My Visit to San Quentin: Transformation Behind Bars
In a world where truth and justice are so often twisted, veiled, and falsified, last week I found my faith restored in a most unexpected place, the San Quentin Corrections Facility in Northern California.
I was invited by Rabbi Paul Shleffar, Jewish Chaplain at the prison, to share my work on intergenerational healing in this Marin County prison, and around 50 men of many backgrounds elected to show up to Chapel C to hear more. As they flowed into the room and took their seats I could feel their eagerness to learn.
San Quentin has more than 2,000 inmates and I was surprised to learn about the prison’s rehabilitation programs, as well as its prison university project to help prisoners better themselves for life both inside and outside the prison walls.
Unlike other classes I have been teaching around the country, these students did not need to be schooled on the impacts of trauma and its lingering effects. They knew all about that. Nor did it seem necessary to discuss how the residue of our ancestors' extreme life experiences lands in us.
What yielded hmm's and aha's was not excavating family ruptures, but bringing to mind ancestral riches. I asked twenty men to gather on one side of the room to portray souls in next world, and then, one person at a time stood before “their ancestors,” who simply gazed softly at their “descendants.” The chapel grew profoundly quiet.
When the first person, Thaddeus, a young white man, stood before the ancestors, who were all men of color, I panicked. Would this work? But this young man dropped in fully and gazed at each ancestor intently. Thaddeus had transcended externals and gone right to the soul. He looked at me and said, “That was overwhelming in a good way.” The questions that arose were: Were the ancestors disappointed? Standing in judgment? I turned and asked the men standing in as ancestors and asked them, “Did you feel disappointed or judgmental toward your descendant?” They shook their heads emphatically, and said, “No, we just felt compassion for how hard it is to walk this earth.”
Later, the room seemed to fill with warm honey when I asked the men to mentally float back to their female caregivers to find their positive legacies. Hands shot up. The men wanted to share the kindness, resilience, support, creativity, style, and faithfulness that their grandmothers, mothers, and aunts had shown them. Could they call upon these strengths? Had these traits passed into them?
Finding their male caregivers' legacies was more challenging, halting. Staccato answers told me about the pain of the men's fathers' absence, violence, and confusion. Was there a moment of gentleness they could remember? Draw upon? Could they see through their outer layers to the soul of the man?
One man shared about his dad’s violent cycles of coming home from jail to beat his mother, go back to jail, and come home to do it again. I asked if there was anything good he could remember. After a long pause, he answered, “Once when I was little I was having a bath and my dad came in and patted my back and said, ‘I’m sorry, son.’” I said, “Take that thread as a glimpse into his dad’s truer self.”
I was so deeply moved by the openness of these men, their commitment to look at themselves and what they carry inside. These are people who are taking radical responsibility for their actions, telling the truth of their existence—not dodging, blaming, or falling into bitterness—more than I can say for some of our highest elected officials. The inmates there taught me that we are all prisoners of our own family conditioning and past choices—until we choose to take the reins of our lives to find out what imprisons us and how to move beyond it. That is where our freedom lies.
I came out of San Quentin with my heart broken open. I know well that a system that incarcerates black men disproportionately continues the trauma legacy of slavery in our country. In this context, I was so humbled to bring the Torah of intergenerational trauma to people who deeply can use it.