I've Been in Stateville and It Isn't Haunted

Four years ago, I was a student in a masters program where I was given the opportunity to be part of a collaborative learning environment of incarcerated and free students inside Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Crest Hill. I wasn’t sure what I would find. But I did know that my faith told me if I’ve ever had anger in my heart towards another, I was no different than one who had committed murder. So I decided to go in to see if I really believed this to be true.

What I didn’t expect to find was that the men in the educational programs at Stateville were not only not monstrous, as things like the local haunted prison or newsreels would have us believe, but very much ordinary people, loving fathers, sons, brothers, who found themselves in extraordinarily complex situations in an even more complex justice system that wasn’t always just and surely wasn’t blind. It didn’t take long for me to see embodied before me the statistics that Michelle Alexander describes in The New Jim Crow. To name one such staggering reality, although black and white communities have the same percentage of drug use, 75% of people in state prisons for a drug conviction are people of color. And with our war on drugs being waged on certain communities, the ACLU reports that the U.S. has seen a 700% increase of people behind bars in the last thirty years, further tearing apart vulnerable communities (instead of finding rehabilitative solutions) and then asking why fathers aren’t in the home. The irony itself is criminal.

But even more, I learned that as men in these educational programs have been turning their lives around and exhibiting more grace, discipline and resilience than most people I meet on the outside, their studies could be in vain because the state of Illinois is one the few states that no longer has a parole system. This means that no matter how restorative, how successful the education programs are at what we call a correctional center, we would still be paying tax dollars to further incarcerate people in violation with the Illinois Constitution article 1, section 11 that reads that the objective of incarceration is to restore the offender to useful citizenship. If we are to add to that the data from the Journal of Correctional Education that shows that recidivism drops down to 0% when inmates receive a masters, this further cost to the state and to families and communities also feels criminal.

Now, as a pastor and a mother in this community, I have to say I do cringe every time I drive past the haunted house in town that bears a similar name to the prison, but not because I found anything scary inside Stateville, but because I found something much scarier outside of it. A society that has forgotten its Constitution, it’s forgotten its fiscal and moral responsibilities, and it has forgotten that we are each more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. This is not to say that parole is for everyone, but surely the data shows it is for some. One more thing worth noting, many of the men receiving their masters are working on projects to right many of the wrongs in society that they witnessed or were a part of, inspiring work and stories that our world and our children so badly need. To keep our societies from these restorative and educational efforts…well that seems the most haunting to me.

Pastor Cheryl Lynn Cain

Church of the Good Shepherd

Crest Hill, IL

If you’d like to learn more, consider these sources…

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Rethinking Incarceration by Dominique DuBois Gilliard

The Equal Justice Initiative (eji.org)

Parole Illinois (paroleillinois.org)