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TALK ON THE THEME OF JUSTICE

by

Theme of Justice
by Melody Ermachild Chavis

melody_chavis

The theme of these two days of retreat for prison volunteers, for me, definitely has been justice. Recently, I took care of my grandchildren for a day. Justice, I noticed, is a constant theme for children. All day long, as they negotiated their play, they worried about whether everything was going to be absolutely, perfectly, fair or not.

We feel small injustices at a very young age, before we find out about the great injustices in this world, and we retain the feeling that it's wrong for things to be unfair. Soon enough my grandchildren will realize that there are children who don't have enough at all, don't even have a home.

This was the case for my client “Ben”, who is living in jail waiting for his death penalty trial. Ben and his mother spent a lot of time in homeless shelters. He's a young African American man who came to the jail at the age of 18. Now he's already turned 20, waiting for his trial. A long wait, which is not unusual. He will be tried for having allegedly killed a police officer, so it's very possible he will be sentenced to death. And we'll have "won" his trial if we get a sentence of life without possibility of parole for him.

When I interviewed Ben's mother, she was drinking whisky while I talked with her. Ben was conceived in Jonestown, Guyana, just before the mass deaths there. His mother escaped, and he was born some months later. He has lived his whole life under the shadow of that trauma, when nearly everyone his mother had ever known died. She herself had been born and raised in the People's Temple group. Again and again, as I look deeply into the lives of my clients, I find the shadows of war, slavery, and trauma.

I practice at the juncture between my spirituality and the criminal justice system. Buddhism does not tell us how society should be organized, or what the laws should be.  In other religions there might be an answer, something like, "If he took the life of a police officer, he should be banished or executed."

Instead, ours is known more as the faith of compassion.

I found a short passage from a dharma talk given by Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi on this very topic.

A student asks: "I have a very hard time forgiving people who abuse kids. I read a newspaper article about a man who burned his girlfriend's three-year old boy on purpose. The man put the child into a pot of hot water on the stove, and the boy went to the hospital, with third degree burns. How do we deal with people like this?".

Roshi says: "One of the problems is that usually those people have suffered from so much cruelty themselves that they don't know what to do with it. They project it on someone else. There are a lot of reasons."

The student says: "I'm not talking about the reasons, not how could somebody do that, I'm asking: how can we relate to people like that?"

Roshi: "With compassion."

Student: "We can't let them go around killing people."

Roshi: "Compassion has many forms. The compassionate thing may be to lock somebody up. The compassionate thing may be to hit someone. But no matter how you're dealing with somebody, don't lose sight of their Buddha nature. Whatever punishment or restriction you impose should be done with compassion. That's the only way we can deal with our anger, our retribution, our resentment, or our feeling for justice."

This is the basic answer Buddhism gives.

My job, in working with Ben is to go out on his behalf and find favorable evidence for his trial, and find witnesses to Ben's life who can come into court. The legal term for it is "mitigation," but I like to just kind of translate it into "compassion." The mitigation in a death penalty trial means the extenuating circumstances of Ben's life story, such as being raised by his alcoholic mother with post-traumatic stress syndrome caused by being a Jonestown survivor; such as not knowing who his father was, though we know his father must have been in Jonestown. Plus, being poor, being raised in a neighborhood around gangs and guns, being an alcoholic himself at a very young age. In the sentencing phase of the trial, the jurors are asked to consider that mitigation against all of the aggravation, which is the crime itself, and every bad act or illegal thing Ben has ever done. The jurors can also consider mercy. That's the law. They can weigh their sympathy for Ben as heavily as any other factor. At that point, they have to choose between giving him life without parole, or death. Those are their only choices.

In my 20 years of work as a death penalty investigator, I've seen again and again these big forces of karma coming into play in people's lives and bringing them to the moment when they might take someone else's life.  And it's not only the murderer, but also the jurors who come to the point of taking a life.

The big law Buddhism does have, the one inescapable law, is the law of karma, the law of cause and effect.

This is what these death penalty trials are about. We, who want Ben to live, are saying: Don't ignore cause and effect; look at the conditions. This is a big complicated thing. And we're not just saying: Because this child was in a homeless shelter, was poor, his mother was an alcoholic, and so on, that is why he might have killed a police officer. That's way too simple. We're saying there are a lot of causes. 10,000 causes. For example, Ben was expelled from a middle school named for a famous black musician, Calvin Simmons. Yet that middle school has no music program. Ben loves music and wanted to study it. Buddha said: "Because there is this, there is that." We understand that Ben is like that because we allow guns to be sold in a store near his home; because we allow Calvin Simmons School not to have a music program; because we allow kids to be expelled from school and don't ask what happened to them after that. We understand that in many ways we failed to act to save the life of a police officer, whose loss is mourned by so many.

But the prosecutors have little sound bites for our position -- they call what we say "abuse excuse," and they ridicule it. They tell the jury: All the children who were homeless and neglected did not kill somebody.

They're saying: Individual responsibility. They're saying that we are each responsible for our own actions, and Ben is allegedly responsible for firing a gun towards some police cars in the night. This is other side of the law of cause and effect, and it's true too, isn't it?. We are creating our karma minute by minute, and we are responsible for the ripples our actions send out. We are setting things into motion every minute of every day as we are living. And we're responsible for everything we set into motion. What Ben did with a gun that drunken night was irretrievably reckless.

Here is Ben, sitting in solitary confinement for two years. He has no TV, only a few books, a Bible. He never gets out to talk with anyone except me, and occasionally his mother or lawyer. He's in a tiny room with solid walls -- there aren't bars. He can yell to other prisoners through the crack at the edge of the door a little bit. And for exercise, for one hour per day, he steps out alone into the pod -- the hallway, and he also showers there, and then steps back into his cell.

So he has time to think about his short life and he tries to come to terms with what has happened. He has been sad, and very remorseful. He cries often and prays for the officer. Sometimes he sees the causes and conditions outside himself and he says: "It's just how I was raised, you know, everybody had a gun and everybody sold drugs." And he feels that his life has been unfair. He feels put upon, and afraid he that he won't get a fair trial because all his life everyone has been dumping on him. He feels he never had a chance.

But a lot of the time that he's been in the jail, he has only been able to see the karma as all of his own making. He says: "I'm no good, my life is worthless." He is suicidal; he wants to die. He's been on suicide watch a lot of the time. So he's teetering back and forth. We all do this. We're either feeling: It's not fair to me. There is nothing I can do about my life. Destiny is ruling me. Or, at other times we feel: It's all my fault, I'm really messing up.

How do we find the balance? I think the way is to realize (and sometimes this happens for Ben): it's ALL true. As Buddhism always reminds us: Don't think dualistically.

Both are true: we have our own responsibility, and, we are tremendously affected by our ancestors and all that they have done, and by the circumstances in the society around us.

The very next step, which Ben sometimes gets little glimmers of, is to begin quickly, without wasting a single second, to transform all this karma by doing for others. Hurry up and we can do it.

Bo Lozoff, who works with prisoners, often says, "You can do it." I try to say to Ben; "You can do this, other people have done it. You can stay in that room alone, you can wait another year. I know, because other people are doing it right now." Sometimes I worry: I haven't done it, who am I to say this? But I'm the only person coming in there, so I tell him, "You can do it, you can send loving letters to your cousin. Why not? Why tell her `I am mad at you that you didn't visit me.' Why don't you say: 'I hope you are doing well' and give her good advice on her boyfriend, or whatever you can do to help. You can be a human being." What is a human being all alone in that room? It's someone who is giving love. We can each join the human race. And that is our way out of our karma.

Our justice system isn't set up for transforming our karma. It's not about reconciliation between people, it's not about restoring the community to balance, bringing wholeness, after someone has offended. It's patriarchal, and hierarchical and it does not bring us together to talk directly. One of the things that's wrong, is that our system doesn't help either the victims or the offenders to reach any kind of wholeness.

As Buddhists, we know that the death penalty and prisons, and everything else we see will pass away some day. Things arise and things dissolve and karma is created and burned up again. But meanwhile, what do we do? I believe that in order to transform our own karma, what we do is, we work for a more just society. And it comes very naturally to us.

When I was in the Buddhist Alliance for Social Engagement prison group, Maylie Scott was our teacher, and she said it's completely natural for us to work for social justice. She compared it to sitting zazen. "You're sitting, and you start slumping down a little, and then you notice, and you straighten up your spine." Maylie said that's what working for social justice is. It's that intention when you think: Well, things are out of whack, and I'm going to try to make things a little bit better.

I think of Maylie sitting in front of the gun store in Oakland, ringing the bell once for each person who had been killed with a gun in the city so far that year. It went on and on, over 300 rings, and her spine was so straight, sitting on the sidewalk next to the traffic on San Pablo Avenue.

Maylie showed me how working for justice is as simple as sitting still striking a bell.

What else can we do to create justice? First of all, stop harm. We in the prison reform movement are not suggesting that all the jails get opened up and the prisoners released. First, we have to stop people from hurting each other.

Then, consider all sides. Don't leave anyone out. Widen the circle of responsibility, and take our own responsibility for the way things are. WE have these schools, we have these prisons. Pelican Bay prison is ours.

And then we allow for transformation. I really believe in transformation, because so many times, I've seen people avow their karma. That's our chant, that's our vow, and it happens. We realize what we've done, we really get it, and we begin to transform it. (Of course the prosecutors are arguing against the possibility of transformation. They're saying: you are the defined by the worst thing you've ever done, and you must die for that. They say: we can't allow for any growth or transformation that might take place after a crime has been committed.)

Another thing on my list is to treat each one as unique. Suzuki Roshi said, "To realize that all things are one is a very sympathetic understanding. But to treat things one by one, that is your practice." Can we make an exception? Do we have to always have such Draconian measures as mandatory sentences and zero tolerance that make it impossible for us to treat people one-by-one? The more we label and catagorize people, the less justice we can have.

Last on my list: we can realize that justice is complicated and uneven. During this last week, there were e-mails going around about sending postcards to Johnny Paul Penry, a man on death row in Texas who was going to be executed on the 16th. I got several e-mails from people saying they don't think that we should send cards to Johnny Paul Penry, because we are not also sending cards to the victim's family.

I thought about that basic fairness idea my grandchildren have. It's a good impulse to worry about fairness, since our system is divided into two opposing sides. If I comfort one person, maybe I better try to comfort the other person. But I don't think so. I actually think it is okay just to do a small act of kindness, for one person. It's really okay for us to send a postcard to Johnny Paul Penry and not send one to everybody else on death row or all their victims' families.

If we can get above that fairness thing -- that everything has to be equal, has to be exactly, perfectly fair -- I think that we can reach for a higher and much more complicated idea of justice.

Postcript: “Ben” is serving a sentence of Life Without the Possibility of Parole, at Pelican Bay State Prison.