More Time in Prison

Though now out of season, the “Christmas in Prison” program of the “Celebration Rock” series was aired shortly after Christmas, perhaps in 1980. The Future Unlimited Involvement Corps was a group of prisoners serving time at the Powhatan Correctional Center at State Farm, Virginia. I had visited the group  in mid-December with my trusty Uher Report L tape recorder and asked some of them to describe what Christmas was like in that maximum security unit.

The concept was fine, and much of  the music I chose fit well, but I didn’t carry it off well personally. On one level, the questions I asked showed my discomfort with the prisoners. And once I went back to the studio to edit the program together, I ad-libbed my introductions to each segment, and that made the flow between music and interviews even more awkward. Listening to the recording of the final product recently, I can’t believe how naive I sounded. Still, some of the responses the inmates gave to my queries might well be echoed in similar circumstances in penal institutions today, all these years later. If I were to have played back the show on a station last month, I doubt anyone would have known the interviews took place 28 years ago. That’s a sad commentary on the state of our prison facilities over the years: no progress.

As that “Celebration Rock” show began, the song that led us into the theme was Queen’s “Somebody to Love.”

“But everybody wants to put me down
They say I’m goin’ crazy
They say I got a lot of water in my brain
I got no common sense
I got nobody left to believe…”

Building on the idea that Christmas is usually celebrated in community, I asked one inmate about whether the holiday would bring friends together even within the prison walls.  “You don’t come to jail to make friends; you come here to do what you have to do and then leave.”  He said the people he was closer to there he would call “associates,” not friends; they were people he associated with, but nothing more.

When I asked about what the day would be like there, one person said life would go on whether it was Christmas or not. It’s not really that special a day, he said. But others disagreed, and spoke of heavier visitation, groups from the outside coming in to have a Mass, sing carols, or leave Christmas cards for prisoners to send out. One man told me that visitation is so crowded and such a hassle, he didn’t want his family subjected to it. When I asked what gifts they’d like for Christmas, some mentioned the long range gift of expanding the visitors center. Another wanted the “system” to consider more carefully the classification of inmates. “I’m 43,” he said, “and there’s no way somebody 16 or 17 years old ought to be in the same cell block as us.” [If I’d been a journalist, I would have done some fact-checking to see what the Corrections Center policy was on that issue.] I expected that the answers to the “gifts” question would center more on “stuff” but many responses dealt with various “reforms” the prisoners desired.

[Very often in my other prison visits and radio interviews, the prisoners would take the first opportunity to issue complaints and laments, and only later in our time together would move toward answers more closely aligned to the questions I posed.]

The next music was Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes: “Wake Up, Everybody.” And then John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison”

"The searchlight in the big yard swings round with the gun,
And spotlights the snowflakes like the dust in the sun.
It's Christmas in Prison, there'll be music tonight,
I'll probably get homesick, I love you, goodnight.

I interviewed another man who didn’t want to have family visit at Christmas. He said he felt sorry for his mother. She would become emotional and her leaving would be too painful to balance whatever joy she’d have in seeing him. Another confessed that Christmas memories hurt. When groups came to sing carols to the prisoners, he remembered what it had been like when he was a part of the “mob” of carolers, and knew that it would be several more Christmases before he could sing those songs again on the outside. [I flinched at the term “mob,” but figured that was prison lingo for “heavenly host.”]

Another album cut: from the Little River Band, “It’s a Long Way There”

“I live for the day when I can hear people saying that they know and they care for everyone
But I feel like I’ve been here for the whole of my life, never knowing home.”

When one incarcerated man mentioned that Christmas was about peace on earth, I asked if that included peace between guards and inmates. He said that on that one day, December 25, there was more “complacency”  between the guards and the guarded. But someone also told me that peace, however temporary, may be attributed to knowing their annual $4 gift is coming from the state, a reward, as one man put it, “for being good little inmates all year long.” Still, having one day when there would be less violence and more self-control on the cell block  was a good thing, many guys agreed.

Next I played the Willie Nelson “classic,”  “The Troublemaker.” It was about another lawbreaker, the Christmas child grown up and in trouble. Google the lyrics. The major glitch here was comparing Jesus being tried and convicted on trumped up sedition charges with these men I was interviewing, people convicted of very serious, very real crimes. I mentioned my naivete earlier. Here’s where it came out again. Certainly a primary reason for doing this theme show was to remind listeners that those we call inmates or prisoners are also fellow human beings. I ad-libbed that they had made some “mistakes” to be sure.  As I listened to this recording all these years later, I thought…mistakes?! Good Lord, this was maximum security. Some of those “mistakes” had cost human lives.

Back to the theme. One man told of parties held in some of the prison shops: there would be free donuts and coffee, someone would bring in tape players for music, and they’d have half  day off  from their shop jobs. I learned that there were also some inmate cell block parties, but for many people it was just an occasion to try to forget it’s Christmas…play some music and maybe we won’t feel so bad.

An inmate told me that what hurts most about Christmas is missing his wife and daughter, and mother and father. He recalled the old saying that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. That led me to the Tom Waits’ song, “San Diego Serenade.”

I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody, until I needed a song.

The same man who lamented his losses (and who admitted it was his own doing) spoke frankly about the need to put up barriers, to be on guard against letting others see your feelings. He said inmates don’t talk about loneliness or admit any vulnerabilities…”People have a tendency to take kindness for weakness.”

At that point I played one of the rare Alice Cooper cuts suitable for “Celebration Rock,” “I Never Cry.”

“If there is a tear on my face
It makes me shiver to the bone
It shakes me, Babe
It’s just a heartache that got caught in my eye
And you know I never cry, I never cry.”

Well, this has been a long entry. Congratulations for making it this far. But this was a program that I probably hadn’t played since the year it was aired, and I’d forgotten much of it.

A quick sidebar: one of the last videos I produced before leaving Richmond media for my Vermont pastorate was entitled “Justice and Mercy: The Virginia Corrections Quiz.” It was an interactive video documentary on the need for prison reform and creative sentencing. It was the last time I visited men and women at Powhatan, or any other secure facility. Said Jesus: “I was in prison…and you visited me.” Or not.

My Time in Prison

Recidivism. A tendency to slip back…into bad behavior. We use the term mostly to describe the return to prison after serving time. Most of us who have been in prison tend to go back, you know.

I know. I was there four times. As a visitor, I hasten to add. A visitor with a microphone. Others who visit do return, especially if one has developed a personal connection with an inmate, or a ministry to those who are incarcerated. It’s one way to follow Jesus, who identified with the hungry, the sick, and the prisoner. “I was in prison and you visited me.”

For about 200 years, Richmond, Va. was home to the Virginia State Penitentiary (or its predecessors). My first visit there was as a guest invited to speak to the Prison Civil War Round Table. I had done a “Celebration Rock” show about Native Americans, and an inmate heard it, assumed I knew something about the subject, made a weak connection to the Civil War, and wrote an invitation. As I look back on the programs I did in the mid-1970’s, I recall at least two CR shows on Native Americans (both already mentioned elsewhere in previous blog entries). One program featured the music of XIT, an American Indian rock band. The other focused on members of a Virginia tribe, the Mataponi, who spoke of their tribal history and current living conditions. Which program prompted my visit to the prison I don’t recall.

But I did go, and presented some kind of program to about 15 inmates who kindly excused my very limited knowledge about the topic they chose for me: Indians and the Civil War. (I’m certain that they didn’t care about my expertise or lack thereof; they just wanted to fill a slot in their schedule and have someone from the “outside” pay attention to their Civil War interest group.)

Sometime later, I returned to that maximum security facility, whose walls were within close proximity to Richmond’s downtown. I was helping the Virginia Chaplaincy Service produce a slide show on their prison ministry. I took a cassette recorder with me as Chaplain George Ricketts introduced me to some inmates. Holding the microphone up to the bars, I asked them questions,  and recorded inmates describing what it was like to live in a cell day after day. I remember distinctly two things about that visit. One was the loud, wailing voice of a man screaming his complaints against…well, everything and anything. The sound of that voice eerily echoing through the cell block while another, more stable inmate calmly described prison life made for a dramatic soundtrack to our audio-visual documentary.

The other thing I remember was interviewing an inmate who was in his early 20s. He looked and sounded like the most vulnerable kid on the cell block. He had been in the infirmary for some reason, and felt safe there. But now that he was back in the prison population he was clearly scared to death.

There is another memory connected with both those visits. After presenting credentials, I emptied my belongings into a basket, was patted down, and walked through a heavy iron door that “clanked” shut behind me. “Clank” doesn’t do it. There must be a better word. Even knowing that I would be coming out within a couple of hours, I heard that slamming cell door and felt a definite shiver.

I just retrieved CR program #464 from my collection of old tapes. The title of that show was based on a John Prine song, “Christmas in Prison.” The program includes interviews I did with members of the “Future Unlimited Involvement Corps,” a group based at the Powhatan Correctional Center, another of Virginia’s maximum security institutions. The Center is located at a place called State Farm, Va. Inmates who had listened to (and written to) my radio program asked me (through their Chaplain Bill Dent) to help them tell their stories. Through my taped interviews they wanted to project themselves as  human beings who were making some progress toward giving something back to their communities through various service projects.

Since my visit took place in early December of that year (the actual date of the show is lost, but the music says late 1970’s), I asked the inmates to describe what it was like to spend Christmas in prison. As I write this, Christmas is “over,” but I listened to the program yesterday and found that some things never change. My hunch is that if I were to interview inmates some 3o years later, their responses would be the same as those I interviewed for that “Celebration Rock” program.

In my next entry: some of the things they wanted for Christmas, how pathetically naive I was back then, and what songs on the show’s play list redeemed the hour.

More on “The Lock Out”

So there we were, ten or twelve teenagers and I, along with a young adult volunteer who had offered to spend the night on the streets with us. All night. After intentionally locking ourselves out of the Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church near downtown Richmond, Virginia, we visited some of the city’s night people: those who worked on the morning paper, a hospital overnight chaplain, an all-night radio DJ, and police officers at a nearby neighborhood precinct.

It was there that I was told by the officer in charge that I was under arrest for keeping the kids out way past the Richmond city midnight curfew. (See the previous blog.) As soon as he said he was sorry but the situation was out of his hands, and I’d have to be detained, there were at least three thoughts in puffy balloons over our heads. The kids thought, “Oh-oh. Are we gonna have to call our parents to come pick us up in the middle of the night? They aren’t going to be happy.” The young adult volunteer (was it Betsy Lodwick or Laura Wohlford?) was thinking, “Oh no! What am I supposed to do with these kids for the rest of the night?” And for about three seconds I thought, “What??!!”

And then the police officer broke into a grin and said he was just kidding. The teens laughed just a little too hard at this. “Let me show you the lock-up,” the cop said. And he took us on the grand tour of the modest precinct house. We noticed no other people around. No perps. No other cops. “It’s a quiet night,” he confessed. “Mostly what we do here is paperwork. Not very exciting most of the time,” he told us. “It’s not exactly ‘Hill Street Blues.'” Another officer arrived, introduced himself, and went right to his clipboard to log his night’s activity. As we left, they both told us to be careful as we walked back to the church to continue our night’s travels. (Our next stop was WLEE’s studio, at that time on West Broad Street.)

When we were finished at the radio station, our last stop was an early breakfast at the all-night Dunkin’ Donuts. It was still dark out, but all of us were ready for food, so we found our stools at the counter and ordered. This was to be a time of debriefing, sharing things we’d learned from the people we’d met, and then looking at Bible passages that tell of the tears and terrors of night (Psalm 30:5 or 91:5) or of Jesus choosing the night time to speak with Nicodemus.  But first there were cream-filled donuts.

While the kids reported on our night to a curious waitress, I noticed that there was only one other person in the restaurant. Sitting at the end of the counter was a young man in ragged jeans and a tee shirt, reading a Bible! I couldn’t have planned that! But when the check was paid and we drove back to the church, we had some conversation together about what might lead a 20-something guy to Dunkin’ Donuts at 4:45 a.m. to read his Bible?

Back at the church, we went to the media room and watched a video of the original Star Trek series, an episode titled “Bread and Circuses,” about “sun worshippers” who turn out to be “Son” worshippers. We ended our official time together with a quick version of morning prayer, and then some of the kids napped until parents arrived to take them home. Others, though, found their way to the third floor of the church and watched the sun come up. (They had said they were going up to the roof, but I was struck deaf at that point and heard no more about that. No one fell off.)

I wonder how many of those kids remember that night some 30 years ago. I’ve not heard of anyone else leading this kind of “lock-out” but it was a highlight of my radio-inspired youth ministry. Wouldn’t mind trying it again. Except for the near arrest.

Contributing to the Delinquency of a Youth Group

Past entries here have mentioned the connections I had with youth ministry, a call I never felt comfortable with, but a vocation made necessary by two things: 1) my radio audience was made up of youth (in the early years especially), and 2) my radio ministry didn’t generate enough income to support me full time. I’ve listed my various youth ministry “jobs” previously in this blog, so I needn’t go into much detail apart from telling two or three stories more or less related to “Celebration Rock” and real live youth.

First, there was the night I was caught with underage kids in the middle of the night and found myself in a police station. That got your attention, didn’t it?

“Celebration Rock” had its birth as a program called “Showcase” broadcast on WBBL, the radio station operated at that time by Richmond, Virginia’s Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church. It was the late 1970s and to supplement my media ministry’s meager income, I had agreed to work at Grace Covenant as a part-time pastor to youth. The problem was that I had no formal training in the field. I was also introverted, never was into athletics, and didn’t sing or play guitar. As I remember it, my responsibilities were primarily with the high school youth, and they were fine kids, most of them. They were patient with my efforts to build community, experience Christian fellowship together, and do the obligatory activities previous groups had done in the past. For example, I organized and led a ski trip. Never mind that I had never skied before. And I took several of the teenagers to the week-long Montreat Youth conference. It was one of the worst weeks of my life. (With some further therapy, maybe I’ll write about that sometime.)

One of the things most youth groups look forward to at least once a year is the “lock in.” That’s a night when teenagers go to church, get “locked in,” and get to stay up all night while making life miserable for the well-meaning adults who thought this was a good thing. Depending on the church’s facilities and resources, the kids may watch movies, play games, sneak around the church building in the dark, and eat junk food. There may be a spiritual component of some kind, but not always. The Bible study or devotional time isn’t nearly as engaging as the sneaking around the building in the dark part.

Being a very creative guy, I changed the rules the night we had scheduled the lock-in. I designed it to be a lock-out. It took a couple of weeks and a score of phone calls, plus a letter to parents explaining what we were going to do that summer night. Frankly, except for the police station episode, the idea was pure genius and I would recommend this idea to anyone doing youth ministry in a local church. Here was the plan:

We gathered at the church at 8 p.m., with the kids arriving with their permission slips in hand. We began with some “circle time,” during which I told them of the night’s itinerary. In a few minutes, we would lock ourselves out of the church building and spend the night on the streets of Richmond. Kind of. Actually, we would be making several stops to visit with people who worked nights. The first stop was the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper building  downtown. We met with a reporter who took us to see the last “galley proofs” of the next morning’s edition. We talked with a photographer, too, and then went to the press room to see the papers printed and then bundled for delivery to the waiting trucks.

Next, we moved to what was then called the Medical College of Virginia Hospital, where we met with the night chaplain. He talked about his work there, but the most fascinating thing to me was the story he told about the day he first arrived at the hospital. Already hired, but not yet on site, he had been injured in an auto crash and arrived as a patient, not as a professional helper. He didn’t suggest that as a requirement for hospital chaplains, but it certainly set the tone for his ministry of empathy, compassion, and healing. The youth group was very impressed.

Also on the itinerary that night was a visit to a radio station. Since the kids knew me as the “rock and roll minister” I had asked the management of the stations where some of my programs were aired (WRVA and WRVQ) if we could stop by to talk with the over-night DJs, but we were turned down. Something about liability issues. Humbug. Q94 was the station most of the youth listened to in those days, and that was to be a highlight of their night out. But no. So I called WLEE (the fast fading AM rocker) and apparently they had no qualms about welcoming my youth group. I had had a long relationship with WLEE from the time “Showcase” started, so there was a firm level of trust there. The kids didn’t seem to mind at all that we weren’t going to the number one station in the city. And once we got into the WLEE studio, they learned that all there was to the station at night was one guy pushing buttons, cuing records, and logging his work. He also answered the phone and drank coffee. But it was as close as many of those kids came to show biz.

They almost didn’t make it to the radio station that night though. Because the stop just before that was to the local police  station, the precinct house in the church’s neighborhood. When I designed this night on the streets, I had called the Richmond police department to alert them to our plans for this all-nighter. Because the church was in a downtown area where one might expect some crime in the middle of the night, I also inquired about whether a patrol car might cruise by and check on us once in awhile. Not likely, the officer told me. They apparently had enough to do with real police work without providing security for our roving band of church kids who were foolish enough to be walking through the Fan District at 2 a.m. Fair enough.

But I was able to add the Fan District police precinct to our list of places we’d stop that night. Between the hospital and the radio station, we dropped by the station house. There was one cop there when we arrived. “Ah, you’re the one who called,” he said as we walked through the door, I and the kids and one other adult adviser. “Yes, I’m Jeff Kellam, the youth pastor at Grace Covenant down the street.”

“Well, Rev. Kellam, I have some bad news for you.” Oh oh; this part of the tour has fallen through for some reason, I thought. Good grief! We’re going to have an extra hour on our hands. That what I was thinking, but not what the officer was saying.

“I hate to tell you this,” the policeman said. “I should have thought about this when you called, but…we have a curfew here in Richmond. These kids were supposed to be off the streets by midnight. Do any of the kids have their parents here?”

“No. But I have permission slips!”

“Permission slips may be OK for the church, but a judge won’t be impressed. Since you are the one in charge, I guess I have no alternative but to place you under arrest for contributing to the delinquency of these minors.”

To be continued…