|
Home
Theory
of The Gift Economy
Practice
Many Voices discuss The Gift Economy
Publications
Links
Contact Us
|
Reconciliation: Forgiving and healing instead of endless cycles of retaliation
By Susan Lee Solar and Susan Bright
Violent crimes rip the souls and devastate the lives of everyone they touch. The question is ó do we strike out in retribution, creating endless cycles of retaliation; or do we reach out to everyone the violence has eviscerated and heal the wounds? Just as surely as the victims' family members weep into the small hours of the morning, so too do family members on the offender side of the crime. Do we work to heal imbalances in our society from which crime manifests; or do we become perpetrators of more hate and violence?"
In Texas, groups like 'Justice for All,' a support group for family members of crime victims, typify the exchange approach to solving human problems. 'Justice for All' maintains families achieve closure and peace only after the criminal has been executed. Afraid for the safety of other family members and wrapped in the fury of grief and revenge, a fury codified and sanctioned by the state, they demand that killers be killed ó an eye for an eye. Governor, and later president, George W. Bush used the pain and outrage these victims endure to justify his stand for capital punishment in the same way he used the grief of September 11 families to justify his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It was good politics to be tough on crime, good politics to go after terrorists.
It is impossible to have too much empathy for the surviving family members of murder victims. Lives are shattered, grief stained hours and dreams extend into drastic, frightening and empty futures for families who have their loved ones ripped away by violent crime. The same is true of the family members of murders. It is difficult to even imagine the horror families of death row inmates who are innocent endure. For mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers whose loved ones have been unjustly executed, there is debilitating outrage plus the added trauma of public humiliation and stigma that lasts generations.
Worse perhaps, is what happens when this eye-for-an-eye logic degenerates to absurdity, when the victims strike out, not at actual perpetrators, but randomly as happens usually in war and as much as half the time when the state executes human beings at the end of the profoundly flawed system that has evolved in the United States. Even if one could assume the right person would be executed for every murder, another death often lightens no one's burden of grief. Many family members discover retaliatory problem solving does not bring peace or healing. Instead it paralyzes them in knots of anxiety and despair, the pain of which becomes impossible to bear. When that happens, some reach for another solution, one that is based on reconciliation. They go into prisons, meet offenders and work to alleviate social and economic problems that breed violent crimes.
Prison ministries such as Dove Prison Ministries, founded by Edwin Smith to serve death row inmates at the Terrell Unit in Livingston Texas, help inmates cope with unbearable conditions. They help prepare inmates for the spiritual journey to death. They also find pen pals and help prisoners communicate with international anti-death penalty activists and organizations who help raise needed funds for the dozens of court procedures on which inmate's lives depend.
The Restorative Justice movement is actually the original human solution to the disruption created by human conflict. A parent, finding one child has smashed the other across the face, will take measures to reconcile the children, not execute the offender. Violence needs healing, it does not require more violence. That is according to the first logic, the logic of the gift.
The leap of mind, which assumes one human being will be healed by killing another comes from a deep disassociation between heart and action. The Theory of the Gift Economy maintains this rift occurred when the boy child became disassociated from the nurturing mother so that he existed not as part of her, but in opposition to her. Suddenly the nurturing logic, is "wrong" and the opposite, is "right." Capital punishment, like war, in a patriarchal society, is the logical outcome of this rift. Seen from the perspective of the first human logic, the logic of the gift, it makes no sense at all.
After 9/11 the Bush war campaign against Afghanistan and then Iraq ballooned on a tide of grief, fury and fear. The United Stated, led by a president who was not elected and in spite of the largest world-wide anti-war movement in history, destroyed homes, killed many thousands of innocent people and mobilized the enemy, who he said were "terrorists." Again it is impossible to overstate the immense grief victim's families of 9/11 have endured. Any yet, many of these people, tears streaming from endless pools of grief, have been leaders in the anti-war movement. They have not wanted their grief to be used to further the political and economic goals of a neo-conservative administration or to justify the killing of any more innocent people.
At an anti-war rally in San Francisco on February 16, 2003, Matthew Lasar spoke out against Shock and Awe, the Pentagon plan to drop a bomb on Baghdad every four minutes for two days. "There is a word that describes the practice of bombing a city full of civilians in order to shock them into submission. That word is terrorism."
He went on to say;
We of 'September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows' know what terrorism means. We know what it means to wake up one morning and discover that a brother, or sister, or spouse or patent or child or uncle has been destroyed because someone wanted to fill us with 'shock and awe.' We oppose such practices, whether directed by Osama bin Ladin or George W. Bush. We of September 11th Families love this country. But our hearts break that it has come to this. Our hearts break as they did on September 11th, 2001, and they did when we visited the people of Afghanistan... We ask America, as citizens and as human beings ó when will the cycle of violence end and the struggle for understanding and resolution begin? Let it begin with this enormous popular movement. Let it begin with us.
From the perspective of gift logic it is useful to link the reconciliation movement and peace work because they are existing alternatives to war and it's civil equivalent, retaliatory justice. There is another way. It is not the way of blind forgetting. Good people are working endlessly to find ways to reach across the violent divides inevitably caused by patriarchal capitalism, which wastes to create scarcity to add value; when real value lies in the gift, an action which follows need and perpetuates to enhance, not destroy life. Serious peacework involves addressing the conditions that create endless cycles of retaliation. There is a radically different way of seeing and acting in the world. People engaged in the restorative justice movement are doing that. They don't often see themselves as activists in the Gift Paradigm; but they are doing the work. Often it occurs that understanding the theory of the Gift Economy is first a matter of recognizing how it is woven through the threads of our lives. The gift, which has been morphed invisible by patriarchal structures for centuries, flourishes in the difficult and courageous work of reconciliation.
Delving into case histories of individuals on death row, one inevitably feels a deep empathy for victims' relatives: parents, children, grandchildren, siblings, spouses, lovers, friends. In the multitude of stories about Texas executions, relatives of the victims are most often quoted. Their stories range from cold fury to wrenching grief and loss that no act of justice can heal, to statements of astounding forgiveness, even love for the perpetrator. It is easy to understand the fury and desolation; what's harder for most of us is to imagine how one could arrive at a place of peace with the perpetrator of the most unforgivable damage imaginable. But some in our midst have done that, and their stories merit telling.
Thomas Ann Hines: Victim Offender Mediation Services (VOMS)
Thomas Ann Hines was the product of an abusive home, then an abusive husband. She left the marriage with her only child, a son who was the delight of her heart. A good kid, a good student, he went away to college. His freshman year, he took a study break in a video arcade between classes at Austin Community College. A young man asked him for a ride, then blasted him from the side with a handgun. They found him slumped over the wheel of his automobile. The seventeen-year-old killer fled, but was apprehended not long afterwards, and eventually sentenced to life, meaning 40 years before the possibility of parole.
Hines was consumed with grief and bitterness. She spoke constantly of hatred, pain, and the senselessness of her son's murder. Friends tired of it. She now believes she was stuck in the anger stage of grief because she didn't know how to move forward. She never thought in positive terms about the future, only about the irredeemable past. She began volunteering in prisons in 1994, thinking it might lessen her pain. Over the next four years, she spoke to men behind bars about how they could change their lives, make different choices, no matter what they had done.
During a talk at the maximum security prison in Huntsville in which she had intended to give offenders a piece of her mind, she realized she was looking at a "sea of broken humanity." She was overwhelmed. "I looked at them, and all of a sudden, I became a mother again." After the presentation an inmate asked her why she had come. She told him, "If my son was sitting in this room, I'd want someone to reach out a hand and lift him up." (Evers 1998)
In 1998, thirteen years after the crime, she was led through the Victim Offender Mediation Services (VOMS), part of the Texas Department of Victims' Services, to the idea of meeting Charles, her son's killer. She agreed to have the meeting video taped.
She prepared for the meeting for three years, thinking at first she just wanted information about the last moments of her son's life. The killer was equally anxious about the meeting, afraid she would scream at him. When she got to the room where they would meet and saw the small table, she almost bolted, saying he would be too close; she didn't want to touch him. It was too late to change the table; the video cameras and mikes were all in place, so she toughed it out, telling the staff of VOMS that she'd already done the hardest thing a mother could do, bury her child and walk away.
The result is an astonishing videotaped encounter between a bereaved, tiny, middle-aged, white, mother and a much larger, younger, black, man who'd killed her beloved son. The turning point came when she asked him what books were read to him as a child. When he said "none," her heart began to open. At the point where he put his head down on the table and began to sob, she could no longer maintain the gap between them, and reached out to him. The meeting changed them both in ways no one could have foreseen, and brought her peace she had not imagined possible. Charles, for his part, no longer accumulates mountains of disciplinary write-ups for fighting and starting riots. These days, along with Thomas Ann, he speaks to groups about his transformation, though still serving the equivalent of a life sentence.
Gracie Jett: Victim's Mother becomes Death Row Mentor
Gracie Jett doesn't fit the profile of the typical ally for a man on death row. She is not European, to start with, or a minister, or enamored of a death row inmate, or a member of a human rights organization, or an activist of any kind. In fact, Mrs. Jett is the mother of a murder victim, whose accused killer is spending what may be the last days of his youth on Texas death row staring at an imminent execution. His appeals are well into the federal cycle, a journey from which few return alive.
It is a story of youthful neglect and abuse, addiction, gang culture on the street and in prison, drugs, thugs and deception. Cronyism, old boy networks and political ambition run through the story as well. The mother of the victim is convinced the person on death row for killing her son, didn't do it.
Mrs. Jett didn't set out to challenge one of Fort Worth's leading prosecutors, a man named Mike Parrish, who has worked for the Tarrant County District Attorney since he left Texas Tech Law School two decades ago. She was minding her own business when she got a call from her ex-husband in the middle of the night, the kind of call every parent dreads. "Mike's been murdered," (Solar, taped interviews of Gracie Jett, 2/01), her ex-husband told her. Their only natural son had just been killed near his childhood home in North Texas.
Jett is a native Texan who raised her family in a neighborhood on the north side of Fort Worth, which was safe and wholesome at the time. But Sansom Park was riddled with crime and drugs by September 1, 1994. That was when her son Michael Wayne Sanders was shot in the back. He died on the floorboard of his new Chevy truck in the parking lot of the Toro Car Wash on Long Street at 31st, just before midnight.
Gracie Jett says she used to believe in the death penalty and when her son was killed, she wanted the killer on death row: "People don't realize what losing a child is like. But now she is mentor for two young men on death row, and she feels like she should be included among families of the condemned inmates. "I just kind of dedicated my life to tryin' to help these two young men." (Solar, taped interviews of Gracie Jett, 2/2001)
Jett and her son's father investigated the crime extensively at their own expense because they were horrified that prosecutors had convicted the wrong person, probably, she later theorized, to get a gang kid off the streets. She wrote to then Governor, George W. Bush, TDCJ Director, Wayne Scott; the Texas Attorney General; and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles asking them not to execute Pablo Melendez, the young man falsely convicted of killing her son. "Here I am a victim's mother, begging the state not to kill the man that stands convicted of killing my only son, but he is not the killer. . . . Pablo Melendez has made plenty of mistakes but one of them isn't killing my son."(ibid.)
"They don't need to be killing a boy that didn't do it," Jett says, adding that neither her son nor Pablo were angels, but "six feet under is not the answer [. . . ]It's going to drive me crazy ñ another young man dead for nothing, a wasted life. And the real killer out there to put somebody's else's mother through what I've been through."(ibid.).
Ten years after the death of her son, Jett continues working with attorneys for Pablo Melendez to obtain his release from prison.
Carol Byars: Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation ó Texas and Journey of Hope ... From Violence to Healing
Carol Byars, the president of the first state chapter of 'Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation' (MVFR), signed in June 2000, the first statement by a victims' group calling for a moratorium on executions. The first state branch of the national group was, fittingly, the Texas chapter, based in Houston, the capital of death row sentences in a state that leads the union and most of the world in state-sponsored killings.
Byars was the headliner in the press conference that formally announced the formation of MVFR -Texas, whose mission statement says they are committed to promoting healing through reconciliation rather than continuing the cycle of violence through retribution and vengeance.
Reporters issued a barrage of leading questions based on the opinion that the high rate of executions and capital sentences here reflect the public will, and that the MVFR position and a moratorium on executions would extend pain for victims' families and thwart the public will. Byars said she felt sympathy for the parents of murder victims and all their relatives, and that their pain was understandable, but from her own experience she believed the position of 'Justice For All' encouraged the continuance of destructive pain.
"In my case I had children I wanted to raise in a positive atmosphere and show them there was a better way than revenge and retribution ó that was Jimmy's legacy. My husband was worth more than teaching his children to hate. I'm doing what I'm doing to honor him." Later Byars added, "We are a healing organization; we don't promise revenge or retaliation. We believe you can't heal while you hold on to revenge and hatred. You can't do anything positive with all that negativity."
Byars has undergone a 22-year journey of pain and has emerged into healing and activism. She returned to her trailer home later that afternoon on the far northeastern outskirts of Houston to find her youngest daughter, born soon after the fatal attack on Carol's husband, exclaiming with friends over the TV coverage they'd witnessed of the event. But Byars had no time to discuss it. She was expected at work at the cafè next door, where she worked as a waitress, hoping to eventually earn enough to replace or repair her dysfunctional vehicle.
The formation of the Houston MVFR group was an effort inspired by Byars' participation in the "Journey of Hope" in Texas and Louisiana in 1998 where she met Ron Carlson, another Houstonian. Carlson's elder sister, Deborah Ray Thornton was killed with a pick-ax by Karla Faye Tucker and her boyfriend Danny Garrett. Carlson came to not only forgive Tucker, but to become a close friend and advocate for commutation of her sentence, and was present on her side of the witness divide at the Walls Unit in Huntsville at her execution in February of 1998.
Byars was 21 and nine months pregnant with her second daughter when the husband she refers to as the love of her life was shot in the stomach by a neighbor. A few years ago, she lost most of her material possessions when a friend who was her employer slowly slid into financial disaster and her wages were first paid by half, then half of that, then nothing. About that time, a Florida-based organizer against the death penalty who was setting up the 'Journey of Hope' tour, called and asked what her schedule was for the next few months. Byars told him she was free, and spent two months in what she describes as an incredible experience. She met Sunny Jacobs, who spent seventeen years in prison including five years on Florida's death row for a murder she never committed. Her common-law husband Jesse Tafero was executed for the same murder two years before an old childhood friend, film-maker Mickie Dickoff, uncovered and presented publicly the evidence of innocence that set her free.
New voices for compassion and reconciliation are loose in the most merciless state in the United States.
The James Byrd Jr. Foundation for Racial Healing
The family of James Byrd, Jr., arguably the most famous Texas murder victim since John F. Kennedy, Jr. found another path to heal raw pain caused by the senseless murder of their family member, a black man dragged to death behind a truck driven by white racists. The Byrd family created a foundation for racial healing in the name of their murdered loved one. In the small town of Jasper, they have reached out to the families of the perpetrators with compassion and a spirit of reconciliation, understanding with wisdom that can only come from the deepest essence of our humanity. Their efforts for healing and reform have gained wide support.
Within three years of Byrd's murder, the State of Texas passed and Governor Perry signed into law the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act, which "strengthens penalties for crimes motivated by the victim's race, religion, color, sex, disability, sexual preference, age or national origin. It replaces previous hate crimes law that did not list specific categories of people who would be protected. In previous years, then-Gov. George W. Bush refused to support such legislation." (Interfaith Alliance Press Release, 5/2001)
Ross Byrd has become an outspoken opponent of Capital Punishment, joining abolitionists in vigil to protest the execution of his father's murderer. While he initially favored the death penalty for the men who killed his father, he experienced a change of heart. "When I heard King had exhausted his appeals, I began thinking, 'How can this help me or solve my pain?' and I realized that it couldn't." (Houston Chronicle, 7/3/02)
The Restorative Justice Movement
The restorative justice movement searches for alternatives to the punitive and retribution models that are the basis of prison life and capital punishment. The community that gathers together in this movement includes not only victims' families, but abolition activists, defenders, the families of perpetrators and death row inmates themselves.
Jim Marcus, director of the Texas Defender Service, said that losing the case of Kenneth Ransom was devastating for him, although he said attorneys who take on capital defense cases have to be able to withstand such losses, given the odds against them. The families and friends of Odell Barnes, Jr., Pablo Melendez, Jr., Anthony Graves, David Stoker, Gary Graham of Kenneth Foster, Randall Dale Adams and Kerry Max Cook are also victims of a system that has declared their loved one dispensable, despite serious reason for doubt about their guilt. That has to affect one's self-esteem, one's worldview, one's sense of trust and hope in a benevolent universe. David Stoker's mother had a heart attack and died shortly after she learned her son's execution date had been set.
The families of those who admitted their guilt, like Larry Robison and Karla Fay Tucker, were traumatized for years by the fate hanging over their loved one. Is it disrespectful to the families of their victims to feel empathy for the families of murderers?
One of the daughters of James Byrd, Jr. demonstrated her answer to that question when she reached out to comfort (after John "Bill" King was condemned by a jury) the aged and grieving father of the man who tortured and dragged her father, in the most hideous way, to death. It was a powerful gesture of mercy.
International Models for Reconciliation
In March of 2001, Carol Byars left for Norway as part of a delegation focused on the death penalty in the United States. Byars wrote on her return that what she found in Norway was:
[,,.] a country that takes care of its own[... ]the police do not carry guns. It was hard for a Texan, like myself, to conceive of this way of life. Yet, their violent crime is very low. Their mentally ill are treated and general healthcare is provided... they have few homeless by comparison. This was a world that was totally alien to me. I love my country, but the problems affecting the U.S. (seem) overwhelming. While I have been in the Human Rights struggle for some time, I had no real comparison to base my understanding of what a peaceful society is like. Coming home, I wanted to weep for America, and especially for Texas. I wanted to weep for what we could and should be." (Solar, taped interview with Carol Byars, 6/00)
Byars contrasted Norway with Texas, where "the exorbitant amount of money spent on executions takes away from victims' funds, crime prevention, help for the mentally impaired, and education."
A Scandinavian psychiatrist named Sissel Egeland who works with violent offenders in rehabilitation offered to take a Texas death row inmate named Michael Moore who she believed to be borderline psychotic and who was scheduled for destruction in March of 2001. She offered to give him the treatment he would have received in her country had he committed his crime there: on-on-one care with a therapist in a nurturing, peaceful environment until he calmed down enough to begin to consider his future and to work together with specialists on constructing an individually tailored education and psychological treatment program that would mold him into a constructive member of society. It was a concept that is difficult to grasp as a reality, when one comes from Texas and has a knowledge of what the reality is here for violent offender, even for nonviolent offenders.
'Journey of Hope' keeps a webpage devoted to stories of reconciliation. Carol Byers writes:
It is past time for being silent about the death penalty. In Texas, we're executing record numbers each year. Things have gotten so bad because people have all been silent and let things get bad. We are told many times that we are not supposed to forgive ñ that when people do horrible things to us we should do something just as bad in retribution. Those of us who know better ñ those of us who know the power of forgiveness ñ need to speak up. Every chance we get we need to challenge the mentality that compassion is a weakness. Compassion is the toughest thing of all, but it's the only thing that works to restore peace in our lives.
On August 8, 2003, in an address to Japanese delegates of the "Peace Boat, " which included Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, Beverly Eckert of 'September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows' said:
We're here today because we are the ones who hear the voices of the dead calling for an end to violence and hatred ó voices that are telling us to rise above our fear in order to have a coherent and compassionate dialogue about the root causes of murderous strife; telling us that we need to shed our doubts about what a mere handful of believers can do; telling us that amid the ashes that covered this city two years go and Hiroshima and Nagasaki 58 years ago, and amid the blood-soaked killing fields in countless nations overseas, we will find the wisdom, grace, unity and strength we need so that on some future September 11th, when we look around us, we will see a better world.(2003)
These voices for reconciliation come from people who have been ravaged by terrorism, violence and war. They speak the logic of the first wisdom, the nurturing logic of the gift. The action of value, or gift, that violence requires us to complete is not retaliation but reconciliation.
References:
Periodicals:
"Byrd Son Fights for Life of Father's Murderer," Houston Chronicle, (7/4/02)
Evers, Tag (1998). "Restorative Justice," Yes!, fall 1998, Positive Futures Network, Bainbridge Island, WA).
Internet
Byers, Carol, "Journey of Hope" website, Carol Byer's page. http://www.journeyofhope.org/people/carol_byers.htm
Eckert, Beverly. August 8, 2003, New York, Speech delivered to Japanese Delegates of the Peace Boat. September Eleventh Families For Peaceful Tomorrows website: http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/.
Unpublished Materials:
Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Susan Lee Campbell Solar Texas Death Penalty papers, letter from Gracie Jett to Governor, George W. Bush; TDCJ Director, Wayne Scott; the Texas Attorney General; and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles
Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Susan Lee Campbell Solar Death Penalty Papers, Interfaith Group Applauds Texas Governor for Courageously Signing Hate Crimes Act," Interfaith Alliance Press Release, Washington DC, 5/15/01.
Center for American History, Susan Lee Campbell Solar Death Penalty Papers, Interfaith Group Applauds Texas Governor for Courageously Signing Hate Crimes Act," Interfaith Alliance Press Release, Washington DC, 5/15/01.
Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Susan Lee Campbell Solar Death Penalty Papers, taped interview of Gracie Jett, 2/8/01.
Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Susan Lee Campbell Solar Death Penalty Papers, taped interview of Gracie Jett, 2/24/01.
Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Susan Lee Campbell Solar Death Penalty Papers, letter from Gracie Jett to Governor, George W. Bush; TDCJ Director, Wayne Scott; the Texas Attorney General; and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Susan Lee Campbell Solar Death Penalty Papers, taped interview of Carol Byers, MVFR, Houston, 6/14/00.
|
return to top |
