Twelve Years for a Paintbrush

EARLY ONE SUNDAY MORNING, I drive to the Durham Correctional Center to pick up Greg. He’s spent the past 16 months at a state prison down east, working overtime in the kitchen so he could get out six weeks early. A few days ago, the Department of Corrections transferred him to this local minimum-security facility. Greg knows the place well. He’s walked out of here more times than he can count.

“Feel good to be out?” I ask as we walk through the gate of the chain-link fence, nodding goodbye to the guards. “You know it does,” Greg says, his back straight and his eyes fixed on the horizon. He’s relishing this taste of freedom.

But Greg knows this pleasure is fleeting. As good as it might feel to walk through the gate and hop in a car, leaving prison doesn’t mean you get to leave this part of your life behind.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 2.4 million Americans are locked behind bars (and 12 million cycle through local jails each year). At any given time, some 6 million Americans are caught up in the criminal justice system—if not behind bars, then checking in with a parole officer who can carry them back to jail for the smallest of transgressions. Like Greg, a disproportionate number of those impacted by the U.S. criminal justice system are African American.

Even if you walk out of the gate like Greg, time served, you still have to deal with the debts that ruined your credit while you were locked away. You still have to rebuild relationships that were cut off because you spent the past decade behind bars. You still have to check the box on almost every job application that says you’re a convicted felon.

I live in a home named Rutba House, where we have opened our doors to friends like Greg who are coming home from prison. Doing so has helped me see that our country’s original sin of race-based slavery has shifted its shape again in the 21st century. As the Black Lives Matter movement has tried to make clear on America’s streets, race still matters. But in light of the fact that African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, we cannot understand race in America today without understanding prisons.

Knowing begins to change us

Befriending people on their way out of prison turns out to be its own way in. “Recidivism” is the official label given to the tendency of people who’ve been in prison to end up there again. Most efforts to curb this tide focus on helping individuals make better choices. When Greg gets arrested for stealing a paintbrush one night, I’m ticked off. Why the heck would he steal a paintbrush?

But recidivism is about more than foolish choices. There are plenty of places where taking a neighbor’s paintbrush when you’ve had too much to drink isn’t going to land you in jail. When we get Greg’s first letter, he tells us he’s facing 12 years as a “repeat offender.” Twelve years for a paintbrush?

Of course, no one who wrote the mandatory minimum laws that would put away someone like Greg was thinking about his situation. Both Republicans and Democrats used “tough on crime” language through the 1980s and ’90s to persuade voters that they were making America safer. What they did not account for, however, was the long-term impact of those laws on places where addiction is a public health epidemic and poverty leaves folks with fewer and fewer options.

Given our nation’s history of racial division, it can be easy for white people to assume that more black people are caught up in the criminal justice system because more black people commit crimes. But it is hard to write off a whole race of people as “criminal” when you get to know them. Living with people caught up in our broken criminal justice system at Rutba House opens my eyes to disparities in opportunity, education, police enforcement, and sentencing. “Man, if they can’t call you [the n-word], they’ll call you an ex-con,” one frustrated young man says. The worst thing about prison, it seems, is the way it disproportionately affects the poor and people of color, marking them as something less than humans created in God’s image.

It’s not a single relationship—no one particular incident—but rather the cumulative effect of knowing those who’ve been to prison that begins to change us. Whatever abstract thoughts any of us had about prison have been exchanged for the stories of people who’ve eaten at our table and vacationed with our families. Yes, they can be frustrating and annoying. Some of them have done terrible things, and as much as they regret them, if put in the same situation they might well do them again. They are not angels. But they are people.

My night in jail

And, occasionally, they are angels after all—at least the Book of Hebrews says those who extend hospitality sometimes entertain angels unawares. Jesus said that when we visit those in prison, we are visiting him. Hard as it is sometimes, we try to see Jesus in those we welcome at Rutba House.

And our state is killing people not unlike them.

When we read in the newspaper that an execution is scheduled for early Friday morning, some of us drive over and join a little crowd that’s gathered outside to pray. We do this a few times before we realize that this is happening every other week.

The stories of those who are being killed are not unlike stories we’ve heard around the dinner table at Rutba House. Only, these stories of poverty, abuse, and suffering have ended in violent tragedy. These men have been convicted of murder. Anyone could understand why their victims’ family members would want them dead. But the reality of this Southern state is not simply that people who take a life face execution. Most murderers are not sentenced to death. The terrible truth we have to face is that in a place where black people once faced the pseudo-justice of lynch mobs, poor and black people who are accused of killing their white neighbors are the people who end up on death row.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the number one indicator of whether a defendant will receive the death penalty is the race of their victim. What’s more, the work of North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission has shown that roughly 1 in 25 of those on our death row was wrongfully convicted.

Yet they are still being killed in our name. So one year, as the season of Lent begins, we decide this is one sin that we must confess. When we receive our ashes on Ash Wednesday, everyone at Rutba House also pins onto our shirts a scarlet letter “I” for idolatry. We wear the I for 40 days, explaining to anyone who asks why we’ve come to believe that the application of the death penalty in North Carolina is so unjust that it amounts to an idolatrous practice of playing God.

When we nonviolently block the prison driveway during a scheduled execution, the local authorities decide they’ve had enough. After they photograph and fingerprint us, they send us to a magistrate who says we’re each being held under a $5,000 bond. An officer escorts me to a cell with a window through which I’m handed a large plastic bag to store my clothes, an orange jumpsuit, boxers, and flip-flops. He stands guard while I change, then walks me to a large holding cell where I join about a dozen other men who have been arrested that night.

The corners of this 12-by-12-foot room are taken by men who are trying to get a little sleep, propped on the wooden benches against the cinderblock walls. I can’t imagine sleeping beneath these fluorescent lights, but I guess if you’re tired enough you can sleep most anywhere. I find an open spot in the middle of a bench, my back against the wall, and watch a man in his mid-20s across from me who’s detoxing, his head between his knees, his body convulsing. A guard brings him some BC Powder pain reliever, which he snorts like a line of cocaine off the wrapping paper. His head drops again, and I watch the drool drip from his mouth to the floor.

When I’m finally sent upstairs to a cell block several hours later, the guard walks me into a room where I’m issued a multicolored tri-fold mat, similar to the one I used for naptime in kindergarten. Due to overcrowding, the officer tells me, this mat is my bunk. “Find a spot on the floor in the common area. Whenever we call count, make sure you’re on it.”

I step onto the block, a small courtyard surrounded by double-occupancy cells stacked two stories high. A set of stairs stands halfway down the courtyard on the left, leading up to a catwalk that circles the block. I feel like I’m in the gym at my neighborhood rec center, only no one is exercising on the track, and the court is littered with tables, chairs, and sleep mats.

When I find a spot in a corner for mine, the guy next to me looks me up and down and asks, “What the hell you doing here?” I tell him about the execution the night before—how some of us had knelt down and tried to block the door. He immediately stands up. “Hey, y’all ain’t gonna believe this,” he shouts, then proceeds to give a one-sentence summary of our action to the cell block, enhanced with three expletives. I happen to have sat down beside the block’s unofficial leader. He decides to lead an all-block rap session on executions and the criminal justice system.

“Look around this room,” he says to me, his eyes both earnest and angry. “I knew every guy in this place before we ever got here. We’re all from the same zip code,” he says, pointing a finger. “The train that ends at death row starts here.” He is looking at me. He knows I won’t be here long. But if I’m going to take anything out of here, he wants to make sure I know this: A young black man who grows up like he did knows in his gut that he’s caught up in a system that’s marked him for death.

Relocating education



After I’m bailed out and return home, I realize that I keep talking about the education I got on that cell block. We need more spaces like that, I say. We need to help people get into prison—to see society from behind the bars, to know people there as fellow human beings. I say it over and over again, not sure exactly what I mean.

I ask Sarah Jobe at Rutba House if she’d like to do something with this prison-based education idea. She runs with it. Pretty soon she has graduate-level courses taught by Duke Divinity School faculty running inside one federal and three state facilities. Project TURN, she calls it, for “Transform, Unlock, ReNew.” Half of each class consists of students who are incarcerated; the other half is students from outside the facility. For everyone, the experience is about what the apostle Paul called the renewing of our minds.

Thousands of religious volunteers come into prisons in America each year, many of them offering services that would not otherwise be provided. But Project TURN students are crossing a line that almost no one has an opportunity to cross, in or outside of prison. They are sitting down as equals to learn with peers who have been locked away from the rest of society.

They are learning not only that race still matters, but also that it’s difficult for “colorblind” Americans who have little firsthand experience with the criminal justice system to see. As evangelical legal scholar William Stuntz wrote, “Among the great untold stories of our time is this one: The last half of the 20th century saw America’s criminal justice system unravel.” Here in the South, where most TURN students grew up, Stuntz’s analysis of the racial dynamics of incarceration is especially pointed. In his The Collapse of the American Criminal Justice System, Stuntz notes that the black inmate population was seven times higher in 2000 than in 1970, a rate that “exceeds by one-fourth the imprisonment rate in the Soviet Union in 1950—near the end of Stalin’s reign.”

When you’re sitting in class with someone from a very different background, hearing their story and learning from their insights, it’s hard to imagine that Gulag-like segregation is really the answer to our problem. For students who read the Bible, it doesn’t take long to see that prisons present a theological problem.

Take Paul’s words in Philippians 1:14 for example: “Because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear.” People who are incarcerated immediately recognize that Paul is claiming chains—so often a symbol of shame—as a badge of honor. He is turning a system designed to condemn on its head. People in prison do this all the time. When they do, they help all of us understand the language of the New Testament.

John, a young white man who attended a Christian college and majored in religious studies before coming to seminary, confessed after a Project TURN class on epistles from prison that he wasn’t sure he had fully understood the message of the New Testament before reading it behind bars. “Sure, I knew the words. I’d memorized many of them. But these guys helped me see how the gospel has power to change lives. It makes me believe it can even change mine.”

“We’re just the ones who got caught.”

Dear to evangelicals for generations, the doctrine of “justification by faith” often loses its force because it is intellectualized. Pastors challenge their flocks to first imagine sin as an offense against a just God, then to conceptualize the impossibility of ever making up for this offense ourselves. The great challenge, as every pastor knows, is to help people feel this problem in their bones.

But prison is a place where the need for justification is immediate. “We aren’t the only ones who’ve broken the law,” one incarcerated student says with a wry smile. “We’re just the ones who got caught.” Having worked to defend themselves in courts of limited justice, prisoners know how impossible it can feel to justify yourself according to the law. But the good news of the gospel is that there is hope beyond demonstrating our innocence in court. There is, in fact, One we can trust to save us apart from the law.

Which continues to give me hope that, despite the grave injustices of our nation, the answer to our predicament may lie with those who’ve been locked away. “The stone that the builder rejected,” the psalmist tells us, “has become the capstone.” When we have the faith to trust this truth, Project TURN keeps showing us that it can, indeed, be “wonderful in our eyes.”