Voices from Solitary: Loneliness and Faith at Christmastime

December 25, 2012 By 14 Comments

Picture1The following essay comes from Brian Nelson, who spent 12 years in solitary confinement in Tamms supermax prison in Illinois. Released in 2010, he now works at the Uptown People’s Law Center, which has been instrumental in the battle to close Tamms–a battle that has at last proved successful. Some prisoners have already been moved out of Tamms, while others await transfer, and the supermax is expected to be empty by January 4, 2013. For more of Brian Nelson’s descriptions of his time in solitary, click here.

I was raised as a Catholic at St. Benedict Church in Chicago. Throughout my life I have maintained my beliefs. While confined in prison I was able to continue to practice my faith: Going to Mass, celebrating the Sacrements. I was also able to celebrate the Holy Days as prescribed by the Catholic Church. Celebrating the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ was a high point each year. At the beginning of Advent I was raised to begin to prepare myself for the Christmas celebration that was shared by the Communion of Saints (this means celebrating Mass together on Christmas Day). The joy of seeing the love on each others face as we celebrate the birth of Our Lord, giving the sign of peace to each other, was a highlight of the season. Even as I was held in prison, I had free access to the chaplin everyday and our priest was at the prison regularly.

In March of 1998 that changed, as I was placed in a supermax prison. When Tamms opened it was designed strictly for sensory deprivation, solitary confinement and as a tool to break all family ties as well as brainwash men into believing they have been abandoned by everyone. Needless to say, I was shocked by the attack upon my religious beliefs upon arrival at Tamms. No longer would I be allowed to attend Mass. No longer would I be granted privacy to say confession to the priest without a correctional officer listening over the speaker in every cell. At times I was even denied my Holy Bible and my Breivary ( prayer book). I was told I was not allowed to fast, nor abstain from eating meat. For months I was denied a Rosary. All this regardless of what the Catholic priest told the prison was proper. Sadly he was ignored by Tamms administration.

Surprisingly, this made my faith stronger and, yes, more meaningful. I spent hours studying the history of St. Benedict and began to study the Order of Cistercian of Strict Observance. These are followers of the Rule of St. Benedict. I copied the Rule of St. Benedict three times as the work in the Rule prescribes. I read the Holy Bible completely numerous times, and regardless of what prison officials did to stop me, I fasted, and followed the teachings to the best of my ability. I spent hours praying every day.

Yet I have to admit, at times during the Christmas season I felt depressed and unconnected to other Christians. The Tamms mail room intentionally withheld mail until after Christmas so men felt abandoned and alone. There was no Mass or celebration. Yet my loving mother would do all she could to make Christmas special. I would receive an Advent calender weeks ahead of time. She would send religious books and she would visit. Other members of the Christian community would also try to reach into the dungeon and share the Word with me. Every man at Tamms would receive Christmas cards from Uptown People’s Law Center as well as The Tamms Year Ten Committee, to try to demonstrate that even though we were in solitary confinement we were not alone. But Christmas would come and there was no feast, no Mass, no Communion of Saints; there was no family gathering.

I was alone in a Gray Box as are thousands of men and women held in solitary confinement in America. Not even allowed a simple phone to tell of families we love them and Merry Christmas. As children we were raise with the joyful expectation of Christmas morning. Of being with family and loved ones and celebrating our Lord’s birth. Yet in solitary you don’t have these hopes of these loving moments. What you have is raw faith and depression in solitude, and never can you express this to those you love and who care about you, because then you would spoil the Christmas celebration for them. To express the loneliness would to become the Grinch that stole Christmas.

Yet at times, praying, I felt all the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ and all the Christians celebrating. At other times I felt the affects of the Gray Box and complete abandonment. Also I felt the anger at  those Christians that treated other Christians as I was being treated. How could they be Christians and treat other human beings so evilly? Then I would pray and pray for and end to such barbaric treatment and for the guidance to be able to help to end the madness of solitary confinement. Christmas is a time of joy yet so many men and women are being tortured in solitary confinement on Christmas day! What would Our Lord Jesus Christ say about this?

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Santa Was in Prison and Jesus Got the Death Penalty

December 24, 2012 By 6 Comments

star-of-bethlehem1[1]_jpg2This post has become a Christmas tradition at Solitary Watch. To all our readers, warm wishes for the holidays.

As Christmas is celebrated in Incarceration Nation, it’s worth remembering certain things about the two figures who dominate this holiday.

As more than 3,000 Americans sit on death row, we revere the birth of a man who was arrested, “tried,” sentenced, and put to death by the state. The Passion is the story of an execution, and the Stations of the Cross trace the path of a Dead Man Walking.

Less well known is the fact that Saint Nicholas, the early Christian saint who inspired Santa Claus, was once a prisoner, like one in every 100 Americans today. Though he was beloved for his kindness and generosity, Nicholas acquired sainthood not only by giving alms, but in part by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to a prison break.

Nicholas was the 4th-century Greek Bishop of Myra (in present-day Turkey). Under the Roman emperor Diocletian, who persecuted Christians, Nicholas spent some five years in prison–and according to some accounts, in solitary confinement.

Under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, Nicholas fared better until the Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. There, after having a serious theological argument with another powerful bishop, Nicholas became so enraged that he walked across the room and slapped the man.

It was illegal for one bishop to strike another. According to an account provided by the St. Nicholas Center: “The bishops stripped Nicholas of his bishop’s garments, chained him, and threw him into jail. That would keep Nicholas away from the meeting. When the Council ended a final decision would be made about his future.”

Nicholas spent the night praying for guidance, and was visited by Jesus and Mary. “When the jailer came in the morning, he found the chains loose on the floor and Nicholas dressed in bishop’s robes, quietly reading the Scriptures.” It was determined that no one could have visited or helped him during the night. Constantine ordered Nicholas freed and reinstated as the Bishop of Myra, and his feat would later be declared one of many miracles performed by the saint.

Saint Nicholas lived on to serve the poor during the devastating famine that hit his part of Turkey in 342 AD. He is reported to have anonymously visited starving families at night and distributed gold coins to help them buy scarce food.

Here in the United States two thousand years later, Christians go to church to worship an executed savior and shop to commemorate an incarcerated saint. And most Americans give little thought to their 2 million countrymen who are spending this Christmas behind bars.

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Voices from Solitary: Christmas in the Hole, 1968

December 17, 2011 By 7 Comments

by Alan CYA #65085

Editors’ Note: In this memoir, the author–who prefers to be identified only by his first name and California Youth Authority number–recalls a Christmas spent as a 17-year-old inmate in the juvenile jail then known as the Preston School of Industry, since renamed the Preston Youth Correctional Facility. Opened in 1894, Preston was one of the most notorious “reform schools” in the country, known for its brutality and deprivation. More than a century later, little had changed–at least, not for the better. Last year, the Ella Baker Center reported abuses at California Youth Authority facilities that included “young people locked in 20- to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement for days, weeks and months on end; young people locked in 4′x4′ cages for temporary detention; guard and staff abuse, neglect, manipulation, and humiliation of the young people in their care; rampant sexual assault;…virtually non-existent care for young people with mental health or substance abuse needs; shocking negligence in medical care, especially emergency care; woefully inadequate educational programming; [and] a culture and atmosphere of constant intimidation, isolation, fear and violence.” It singled out Preston, along with Stark, as the worst of the facilities. In the fall of 2010, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced that it would close Preston in order “to operate more effectively and efficiently as the state adapts to changes in our youth population.”

= = = = =

For most of us the holiday season is filled with good memories of cheerfully bright decorations at holiday parties with ample supplies of sinfully good food and drink. It is a time that we all gather together to share our good fortune with those that we care most about. And for the luckiest amongst us, our homes are as full as the cornucopias that sit at the center of our dining room tables.

But as we gather near the Christmas tree to sing “Silent Night,” I cannot help but recall my solitary confinement experience during the holidays of 1968. The knowledge that there are still other human beings being held in such sterile, foul smelling, and depressingly deteriorating, cold, concrete boxes leaves me both grateful for my good fortune and somber for the others that I left behind. Because, you see, Christmas in solitary is neither silent nor holy, but filled with the howling cries of the ever increasing population of mentally ill prisoners housed there.

When I read about the long term isolation that inmates endure today, my experience as a 17-year-old juvenile seems to pale in comparison. The solitary confinement unit at Preston School of Industry, a California Youth Authority facility which only recently has been closed due to the infamous and unproductive brutality of it’s wards, is briefly described in Edward Bunker’s memoir titled Education of A Felon: “I was assigned permanently to G Company, a unit with a three-tier Cell block. It was dark and gloomy and a carbon copy of a prison cell block.” An indeed it still was when I landed in the hole just before Christmas for fighting.

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Filed Under: California, juveniles, mental illness, psychological effects, solitary confinement, Voices from Solitary Tagged With: , , , ,

Santa Was in Prison and Jesus Got the Death Penalty

December 25, 2010 By 7 Comments

As Christmas is celebrated in Incarceration Nation, it’s worth remembering certain things about the two figures who dominate this holiday.

As more than 3,000 Americans sit on death row, we revere the birth of a godly man who was arrested, “tried,” sentenced, and put to death by the state. The Passion is the story of an execution, and the Stations of the Cross trace the path of a Dead Man Walking.

Less well known is the fact that Saint Nicholas, the early Christian saint who inspired Santa Claus, was once a prisoner, like one in every 100 Americans today. Though he was beloved for his kindness and generosity, Nicholas acquired sainthood not only by giving alms, but in part by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to a prison break.

As we described in one of our earliest posts on Solitary Watch, Nicholas was the 4th-century Greek Bishop of Myra (in present-day Turkey). Under the Roman emperor Diocletian, who persecuted Christians, Nicholas spent some five years in prison–and according to some accounts, in solitary confinement.

Under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, Nicholas fared better until the Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. There, after having a serious theological argument with another powerful bishop, Nicholas became so enraged that he walked across the room and slapped the man.  

It was illegal for one bishop to strike another. According to an account provided by the St. Nicholas Center: “The bishops stripped Nicholas of his bishop’s garments, chained him, and threw him into jail. That would keep Nicholas away from the meeting. When the Council ended a final decision would be made about his future.”

Nicholas spent the night praying for guidance, and was visited by Jesus and Mary. “When the jailer came in the morning, he found the chains loose on the floor and Nicholas dressed in bishop’s robes, quietly reading the Scriptures.” It was determined that no one could have visited or helped him during the night. Constantine ordered Nicholas freed and reinstated as the Bishop of Myra, and his feat would later be declared one of many miracles performed by the saint.

Saint Nicholas lived on to serve the poor during the devastating famine that hit his part of Turkey in 342 AD. He is reported to have anonymously visited starving families at night and distributed gold coins to help them buy scarce food.

But here in America two thousand years later, Christians go to church to worship an executed savior and shop to commemorate an incarcerated saint, with little thought to their 2 million countrymen who are spending this Christmas behind bars.

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Filed Under: death row, political prisoners, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

War (on Crime) Is Over — If You Want It

December 23, 2010 By 1 Comment

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Santa Was in Solitary

December 24, 2009 By 1 Comment

Most people know that Santa Claus is derived from St. Nicholas, an early Christian saint beloved for his kindness and generosity. What hardly anyone knows is that Nicholas acquired sainthood not by giving alms, but by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to breaking out of solitary confinment.

George Pappas Sr., writing in Ohio’s Zanesville Times Recorder, tells the full story:

[St. Nicholas ] was a 4th-century Greek Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor who is mostly associated with the legends of his tireless work to help the poor families during the great famine (342 AD) which plagued this part of Turkey. The Jolly Old Bishop was known for his nightly and anonymous distribution of gold coins to aid starving families who were no longer able to afford to feed their children….

A lesser known legend is more serious and very relevant to the issues facing our American way of life in 2009.

It turns out that St. Nicholas had some serious theological differences with Arius, the Bishop of Alexandria, over the exact nature of the divinity of Jesus Christ. (Arias believed he was not made of the same stuff as God.) They argued over it at the First Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. According to Pappas:

The debate proceeded with “required decorum” until St. Nicholas became so enraged that he walked across the room and slapped Arian to the floor.

It was a sin in Canon Law to strike another bishop. St. Nicholas was excommunicated, stripped of his vestment (ornate individually handcrafted bishop robes) and locked in solitary confinement under guard.

The council could now proceed without this very troublesome and now excommunicated bishop. It appeared certain that Arian would have a majority of the 299 remaining bishops support his Arian philosophy.

The next morning, as the session of the council was beginning, it was interrupted. A guard had come from the prison where St. Nicholas was jailed and reported that he had gone to check on the prisoner and found the door of St. Nicholas’ cell open, his chains removed and he was kneeling in prayer fully clothed in his bishop’s vestments. The immediate response of the council was to find who had committed this act of defiance against the will of the council. Investigation yielded no one who could have done this and the vestments stripped from St. Nicholas were exactly where they had been placed. St. Nicholas wore the exact same ornate vestments. It would have take months to fabricate new vestments.

Pappas finds a moral in this story that might well apply to advocates who work for the often unpopular cause of prison reform.

St. Nicholas believed so much and cared so much that he was willing to risk all to challenge the “politically correct notion” of decorum to defend and expound true and honest beliefs. He was ahead of his time and teaches us a timeless lesson about integrity and passion for the truth.

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