cabinet, heading straight for me. Other inmates instantly intervened and wrestled him to a standstill. No one was hurt. The man, trembling with rage, looked at me with confusion. His head was telling him that I was a friend, or at least a person trying to help him. His gut was telling him that I was someone who should be obliterated.     Once again, I had been much too quick to believe that profound feelings of self-contempt could be quickly and easily resolved. In prison there is an enormous need for people to be reminded every day of their own value as human beings. That reminder runs counter to a lifetime of contrary messages: "You're stupid. You're bad. You should never have been born. You're just like your father, and he's in jail where he belongs." And, of course, "Your mother's a whore." Any taunt ignites the flame of violence in the smoldering volcano of prison culture.     The ingrained belief that "I am bad" was evident in Dilly, another member of the Green Haven inmate group. He was an intelligent, articulate and high-strung inmate very involved in the life of the group. He remarked from time to time on ways he felt he was changing. One day he did not show up. I learned that he had been keep-locked, or confined to his cell as a punishment. When he returned to the group in two weeks, it was part of our routine for the inmate to explain what had happened. Dilly was disgusted. "I got busted for talking in line." His lip was still swollen and one eye was partly closed. "They gave me all this, too."     The group looked at me. I repeated the rule: "I cannot do anything about unjust use of force. Do any of you have anything you would like to ask or say to Dilly?" One man asked him who the officer was.     "Powell," Dilly replied.     Another said, as others chimed in, "Powell! You know he has as bad a reputation as any officer in the joint! Why you had to pull his chain talking in line?" Dilly looked down. Another inmate said, "Dilly, you've got as many old scars on your face as all the rest of us put together. Have you always looked for trouble?"     It was a beginning for Dilly to look at himself in a new way. A few weeks later he told the group that he wanted them to stop calling him Dilly, that his name was really Jonathan. It was a brutal way to learn the lesson, but I was glad he had a caring group to help him learn it instead of having people like Powell pound him deeper into the ground.       The group structure was composed of three levels, designed to address the men's different needs as they progressed. The lowest level, C, was for groups of twenty who had signed up requesting to participate and come off a waiting list. If they talked about their own personal issues and were able to listen to others, they were eligible for the next level, if they requested the promotion themselves. B Groups were smaller - eight to ten - the place where the real work was done. There was stability of membership in B Group, so the trust level grew strong. The A Group was for those nearing their release dates. They had different matters to discuss, having to do with jobs, residence and family on the outside. In retrospect, it might have been better to keep A Group and B Group together, so those remaining inside might have been even more motivated to get ready for release and the special problems that were coming.     In B Groups we tried to reach a new level of self-understanding, and I tried many ways of helping the men achieve that. One was a self-identification exercise. Each man around the circle would simply say "I am ... " and then complete the sentence (or paragraph) in any way he felt was honest.     Fred Clinkscales said, "I am a thief." He laughed nervously and stopped there. When I asked if there was anything more to him, he said, 'No. I'm only a thief. Been one all my life. Stole from my family when I was a kid. Then from sidewalk stores. Then burglaries. This is my third bit (third time in prison)." Another inmate said "Fred, you're also my friend." Fred agreed, but only with reluctance, to being both a thief and a friend. It was as if he was clinging to his familiar negative identity; it was all he knew. It amazed me that admitting anything else made it seem as if he was giving up something. It took me a long time to learn that he felt he was losing his freedom. As he was, he was free to be a bad dude. He liked being a bad dude. He was good at it. No one messed with him. Now, if he was also a friend, he might be weak, and vulnerable, and anyone might mess with him.     Fred helped me realize vividly the horror of committing street crimes for a living. He described waiting to mug people, standing in a doorway, saying to himself, "The next one that goes by is mine. Tall or short, thin or fat, black or white, male or female. If I wait and think about it, there is always some reason not to do it and then I'm still broke and still strung out..." He used to wait by a lamppost, or in a doorway to check out who was coming, but he said that the problem was that he had too much time to think. Often there was a reason not to jump the person, Fred said: "Looks too tough; looks like my sister; might be an undercover cop. So, I started waiting in a doorway and listened for the steps. That's when I said, 'This one is mine.' And I would jump." Another prisoner asked him: "How did it work for you?" "See where I am," said Fred. No one laughed.     Then he commented, "I'd still be doing it if I wasn't in prison. I'm glad I'm not doing it." He appeared thoughtful, sincere, a little surprised at himself. He still seemed unaware of the ripples of pain he had caused: to the victim of the crime; to the family around the victim; to the friends of the victim who were now afraid to go out at night even if they were shift-workers, for esample, and had no choice. But, Fred had made a beginning.     Fred was one of many who helped me understand that for some prisoners, it can almost be said that other people don't really exist: they live in a solipsistic world that served them well while they were children. During those early years of neglect and abuse, they simply retreated for self-protection into themselves. Sometimes they went into a child's fantasy world, but more often it was a world in which they learned to look out only for their own safety. This meant not acknowledging the existence, and, in particular, the feelings, of those around them. Stealing from their often abusive fathers, mothers and sisters and brothers led naturally to stealing from others in the streets.     It was painful to imagine the actual crimes which, for me, had up to now only been statistics or media stories. I thought about the boys who had broken my brother's arm years before and taken my money. Talking with human beings who actually committed those crimes made me see their side, even though in the groups they were always so well behaved that it was a challenge to imagine them being that desperate. It was painful to recognize the truth that these men, my friends, had caused great pain to many people.     It was also during this period that I learned that most inmates had their own limits: crimes they considered beyond the pale. This came out when one prisoner admitted, "I was so strung out that I stole money from my mother." Another inmate interrupted and said proudly, "That is something I would never do. Stealing from your own mother!" The first one replied, "I have my own limits. I would never give blow jobs for money." And then the others joined in, each proudly saying what act or crime he had reserved as "impossible." Another said that he remembered when he was living with his sister, he was doing horrible things in the street (which he would not specify), but that he would never steal from his sister. She was his only friend. In the meantime I was encouraged that each seemed proud of having  moral limits however minimal. Honor of some sort played some role in their lives. Later I found out that this was not true of all prisoners. Some had no limits. They were the ones who were still desperadoes, ready for homicidal violence at the smallest provocation. Inaccessible to any serious conversation about anything.     My happiness and excitement about the strengthening work in prison coincided with the time of the greatest personal sadness in my own life. I was in the process, in 1965, of getting a divorce from Gay, my first wife. Our children were six and four, and it tore me apart. I had been utterly committed to the marriage and to my children and could not believe this was happening to me.      I was trying to help others succeed and I was, myself,  failing in my own most serious commitment, to my family. Nothing was more important to me than having a stable home for my two beloved children, and now that seemed impossible. My wife had fallen in love with another man; I waited two years for her to change her mind and finally realized that I could wait no longer. In retrospect I should have been stronger, more demanding, but then I would never have had the joys that have come (new marriage, another son, another daughter in law, a granddaughter) as a result of all the pain. Back then I wondered if I was a fraud. Then my own words came back to me: no one is perfect; life goes on. Even though my children were hurt, maybe they too could gain something from the painful experience. And I never felt closer to God. My prayers were all about staying faithful to Him, confident that we could go through the trying time and come out of it together. Maybe my dark night of the soul is still to come; that would have been the time, in that night, for me to have one. I feel miraculously blessed that it has not happened yet. At that time in my life, I definitely felt that I was more deeply connected to the group of men in prison than ever before.     The prison groups were not intended to be therapy for me, but when the men commented that I was not entirely myself, I shared what was going on in my life. Brief as my parts of the sessions were, it was a healing experience.      I discovered the healing Body of Christ in prison. It may sound strange, but we were all broken, without pretense, vulnerable and honest with each other. We certainly had problems of different magnitude, but we cried together and healed together. I felt I could be more fully and consistently myself in those groups than I could be in any other setting. So the Body of Christ is characterized by honesty, most of all. Many of Jesus' sayings sound as if they could have been preceded by His stating, "Don't kid yourselves" or "Don't hide behind your questions; what you are really saying is ... " The Prison Code, unspoken, certainly prevented them from saying many things, and there was a universe of revelations that they did want to speak about. Nevertheless, there was trust in those groups and there was much that was said. Sharing intimate and shameful histories was a significant relief, but it meant first being somehow broken, poured out, like the body and the blood of Christ. The Biblical passage, "Where there is love, there is God" kept coming to mind.     One of the inmates said, "You're white, handsome, well educated. We thought you'd have all the women and money you ever would want. It blows my mind that you'd be sad about losing one woman!" I believe that my experience helped them to have a different way of looking at marriage in particular and women in general. Telling them about my experience also helped me believe that there was someone out there for me.     I was married again, a year and a half later, at the end of 1966, to the love of my life, Caroline Cross. We were introduced by a mutual friend and I fell in love the first time I looked at her face. Most of the men in the group contiunued as members through all that excitement, and we had good talks together about monogamy and commitment.     Mostly the meetings were times of simple sharing of pain. The men missed their children and were most open about that. There was a gritty, grinding misery about missing their women. Though they rarely mentioned it, that pain was never far away. It ate away at their cores in ways they could not explain or even describe because their relationships with their women were often sub-verbal and one-sided: "I command; you obey." The women could withhold sex, money, connection to children, affection and the dimly perceived avenue to a more civilized life. The men would hit, or leave, or both, and they did. That layer of agony was like a time bomb because it was so poorly understood that it transformed itself into constant anger that led to sudden eruptions. One man said that he was back in prison for brutally beating his woman. As he spoke of it, he clearly implied that the crime had followed his having failed sexually in some way. He had blamed his victim for his own human limitations.     The men were amazed to learn that sex could be even more satisfying as a part of life when it has its own rhythms and  was not automatic. That fit with their disbelief that one could be monogamous and committed for a lifetime, and that this led to a more meaningful relationship.     `We talked particuarly about domestic violence. One man said, "I don't fight. I would  tell her what I wanted. If she didn't do it, I hit her. Then she would do it." I was thunderstruck by the bland way he said this. In my own life I was wrestling with layers of upset emotions, subtleties of anger and the denial of unwelcome feelings. Entering their world, which contained little obvious nuance, helped me to be more honest with myself. I in turn tried to help them to realize that there was a universe of complex interactions waiting for them. One man shook his head. "Fucking the same woman for forty years! Doesn't seem possible."     When I tried to touch on root causes, especially childhood relationships with parents, I was quickly aware that I had moved my hand close to high-voltage wires: "If I could find my father, I would kill him," said one. Another: "I don't talk about my mother - ever." And: "I don't remember anything before I was a teenager." These statements were all made with barely contained fury. One man's earliest memory was of his father killing his little sister with a poker. This told me that it would simply not be possible to go through the practice of the traditional therapy of the time: discover the childhood roots of the problems, desensitize them and live life free of neurosis. And, of course, I was not a psychotherapist. But I was in another land, and it was going to be necessary to find an innovative way to touch their older pain, one in which the men could discover their own value, as people first, and then begin to address the other, deeper, problems later. They needed to believe they were worth bothering about before they could begin any serious self-examination.     Then one day, in a group at Green Haven, a member mentioned something he himself had done in which he took satisfaction. He had finally written a letter to his estranged son. "And he wrote me back!" He was delighted with the re-establishment of his father-son connection.     The whole group connected gladly with his new satisfaction. Reflecting on that moment as I drove home, it seemed very important. It was something that could be intentionally repeated in fuiture group meetings.     The human potential movement was just getting into full swing then, and I had learned from such seminal figures as Virginia Satir, Dorothy Stoneman and John Bell in workshops. Virginia was a leader, going around the nation and eventually the world, helping people discover the courage, brains and imagination that exist in ourselves, covered over by our cultural training to put ourselves down in the name of modesty. I was also increasingly upset about the usual teaching of the Church: that we are hopeless sinners, and that only the outside help of God can make us acceptable. We are trained to ignore the good in ourselves.     Dorothy and John were involved in Re-Evaluation Co-counseling, a movement started in Washington State, and were running training groups for people unrelated to the prison world. I went to learn about what they were doing. The groups met in East Harlem where they and others had started a primary school. The training helped everyone learn to be more understanding of themselves, their children and their parents. They began by asking each person in the group to name something they had done which they felt good about doing. Today it may sound simple and obvious, but it continues to amaze me that this basic act of recollection and declaration in a small group has such a powerful, energizing effect. It is also more difficult than it initially appears.     So, at the next prison group meeting, I asked that each of us do the same thing: say something positive we had done before starting to talk about our problems. I realized that it was hard for many group members to be able to say something good that they had done. Most had to dig pretty hard to find something that they had done that was good. But through the group process I was attempting an all-out assault on the fortress of the members' view of themselves as bad, only bad, people.     Frankie Adams, a handsome dark-skinned man who normally had a big smile now spoke haltingly, with tears streaming down his face. "I am only a piece of shit," he sobbed. He placed his large hands in front of him as one would cover a cup of hot coffee in a cold room to show that he meant just what he said. Others in the group, weeping also, told him what he meant to them as a friend. He said that no one had ever said anything good about him before. He could not think of one good thing he had ever done in his life.     However, little by little, with the new exercises, the men began to get in touch with the positive, small actions that knit together any more "normal" person's life. One inmate, Michael Odett, especially convinced of his bad identity, nevertheless looked to me as if he was, deep down, open. I finally asked him, on a hunch, maybe out of my great affection for my own sister, Edie, if he had any younger sisters.     His face softened, "Yes, one."     I asked if he had ever defended her when she was a young teenager.     "Oh, yes. The guys knew they would have to deal with me."     I said, "So you were a good brother."     He looked very sad and said that he had let her down badly ever since then. He had even stolen money from her at the bottom of his addiction.     I stopped him from going on, reminding him that we were only trying at that moment to remember the occasions of responsible action. We had agreed that saying; "I am a good brother (or man, or son)" does not mean you always acted well. So again, I said, "Were you a good brother?" he said, "Yeah, I guess so." I said, "You have to say the words without saying 'I guess so'. It is only the truth," Finally, he said, "I am a good brother," and his face contorted into tears.     A display of emotion like Michael's was not an uncommon experience, but when it happened, I was always surprised by its force. After forty years I still only understand this phenomenon partly: there is a certain kind of security - a freedom from responsibility - in an “all-bad” identity. You have no tension in your life if you are someone from whom no good can come. You can relax and just be bad. As one inmate said, "I can just go ahead and be the son-of-a-bitch I really am." The tears of sadness may have come also from the veil being lifted on the wasted years. A life that might have been, suddenly comes clearer. It made Michael wish all the more that he had been a good brother always.     There is a shock of surprise for one who has thought for many years that his life was set, like a chasm opening in the road. I believe also it is a  way of connecting with the person we were when we were small children. We were loving and trustful if the people around us were loving even in minimal ways. Even children who have been abused or neglected continue to have powerful feelings of loyalty toward their flawed caretakers.     Finally, there is a fear. To lose, even momentarily, the shield of cynicism and hardness means that you are vulnerable to buried memories of the past - and hopes of the future. The Russian philosopher-theologian Nicholas Berdyaev said of this process that people are thus able to move "up from absurdity to tragedy." The lives of many, perhaps most, inmates seem absurd in the literal sense (away from or outside any core meaning of life: "ab" meaning "away" and "surd" meaning "whole" or "central unity"). It is a step up, but still a step worthy of tears.     We all agreed that being able to affirm our goodness, whatever we may have done wrong, was critically important for our own sense of reality. So from that time on the meetings started that way, with self affirmations.     The door was now open for Michael Odett and others in the group to rediscover both old and more recent positive memories. Most important, they could recognize things they did every day in prison that made life better for another inmate (even an officer!). Or for themselves: trouble avoided, drugs refused, a letter home written, a meditation discipline maintained. Some inmates were able to make lists that seemed endless, and that in itself was energizing.     Reports of the "good stuff” were never questioned. Sometimes prisoners said that they had lied in their positive reports and then decided actually to do what they falsely said they had done.     The format of the group meetings now had two parts: self-affirmation, followed by discussions of problems of stress. The stress issues continued to leave the group feeling overwhelmed and discouraged. It seemed that the men continued to be as sad at the end as they were in the beginning. So one day I proposed that we conclude the next meeting with a third part, in which we would say what we planned to do in the next week that would be satisfying. One small plan of action, something that could be reported as a self-affirmation the following week. That became the third part of the meetings. Their plan had to be specific, and it had to be something that they could be sure of doing themselves. They had control.     Initially, there was resistance to this new addition. The men protested: "We're in prison. We can't make plans. All our choices are made for us." But when I asked them to consider the number of choices they had already made, just in that day since they were first awake, many of them were amazed when they recognized the breadth of their volitional circle. First, in the morning they got up out of the bunk. They could have stayed in their bunks and been punished. Then they washed somehow. They straightened their cells. Some prayed and many did push-ups and sit-ups. They went out into the dangers of the population, and faced other inmates. They avoided fights, avoided drugs, said an encouraging word, meditated, wrote, went to classes, read in their cells. As the group members recognized moments of opportunity to choose their course of action, this third part became a successful addition, and sometimes emotionally moving.     For example, Sam came to a meeting in a rage. He could not even participate in the first part and say anything good about himself. "Somebody beat me for my sweater!" He explained that his sister had knit a green sweater for him, permissible on the property list, and he had greatly treasured it: for the sentimental value, for being something a little special, and for keeping him warm in the yard. He said he was reasonably sure that he knew who had taken it and that he intended to "hurt the man." The group gave him good feedback, especially one prisoner who asked "How will your sister feel when she finds out that you are doing more years for felonious assault over HER sweater?" He was still spitting with anger.     Finally, after listening to all the rest of the meeting and everyone else's plans, Sam said, "I'm going to let it go. I'm still mad, but I'm going to start reading that book she gave me, not go to the yard and be cool. Let it go." The group cheered.     We continued with the three-part form for a couple of years. It proved so dynamic, even dislocating, that the men said they were leaving the meetings "disarmed." They returned to regular prison life "too open, too fired up," as one of them said. They were vulnerable to harm "in population" - teasing, hazing, physical attack--because they carried themselves in a vulnerable way.     So we finally added a fourth part: silence. We concluded the meetings with a time in which they could take slow, deep, abdominal breaths, reflect on what they had said, and pray silently, perhaps, for themselves, for others in the group and for family members they had named. This helped them to regain their centers, become firm and determined. They were protected, ready to return to population.     Since silence in prison is present only as a chance, unexpected absence of noise, almost never as a happily made choice, I had been anxious about proposing it as a fourth part. It was, however, the way I wished, more and more, that we could end our meetings. It connected me with the silence of the Quaker meetings of my own childhood, and the silence I had experienced in the monasteries at Fiesole, Mt. Athos and Taizé.     Silence in God is one key to weathering the fearsome, noisy and brutal storms of prison life. I hoped that some of the prisoners would find in the silence what I had first discovered as a little boy and as a teenager.     I learned that a few men were already involved in using silence to fortify themselves. Some even found themselves thinking, in the silence, about surviving the worst that could happen to them. Like a child who decides that he will not cry when he is spanked, they used the silence to make themselves stronger in the face of future beatings and humiliations. Silence became a time to build their shield. It was something new for them to be in group silence even for a full minute (eternity in today's culture) and they were impressed by the power of intentional, community silence. There is a unique intimacy which comes from being with people who are letting their hearts and minds wander over the full range of thoughts: pious, violent, erotic, banal, loving, penitential and thankful. Many of the men were praying.      It was in this way that the Four Part meeting was born: Self-Affirmations; Issues of Stress and Pain; a Short Range Plan; Silence. Since then, the Four Part Meeting has proved a form of remarkable endurance and effectiveness with many different kinds of participants, not just people convicted of crimes.     I have tried this same four part form of meeting with success in New York City public schools. The children, grades four to twelve, get it right away. They love the structure. Dr. Thom Turner, the man I recruited to lead the program, added a phrase to the beginning. Each child says his/her name and then says, "My dream is to be ... " before going on to "I feel good about myself because I ... " In constantly holding their dream before them, I believe, they find new determination to live it out. And, I do love hearing original combinations: "My dream is to be an actress and a lawyer." Or, "My dream is to be a football player and a pediatrician."     I have also used the same form with elderly people. "How can I have a plan? I could die anytime," They would say.     "You still can have a plan to buy a small potted plant."     "Oh, yes. Well, I plan to call my old friend Rachel."     Inmates often said things like, "I wish I could have met this way, and done these Four Parts, every week while I grew up, during my school years. I would never have ended up in prison."     I learned a lot in those years, 1964-1968, from working, one day each week, inside Green Haven. Most of the lessons were ones I was forced to learn. Since I had been required by Warden Follette to have Officers inside the circle, I found out, for one thing, that it really is possible to break the prison code and create a setting in which both staff and prisoners can learn to be more fully human. Among the (then) almost all-white Officer staff, some seemed to have taken their jobs in order to be in daily contact with people they could look down upon, so that blurring the lines was unwelcome. Similarly, prisoners (who by then were increasingly Black and Latino) wanted to be completely different from the "police." They generally wanted nothing to do with making things better, or "squaring up." Life was simpler if they could just go ahead in their accustomed roles.     But two Officers helped pave the way: Joseph Keenan and Tony Pezzullo, each in their mid-thirties. They both were men of courage who knew how to stand up to other Officers, and to prisoners. Joe and Tony each had homes nearby, were committed to their families and loved to laugh. Joe had two children. Tony had three and was a gifted craftsman; he would build a new house, sell it, then build a new one. He made Adirondack flat-bottom boats for fishermen of such high quality that one is exhibited in the Adirondack Museum. Both men also had room for change. Each was rather committed to the conventions of being an officer, which included, at that time, a cynical attitude about the capacity of inmates to change, and only a minimal interest in their own development as professionals. But each was surprised to find himself saying, "Yes, what am I doing about my own life; my own growth as a person?" Both began attending community college courses. Joe put his name on the list to take the Sergeant's exam - a bigger step than it might seem because back then the line between Correction Officers (blue shirts) and supervisory staff: Sergeants, Lieutenants and Captains (white shirts) was pretty rigid.     Though I was an outsider, it was clear that I brought something to the prisoners, and even to the staff. The waiting list was growing. I loved going to prison.     However, the sharing by peers was always and obviously much more important than anything I myself might say. I repeatedly had the experience of saying something, drawing blank stares, and then seeing immediate understanding by the group when a prisoner said virtually the same words I had used! It was overwhelmingly plain to me that the color of my skin, my education, and (maybe most of all) the fact that I could have quit my job at any time and done something else for more money, all combined to make it hard for them to hear me.     It was also clear that after one year, in 1964, our little group of eleven had pushed the whole prison a little bit in a good new direction. Up to this time, there was just one group. Yet not only did all of the 1,800 men confined in Green Haven know about the program; they were all challenged by it because it was a little harder to hide behind their cynicism. As the program grew in strength, it was no longer easy to dismiss it as "all bullshit." There was a voice calling all 1,800, and the staff, to have the courage to sign up and get real.     I would not have missed the sessions for anything, and neither would the former prisoners who worked with me. Our team arrived on time in blizzards and heavy rain, coming from East Harlem like clockwork. A few officers were even angry with us because some of them had tried to give bad weather as an excuse for being late, only to be told we had made it all the way from the city on time.     One day when we were late leaving East Harlem, it looked as if we would actually be late arriving for the first time ever. I was driving a station wagon carrying five black and Latino men on parole, and I was speeding. A State Trooper stopped us and I explained the situation, all of us in white shirts and ties (uniforms I believed necessary to gain credibility with staff) headed for prison. The Trooper looked inside dubiously, then carefully, while my passengers squirmed as they always did when they were near the police. Finally he said that he believed my story and he was real sorry, but his partner on the bridge (still in sight behind us) would never believe it. Rather, the partner would assume I had paid him off, so, he would have to give me a speeding ticket - the only one I have ever gotten in my whole life. That friendly gesture was not just because of my clerical collar; I had stopped wearing it anyway after a few years of going inside. It helped in the beginning, I thought, to diminish my difference because of race and being an outsider; I was just a person, neither staff nor prisoner.     Also, I found that many prisoners had had terrible experiences with representatives of God, who portrayed that God as a tyrant akin to Warden Follette, full of wrath and impossible to satisfy. One man, Mark Shepherd, who was soon to be released, had a mother who was a storefront minister. She had believed that her son would stop "being bad" as a teenager if he would only give his life to God. He refused ever more stubbornly. Finally she beat him repeatedly, lashing his legs with fury until the blood came. He pulled up his trousers to show me the marks on his shins, impressive scars that remained fifteen years later. I certainly didn't want to remind Mark of her. But I stopped wearing my collar mainly because it seemed to connect me with those who said "People are bad. Only God is good." I was there to say: all people are both good and bad.     When Mark Shepherd was released, he clearly needed substantial help to make the transition. He tried to follow through, looking for work, but always came up empty. He was determined not to go back to prison. But it was the same old story. He had little job experience. He had a prison record and no money. He was tall and dark skinned, and that all combined to make him appear threatening to employers. I had heard that there was a place one could go "to shape up," to help unload trucks in the middle of the night. Truck drivers stopped there and picked up helpers just before delivering. The spot was in Manhattan under the West Side Highway near the Washington Street meat markets - now a chic neighborhood of trendy restaurants, but then a dimly lit, out-of-the-way warehouse district. I set my alarm for 2:00 A.M., put on my boots, and went to meet Mark. I had told him that he better not stand me up, I did not want to give up a good night's sleep for nothing.     Mark showed up on time and we moved toward a group of figures gathered around a fire in a big oil can with holes punched in the side. There was no conversation. No one looked happy to be there, and they did not seem pleased when Mark and I arrived, a distinctly odd couple of newcomers. We took our places in the outer ring, getting little benefit from the fire.  Soon the trucks began to appear. The driver climbed down from the cab and approached the group. He would quickly choose one man, who would go off with him. Then the next truck came.     We waited more than two hours. I was not sure how to handle it if I were picked, intending to ask the driver to consider Mark. I did not know how that would work out. But the problem never came because, as dawn was breaking, Mark was chosen. He was laughing at me as he drove off.     It was not until I was on my way home to get ready to go to my actual job that I wondered whether anyone had thought about beating me up. One less man in the shape-up. But the group around the fire may have known I would not be chosen; I looked too weird.     Mark found a job, then he disappeared from my radar. I hoped that meant that he was doing well.     In the meantime Exodus House was growing. We raised money to build a halfway house across the street for men coming out of prison, and we prepared for our first arrivals. Then in a dispute, which seemed almost endemic to the drug rehab world, the city part of our work came unraveled. The board of Exodus House decided that neither Director Lynn Hageman nor I should live in the house ourselves. I favored, instead, having three shifts of staff and no live-in directors. We needed staff to be awake and responsible, three shifts a day, every day of the year. Lynn disagreed with me, organized some of our clients into pickets and was ready for war. I had no wish to turn East 103rd Street into the OK Corral. With immense regret, I left - and three quarters of the staff left with me- to create a new program. This was Reality House, on 145th Street in central Harlem. It was a similar operation. The whole prison team left Exodus House and became part of the staff of Reality House. We continued the prison visits without interruption.     Then I teamed up with an amazing man named Leroy Looper, whom I knew from Exodus House. He was an ex-con and ex-addict with an astonishing gift for group work. He had shown me at Exodus House that it was possible to run an effective recovery group for ex-addicts without tearing people up psychologically as they did in Synanon and Daytop. Leroy became the director of Reality House; I was the administrator. He was responsible for the operations, while I raised money and connected to the various agencies. We established Reality House and then Leroy suddenly left, off to the West Coast.     He arrived in San Francisco without money, friends or connections, but quickly began to assemble the group and the funds which have made a major contribution to helping homeless and mentally ill people there. Leroy helped confirm for me the power of group work. A 1987 New Yorker profile of him later described his continuing self transformation from violent man in the street to leader at Reality House and, later, Executive Director of Cadillac House, a home for people who are mentally ill in California. He was a charismatic, resourceful person, destined to go farther than most of us -and he reinforced my conviction that the same efforts that had brought him out of the deep hole that had once been his life could also bring others up to the surface.