Spirit in Action

Grace Goes To Prison

Melanie G. Snyder is author of Grace Goes To Prison which tells the story of Grace Marie Hamilton's growing and deepening work in Pennsylvania prisons, covering a wide variety of initiatives and programs aimed at reforming, improving and humanizing the lives of prisoners. Melanie also interacts with the legal system in her work as a restorative justice mediator.

Broadcast on:: 11 Apr 2010
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing their song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear that as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sync deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing your dead song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be talking about what does and doesn't work within our US prison system. We'll be talking about an alternate for some criminal proceedings called restorative justice, and we'll be talking about the life and witness of Grace Marie Hamilton, known mostly as Marie Hamilton. Our Spirit in Action guest today is Melanie Snyder, and she's the author of a book about Marie that's called Grace Goes to Prison. Melanie's growing expertise is in restorative justice with Marie as one of her mentors. Melanie's on the road right now, talking about all that she's learned through the book and through her own work with the criminal system. Melanie Snyder joins us by phone. - Melanie, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - Thank you, Mark. - You're on a long pilgrimage sharing the fruits of this book and the fruits of your work with prison system. Where can people find your schedule? - If they go to my website, which is MelanieG Snyder.com, and go to the books page, my schedule is there and I keep it updated as I continue to add new speaking engagements. - And I'll just let our listeners know. You can also find the link to that site via my site, northernspiritradio.org. - Melanie, is it easy to find people to host you as you talk about this? Is this bookstores? Is this churches? Who wants to hear about prisons and a book about Grace going to prison? - Well, it has been a combination of places. I have spoken to many faith groups of many different denominations, a few small independent bookstores, and also a number of colleges and universities, either in their social work or sociology programs, a few in their criminal justice programs, and a few colleges that I specifically sought out because they have peace studies or conflict studies programs. - And why did you take up this writing of this book, this story of Grace Marie? Why did you write about Marie? Why did you feel like prisons was a message to get out there? Could just give us the background. What's your connection with prisons and with reform in prisons, I guess, specifically? - This has been a quite an amazing journey for me, Mark. I never set out to do this. The book found me several years ago, I was involved in working with juvenile offenders. I'm a restorative justice mediator, and I work with juvenile offenders in Pennsylvania. What we do is we bring them face-to-face with the victims of their crimes for a restorative process to let victims and offenders work out how to address the harms that the offender has caused. So I had been doing that work for several years, and the day after the Virginia Tech shooting, I got a phone call from the director of that program where I'm a volunteer mediator, and he said, "What are you doing this Saturday?" And I told him I was incredibly busy and had lots going on, and he said, "Oh, okay, that's too bad," and didn't continue, but of course, my curiosity was piqued, so I asked why he wanted to know. And he told me that they had a group of 10 troubled kids who were signed up to take a conflict resolution training program, but the instructor had just backed out. He knew that I had taught conflict resolution in the business world for a number of years, and he said, "I just thought that maybe you would be willing to take on these kids." And I guess when you get a phone call like that, I just thought that there was some larger reason why I got that phone call out of the blue. So I agreed to teach that class pretty quickly realized I was in over my head because these were some very troubled, very angry kids. I knew that I needed help because teaching them was not in any way the same as what I had taught in the business world. So one Sunday morning in church, I actually stood up and asked for prayers for myself and for these kids because I just didn't feel like I was reaching them. At church, a friend of mine came up to me afterward and said, "You know, I met this woman named Marie Hamilton many years ago, and she was teaching conflict resolution and non-violence to prison inmates. So surely she could help you with these teenagers." So my friend was going to see if she still had Marie Hamilton's contact information, but she didn't, unfortunately, and I taught a few more classes and continued to struggle with them. And I finally decided to just look on Google and see if I could find out anything about Marie Hamilton. And when I did, I did find information about her and was just amazed at all that she had done to try to improve the lives of incarcerated men and women across Pennsylvania. So I called my friend from church and I said, "Hey, guess what?" I found information about Marie Hamilton on the internet and my friend, whose name is Jean Moyer, said, "Well, wait until you hear this." I went to church on Sunday morning and I saw this blonde-haired lady sitting by herself in a pew. And I thought, "Well, I'll scoot in next to her and make her feel welcome." She looks like she might be a visitor. And during the time in our service, when we passed the attendance pad down the pew, this woman filled out her name and passed the pad to Jean and Jean opened it up and it said, "Marie Hamilton, State College, Pennsylvania." So Jean talked with Marie after church about me and my students that I was trying to teach and Marie agreed to offer any help that she could to me. And then Jean asked whether she was still doing her work in the prison. Marie said, "As a matter of fact, I've retired and I'm looking for someone to write a book about all of my experiences over 30 years in the prisons." When Jean told me all of this, I was so excited. I was a freelance writer and I was struggling to try and build up a freelance writing business. And I said to Jean, "Well, gosh, I've always wanted to write a book about restorative justice." So Jean and I went to meet with Marie Hamilton and she just started telling us some of her stories and we thought, "Wow, this book has to get written one way or another. That's how it started." - You start out the book, which is called "Grace Goes to Prison" with a true story from Marie's encounter with one of the prisoners. He's out of prison. I think that this story kind of encapsulates the fears that everyone has in dealing with anyone in prison. It does what I guess you'd say is a happy ending, but you want to just share that story to get us started on what this book is about, what it deals with. Marie had taken a former prison inmate named Tony under her wing, as she often did in the prisons. Tony had been released from prison. He had been in and out of prison a number of times, primarily on drug charges. But Marie just thought that she could help him by making him one of her volunteers. So she was taking Tony with her out to speak to churches, and at civic groups, and banquets, and so forth to try and get support for the prison programs that they had going. And Tony would share his story about what incarceration had been like for him. And so one particular evening, she and Tony were driving back from one of these events, and they were going up over a mountain where there was just a beautiful overlook. And Marie thought as something special to do with Tony that she would stop at this scenic overlook. And so she pulled her car into the parking lot, and they got out of the car and were standing there looking at the lights. And the next thing she knew, she was on the ground, pinned underneath Tony, he had a knife at her throat. And she realized what his intentions were. She said she was absolutely terrified in that moment. She had had training in principles of non-violence, and how to disarm violence. But of course, in that moment of terror, she said she wasn't able to remember anything that she had learned in her classes. But as she looked into Tony's face, she realized that what was going on here was that she thought that perhaps he had fallen in love with her and that he was seeking in his own very inappropriate way to have a relationship with her. And so she said she summoned all of the love and sense of calm that she could. And she looked into his eyes and she said, "Tony, do you really want to hurt someone that you want to love?" And she said her question so disarmed him, he leaped to his feet, he threw his knife to the ground and he just started pacing back and forth across this gravel parking lot. He paced for a while and he was cursing and muttering, but he did not come back toward her. And after a little while, he finally stopped pacing. And she said it, the thought did cross her mind at that point that maybe what she really needed to do was jump in the car and drive away and just leave him there. But she didn't, she stayed and she waited until he had quieted down. He finally looked at her and she just said, "Let me take you home." When Marie told me that story, of course I wanted to know, "Well, did you report him or did you stop having him volunteer with you in the prison programs?" And she said, "No, of course not." She said she knew that she could be far more helped to him by continuing to try and give him opportunities to show his better self. And I said, "Well, did he ever apologize?" And she said, "Well, everything he did for years after that "as a volunteer for our programs was a form of apology." And at some point she said she realized that perhaps he had grown up in an environment where he simply didn't understand the right way to approach a woman. And so she sat him down and she explained to him, "You know, Tony, if a woman says no to your advances "and you proceed, that's rape." And she said she never knew whether Tony really understood until many months later when she overheard him telling one of his friends, "You know, man, "if a woman says no and you go ahead anyway, that's rape." And Marie told me that was all the apology I ever needed from him to know that he finally understood. - That really is a powerful story about Marie's situation. But I think you work in the prisons too. Have you had similar things that transformed for you? Made you feel like maybe we're making progress? Maybe this can really make a difference in the prison system? I think you're working with restorative justice. - Right, until I began going into the prisons to interview incarcerated men and women for this book, I had not worked in the prisons. My work with juvenile offenders is outside of the prison system, both doing the victim of fender mediations and also teaching the conflict resolution program. - You know, there definitely have been moments when I've worked with some of these kids who are very, very troubled, very angry and have so many things in the world stacked against them. And I do sometimes wonder whether what we're doing can really reach them, can really make a difference over the long term, because of course, we're just one small moment in their lives. And then they go back to homes where they're sometimes surrounded by violence and their neighborhoods, which are sometimes very rough. But a friend of mine told me one time when she knew that I was getting very down about whether we were really making an impact with these kids. She said, "Melamy, the seed never gets to see the flower and you've got to just keep planting seeds." And that's been a tremendous help to me. - Could you tell me a little bit about what you've actually done, the mediation work that you've done? Maybe I guess you better start off by saying what restorative justice work is. - Restorative justice focuses on a different set of questions than what our criminal justice system focuses on. Restorative justice focuses on, first of all, who has been harmed by a crime? And it looks much more broadly than just the obvious victims. But it looks at how senders in the broader community are harmed by crime. And then it asks the question, what are the needs of those who have been harmed by a crime? And what can be done to address those needs? And then who should carry the obligation to address those needs? So what we do, we get in the particular nonprofit agency that I work with in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It's called the Lancaster Victim Offender Reconciliation Program. We get referrals from district judges. We get referrals sometimes from the schools and sometimes from something that we have in Pennsylvania called youth aid panels, which are circles of people from within a community who sometimes work with young offenders in that community to determine appropriate consequences for an offender. So we get these referrals. And it is a voluntary program on the part of both the victims and the offenders. But we start by meeting with the victim and finding out how they've been harmed by the offender's actions and what they need to have things set right for them. And then we ask whether they would be willing to meet with the offender face to face to talk through all of that. So if they are willing to meet with the offender, then what we do as mediators as we go and we sit down with the offender and we try to find out what was going on with them at the time they committed the crime, one of the things we have a responsibility to do is try to assess whether this offender truly seems like they are willing to be accountable for what they've done. Because we don't ever want to re-victimize a victim by bringing them face to face with an offender who takes the attitude that, well, I didn't really do anything or it's not that big a deal or it wasn't my fault or whatever. So that's part of our process when we meet one-on-one with the offender. Then we ask the offender whether they are willing to sit down face to face with the victim. And what I tell the kids I work with is part of my job as the mediator is to create a safe environment. It's not my job to create a comfortable environment for you. And I tell kids, you know, this takes a lot of courage for you to be willing to sit down with someone you've harmed and hear from them directly. It's going to be uncomfortable, but it's part of the process that we need to go through. So if both the victim and the offender are willing, then we bring them together. And all we do as mediators at that point is facilitate the process. It is entirely up to the victim and the offender to determine what they want to do to address the harm. One particularly compelling story that I love to share, even though I personally was not the mediator in this case, but it comes from our agency where I am a volunteer mediator, I just think this particular story really demonstrates the power and the potential of restorative justice. There was a young man about 16 years old named Michael. Michael was just at a stage of life where he was very angry, mad at the world, and spent a lot of his days just loitering around town. And one day he was loitering in a little family-run grocery store near where I live. And while he was in the store, Michael pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pants pocket and lit the corners of a couple of boxes on the shelf and just stood there and watched the fire start to take hold there in the grocery store shelf. And then I guess he realized what he had done. And he ran out of the store. So by the time the store staff noticed this fire and put out the flames, it had caused $1,500 worth of damage. And Michael ended up getting caught, and he was sent to the district judge. And the judge decided to refer Michael to the Lancaster Victim Offender Reconciliation Program. So the mediator met first with the store owner, a man named Mr. Good, and asked how that fire had affected him and his business, and what Mr. Good needed to address the harm that Michael had caused. And then the mediator asked Mr. Good whether he would be willing to sit down with this young man and talk with him about it. And Mr. Good said yes, he would like to meet with Michael. So the mediator went and sat down with Michael and talked with him about what was going on for him at the time of the fire. And it did appear that Michael was willing to take responsibility for what he had done. The mediator wasn't sure that he fully understood the ramifications of his actions, but he did seem at least open to sitting down with Mr. Good and taking accountability. So when the mediator brought them together, one of the things that we tell victims is don't hold back. You'd need to tell the offender in no uncertain terms exactly how their actions have affected you. And so Mr. Good laid it all out for Michael. Michael felt terrible when he realized all the ways that his actions had hurt Mr. Good and his employees and his business and Mr. Good's family. Michael offered a very sincere apology to Mr. Good and said, what do you need from me? What can I do to make it up to you? And then together, Mr. Good and Michael laid out a detailed plan, a schedule of payments for Michael to pay for all of the damages that he had caused. As a mediator, when you get to that point, you're really pretty happy. You feel like, gosh, this has been just a wonderful success. And so the mediator thought, OK, I think we're ready to wrap this up. But Mr. Good said, hold on a minute. Michael, what kind of future do you envision for yourself? What do you want your life to be? And Michael shrugged his shoulders and said, I don't know. And Mr. Good said, well, have you thought beyond high school? You're in high school now. What comes after that? Have you thought about going to college? Michael said, well, no, I don't really think so. And Mr. Good said, I think you really need to be thinking about going to college. And doing so would give you much better options for your future. And here's what I want you to do. You follow through on this agreement we've made. And make sure you pay me the full amount of restitution, make all of these payments on time. Graduate from high school and go get yourself enrolled in college somewhere, anywhere. And you come back and see me and tell me where you've enrolled. And I will put the $1,500 restitution money toward your college tuition. Michael did make all of those restitution payments. And he graduated from high school. And he got himself enrolled at Lockhaven University in Pennsylvania. He decided he was going to major in criminal justice, which I think is just wonderful. And he went back to see Mr. Good. And Mr. Good, true to his word, put $1,500 toward Michael's tuition. And Michael went on to complete a four-year degree program in criminal justice in only three years. And he is now wrapping up the second year of a two-year master's degree program in criminal justice at Penn. And to me, that story demonstrates the real potential of restorative justice to offer healing, to offer empowerment for victims, and to help offenders to really pursue a different path. We don't know what Michael's future might have been if it hadn't been for this restorative justice process. And if it hadn't been for Mr. Good's willingness as a victim to reach out in that way to Michael and to do good for someone who had harmed him. Certainly, he went beyond what was required of him in terms of getting the restitution. Why did he go with this extra step? It seems to me like maybe Mr. Good is some kind of unusual saint. And so this is not a typical example. He's running too out in the world. Well, I don't think Mr. Good would describe himself as a saint, but I think that something happened in that dialogue between him and Michael, where they were able to make a human-to-human connection. And I think if you contrast that with how our criminal justice system works, when the criminal justice system victims and offenders are largely kept apart and they're encouraged, really, not to have any engagement with one another. It's set up as a decidedly adversarial relationship. Yes, perhaps what Mr. Good was willing to do is unusual. But I think at the same time, because restorative justice offered that opportunity to make a human connection between someone who had caused harm and someone who had been harmed, it allowed for that kind of healing and that kind of expansive generosity of spirit and level of forgiveness. So I think that those things are possible through restorative justice. And our criminal justice system just doesn't really allow for that. I'm pretty sure a lot of people react viscerally against the idea of molly-coupling prisoners, treating them so nicely. Don't we really need to punish them? Does restorative justice actually accomplish anything? So maybe you want to speak a little bit about what our current prison system, not doing restorative justice accomplishes versus what restorative justice potentially or maybe often accomplishes? Actually, what I would say is that when people are incarcerated, the prison system does not really require offenders to be fully accountable for what they have done. It merely punishes them, it locks them away, and keeps them out of society. But they never really have to take any direct responsibility or accountability to address the harm they've caused to the victim. I have had many young offenders that I have talked with say that it is much more difficult to sit down and face the person you have harmed to hear very directly from them how you've harmed them, and then to have to work out an agreement with them to directly address their harm. And I've been using the phrases, I've gone out and done many speaking engagements, I've been using the title for my talk, restorative justice in a tough on crime world. But someone at speaking engagement that I had last week in Asheville, North Carolina, very wisely pointed out that restorative justice is tough on crime because it really requires offenders to be accountable and to take direct responsibility for their actions in a way that the prison system does not require. So restorative justice is not at all about letting offenders off the hook. It is about requiring them to be accountable and responsible in a much more direct and much more, I think, challenging way. And restorative justice, I should mention, is not a new concept at all. It's been around in the United States for over 30 years. And there has been some good, long-term research that has proven that offenders who go through a restorative justice process are significantly less likely to ever commit another crime than offenders who simply go through standard criminal justice processes. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit In Action. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. You can always find these interviews and more connections to our guests, like our guest for today, Melanie G. Snyder, via my website, northernspiritradio.org. My home radio station is WHYS, LP Eau Claire, here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. And we're speaking today with Melanie G. Snyder, who has written a book called Grace Goes to Prison. And that's a pun. Grace is the first name of a woman whose middle name is Marie, but that's the name she goes by. Marie worked in prisons of Pennsylvania. My guest, Melanie Snyder, does work with restorative justice. We're talking right now a bit about restorative justice. Are the prisons effective now in terms of keeping people out of prisons? I understand that something like one out of 100 people in the United States are in the judicial system here in the US. Yes, that's right, Mark. The Pew Charitable Trust published two reports over the last couple of years. They've done an in-depth study of the American criminal justice system. And the first report they published was titled, One in 100 Behind Bars in America. What they discovered is that one out of every 100 American adults is now incarcerated right now today. And that's something like 2.3 million Americans. When I learned these statistics, I was just so shocked and began to look into what's behind all of this. And the Pew report does an excellent job of spelling out what has happened. The US prison population in the last 20 years has nearly tripled. But it is not because crime rates have been skyrocketing. It is largely due to changes in our laws that have led to locking up more and more people for longer and longer periods of time, for more and more minor infraction. And so the Pew report, One in 100, spells a lot of this out. But it also highlight a number of promising practices that can greatly improve this situation. But the other thing that the Pew Center on the States did was once they learned that one out of 100 American adults is incarcerated, they wondered about all of the other people who are on probation and parole. So they published a second report, which is titled One in 31, which reveals that one out of every 31 American adults is under some form of corrections control. So that means they are either incarcerated or on probation or on parole. So I just have found these statistics so deeply disturbing and so shocking. And because I've been going into prisons for the past couple of years and interviewing incarcerated men and women about their experience and starting to see the human face of this and realizing what has happened to some of these people that we are incarcerating, I've just felt like-- I can't pretend that I don't know this stuff now-- and knowing what I know now, which is only the-- I'm sure the tip of the iceberg. I have so much more to learn. But knowing what I know so far about what's happening in our prisons, I have felt like I needed to do something about it. And that is what this 10-week cross country journey really is about. And one of the things I learned doing the research for this book is that Marie Hamilton was a volunteer in the Pennsylvania State Prisons for 30 years. During those 30 years, largely because of policy changes and societal attitudes, what happens in the prisons has gone backward in many ways. When Marie first started going into the prisons in the mid-1970s, there were far more opportunities for inmates to get education, to get rehabilitation programs and treatment programs for various addictions and issues that they had. And much of that has been cut back as state budget dollars have dwindled and more and more of the state budget dollars that are allocated to departments of corrections, get spent on building new prisons because of the rapidly burgeoning prison population and to paying staff over time. So all of these things are highlighted in these reports from the Pew Center on the States. And both of those reports are available online. Everywhere I speak, I have been recommending to people that I think every American citizen and voter and taxpayer needs to at least skim these reports and begin to have a grasp of what is going on because our tax dollars are paying for all of this. It's largely not working. It's a sad story. I think what's powerful about the book, Grace Goes to Prison, is you get to see the many facets of how this system is dysfunctional, how this system is not working, and what could be working better. So I just want to cover a few of the topics that Marie deals with in her work with the prison system. I mean, she started out just with weekly visit program. There's people who are getting ready to come out of prison. They don't know how to work in the outer world. She organizes some volunteers just to go in. And she was at that point just ahead of an organization. She was active in an organization which just tried to supply volunteers for different purposes, not prisons, but just for different purposes. So she went into the prison, she got involved, and that was the first step. Well, you want to mention a few of the other topics, issues of concern, perspectives on prison life that Marie encountered in the course of her work with prisons? Yes, basically what happened was once she and this group of volunteers started going in on a weekly basis and just visiting with this one group of incarcerated men at one prison in Pennsylvania, one state prison. They started discovering that there were so many needs that these men had that were not being met by the system itself. So they started trying to create programs to address those needs. So for example, early on she found out that less than half of the inmates at that particular prison ever received a visit from their family members, from loved ones. And yet she had learned that those who were able to maintain contact with family members on the outside were much more likely to be successful when they were released from prison. But she found that for many of their families, they just did not have the money to travel the often very long distances that were required to get from where the family was based to where the prison where the inmate was being housed. And one particular story was just so touching. There was a man who during their weekly visits was rather withdrawn and quiet. And Marie pulled him aside one week when they were there and asked what was happening, what was going on for him. And he told her that he had gotten word that his wife and his little girl had been in a very bad car accident. His wife had died in this car accident and he had of course never had a chance to say goodbye to his wife, he had not been able to go to her funeral. His little girl had been badly injured in the accident, then had been placed in foster care. And he had gotten word that his little girl thought that her father was dead as well because it had been such a long time since she had seen him. This man asked Marie whether she knew of any way that someone could get his little girl there to the prison to visit with him so that at least his daughter would know that he was not dead. And this was early enough in Marie's work in the prisons that she naively thought, well, of course, there must be some way that the prison can get your daughter here to see you. So she went to talk with the prison administrators and was promptly told, we don't have anything to do with the families. Marie, we deal with the inmates. So she was a little shocked, but undeterred, she decided that she would take this project on to get this man's little girl there to visit him. And it took many phone calls, the little girl lived hours away in Pittsburgh, and this prison was in the middle of Pennsylvania and State College, Pennsylvania. But she made arrangements for the little girl and the foster mother to take a Greyhound bus to State College so that the little girl could visit her father. And when Marie went in to the prison the week after this man's visit with his little girl, she said she saw a changed man. She saw how deeply moved he had been by that opportunity to just spend a couple of hours with his daughter. And as he recounted to Marie every word and gesture and thing that his little girl had done during those few brief hours together, Marie thought this is something we need to address for more than just this one man. So she and the volunteers started a fund to provide financial assistance to help the families be able to afford to come and visit their loved ones. And that was a program that they operated for many years and that fund, they got donations from churches and individual donors in the community. And that fund enabled many, many families to come and visit their loved one some for the first time after years of their loved one being incarcerated. So that's just one example of one of the programs that Marie started in the prisons. - My personal favorite is the postcard, the card writing thing. She and they arranged to have children anonymously, I mean with their name but nothing else to identify them, prepare Christmas cards so that people in prison would receive a card. In the book, you mentioned how people post them up, how they share them, how they collect them, how this is a precious thing from something that most of us outside throw away without a single thought. - Yeah, that Christmas card program really came about almost by a fluke. After several years of volunteering in the prisons, Marie saw that the holidays were a particularly painful and lonely time for people who are incarcerated. She wanted to try and do something to just brighten things up for the inmates at that one particular prison outside of state college for the holidays. And so she called the prison superintendent. She and the volunteers came up with a whole list of ideas for what they might do. And then she called the superintendent and as she went through her ideas one by one, the prison superintendent said no to every single idea that they proposed, not possible, can't do it, too much of a security risk, no money in the budget for that. And Marie got to the end of this list that they had developed and he had said no to everything. But one of Marie's characteristics is she's a very persistent person. And so she sat there and thought, okay, I need to come up with something else. And then she said, she just started talking and she wasn't even sure where these ideas were coming from. But she said to the superintendent, how about if we send Christmas cards to the inmates? In fact, how about if we have children in the community make Christmas cards to send into the inmates? Well, the superintendent objected to that. He said, no, we cannot have inmates knowing the names of children in the community. And Marie said, oh, well, we would only have the children put just their first name. They would not put their last name. So nobody would know who these children were. And the superintendent had a number of other objections. He said, well, you'd have to have enough so that every single inmate would get one and they couldn't be in envelopes because any male that comes into a prison, the prison staff, opens the mail to review it and scan it and search it for any possible contraband. So they couldn't be in envelopes and they would all have to be a standard size. He told her and he laid out a whole set of restrictions. And Marie finally said, okay, if we can do all of that, will you let us go forward with this program? And the superintendent by this time was sort of worn down and he said, okay, Marie, if you think you can get all of that done in time for Christmas, you come back and let me know. And that was all Marie needed. She immediately went to her group of volunteers and she said, here's what we're going to do. She was just making this up as she went along, but they sent, they got blank cards, printed up with a little message. She wanted a message in those cards that would really be meaningful to people who were going to spend Christmas in prison. And she said she went to card stores and looked at a whole bunch of Christmas cards. And of course, the messages in most Christmas cards just would not do for someone who was going to spend Christmas in prison. So she heard on a television program, this message Christmas means you are loved. And she decided that's the message. So they got a bunch of cards printed up with this message. They contacted children's groups and Sunday school classes and youth groups all over the community and got these groups to agree that the children would decorate the front of these cards. They would put just their first name and their age inside the card and that they would send all of these cards back to Marie's group so that her group could scan every single card and make sure that no child had put any identifying information in them. And then they delivered a package of these cards to the prison. That first year, I think they collected something like 1,500 cards so that every incarcerated man in that one prison would receive a card. And after those cards were delivered, she started receiving letters from the men in the prison talking about how touched they were that a child would take time to decorate a Christmas card for someone who was in prison. And for many of them, that was the only piece of mail they had received from the outside world ever since their incarceration. And so when she saw how very much that meant to them to have a sign of caring and compassion from the outside world, she decided that this needed to be a regular annual program and that program continues to this day. And I think this past year, Marie's the centerpiece, which is the nonprofit organization that Marie eventually started up for all of these prison programs, centerpiece distributed, I think over 30,000 of those decorated Christmas cards this past Christmas. - You're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm Mark Helpsmead and this is Northern Spirit Radio Production. We're speaking today with Melanie G. Snyder and you can find a link to her site, MelanieG Snyder.com, at northernspiritradio.org. Now, Melanie, there's so much that we could talk about from this book, Grace Goes to Prison. I do want to remind people they can find it on your site, possibly if they're part of the lucky folks, they'll catch up with you when you pass through Minneapolis on March 31st or through Madison on April 6th. And the rest of that information about where you'll be, you can find in the book section on MelanieG Snyder.com. There's so much more in this book, but I want to turn a little bit more to you and to Marie. One thing you did mention is the way you first connected with Marie was someone at church. So you attend some church, evidently. And I know from the book that Marie was part of the church of the brethren and this inspired and fueled a whole life of service really caring for those in prison. And as we all know, I think in Matthew, one of the tests about what you get into heaven is, did you visit those in prison? Did you care for the least of these? What's your background religiously, spiritually? - Well, I currently am a member of a church of the brethren congregation in Pennsylvania, the Elizabeth town church of the brethren. Interestingly, I did not grow up in the church of the brethren, I've sometimes referred to myself as a spiritual mutt. I have attended United Church of Christ, United Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and a number of other denominations throughout my life. But when I joined the Elizabeth town church of the brethren four years ago, my father said to me, well, you know that I grew up in the church of the brethren, right? And I said, no, I never knew that. But what had happened was when he was growing up, when he was an older teenager, his parents moved, they moved to a place where there was not a church of the brethren congregation nearby, and they started going to a United Church Christ church that was just a half mile up the road from their farm. And in fact, when I was a little girl, that was the church then that I went to as well. For me, the church of the brethren denomination has truly felt like home. After finding out that my father had been raised in the church of the brethren, and in fact, I have several ancestors back in my family lineage who actually started up church of the brethren congregations in Pennsylvania and Ohio. I've been saying, well, it must have been in my DNA, and something was calling me back home to the church of the brethren denomination. But I feel very fortunate to be in the particular congregation that I attend in Elizabeth town. But for Marie, yes, she has grown up her whole life in the church of the brethren. And it really was being steeped in the brethren principles of peacemaking and justice and looking for that of God in others that has so influenced her work. But one of the formative experiences for Marie was when she was 18 years old after she finished high school, she went off to serve in Brethren Volunteer Service, which is similar in some ways to the Peace Corps. It was started as an opportunity to give people who were conscientious objectors, an alternative form of service. When Marie was in Brethren Volunteer Service for that year from age 18 to about age 19, back in the late 1950s, this was. She worked in Phoenix, Arizona, that was where her assignment was. She worked at the Phoenix Indian School, which was a boarding school for Native American children. And she was assigned to be the assistant to Reverend Harold Lundgren, who was the director of religious education at the school. Part of what Reverend Lundgren did at that school was he was in charge of discipline for the students. So when a student misbehaved in class, they were sent to Reverend Lundgren's office. And the student would arrive in the little office holding a note from their teacher, spelling out what the student's infraction had been. And the teacher would request that suitable punishment be meted out. And Marie told me that what she learned from Reverend Lundgren's example was so powerful and shaped her work many years later in the prisons. Because Reverend Lundgren would simply accept that note that the student was carrying. And he would just shove it in his pocket and invite the student to sit down. And he would then engage the student in a conversation about their home, their family, what life was like back in the reservation. He would just show interest in whatever they seemed to want to talk about. And she said he never directly addressed what it was that the student had done wrong, what their so-called crime was back in the classroom. He never meted out any form of punishment. He would simply sit and listen and allow the student to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. And then he would send them on their way. But before he'd send them on their way, he would tell them, if you would ever like to just have a place to come and sit and talk, you can always come here to my office. And while you're here, you could teach Marie some of your native language or talk to her about your home and your family and your tribal customs. This school at this time did not allow students to speak their native language. In fact, if they got caught speaking their native language, they were punished. And so that was Reverend Lundgren's way of letting them know that his office and he and Marie were a safe haven for these students. And Marie told me that many years later, when she started going into the prisons, she realized that punishment was not effective and that what she wanted to do and what she wanted her volunteers to do was offer compassion and respect and humanity to the men and women that they encountered in prison. And so they would never ask any incarcerated person what their crime had been or what got them sent to prison. But instead, they focused on looking for the good in these men and women. And in many cases, I think helping them to discover the good in themselves. - And that what you feed is that which grows. And so if you feed fear, if you feed hate, hate grows, if you feed the love, the good, that's what grows. I think that's the principle that we're talking about here. - Absolutely. - There's so much more that we could cover from the book. But in the meantime, I think people should either just come to hear you speak as you're traveling around. Again, you can check the website MelanieGsnider.com. You can get the book, Grace Goes to Prison by Melanie. And you can start visiting prisons on your own. There's a lot to learn and a lot that each of us could make a difference in if we just got involved. Melanie, there's so much more we could talk about. We could talk about the Alternative Surveillance Program, the Social Skills Conflict Resolution work that you talk about in the book. She was incredible. - I think Marie would be so humbled and flattered by that comment and I will pass it along to her when I join her out in Phoenix, Arizona in a few weeks. - Again, Melanie, thanks so much for bringing Marie's story to the wider world. Thank you for your own work with people connected with prison through the Restorative Justice Program. Thank you so much for joining me for Spirit and Action. - Thank you, Mark. It's been a great privilege for me to have this time to talk with you and to share these stories. So thank you for inviting me to do this. - That was today's Spirit and Action guest, Melanie Snyder, author of Grace Goes to Prison. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit and Action Program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit and Action. (upbeat music) ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ Feeling ♪