"You are hereby sentanced....."

Jaci and I are on vacation this week and have bee in Kingston since Saturday. We both really enjoy coming here for pretty well the same reasons.
1) Away from home is away from home.
2) Kingston is a very nice city to come visit.
3) To see Jaci’s family

Many married folk will take great delight in regaling others with stories of the dreaded “in-laws”. I however, can’t. Jaci has a great family. I always enjoy spending time with her brothers, sister, and in particular her parents. Really I could go on for hours about how great it is to spend time with Debi and Stan (Jac’s mom and dad) but that’s not really the point of this missive.

Yesterday Jaci and I shadowed Stan and Debi. Almost like it was a “Take your kid to work day”. Jaci with Debi and me with Stan. In case you aren’t aware, Jaci’s parents are Salvation Army Officers (ministers and so much more) who are currently appointed to Corrections in Kingston. If you have never been to Kingston there are about eight jails, prisons and/or penitentiaries in the area. Debi is mostly in the courts with families (of the accused or the victim) while Stan is mostly in the jails. There is of course a lot more that they do (anger management training, escorts, etc), but to detail everything would again, detract from the point of the missive.

So what is the point? Simply put, prisoners. Call them what you like, prisoner, inmate, convict, wrongly convicted, it makes little difference. I have held the long-term belief that those in jail deserve to be there. While they are there they should have very few “rights” and privileges should be hard to earn and pulled away at the slightest hint of infraction. If they believed that they could take away the basic rights of another, why should they get to keep theirs?

Needless to say my visit to first Pittsburgh and then Joyceville were eye-opening experiences. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I will mention one man that I met, I’ll call him “J”. He is currently serving his twenty-third year of a life sentence for rape/murder. J has been married for seventeen years now and when he will likely be released on parole soon (he’ll be on parole until he dies, life means life after all) he will move in with his long time wife and they have never spent more than a few hours at a time together. Almost like they’ll be newlyweds.

Stan and Debi will be doing marriage counseling with them right from the get-go to help ease this transition but the point that I am taking an awfully long time to get to is that my experience with J has left me changed. His openness and his candor about his crime and his experiences on the inside were both shocking and refreshing. He spoke at great length on how he knew that his problems stemmed from alcohol and how it took some time, even inside, to come to terms with that, and to begin the process of making himself a better human being.

Despite his crimes, I believe J to be a good man; He appears to have a sincere desire to use his experiences to help others face some of the same problems and issues that plagued him. He is worried about being “out” and rightly so but seems to be doing everything he can and then some to make the transition as smooth as possible.

He will likely be released soon. Statistically, those in his situation rarely re-offend and don’t present any more danger to society than you or I do. I wish him the best and will be forever grateful to him because through him I am forced to re-examine how I look at things.

I am also grateful to Stan to taking me around for the day and showing me everything he did. It may take some time for me to change my thinking on prisoners. I may never completely change my mind but if I may wax poetic for a moment, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Be well all.