Holman Prison; June 15, 2006
I just got back from a visit to death row.
Holman Prison is located about 115 miles outside of Montgomery near the town of Atmore, Alabama. The maximum security prison was constructed in 1968 under the administration of Governor Lurleen Wallace, wife and successor to the infamous Governor George Wallace (known for his stance against desegregation), and the only female governor to ever be elected in this state. Today, the facility houses about 830 general inmates (many of whom are serving life without parole) and 168 death row prisoners.
I emptied my pockets and left the contents in the car, taking only a photo ID and a note pad. The tower guards sitting at the entrance pressed the buzzer to let us in. We walked inside to the reception area and a guard materialized and patted me down. Then the door slid open, kind of like I would have imagined from the movies I’ve seen, and we walked into a room containing about 20 tables, a couple of snack machines and surrounded by glass walls.
In 2000, at the age of 19, BB was convicted of capital murder because he shot and killed the man he was trying to rob. This morning, he walked into the room with the glass windows; I shook his hand and, with the EJI staff attorney leading the way, helped to explain the next steps of his appeals process. This explanation was important because since his conviction 6 years ago, BB has not been visited by an attorney. It’s a bit unsettling talking so banally with someone about trying to save his life, especially when the odds aren’t good. I imagine it’s what a doctor feels like talking to a patient whose cancer has already metastasized.
When I walked into the prison, out of the corner of my eye I saw a plaque with the quote “As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” To me, the shadow of death took the form of a pit in my stomach as I sat there, having a conversation with a guy who looked not a day older than 20, who was quick to smile and who was genuinely considerate and happy to see us. The main question he asked as we went along was “how much time are the appeals going to take?”, which is a loaded question that doesn’t have a good answer no matter which way you cut it, though in his case the process is still in its early stages.
For more than a half hour after we got the legal material out of the way, we chatted about everything from the NBA finals to his favorite college teams to the family members he keeps in touch with and why he likes the heat of Alabama and Louisiana compared to the cold of the northeast, where he used to live. He became most animated when telling us about the annual death row-wide competition that’s coming up, where teams of prisoners compete against each other in chess, basketball, volleyball and dominoes in order to win a prize of ice cream, soda and, most important of all, bragging rights. We only left when he had to go back to his prison cell for the twice-daily prison-wide count that takes place.
Though I know BB unlawfully took someone’s life, sitting there it was hard to envision the 60 seconds when the gun went off as anything more than a reckless and tragic mistake brought on with the help of a childhood marred by physical abuse and the deaths of BB’s immediate family. Sitting there, it was also hard to think that no matter what happens with his appeals, BB is virtually guaranteed of spending the rest of his life behind bars in a jail cell in Alabama without air conditioning, competing for ice cream and a soda.
As I wrote earlier, I can’t imagine the loss and grieving that the victim’s family has suffered since the day he was killed. But today - after I realized first-hand that the person convicted of committing the crime is not defined by his life’s worst moment (that’s one of EJI’s mottos) - I understood that execution is not the solution to honor the victim’s life or to attaining justice. Perhaps I would have reacted differently had I met a death row prisoner who was a habitual violent offender, or who visibly displayed his evil designs.
What does evil look like after all? If the person sitting in front of me today is considered the face of evil, and is deemed to be so dangerous to society that his life must be terminated, then I can only look in the mirror and conclude that evil resides within me and my friends too, because in different circumstances BB and I would have no problem hanging out and becoming friends outside of the barbed wire fences that surrounded us.
That makes me think of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant”, where Guthrie is arrested for littering and is placed on the same bench as violent offenders - “Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me!” And a few minutes later, Guthrie sings how they all “shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talking about all kinds of groovy things.” The point is that maybe we’re all the same inside – we’re all sitting on the same bench – except that different people act out their bad parts while others keep it contained.
Or I could drop the whole evil stuff and conclude that I’m not an evil person nor did I meet the face of evil today - only a friendly kid who would cream me in basketball and/or chess if I ever played him and who is paying too high a price for his mistakes, which originated through no fault of his own way before he pulled the gun on an innocent victim in a mall parking lot. To the extent that it's possible to generalize about evil people, I believe that the real ones might be serial criminals, sociopaths or even perhaps the few individuals who enforce laws and punishments in the false name of justice.
The answer is probably a little bit of both. I guess I’ll just have to go listen to Alice’s Restaurant and think about it.
Holman Prison is located about 115 miles outside of Montgomery near the town of Atmore, Alabama. The maximum security prison was constructed in 1968 under the administration of Governor Lurleen Wallace, wife and successor to the infamous Governor George Wallace (known for his stance against desegregation), and the only female governor to ever be elected in this state. Today, the facility houses about 830 general inmates (many of whom are serving life without parole) and 168 death row prisoners.
I emptied my pockets and left the contents in the car, taking only a photo ID and a note pad. The tower guards sitting at the entrance pressed the buzzer to let us in. We walked inside to the reception area and a guard materialized and patted me down. Then the door slid open, kind of like I would have imagined from the movies I’ve seen, and we walked into a room containing about 20 tables, a couple of snack machines and surrounded by glass walls.
In 2000, at the age of 19, BB was convicted of capital murder because he shot and killed the man he was trying to rob. This morning, he walked into the room with the glass windows; I shook his hand and, with the EJI staff attorney leading the way, helped to explain the next steps of his appeals process. This explanation was important because since his conviction 6 years ago, BB has not been visited by an attorney. It’s a bit unsettling talking so banally with someone about trying to save his life, especially when the odds aren’t good. I imagine it’s what a doctor feels like talking to a patient whose cancer has already metastasized.
When I walked into the prison, out of the corner of my eye I saw a plaque with the quote “As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” To me, the shadow of death took the form of a pit in my stomach as I sat there, having a conversation with a guy who looked not a day older than 20, who was quick to smile and who was genuinely considerate and happy to see us. The main question he asked as we went along was “how much time are the appeals going to take?”, which is a loaded question that doesn’t have a good answer no matter which way you cut it, though in his case the process is still in its early stages.
For more than a half hour after we got the legal material out of the way, we chatted about everything from the NBA finals to his favorite college teams to the family members he keeps in touch with and why he likes the heat of Alabama and Louisiana compared to the cold of the northeast, where he used to live. He became most animated when telling us about the annual death row-wide competition that’s coming up, where teams of prisoners compete against each other in chess, basketball, volleyball and dominoes in order to win a prize of ice cream, soda and, most important of all, bragging rights. We only left when he had to go back to his prison cell for the twice-daily prison-wide count that takes place.
Though I know BB unlawfully took someone’s life, sitting there it was hard to envision the 60 seconds when the gun went off as anything more than a reckless and tragic mistake brought on with the help of a childhood marred by physical abuse and the deaths of BB’s immediate family. Sitting there, it was also hard to think that no matter what happens with his appeals, BB is virtually guaranteed of spending the rest of his life behind bars in a jail cell in Alabama without air conditioning, competing for ice cream and a soda.
As I wrote earlier, I can’t imagine the loss and grieving that the victim’s family has suffered since the day he was killed. But today - after I realized first-hand that the person convicted of committing the crime is not defined by his life’s worst moment (that’s one of EJI’s mottos) - I understood that execution is not the solution to honor the victim’s life or to attaining justice. Perhaps I would have reacted differently had I met a death row prisoner who was a habitual violent offender, or who visibly displayed his evil designs.
What does evil look like after all? If the person sitting in front of me today is considered the face of evil, and is deemed to be so dangerous to society that his life must be terminated, then I can only look in the mirror and conclude that evil resides within me and my friends too, because in different circumstances BB and I would have no problem hanging out and becoming friends outside of the barbed wire fences that surrounded us.
That makes me think of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant”, where Guthrie is arrested for littering and is placed on the same bench as violent offenders - “Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me!” And a few minutes later, Guthrie sings how they all “shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talking about all kinds of groovy things.” The point is that maybe we’re all the same inside – we’re all sitting on the same bench – except that different people act out their bad parts while others keep it contained.
Or I could drop the whole evil stuff and conclude that I’m not an evil person nor did I meet the face of evil today - only a friendly kid who would cream me in basketball and/or chess if I ever played him and who is paying too high a price for his mistakes, which originated through no fault of his own way before he pulled the gun on an innocent victim in a mall parking lot. To the extent that it's possible to generalize about evil people, I believe that the real ones might be serial criminals, sociopaths or even perhaps the few individuals who enforce laws and punishments in the false name of justice.
The answer is probably a little bit of both. I guess I’ll just have to go listen to Alice’s Restaurant and think about it.
posted by Ariel Glasner @ 8:51 PM
2 Comments:
At 3:43 PM,
Anonymous said…
There's something I find a little unsettling about your post. Certainly the concept of "evil" is reductionist -- and certainly a person's nature shouldn't be defined by one horrible misdeed -- but what percentage of people on death row do you really think are sweet, naive young men? (I would imagine EJI took this man's case because the seeming disproportion of the punishment to the crime -- not to mention the way he presents himself -- means that there is something EJI can do for him.) It's important for those of us on the outside to view deathrow inmates as people, not soul-less villains, and I thank you for helping to give me that perspective, but what's the limit to such empathy? How far should we go in absolving people with tragic pasts? What do you think ought to have happened to this young man in the aftermath of his crime?
At 6:37 PM,
Ariel Glasner said…
Several people have commented both on and off-line regarding this post, so I wanted to take a minute to respond to some of the comments. I agree that my one experience thus far visiting death row is skewed because the individual I met presented a sympathetic character, something that is undoubtedly more the exception than the norm, both for people on death row and for the clients that EJI chooses to represent.
Nevertheless, as I’m learning here, the very notion of a state choosing to kill an individual who has committed a heinous crime represents an extremely drastic punishment, even though the magnitude of the crime is often unspeakable. Though the Supreme Court has built in procedural protections to the death penalty over the last two decades, particularly in states like Alabama, those protections are almost invariably insufficient to prevent capital punishment from being imposed in systematically unfair and imperfect ways. (I’m happy to provide specific examples…)
Moreover, as most any history major would say, it’s important to consider events in their proper context and not simply as spontaneous occurrences. Unfortunately, in many cases in Alabama (and in other states) the context of what brought about a capital crime is overlooked so that prosecutors and judges can claim they’re tough on fighting crime among a predominately conservative electorate.
I’m not suggesting that the perpetrators of a capital crime not be held accountable. To the contrary, the crimes I’ve come across so far have struck me as being everything from revolting to tragic to simply unacceptable and unimaginable. Nor am I suggesting that we must empathize with the perpetrators of the crime. But, I do think we must empathize with the individuals who are behind the perpetrators, to understand why they have been disenfranchised from society and why the justice system has failed to adequately represent them even as it determines that it has the right to terminate their lives.
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