At 8 a.m., the August air of California’s Central Valley already feels like an open door to a sauna. As we sign in at the gatehouse, Fateen Jackson nods approvingly at my red T-shirt. “Don’t wear green,” he told me several days ago, “and don’t wear blue.”
A green-uniformed guard, belt bristling with a walkie-talkie and black leather pouches, leads us through a gate in a high fence topped with coils of razor wire and punctuated by watchtowers. Prisoners wear “blues”—baggy light blue shirts and dark blue pants. We walk past a sign, “Inmates Stay to the Right,” and a red ceiling light that flashes to signal a headcount. As an electrically operated grate slides open, we pass our IDs into a fortified booth where a guard inspects them and then pushes a button to unlock a metal door. One more corridor takes us to the prison chapel.
Setting up a wide circle of chairs in front of the altar, about 20 men slowly assemble. Former inmates themselves, 47-year-old Fateen and Marcos Morales, 57, have returned to prison to facilitate this 13-month course. It’s a program called Guiding Rage Into Power, or GRIP, which began more than a dozen years ago and is now offered in seven California prisons. We are at one in Vacaville, southwest of Sacramento, where GRIP classes meet for eight hours once a month, with homework and study sessions in between.
Nearly all GRIP students are long-term prisoners convicted of violent crimes. Taking the course is no guarantee of early parole. Many graduates are not freed until years later—some never. In a country with a colossal incarceration rate (five times that of the European Union, for example) our grim, revolving-door prisons seldom provide much to cheer about. But I’ve come to Vacaville, which houses some 2,000 prisoners and will return monthly, because of a remarkable pair of statistics:
In the United States, the likelihood that a released convict will return to prison within five years is 45.8 percent.
For the 750 GRIP graduates since 2012 who have subsequently been released, the figure is 1.71 percent.
When I first heard these numbers, I wondered: Why isn’t this program nationally known and replicated? What do they do that makes it so effective? So, I asked if I could sit in and see just how it worked.
“OK, listen up,” Fateen begins. A Black man with a mustache and small goatee, he is quick and muscular—easy to imagine in a wrestling ring, swiftly pinning an opponent to the mat. Like all of us, he is soon sweating, taking off his black baseball hat to wipe his shaven skull with a handkerchief. There is no air conditioning.
“How’s everybody feeling?”
The answers come back, in guarded tones: “anxious,” “a little nervous.” Some men slouch in their chairs, a few have their arms crossed defiantly. Most are Black.
Fateen now asks every man how many years—counting juvenile hall and county jail—he has spent “inside.” Only one person’s number is in the single digits. Fateen himself contributes 24 years to the sum, Marcos 21. The grand total is 516 years.
“OK,” Fateen says. “We are now Tribe 516.” Building a sense of group membership is crucial. As their tattoos attest, many here once saw the path to manhood in a gang.
“That’s how much time we’ve lost,” he continues. “Now, I want to know how much time it took you to go from anger to violence. For me it was two seconds.” Two seconds from when a driver tried to resist the hijacking of his car to when Fateen shot him.
The answers come from around the circle: “Four seconds…10 seconds..20 seconds…60..10…two.. The numbers go up on a whiteboard to one side of the altar and Fateen adds them up.
“OK. We’ve got 516 years of lost time . . . and two minutes and 39 seconds of decision-making time.”
“OK,” he says. “We’ve got 516 years of lost time…and two minutes and 39 seconds of decision-making time.”
His next question: “How many lives were lost?”
Hands go up—including from Fateen’s co-facilitator Marcos—several with more than one finger extended. The total: eight lives.
“How many experienced a traumatic event when young?”
“How many did not have a positive male role model?”
Each time, all hands rise.
The men display little emotion. But when Fateen and Marcos divide them into groups of three or four, their armor starts to drop. The topic now is “shades”—the lenses through which you see the world.
I’m in a group with Robert; he’s stocky, with glasses, and his graying, well-trimmed beard and mustache lend him an almost professorial air. Fateen knew him in prison years ago. Robert, who’s spent 29 of his 49 years behind bars, grew up with a physically abusive father. “I was scared of being hurt and rejected. To this day I don’t allow people to get too close to me. I cut them off. I push them away.” His shades are, he says, “‘I don’t need you, I don’t care.’ I’m trying to take them off.”
Another student asks him how it feels to say that.
His voice breaks. “I feel lighter.”
Abel-Bey, 47, is next. He has caterpillar eyebrows and says he wears “shades of protection, ‘Don’t notice me’ shades. I was beaten and slapped by my father. Elementary through high school, I got bullied. At age 10 my dad locked me out of the house. He left home when I was 12.” He is overcome by emotion. When Fateen asks how he’s feeling. Abel-Bey replies, “That wounded boy is being shrunken every time I talk about it.”
“My father was sent to Death Row when I was three,” says Ricky, 46. “Now I’m here with 833 years to life. My shades are, ‘Am I just like my father?’” His victims “won’t ever be the same,” he continues. “That hurts me because I’m not that kind of person. But am I? This is the first time I’ve talked about my case. My mom was always telling me, ‘You’re just like your dad.’ But I didn’t even know my dad.” Maybe, he fears, she’s right. “What’s the difference between Death Row and 833 years to life?”
“What’s the difference between Death Row and 833 years to life?”
The men mop their foreheads and drink from water bottles. The topic now shifts. “I lost my mother while I was incarcerated,” Marcos tells the tribe. “Do you think I could walk around the yard and talk about that?” In the hypermasculine atmosphere of prison, few men are willing to display weakness—or grief. He asks who else has lost someone close while inside. Almost all hands go up.
Marcos gives the next assignment: take out your notebooks and write to the person who died. “Keep your hands moving. Don’t cross things out. Don’t worry about grammar and spelling and penmanship. Don’t censor yourself. I want to see smoke coming out of your ears. I want to see that pen writing.”
Some minutes later, Fateen points at an empty chair. “That loved one, they’re sitting there. Speak to them.”
Ricky, whose mother was a drug addict and is now dead, reads his letter to her. Although he is speaking of what happened 40 years ago, his voice is as raw as if she were in the room. “I wish you hadn’t left me hanging like that. You gave me all kinds of candy and toys and then you were gone again.” Living elsewhere, probably with other addicts, she would promise to take him to Disneyland or Magic Mountain, and then not show up. “I was waiting on the porch, endlessly calling you and leaving messages, ‘Mom, are you coming? Mom, are you coming?’”
Judging by the nods of others in his group, his pain resonates for them. As the grueling, sweltering day ends, each man calls out the names of those he has lost, writes them on a sticky note, and posts the note on the whiteboard. Soon, it is covered with yellow stickers, and Fateen asks, “How do we honor those people now?”
Fateen spent roughly half his life imprisoned, most recently serving 21 years for attempted murder. It was in San Quentin where he first discovered GRIP. He graduated from the program in 2013 and became an “inside facilitator” for GRIP sessions before finally walking out of the prison’s gate in 2019. “The colors were more vivid—greener, bluer—than I’d remembered,” he recalled. “I noticed every detail. Getting out was like a rebirth.” For several years now, he has led GRIP tribes in several different prisons. “Working with GRIP lets me feel like I’m helping other people get reborn as well.”
“Getting out was like a rebirth. Working with GRIP lets me feel like I’m helping other people get reborn as well.”
When Tribe 516 meets next, in September, the chapel is mercifully cooler. My eyes are drawn to the giant mural that fills an entire wall. Painted by a prisoner—“Like any art you see inside,” Fateen explains—it shows a pastoral landscape in brilliant autumn colors: fields, cows, sheep, a village church under a rainbow. At the painting’s center, riding in a horse-drawn cart, are a farmer in a straw hat, his wife in a bonnet, and a small boy and girl.
This idyllic nuclear family looms over us as the men talk about disappearing fathers, violent stepfathers, drug-addicted mothers, parents who never came to watch a school football or baseball game, sexual abuse, years spent shifting among foster homes. “My dad had five families,” one man says.
“Diving into these traumas is really, really important,” Marcos tells the tribe. Tall and well-spoken, he is part Jewish and part Mexican; his nickname as an inmate was Telemundo. “Think of them as like having a barrel of fuel. And if you haven’t processed that stuff, that barrel is there, right? So, years pass, and what happens if someone throws a match?” Only later will we learn what reignited his own trauma.
Men begin to describe their difficulty in forming stable relationships outside of prison. One side of the whiteboard is headed: Male Role Belief System. Class members pitch in words and Marcos writes them down: Strength. Invincible. Stoic. Powerful. Angry. Know It All. My Way or the Highway. In Control. I’m Always Right. Confident. Aggressive. Dominant. Leader. Fateen calls these feelings, “The Manbox.”
The board’s other side lists “Out of the Box Male Behavior.” The class suggests words: Sad. Vulnerable. Hurt. Sensitive. Empathetic. Remorse. Guilt. Shame. Embarrassment.
As the men in blue share more about their painful childhoods and seemingly unbearable losses, occasionally with a half-suppressed sob, it is clearly new territory for them, not what they are accustomed to. They are struggling to do what so many men find so difficult: talking honestly about our feelings. It’s as if I’m watching people learn to speak a new language.
For decades, California’s prison system was known for its overcrowding, its harsh conditions, and its gangs. But a transformation is underway. In the last decade, the number of prisoners has dropped by nearly a third. The 170-year-old San Quentin State Prison is now the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, home of the Ear Hustle podcast (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), a lively bilingual newspaper, and a recent film festival attended by Kerry Washington and Jerry Seinfeld. The state has welcomed a variety of colleges and outside groups to mount programs behind bars.
GRIP is one of the oldest and most comprehensive. “When I was new at San Quentin,” says Ronald Broomfield, the former warden there who is now chief of the state prison system’s Division of Adult Institutions, “I would tour the yard and ask, ‘What’s working for you? What has helped you change?’ And I kept hearing: GRIP.” A week before I spoke to him, Broomfield had spent two hours with a GRIP tribe at a maximum-security prison. “They’re living in a yard where there’s active criminal activity. And they’re choosing to pull themselves away and form a supportive community. That takes real courage.”
“They’re living in a yard where there’s active criminal activity. And they’re choosing to pull themselves away and form a supportive community. That takes real courage.”
There’s another reason why GRIP is starting to catch the eye of public officials. California spends $15 billion annually incarcerating people, about $130,000 per inmate. By the astoundingly low rate at which its graduates return to prison, GRIP saves the state an estimated $39 million a year.
In the program’s curriculum and 502-page workbook, you can find echoes of group therapy, anger management, restorative justice, Alcoholics Anonymous, mindfulness, and somatic psychology. But GRIP is, above all, the creation of one man, Jacques Verduin.
In 1981, when Verduin was 21 years old, he came to the United States from the Netherlands, shadowed by generational trauma. Like millions of others throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, his father, Jacobus, had been conscripted as a forced laborer. He was sent 400 miles away, to eastern Germany. His supervisors were cruel; the work was harsh; he slept in unheated stables through bitterly cold winters. He endured Allied bombings. At the war’s end, his hands frostbitten, stealing food to survive, Jacobus walked the full distance back to his Dutch village. For years afterward, Verduin says, “We used to hear him scream in his sleep.”
After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Jacobus made an audacious choice, “to go back and find his captors, or whoever survived from the captors, and make his peace,” Verduin recalls, speaking in a soft voice in the sunlit kitchen of his Marin County home. “We were all like, ‘No Dad, nobody does things like that. That’s crazy.’” But Jacobus went to Germany, found his captors, and “they sat around in a circle, and made their peace. Pain was spoken, forgiveness was offered, apologies were extended—and accepted. My father came back a radically changed human being. That affected me.”
Moving to California, Jacques Verduin studied psychology and then began working with prisoners at San Quentin, slowly developing what would become the GRIP curriculum. Illness recently forced him to retire, and today, Kim Grose Moore, 55, a veteran GRIP facilitator, former community organizer and Buddhist prison chaplain, is now the organization’s executive director.
Based in Berkeley, GRIP has more than 700 prisoners in its classes across California. It gets 30 percent of its funding from the state and raises the rest of its $2.3 million annual budget from private sources. Moore appreciates how the low recidivism rate of graduates is considered an important metric, but it’s “insufficient,” she says. “Our standard of success is whether GRIP graduates are peacemakers while they’re still incarcerated—and when they get out. Are they developing healthy relationships? And being of service to others?”
“Our standard of success is whether GRIP graduates are peacemakers while they’re still incarcerated—and when they get out. Are they developing healthy relationships? And being of service to others?”
Bowen Paulle, a University of Amsterdam sociologist who has been studying GRIP for almost a decade, agrees. “The positive spillover effect”—though hard to enumerate—”may be even more interesting than the recidivism rate,” he says. “The real juice here is a ripple effect, especially on the sons. Because the sons are growing up in gang-ridden neighborhoods like the Iron Triangle [a high-crime area of Richmond, California]. And these kids of men doing 25 to life have a humungous chance of getting locked up themselves. If you could reduce that by five percent, you’ve already paid for five years of GRIP.” In interviewing families of graduates now released, Paulle adds, “Often I’ve heard girlfriends and wives say, ‘I cannot believe he’s actually processing his emotions, and he has, like, a better language to talk about it than I do.’”
Skeptics might argue that GRIP has achieved its success by being selective. Prisoners must apply to take the class, and not all are accepted. Furthermore, the long-term inmates the program targets are older than the average prisoner when released, and older people commit fewer crimes. All true. But, the recidivism rate for California prisoners over 60 is more than ten times the rate for GRIP graduates of all ages. GRIP also cherry-picks in a different way, by deliberately aiming at prisoners serving time for violent felonies, usually as gang members. As well as those convicted of murder in Tribe 516 at Vacaville were men found guilty of armed robbery, assault, sex trafficking, and more.
The program’s accomplishments, however, are no substitute for changing all that has packed our prisons to overflowing, from the misguided war on drugs to sentences of staggering length to miserable ghetto schools to our vast ocean of easily available handguns. These are only some of the injustices that have helped put nearly 2 million Americans behind bars. But what I saw unfolding beneath that chapel mural shows a gently radical path to helping such people heal.
Mid-December. As class begins, the sun is barely high enough to light the chapel windows. I’m glad I wore a thick sweater. Now, halfway through the course, the mood has changed. Tribe 516 is more animated. The men greet each other and Fateen and Marcos with fist bumps.
One assignment today is writing an “unfinished business letter.” It should be addressed to anyone, Fateen explains, “in our life that we have unresolved issues with. Most of the time it’s dads. Either they were there and emotionally absent—or they weren’t there at all. You can also write to your younger self.”
There is silence for about 30 minutes while the men write. Then the facilitators call on several to share their reflections. “My unfinished business is with my wife,” Abel-Bey says, anguish knitting his eyebrows. He is 47 years old, 13 years into a sentence of 26 years to life for homicide. “Because of my decisions, my choices, she’s had to take care of our children, our eight children, by herself. ‘Where is Dad? When is he coming home? Is he coming home?’” He reads from his letter, which he titled, “An Ongoing Open Wound:” “Monica, I love you. I’m sorry for the pain I have caused you. I have learned that I was only able to love you as much as I love myself. I have encountered a lot of trauma that I never processed. I have run from the abuse. I have hid from the pain…I understand the reason why you wanted to divorce me. I have hurt you many times. I’m ready to heal. My love for you is eternal. I love you enough to let you go.”
A little later in the meeting, when we move on to what GRIP calls the Moment of Imminent Danger—the instant, as Marcos puts it, “between you getting angry, and then, boom!”—Abel-Bey speaks again. He describes such a moment just days ago. He was playing basketball in the prison gym, “going for a layup,” and then was fouled—shoved into a pole. In the past, this could have led to a major confrontation. This time, he’s proud that he didn’t let it escalate.
Marcos and Fateen talk him through every detail: “So what were the sensations you felt?”
Abel-Bey: “Anger…frustration…numbness. My heart started beating faster.”
Fateen: “When you got pushed into the pole, was it intentional?”
Abel-Bey: “It was.”
Fateen: “I want to know how it could have went bad.”
Abel-Bey: “This situation could have went bad if I didn’t stop. Because I get tunnel vision if I feel like I’m threatened. And it’s like automatic. That’s what I’m in here for.”
Marcos: “I think a lot of us, when we’re at the Moment of Imminent Danger, we cross the line and get tunnel vision.” To Abel-Bey: “You caught yourself. You’re demonstrating emotional intelligence.”
Abel-Bey: “My thoughts were racing. I had to slow down and stop. Another thing is just being able to breathe.”
Marcos: “Why was it important to him, guys, to take that deep breath?”
Abel-Bey restrained himself. The basketball game resumed. Someone asks what happened next, and he says, “We won the game.”
Marcos: “Two wins!”
By January, the class has shrunk: one member has been released, somebody else was transferred to another prison, and a few have dropped out. One reason that may have happened now is that the Christmas holidays are a particularly painful time for anyone in prison. Tribe 516 is down to 14 members.
We go around the circle: name, preferred pronoun, how you’re feeling.
“I’m still struggling,” says Abel-Bey.
“I get depressed,” says another. “I’ve done 28 years. I’m not going to sugar-coat it.”
“Preferred pronoun: Alien,” says Eddie Davis, 57. A large man with a parental air, he has had 42 years behind bars and a long struggle with addiction. A GRIP graduate, he is an “inside facilitator” who helps lead some sessions. “Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s have lost all magic for me. Prison is all that I know.”
Today is Marcos’s final session here because GRIP is sending him to start teaching its program in Spanish at two other prisons. The men know he did time for murder, but now, in bidding Tribe 516 farewell, he shares the backstory.
“I hope I don’t make you uncomfortable…but I want to make you uncomfortable,” he begins. “The man I murdered called me a fag. In Spanish: maricón. For my generation, that was the ultimate insult: you are not a man.” Like most people in prison, Marcos says, he was no “mastermind criminal” but instead, an ”emotional being.” He was sexually molested as a child, and “had all this unresolved trauma, and I dumped my bucket”—he makes a sweeping motion with his hand—“on this basically innocent guy. He didn’t deserve that. We all have different triggers.”
Fateen also tells his story. How he joined a gang and felt pressured to be tough. How he was the father of twins at 19, with no job, and how his attempted murder charge began as a robbery until his victim grabbed the gun Fateen had shoved in his face. That was the trigger for him, he felt that he had been disrespected. “My heart was pounding, and I was sweating profusely,” he tells the group. “We wrestled with my gun before I regained full control of it. I blamed him. How dare he?” Fateen fired two shots and pulled the injured, unconscious victim out of his car onto the sidewalk. “I was arrested ten days later.”
For years, he blamed the victim. “In my mind, I’m telling myself: this fool wants to get shot. For the first decade afterward, I blamed him.”
“In my mind, I’m telling myself: this fool wants to get shot. For the first decade afterward, I blamed him.”
“But this is not the complete story.” He chokes up. “I had a partner in crime.”
His 18-year-old younger sister was supposed to distract the victim. In the fight over the gun, Fateen accidentally fired a third bullet, into his sister’s buttock. “And so, we took the car, we headed to Long Beach and came back with a story that [her injury] was gang-related. I started spreading this lie. This is how much shame can affect the mind: I started believing that gang members actually shot her. Crazy. Because I wanted to avoid the shame of me doing it. For years, I never included my sister when I’m telling my story. And finally, GRIP pulled this out of me.”
The men are listening intently, nodding, missing nothing. Fateen chokes up again, and wipes sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief.
When the class meets in February, 31-year-old Donnell, the youngest participant who has already spent more than a decade behind bars, is distraught: a few days before he had gotten into a fistfight with another prisoner, who had called him a “bitch.”
“I feel so much shame. It was like, like, damn, like I’m still making the same mistakes, and these mistakes is going to get me a life sentence.”
“I just wish someone was there, one of your fellow tribe members,” Fateen responds. Like the experience of Abel-Bey on the basketball court, Donnell had faced a Moment of Imminent Danger. Unlike Abel-Bey, Donnell’s encounter escalated in all-too-familiar ways. How can triggers like this can be avoided?
Fateen and inside facilitator, Eddie, offer some answers from the “GRIP Toolbox,” a collection of “tools” to use in moments of extreme stress or triggering.
One is the “NO MATCHING TOOL.” The card reads. “I make sure I do not match your energy when you threaten me.”
Another is the “ANGER IS A SECONDARY EMOTION TOOL. Next time I get angry…I will ask myself if underneath my anger I am…sad, afraid and/or ashamed.” And a third is the “Q-TIP TOOL. Quit Taking it Personally.”
Eddie asks the men what strategies could have helped Donnell. “Walk away,” someone says. (Then someone else adds, with feeling: “But it’s hard!”)
“Breathe!”
“Get out of your head!”
Donnell takes this all in. He’s ashamed of getting drawn into the fight, but also defensive. “We all in the same building together,” he says. “I don’t want to walk around someone who might be a threat.”
Eddie, whose many years inside have given him a kind of weary wisdom, tells Donnell that others will back him up if he takes a different path: “You have this tribe. You got people who care for you.”
Fateen asks Donnell: “So, real quick: Out of these tools, which one can you use?”
“I like that No-Matching tool,” Donnell replies. “Because I’m always matching the motherfucker’s energy. That’s what I’ve always believed in. And I like the quit-taking-it-personal tool, Q-TIP.”
But he remains torn. “It would have been easy to walk away. But honestly, I would feel less of a man.”
Later, when another Tribe 516 member shared a vulnerable moment, he adds, “It takes strength to be weak.”
“It takes strength to be weak.”
Eddie puts his hand over his heart in solidarity and almost everyone around the circle does the same.
Donnell’s mother was a sex worker who used drugs; his grandmother “was my mom and dad.” He talks about the man he killed, an 18-year-old whom he shot in West Oakland 12 years ago. That man had also called him a “bitch.” And much like Fateen, he felt his victim was, in fact, the perpetrator. “For the longest time, I blamed him. ‘I never would have killed him if he didn’t make me.’ So, it’s his fault what I did, because he disrespected me…These groups are teaching me that I had the biggest part in this, because I had the option to walk away,” he says. “And then I would have never brought my family so much pain. Somewhere, deep down inside, honestly, I still want to blame him. But I know it’s my fault.”
Robert broadens the conversation: “Every time you think you’re victimizing just one person, it’s like a bomb going off. Everybody gets hurt. I gotta say sorry to his parents. To his uncles, his nephews, his niece. I gotta say sorry to his teachers out there who watched him grow up. I gotta reach back to everybody I impacted by my actions. That’s what I struggle with.”
Today, for the first time after such a confession, I see a man stand up, walk across the room, and give the speaker a hug. Somewhere else that would not be unusual. But here it is.
It’s April, and time for the part of the process that was first inspired by Jacob Verduin’s experience confronting his Nazi guards—bringing victims and offenders together. Now is Tribe 516’s turn.
The guests today are two Black women, LaTonya Stewart, 54, and Charlotte Briggs, 70. Stewart, in a black pantsuit, is a longtime FedEx driver; Briggs, with grey braids tightly coiled, works in a hospital’s business office. Both have lost a son to murder. Before the class begins, Stewart looks at the expansive wall mural and murmurs to me sadly, “So much talent in prison.”
After she is introduced, Stewart says to the tribe, that she’s “a mother on both sides of gun violence.” One son was murdered. But another is “doing three LWOPs [life without parole]—plus 72 years.” She has followed the work of GRIP and has seen how it transforms men. “And I’m saying, ‘This is what my son needs.’”
Her marriage was full of domestic violence. “And I subjected my kids to all that violence, not really understanding the damage that I was causing them, to see me and their father fighting, him verbally abusing me, and him with other women.” Heads are nodding around the circle. “Finally, after 12 years the light went on. But by that time, the damage was done.” Her older son was soon “lost to the streets.” To try to save his younger brother, she moved out of Oakland and got him a job with FedEx. But he returned to the old neighborhood and was arrested, at 21, as a participant in a gang-related triple murder. “It was a Black-on-Black crime.”
“I went into a state of depression. I isolated myself. I shut down. I would work six days a week to just keep my mind focused on something where I didn’t, like, totally lose it.” She clocked thousands of miles driving back and forth to see her son in jail and in court. Then she learned that her older son had been fatally shot. Next came the job of informing his brother, now at San Quentin.
“I’ve been on my journey 12 years,” she says. “That emptiness and not having the presence of your children…My spiritual teaching came back to me that God don’t give me more than I can handle. Even though the system might say my son got three life sentences, God got the last say so.” She passes around color photographs of her two boys, one living, one dead.
They came from a world the men in this circle know all too well. Indeed, two of them, Donnell and Clem, even knew her sons. During a break, they come up and hug her.
Stewart tells the group that she has taken part in meetings like this one before, but today marks the first time she has ever spoken about her ex-husband’s abuse. Monterio, who at 57 is the oldest member of Tribe 516, congratulates her on getting out of an abusive relationship when his own mother never did.
We now hear from Charlotte Briggs. Beneath her suit jacket, she wears a T-shirt bearing the broad, smiling face of her murdered son. After he had tried to break up a fight between a white acquaintance and his girlfriend, the man, drunk, chased her unarmed son down the street with a crossbow and killed him with a razor-tipped hunting arrow. Someone captured the killing on video.
“I spent a lot of time praying, just talking to God, asking him to help me not to be angry, not to hate [even though] I felt like my hate would have been justified because of the race issue.” She has forgiven the murderer and has traded letters and emails with him as he serves 26 years to life. She has even talked to him on the phone.
I had wondered how the men in this room, with so many violent crimes in their past, would respond to the mothers of two murdered sons. With guilt? Shame? Apologies?
But no. Instead, the palpable emotion in the chapel is awe that these two mothers have forgiven the killers. This is what the men want to talk about, and that’s what they do for several hours. The crimes that landed then here are typically a decade or more in the past. But almost all have lost friends and family to violence since then; two, for example, have had teenage children killed since they’ve been in prison.
Markeith lost his 17-year-old. “I’d like to thank you because you just gave me courage,” he says to LaTonya Stewart. It’s been almost four years since his son was killed, and he and his wife are still in shock. “I don’t think either of us has learned to forgive. The only thing I’ve ever been able to say to anyone outside of my wife, even in group, is that we lost a son. I’ve never been able to relive the story of how it happened. And to hear from someone that has lost a child that they have forgiven that person…and I can hear in your voice that you really forgive him. That’s what I’m trying to learn.” The opposite of forgiveness is revenge, he observes, and he describes how this emotion has surrounded his life. “I look around at my peers, even the so-called friends outside of prison, I can tell they’re looking for me to have some kind of revenge.”
“God says vengeance is mine and I will repay,” says Stewart. “So, you don’t have to look for revenge.”
“You’ve heard it said that if you’re in a room with a thousand people and you change one, you’ve done your job,” Markeith replies. “Well, you’ve done your job.”
Robert also lost a child, six years ago. His 18-year-old daughter was killed by someone gunning for her boyfriend. “All my life I’ve been the guy that can’t be hurt. You can’t do nothin’ to me. This is a shell I built up. This is the wall I put up to justify me robbing people, selling drugs, gangbanging. My daughter got gunned down. I don’t talk about it much. It’s a pain that never leaves.” He suppresses a sob. When he got the news, he was in the same county jail that he expected her murderer to be sent to. “I would have killed him. All the years of hard work trying to better myself, it was gone that instant. I don’t deal with this too much. I squash it, I push it down, I’m like, suffocated. So I appreciate your coming here, and sharing, and being at the place where you at. I ain’t there yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. I hope. I’m trying.”
Fateen asks the women how the visit has been for them. “I felt like I got some healing,” says Stewart. “I want each of you to know, coming from a mother, your situation does not define who you guys are.”
After the two women leave, Fateen asks everyone to stand and link arms. “We’re gonna put our victims in the circle. I’ll start.” Each person says the name of his victim or victims, usually adding “and his family,” or “and my family.” There is a hushed solemnity to this—like a church service.
May. In six weeks, Tribe 516 will have a formal cap-and-gown graduation in the prison gymnasium. The men are visibly excited about this—and nervous: For many, it will be the first time they have ever graduated from anything. The students are far more animated than they were a few months ago. They no longer slouch. One gives another a quick shoulder massage. Today is the final class, the end of a 13-month journey.
It’s the end of a journey for me, too. As a largely silent traveler, I cannot claim that the journey has changed me as deeply as it clearly has changed most of the blue-garbed men now taking their seats. But something feels different. In the first few meetings, I kept thinking: the people I’m surrounded by are responsible for eight murders and great additional violence. If I were alone with one of them, I felt, I’d be uneasy and on guard. But now I’ve watched them struggle. I’ve watched them try to master decades-old pain. I’ve watched them wish they could bring their victims back to life. Today I feel at ease with them. To travel with them has been a privilege. If I meet one of them again after he has been released, I’ll greet him with open arms.
In San Quentin, Fateen became a spoken-word poet, and before the class ends, he performs a piece he wrote. “I want y’all to listen for that original pain, secondary pain, and the breakthrough.”
It’s a grim, fast-paced, rap-inflected story of a 14-year-old on tough streets where “my lifestyle and profile says I shouldn’t show any love. It made sense to be as hard as a diamond stone.” One day “my big homie Slay say, ‘hello, hum, let’s take a ride.’ He tossed me the keys and said, ‘Yo, dawg, you drive.’ And I was like, all right, excited the big homie took interest in me, since there’s no carin’ dad at the pad.”
Things rapidly escalate. The “big homie” shoots someone from the car, “Boom, boom, boom. I’m yellin’ in my mind, ‘Oh God, I hope I don’t die or meet my doom. Please, Lord, I’m too young. Not so soon.” Then the 14-year-old takes a bullet in the heart, the “big homie” grabs his money and cell phone and abandons him to die.
The men are nodding as he recites and applaud at the end. “That’s all our story,” says Robert.
One last time, we go around the circle and each man says what the class has meant to him:
Ricky: “It helped me get back in contact with my younger self, my innocent self.”
Anthony: “I’m gonna say I’m from a different gang now.”
Clem, one of the youngest: “I gained some older brothers.”
Monterio, the oldest, is passing on GRIP materials to a son who is also in jail. “I never thought in a million years that I could come to a room and actually cry,” he says. “So now it’s bittersweet. It’s almost like sending your kid off to college.”
