November
9, 2004
 LIGHTING
THE WAY 2004
Thank you for coming and welcome. My name is Elizabeth
Gaynes, and I am here to introduce to you the Osborne
Association.
When you leave here, there will be an exit poll on why
you support the Osborne Association. You can choose between
moral values and the economy. They are both right.
I am completing my 20th year here at Osborne, a tremendous
feat for someone with the attention span of a gnat. But
this organization and this work has held my rapt attention
for all this time.
I came here because I was inspired by Thomas Mott Osborne,
a prison warden at Sing Sing nearly 100 years ago. He
believed that you prepared people to live successfully
on the outside by allowing them to live responsibly on
the inside – accountable for themselves and their
environment. He recognized that what happens inside our
prisons matters, and believed that every person is an
individual entitled to dignity and respect, that every
person deserves another chance, and that every person
has the capacity to change. These are Osborne’s
moral values, and they have far more economic value than
the $60 billion that America spends annually on its prison
systems.
I also came to Osborne because of the men and women who
have changed their lives and can change our communities.
People like Samuel Hamilton.
Who is Samuel Hamilton? When he was 19 years old, Sam
was the lookout in a robbery that went very wrong. A man
was killed, and Sam was sentenced to a minimum of 19 years
in prison. He had a small baby he didn’t really
know, but a few years into his incarceration, he took
our parenting class at Sing Sing. We helped him reach
out to his daughter, and they built a relationship from
the ground up. Nykia grew up in the prison visiting room.
Sam became a caregiver in our children’s center,
and took college classes. And when his daughter was 19,
the same age he was when he went to prison, with his help
and support SHE went to college.
When Sam went to the parole board 4 years ago, he had
served his 19 years. The Parole Board acknowledged his
extraordinary rehabilitation, but denied parole anyway,
due to the serious nature of his crime – the one
thing he could not change. By the time he went back to
the Parole Board two years later, he was a senior caregiver
and had earned a masters degree from NYTS. Again his parole
was denied. Sam began co-teaching two of the courses we
offer at Sing Sing, Alternatives to Domestic Violence,
and Breaking Barriers. Earlier this year, he married Nykia’s
mother. When he went to the parole board last month, he
had a firm job offer from Osborne, a place to live with
his wife and daughter, two degrees, and 23 years of prison
time behind him. His parole was denied. He will be considered
for parole again in 2006.
I came to Osborne because prison tears families apart.
If chattel slavery has a direct descendent in America
today, it is our prison system. Millions of families and
children are affected by a parent’s incarceration,
including my own. My children’s father has served
20 years, his parole has been turned down 8 times. My
son recently moved to the rural heart of North Carolina
where about all there is is an Army recruiting station,
a Wal-Mart and a prison where the paper mill used to be.
He is waiting tables so he can visit his father every
Sunday. At 22, he says he needs to get to know his dad
better, and I think he has a right to do that.
I think all children have a right to do that, I think
that the 1 in 9 black children with a parent in prison,
hit harder by our nation’s race and criminal justice
policies than any others, especially have a right to do
that.
Taking away someone’s freedom is a big deal –
a very big deal – and we take it away all too lightly
in this country. But when imprisonment is the only response
you can think of to crime, you get the highest incarceration
rate and the most expensive prison system in the world,
and that doesn’t make our communities safer.
People who said their vote was about the economy should
be appalled at the waste of money to keep people locked
up when they could be working, paying taxes, taking care
of their families, and making amends to their communities.
And for those who said their vote was based on moral values?
It’s more than wasteful, it’s a sin to run
a prison system based on revenge. It’s more than
a sin; it’s insane to think that years of extracting
vengeance can lead to success and redemption. In fact,
it leads to nearly half of those who leave prison returning
within two years.
Our country will be safer when FEWER people go to prison,
and when those who do stay CONNECTED to their families.
There is a dynamic relationship between individual transformation
and transforming the communities to which prisoners return.
Osborne has made great strides in making prisoners safe
for the world, but we also have to work to make the world
safe for returning prisoners, changing public policies
that prohibit so many from coming home to live in public
housing with their families, from taking out a college
loan so they can continue their education, from working
in jobs they are denied because of their criminal records.
We serve 7500 people affected by incarceration every
year in programs in three community sites, in two court
houses, 8 prisons, and on Rikers Island. Not only family
services and drug treatment, but employment and training,
not only reentry but pre-entry.
People who told the exit polls their vote was based on
the economy might want to know that it costs us about
$2000 to put someone to work, about $3000 to help put
their families back together, and about $6000 to return
them to sobriety. Compare that to the $3 billion NYC and
NYS spend on corrections. Compare it to $32,000 to house
someone for a year in state prison; compare it to Rikers
Island, where it costs nearly $70,000.
And then they almost all come home, about 25,000 just
from NYS prisons, 2/3 of those to NYC. Most leaving state
prison will arrive at Port Authority with $40, and many
will not know where they are spending their first night
of freedom.
I was trying to write these remarks before the election,
but I noticed that for some reason there was nothing in
the debates or platforms or in the 50 election emails
I was getting every day, about crime and prisons. Maybe
that’s because crime has been going down for some
time. Or because people are already so scared that they
didn’t need to mention it. Who needs Willie Horton
when you can blame the collapse of the free world on gays
and lesbians?
But except for New York, where the prison population
has gone down, across the country the size of our prisons
and the amount we spend on them just keeps going up. Not
only did the election ignore crime, it also ignored Abu
Ghraib. I would have thought it was an easy shot to condemn
the torture of prisoners. The photos I saw from Abu Ghraib
looked strikingly like the ones we saw of the retaking
of Attica Prison in 1971, depicting the vengeance and
humiliation that is the bedrock of our prison system.
We are really hooked on punishment.
But it is Abu Ghraib that points us in the direction
we need to take. And it really has nothing to do with
prison conditions or prison reform. The truth is that
prisons are doing exactly what they are designed to do.
The question is whether WE are doing what WE were designed
to do. We are human beings and we have human rights. And
it is time for us to hold ourselves up to the international
standards that the US holds itself apart from.
The kind of moral values we are talking about won’t
be found in popular opinion or referenda, and they won’t
be protected by the courts. Not long ago, the US Supreme
Court issued its Dred Scott for Prison Families decision,
making clear that people in prison have no rights that
we are bound to respect, and specifically no right to
see their children. But the decision was silent about
the right of a child to know and see and touch his parents.
These rights are found in the UN Convention on the Rights
of the Child, and in international standards of human
rights and human decency. When my daughter and I were
nominated earlier this year for the World’s Children’s
Prize based on the UN convention (which the US and Somalia
have not signed), I realized something that in 20 years
had never really occurred to me. The award we got in Sweden
was for “defending children whose rights have been
violated” and I swear to you that in all the time
that we have built our children’s centers, and worked
with corrections folks to improve visitation, in all the
time I have tried to help my children maintain their relationship
with their father, I never thought about children’s
rights in that context.
I have been focused on keeping families of prisoners
together because I believe it helps children grow, and
reduces recidivism and strengthens communities. So it
was strange to hear the Swedes explain to me that from
how it looks to them, mass incarceration is the greatest
threat to child well-being in the US today, and ask me
to explain why the US lock up its citizens at 6 times
the rate of Canada and 8 times the rate of France, especially
its citizens of color.
In the next few months, we plan to add to our agenda
the implementation of a Bill of Rights for Children of
Incarcerated Parents. We seek to launch a statewide campaign
on behalf of a child’s right to a lifelong relationship
with his or her parent, a child’s right to be considered
when decisions are made about that parent, to be cared
for in that parent’s absence, and others (all of
which can be found in our newsletter).
Our plan is to bring all the policies and practices that
violate the human rights of children of prisoners to the
attention of legislatures and communities, in order to
guarantee these rights to the 10 million children across
America who have experienced the arrest and incarceration
of a parent. We believe that the human rights framework,
which America once helped bring to the world, needs to
be brought to America once again.
I know it’s a stretch to think that the public
will care more about the children of prisoners than about
the prisoners themselves. This is a nation that eats its
young. We don’t need them in our labor force, we
can’t play all the kids on the team, so we bench
them for 5 or 6 years – the middle class and rich
kids go to college, the working class goes to the army,
and the poor and the black and Latino go to prison.
The transformation of our prisons, offering the possibility
of change for the people who live in them, work in them
and visit them, is a moral imperative. We all know locking
people in small cages or forcing lethal drugs into their
veins will look barbaric to our great grandchildren. The
direction in which we are headed is simply wrong.
We can change the direction. You might think it takes
a lot of force to change course, but if you’ve ever
watched a freighter, you know that it is steered by moving
the rudder. Even that looks like it would take some force,
but there's a tiny thing, a miniature rudder, at the edge
of the rudder called a trim tab. Just moving the little
trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around.
The work we do at Osborne, the services and the advocacy,
puts our hands right on the trimtab, right in the place
that determines our direction, right at the intersection
of moral values and economic common sense.
We invite you to be our partners in steering a course
that keeps families intact, heals communities devastated
by crime, and charts a future in which people in prison
are, well, PEOPLE, of great value to a society that in
its own interest (moral and economic) will give them every
possible chance to get it right.
|
