Christopher's Unlikely Redemption

Christopher’s Unlikely Redemption*

In the little bit of time left of the workday, I was trying to finish my daily notes on the therapy sessions I had had with my inmate clients when there was a knock on the door.

I stood up hurriedly and pulled the door open. A compact Black man with an intense expression stood in the hallway. “I hear you doing a rational emotive therapy group,” he said. I nodded. “I like to be a part of that.”

I hesitated briefly. The group I was starting was already full. “What dormitory are you in?” I asked.

“Jackson.” I was hoping that he would at least be in the dormitory I was assigned to cover but he wasn’t.

I didn’t really want to let him in the group which already had ten members but I found it hard to say no to reasonable requests the inmates made when prison is such a desolate place. Besides, some inmates would probably drop out along the way. And so far, no one had criticized me for taking inmates from other dormitories.

I grabbed a piece of paper from my desk drawer. “Name?”

“Christopher Carver.”

“Number?” He rattled off his 7-digit federal inmate number.

“Okay,” I said. “The secretary already has the names for the call-outs for tomorrow. If she’s already got them on the computer and your name doesn’t show up, have your boss call.”

He nodded wordlessly and faded down the hallway. He had come over without a pass, which was something of a risk, and he needed to get back to his dormitory room for the 4:00 count.

In my year as a psychology intern, a position I had sought because my ex-husband was not paying child support and the Bureau of Prisons paid double for obvious reasons, I made several soft-hearted decisions that came back to bite me. This one did not. I wouldn’t know it for a while but letting Chris in my group made the difference between a rather ordinary internship year and one I felt good about.

“We all do two therapy groups a week,” my boss had told me on the first day of my internship. With the poker face I had learned during my seven years as a therapist with my master’s degree, I carefully did not reveal my anxiety. This was the only internship in the U.S. (besides the Army which was not feasible) that paid enough to support my son and myself and I needed to make a success of it if I were going to finish up my PhD and get a job with a living wage.

We had slid on the groups for the first three months because the prison was changing from a youth prison to an adult prison and there were hundreds of interviews to be conducted and mountains of paperwork. There simply had not been enough time to run groups but my boss announced we would begin running them the beginning of January.

What did I really know about being therapeutic with bank robbers, sex offenders, murderers and drug runners, I mused. “Nothing,” was the answer and it would be more challenging with a whole group than my individual clients but I would need to give it my best shot.

I decided to start the group with a couple sessions of rational emotive therapy. I had read about a project using RET in a prison group that had seemed promising. The goal of rational emotive therapy is to identify self-defeating and irrational thoughts, often significantly exaggerated, and replace them with more rational and productive thoughts to manage your emotions in a more helpful way without depression and anxiety. Using your mind to manage your emotions is a good fit with prison since the prison can take virtually everything from you but your mind.

The original composition of my group was eight Black members, a man from Mexico, a Jewish man proud of his heritage and a Caucasian graduate student. The three non-Black members quickly told me they didn’t think they fit well and my group became a rather homogenous group of Black men.

How was I to teach them about rational emotive therapy? In the mental health center, I had started by giving my clients a couple of cases to read and working with them on a written exercise which demonstrated the technique. My group did not have cognitive deficits but they had, as a group, limited literacy, making that method unrealistic.

I decided to play the group some educational tapes the psychology department had. They were written and narrated by Dr. Albert Ellis who had developed this type of cognitive therapy. He took pride in being confrontational. Even his voice was abrasive. The inmates nevertheless, almost without exception, went soundly to sleep. Embarrassed, I told John, one of the other psychologists, my group members had slept through my group. “They always do,” he said sympathetically. “I don’t use the tapes anymore.”

For the second group, I decided to do an example on the blackboard. My group members were totally polite and utterly bored. Chris watched me flounder for a while, then said, “We do it a bit different at the Hut.” He was referring to the prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, where I knew he had received some rational behavior treatment for his addiction to heroin. I recognized it as an offer to rescue me but he didn’t say anything further while he watched my face to see if I would take umbrage at the thought of being bailed out of my hopeless presentation by a lowly inmate.

He didn’t wait long. I could not remember a time I had so much wanted to be out of the hot seat. Gratefully, I held out the chalk to him and took his vacated seat while he went to the blackboard.

“What somebody be mad over yesterday?” he asked the group.

He got the same mute response I had received but he knew what to do about it.

“Nobody be mad over anything yesterday?”

The group laughed at the thought of making it through a day in prison without being angry and somebody offered “the count. They messed up the count.” This was the 4 o’clock count when the men had to stand so they were visible from their doorways. No one could sit until the employee in the front office had received the count from multiple areas in the prison and added them together so that the number correctly reflected the number of men who were supposed to be in the prison. This method left a great deal of room for mistakes.

“What you think?” Chris asked.

“The guards be idiots” a group member offered, to laughter and uniform consent.

“What else you think?” Chris continued.

“The guards are high school drop-outs and stupid and can’t get a job anywhere else. They always be messin’ up the count. They oughta be locked up.”

“What if we have a camera?” Chris asked. “They always mess up the count?”

The men conceded quickly – often, not always.

“Are they all stupid?” Chris asked. The men did not concede as quickly but after some dithering they did agree that not every single guard was stupid. And some of the guards might even be decent and had simply taken the best job they could get.

“Any other reason the count be messed up?” Chris queried.

“Somebody not be where they supposed to be,” one of the inmates offered and the other men agreed.

“How you want to feel the next time it happen?” Chris asked – and the men agreed a calm perspective would feel better. They were attentive and having a good time. And so was I. Chris had replaced my fumbling with a successful teaching experience.

This was not my only blunder. One day, when attempting to convey the need to monitor oneself for signs one might reoffend, I mentioned that many people who commit crimes are thrill seekers and added that in my personal life I knew a man on parole for robbing a bank who went shoplifting for the thrills it gave him. Then I realized it might have sounded as though I was personal friends with the bank robber and hung around people who committed crimes despite my status as an employee of the Bureau of Prisons. I quickly announced firmly that the bank robber had not been my friend.

As I fumbled through these remarks, I looked at the blank faces of my group members. Most were from D.C. and at least some of them had almost certainly been funding heroin addictions by robbing banks. And I had just made it sound as though I was contemptuous of them as bank robbers. As their group leader, this was totally unacceptable. I felt I must atone for my tactless remarks. They were staring at me without expression.

“I have nothing against bank robbers,” I announced. They continued to stare at me without expression. “In fact,” I added, “I like bank robbers.” Still, there was no change in their facial expressions. “Very much so,” I added desperately. I could scarcely believe I had just announced I liked bank robbers very much but I didn’t seem to be able to stop talking and I babbled for several minutes. Somehow the group dragged to an end.

If I had not already redeemed myself, I did so on the last day of the group by getting permission to bring in home-made cookies. And so the second hour of our last group had a party atmosphere and while they ate cookies I stood in my usual spot at the blackboard, confessed I had had no idea what to include in a group and asked what would be useful to them. They needed to know how to be successful at parole board hearings and job interviews, they answered in total agreement.

On the way out of the room, Chris said to me, “I like to talk to you about what we do at Terre Haute”.I waited. “Away from the group,” he said. “Could I have an appointment?”

I nodded. “It will take me about a week and a half to find an appointment time.”

“All right,” he answered. Patience is a virtue in all walks of life but in prison, where one must wait for almost everything, it is mandatory if one is going to survive semi-intact.

When Chris arrived for his appointment, he was unexpectedly forthcoming. I knew he had been in a rational behavior therapy group but he had watched me for the eight-week group to determine if I was trustworthy before he decided he would be candid with the rest of his story.

Chris had first gone to prison when he was 17 for robbing a bank to buy heroin. He had been given a break and served several years in a state prison. Upon release, he had quickly found a job he loved but during breaks he could watch the “buys” taking place down the street and heroin called to him. He was only six months on the street before he was apprehended for robbing another bank and this time he did not get a break.

Chris was given the standard 20 years in federal prison for that bank robbery. He could have been given a more lenient sentence under the Youth Correctional Act but the judge unsurprisingly decided not to do so since had recidivated in such a short time. What was surprising was that he was sent to maximum security at Leavenworth, one of the toughest prisons in the country, for a crime that normally would have placed him in a medium security prison. At 24, he had held, for a while, the dubious distinction of being the youngest man in the Leavenworth prison. This did not encourage him to give up crime. Something, or someone, else did though.

It would be hard to find a more unlikely hero than Gerald. After having been convicted of eight murders, Gerald was doing “life without possibility” (of parole). Somehow, out of the shambles of his life, Gerald had decided to become a good man. He had become a Black Muslim and had given up all vices except marijuana. Perhaps it was Chris’s extreme youth that inspired Gerald to mentor him. Early on though, Gerald did make a poor judgment.

His eight murder convictions gave Gerald stature on the compound and when he heard of an inmate who had scored a bag of weed, he sent Chris to get him a joint. He was not greedy and asked for only one joint but sending an unrepentant drug addict on this errand was not a good idea. The cells were open during the day and finding the cell of the inmate who had made the lucky score empty, Chris stole the whole bag and delivered it to Gerald.

Gerald was not impressed by this act of stupidity. “What you do if he come after you?” he asked.

“What you think I do?” Chris answered. “I cut him.”

“What your bid?” Gerald asked.

“Twenty years,” Chris answered.

“That be your front number or your whole bid?”

“My whole bid.”

Since federal inmates at that time were eligible for parole after a third of their sentences, Chris could, with good behavior, be out in seven and a third years. Unlike Gerald, he could leave prison and make a life for himself with many years left.

Gerald shook his head. He did not spare Chris his contempt. “Man, you be doin’ your whole life behind these walls for a 50-dollar bag of dope.”

Gerald’s tutelage was effective where parental and societal constraints had not been. He took Chris to Muslim services and Chris also became a Black Muslim and committed himself to sobriety.

After a couple of years of good behavior, Chris was transferred to the prison at Terre Haute, Indiana. This was still a tough prison but it had been changed from a maximum to a medium security prison and, best of all, Chris was placed in the drug treatment program which, amazingly, the inmates themselves ran.

And not only did Chris maintain his sobriety, he began training to become a certified counselor. This program was headed by an inmate Chris always referred to as a PhD. (Presumably he was a psychologist who had had his license revoked after being convicted of a felony.) The PhD taught classes and taught his students to teach classes and supervised practica and the state of Indiana accommodated the inmate trainees by going into the prison to give the test required to become a certified counselor.

Chris had loved the program. He was happily sober, had purpose in his life, and was well on his way to becoming a certified counselor when the prison where I was interning changed from a youth to an adult prison with hundreds of open slots. Because the prison was close to his home in D.C., Chris was transferred, over his protest, away from his counselor training program.

He had taught a class in rational behavior therapy at the Hut, he told me, and he’d like to teach one here in this prison. I doubtfully agreed to ask if this were possible. I kept my word although I had no expectation of success. In the meantime, I accepted his offer of helping me figure out the curriculum for my next group.

I waited until my boss was relaxed and in a good mood during a coffee break to broach the possibility of Chris teaching a rational behavior therapy class. My boss waited until he caught his boss, one of the associate wardens, in a good mood and three days later told me to go ahead and give Chris a try.

At first, I had Chris review his plan for the next group ahead of time but after several sessions I could see he was prepared and quit asking for his plans. I believe he spent many contented hours in his room at night and on weekends getting his presentations ready. For me, it was an incredible luxury in a harried life of completing an internship, writing a dissertation and single parenting to simply sit back and relax while he took care of one of my two weekly requirements of running groups.

In the meantime, Chris taught me about what life in prison was like and what issues the inmates needed to address. Sometimes he brought a friend with him to our preparatory meetings, a rather gentle man who, when he needed money, committed fraud rather than robbing banks, and they were patient when I displayed a lack of understanding. I think it’s fair to say the groups were happy highlights in all our weeks – those of us preparing and running the groups and the group members.

A couple of years after I left, Chris, having been credited with good behavior, was released – on Christmas Day no less. I’m sure having her son walk out of prison free and rehabilitated was the best Christmas present his mom ever received.

After a while, Chris’s letters stopped. I recently looked for him on the internet. With a common name in a large city, I couldn’t really sort him out. Having decided to write a book about the prison, I had kept all sorts of memorabilia, though, including inmate numbers from my call-out sheets, and I can say unequivocally from the online federal records that Chris never went back to federal prison, suggesting that heroin and bank robberies remained in his past.

In the most unlikely circumstances, with the most unlikely mentor, Chris had gone from being willing to steal another person’s property and kill him over it if he protested, to being a compassionate counselor. And in my decades as a psychologist, he was the best co-therapist I ever had.

* Names have been changed.