I began my role as Prison Justice Learning Action Community Organizer with On Earth Peace in October of 2019. My faith background as a Quaker led me to pursue this position. Some of the Quaker testimonies that are most valuable to me are Community, Equality, and Simplicity. Being exposed to these testimonies as an adolescent switched on my attentiveness to justice issues, and inspired me to learn more and more about them during my school years. This led to my main interest in human rights advocacy and peaceful conflict resolution that guided my decision to choose a major in Global Studies (International Relations) in college.
During my freshman year at Bridgwater College, I was taking a class entitled Social Problems. During this course, I took experiential trips to different locations in Harrisonburg VA to showcase the social issue theories we studied in class. One of these locations was Middle River Regional Jail, which my class toured guided by a corrections officer. We saw temporary holding cells, the kitchen, the cafeteria, regular holding areas, outdoor exercise areas, and solitary confinement areas. Something overwhelming struck me during this tour. It was the way that the corrections officer spoke about the people being held there: “These aren’t good people,” “They got themselves in here, they deserve what they get,” “You can’t feel bad for them like you and me, they’re not like us.” The most disturbing instance was when the officer freely admitted to us that, because the jail was running low on space for prisoners with mental health issues, they overflowed these inmates into solitary confinement holding cells permanently. Given that solitary confinement is defined as torture by many human rights organizations, and is shown to worsen or cause mental health issues in incarcerated people, this disturbed me. But it was particularly the nonchalant nature of the guard explaining this to us that felt wrong; he had no fear of the institution being held accountable for such treatment of citizens, and he didn’t believe this treatment was wrong at all.
Another Quaker belief is that the light of God exists in everyone, there is that of God in everyone. Thus, from a faith perspective, there is no justifiable reason to throw people away, even if they require lots of rehabilitation. Each human life is valuable, and thus should not be conveniently thrown away, out of sight and out of mind. This is what I was witnessing as a defining factor of the US “justice” system. When people do not follow the laws constructed by the government, or they happen to struggle with mental health, or drug addiction, they are thrown away in cells. There is little opportunity for effective mental health counseling, drug addiction counseling, and trauma counseling. Ironically, these are the systems that could have stopped crime before it starts. During my reading on this subject, I remember seeing that a significant percentage of people who commit violent crimes experienced some kind of abuse before the age of 5. Our lack of comprehensive systems to provide rehabilitation and counseling leave many people hurting and more inclined to crime. In addition, those under the sway of the prison system usually face abuse and exploitation, either through prison slavery, solitary confinement, systematic dehumanization, and physical abuse. In fact, after getting home from my trip to Middle River Regional Jail, I did some research. I found that a few years before, prison officials had been denying prisoners their essential prescription medication. When prisoners tried to stand up for themselves and demand their essential medication, officers responded with physical violence, even breaking the fingers of one of the prisoners involved.
This was the background of inspiration that pushed me to apply for the position of Prison Justice Organizer with On Earth Peace. Remembering the guard’s words, I held a belief that cultural perception of incarcerated people is what needed to change in order to halt some of the injustices committed against them: “They’re not like us,” they are like us, with that of God in them; “They deserve what they got,” not a soul deserves the dehumanizing treatment of the US prison system. Unfortunately, my responses to the guard’s statements are seen as fairly radical by a large percentage of the US population. It is a widely held belief that if someone commits a crime, they deserve to be punished by the prison system, to become less than a citizen. This can include the loss of physical freedom, sense of identity, the right to vote, the ability to apply for public housing, the ability to apply for food stamps, and the ability to be compensated fairly for work (prisoners can be paid nothing or as little as 15 cents an hour for their work). They are also subjected to personal and cultural shame for the rest of their lives. If a good percentage of the population believes that people deserve this treatment, to be thrown away, for something as little as drug possession, something is wrong. Thus, I approached my work as a community organizer with a goal of spreading awareness, issue education, building community engagement with the subject, and encouraging people to take action supporting prisoners’ citizenship rights, letting their representatives know, and spreading awareness in their own communities.
This goal led me to my current project at On Earth Peace. In brainstorming how to reach that goal, I crafted the Prison Justice Learning Action Community Engagement Program with the help of my supervisor, Matt Guynn. I designed this program to be an 8-week process of community engagement, issue education, and facilitation to taking action. During this program I have seen community members learning more about prison justice issues than before, engaging with each other to form a community network around the agenda of prison justice, and building up the facilities and courage to learn and take action in their own communities. I am so grateful for the energy that my program participants put into learning and building a community-conscious with the agenda of changing the prison culture in the US, one small step at a time. I see compassion for other human beings with the light of God in them, regardless of the legal crimes they may have committed. I see energy to take this knowledge from our discussions and spread it to their local communities.
While simply learning and having conversations with a small community about prison justice issues may seem simple, with little measurable impact, I believe this is key to eventual widespread systemic change in favor of prison reform. Spreading awareness through multiple intersecting community networks and having conversations is how people come to hold strong beliefs and passion for the subject. Communities vote and design systems and stand up for what they believe in. If a large enough portion of US citizens hold that everyone has the light of God in them, and no one deserves to be thrown away, tortured, or made a second class citizen, this system of exploitation and abuse cannot stand forever.
Jennifer Weakland is a young adult Friend (Quaker) living in Richmond, Virginia. She graduated from Bridgewater College with a degree in Global Studies. During her senior year, she served as the Prison Justice Intern for On Earth Peace – an agency of the Church of the Brethren.