The Easter hymn comes to mind tonight:  “When we are walking, doubtful and dreading, blinded by sadness, slowness of heart; yet Christ walks with us, ever awaiting our invitation: Stay, do not part.”  It is based on tomorrow’s Gospel text from Luke 24, the “Road to Emmaus” story.

On Thursday, our friend Jeffrey was finally released from state prison—one month late due to the passive-aggressive incompetence of our state department of “corrections.”

Jeffrey is a gay man who was part of our church community, even though actually homeless when he was nabbed for a technical violation of his parole—failing to report his whereabouts to the parole officer.

Our “criminal justice” system is broken.  In California it eats up about as much as our entire educational system, some $10.5 billion a year.  The [1] California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation admits that more than 95% of that monstrous sum goes to simply keeping inmates locked up.  Prisons are running at over 200% design capacity.  Actual “correction” or “rehabilitation” scarcely happen at all.  Job training is spotty and inadequate.  Those inmates who never finished high school may only be permitted to take one class per week toward their G.E.D., while prison guards have the money sewed up and take home huge sums of overtime pay.  Medical care is equally spotty, and we know inmates who have had to manipulate the system just to get a nurse to see them.  There really is no such thing as counseling available to inmates, and it is extremely onerous to get the permission needed to visit inmates as pastors or volunteer chaplains.

Gay men are still targets in prison, and get raped—often by guards, not other inmates.  (See [2] Just Detention International.)  We know of inmates who got HIV while doing time.  One straight inmate has gotten himself permanently into Ad Seg, or Administrative Segregation, so that other inmates don’t hit on him or try to beat him up because he is not real masculine-appearing.  How do we know he’s straight?  He serving time for raping his girl friend (even though she was living with him at the time, but that’s another symptom of a broken justice system).

I wouldn’t have thought so, but transgender M2F (male to female) inmates have it easier, and often find a straight protector in a fellow inmate who likes having someone feminine around for friendship and privileges.  We’ve had some difficulty with one transgender parolee, who looked for the same sweet deal “on the outside,” expecting someone would protect and support her.

It is hard to get an accurate picture of the system unless you get to know the people who have been swept into its grasp.  Voters see periodic reports that California has the highest recidivism rate in America, but according to the [3] UC-Irvine Center for Evidence-Based Corrections in September 2005, “Two-thirds of California’s offenders return to prison within three years, but more than 50% of those offenders are sent back for parole violations alone, a rate considerably higher than in other large states.”

Such parole violations may sound serious, but how they are defined is itself often at the whim of the system which is abused not only by the guards union but political opportunists.  They have created a climate of “lock ‘em up and throw the key away” at the same time we don’t have enough money for education or the decent humanitarian care of our most vulnerable citizens.  As if the [4] Three Strikes Law weren’t ineffective enough, in 2010—thanks to governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—Chelsea’s Law added to the insanity of [5] Jessica’s Law, making it almost impossible to live in an urban county in this state if you are a sex offender.  (This is on top of [6] Megan’s Law.)  The two options for such parolees are idiotic: either you declare yourself homeless, in which case the public is no safer if it doesn’t know where you are from night to night; or move to a rural county where there are no jobs or future, increasing the likelihood that parolees will eventually turn to criminal activity just to eat and stay alive.

Yet the CDCR and parole system requires parolees to return to the county in which they were originally apprehended.  We were working with another gay parolee a few months ago who did not want to return to the central valley county where he had been mixed up with local gangs that got him into trouble in the first place.  He had the official promise he could return instead to Los Angeles, where there was a support network waiting to help him start a brand-new life. But the minute he actually got our on parole, the parole officer changed everything, had him nabbed for a parole violation for not returning to his home county, and forced him back into the very criminal environment he was trying to avoid. As a result, he has disappeared.

Yet Christ walks with us, even as we try to carry out the mandate of Matthew 25:36. Tomorrow Jeffrey comes home to our congregation, to meet the people who have kept faith with him for three years of imprisonment.  Thanks to the vision of church members, we’ve been able to visit him twice in prison, write frequently, send him supplies and accept collect calls from prison several times a month.  Tomorrow is a homecoming, even though he still faces homelessness, unemployment, and three more years of close surveillance under parole. Yet Christ walks with us!

—Pastor Dan Hooper