It always shocks people I meet now, when I tell them I used to work with death row inmates! I have always, in a very visceral way, been one of those seamless garment Catholics. Even when I was going through my long desert experience of being a depressed agnostic, I never understood abortion and I never supported the death penalty. I just instinctively felt, from childhood, that we should be very cautious about taking people's lives. Being raised in a big Catholic family, children were viewed as gifts from God. To have an abortion or even to take birth control was seen as slapping God in the face or playing God. Children are created in his image and likeness, new souls parents are entrusted with caring for. God's children first, before your own. My father, who was a judge was anti death penalty and this partly stemmed from religious belief and cultural history. We know we can never know the state of someone else's soul. Even murderers should be given a chance at repentance. We know our human system of justice is very imperfect. Therefore, the state should be very reluctant to take its own citizen's lives. It is better that a 100 guilty men go free, than one innocent man suffer, as Benjamin Franklin put it. The state loses its legitimacy with every mistaken execution. We've now had a spate of death row inmates released because of new DNA findings that exonerated them. This shows just how inexact our legal system is! Anyway, the death penalty doesn't work. If it did our country would have the lowest murder rate, but instead it has one of the highest. It is a false solution to our problems.
But ever since I left law school, I have not done much for prisoners at all. Sometimes I fantasize about reading aloud to them, especially juvenile delinquents. I read an article once where someone's ministry was to come in and read to the prisoners books they never had read to them as a child. I personally am of the conviction that snuggling up with mom or dad and being read to is probably a pretty effective inoculation against a life in crime. But I got very busy with raising children and homeschooling and I never did do anything like that.
My church participates in something called Kairos Prison Ministry. The thing people do to help out is to bake cookies for prisoners. Then when someone goes into to minister to them, they bring the cookies along. I get easily intimidated by baking, silly as that sounds, and the instructions are very precise for these cookies as to size and what can go in them. So I've never done this, though I think some of my kids have. I'd like to try to participate at least once in this project. It is a fairly popular around here.
The one little, little thing I do is that I signed up to receive email alerts and updates from the Virginia Catholic Conference. They work on death penalty issues in Virginia and so occasionally I do what they say and send emails to my representatives when issues dealing with the death penalty come up.
But that's about it. Wimpy, I know. I am feeling the need to make a New Year's resolution that I will do something that fits in some way into the 'visiting the imprisoned' category this coming year.
I remember my sister volunteering in the Special Olympics one year, years ago. Some of the other volunteers were prisoners who had earned the privilege of helping out. It was a really good idea because the prisoners got really into it. When you are a prisoner is is very hard to feel like you can help anyone or do anything worthwhile. My sister and one of the inmates started exchanging letters but the guy got too romantic, so she stopped the correspondence. I think she was a little freaked out by him. This aside, writing to them is one option.
St Therese of Lisieux prayed for a notorious prisoner sentenced to death. Did she correspond with him? I don't recall. But of course prayer is always something we can do.
Out of time again! Time to wake Sean and get him ready for Aquinas Learning.
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