Speech to the National Convention of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, delivered November 13, 2015 via telephone from the California State Prison, Los Angeles County in Lancaster, California.
Greetings, from inside California’s prison system. Thank you to Lily Hughes and Christine Thomas for the singular opportunity to address my fellow activists in the long struggle to end all forms of the death penalty, lethal injections and lethal terms of imprisonment. In any situation like this, I am especially compelled to point out that I feel the great weight of the more than 50,000 men and women condemned to life without the possibility of parole sentences, in prisons all across this country, serving what I’ve called the other death penalty. A number, by the way, that is greater than all the rest of the countries in the world combined.
I do not presume to speak for them all. Nor do I assert that what I advocate,or what I believe or what I feel, is universal amongst this diverse group of people. Nevertheless, I will try to share with you what it means to me to serve this other death penalty. It is also imperative to me that I acknowledge up front that I am not an innocent. When I was 19 years old, I killed a man named Thomas Allen Fellowes in a drunken, drugged up fist fight that started over some mispoken words. What I did then was wrong, and from the start, I’ve owned up to my guilt. To this day, to this very moment, I feel tremendous shame and remorse for that act of inhumanity. But I don’t believe I ceased to be a human on that day. I don’t believe I became incapable of positive change, or that I should remain forever outside the pale of society, outside even the possibility of growth or healing. More to the point of this discussion, I don’t believe that my actions somehow warranted and justified a suspension of the normal rules of justice.
This really is the heart of the problem of all death sentences: The idea and the practice of suspending the normal rules of the idea and practice of justice. And that’s why, in a just society, there cannot be death sentences of any variety, lethal injections or lethal terms of imprisonment. I’ve been asked to talk about what it’s like to be sentenced to the other death penalty. I am fully qualified for this task because I’ve been doing it now for more than 35 years inside one of the most dysfunctional, dangerous and punitive prison systems inside our prison nation.
The first thing to understand about life without parole is its cruelest aspect, the denial of hope. In religious iconography, the traditional theological virtues, faith, hope and charity, have often been represented as two young women with a child between them, the child being the embodiment of hope. Without hope, life is a shadow of a life. It is two dimensional and flat, a mere reflection. Without hope, which is the wellspring of possibility and desire, life is rendered down to its mechanical functions. It is breath without spirit. What this means on the ground inside prison is there are more than 50,000 men and women walking, but not living, in the worst prisons in the industrialized world without the most basic reason for being alive, without hope.
The second thing to understand about life without parole is its most insidious aspect, how it disappears us. When a man or a woman is sentenced to the other death penalty, that’s basically the end of their story. Unlike the more obvious forms of the death penalty, it’s not the beginning of a long, protracted court battle or the focus of any intense scrutiny. And, unlike a regular life sentence, it’s not the first act in that man or woman’s long process of appearing before parole boards seeking to be found ‘suitable,’ as it’s called here in California.
In my 35 years of prison, I’ve never once been before a parole board and I never will. Neither have I been the focus of anyone’s attention, decrying the injustice of my predicament. Factually, until but a few years ago, after grueling work supported by courageous volunteers not intimidated by the entrenched abolitionist groups, we were an afterthought at most. What this means on the ground inside of prison is those 50,000 men and women in those terrible prisons, abandoned and left to the prison industrial complex’s designs; without representation, without advocates, without hope.
The third thing to understand about life without parole is one of its most frustrating aspects: the limitations we’re forced to contend with on account of the sentence itself and regardless of our personal situation. In every prison system that houses life without parole prisoners, there are special restrictions placed on us. These run the gamut from limited job assignments, to no access to rehabilitated programs, to being barred from placement in higher functioning prisons. In California, life without parole prisoners are placed last on work assignment waiting lists, are excluded from many other assignments due to our status alone, and must be housed in those prisons with the least programming opportunities.
Many other states place even more severe restrictions on life without parole prisoners, essentially forcing them to spend the rest of their lives in security housing units, more commonly known as the hole. What this means on the ground in prison is those 50,000 men and women in terrible prisons, abandoned to the prison system’s abuses without any real representation or hope, are also denied access to the only things that can bring some sense of meaning to a life — work, education, peace. We are, in fact, often told that resources should not be wasted on people sentenced to die in prison.
The fourth thing to understand about life without parole is its most discouraging aspect: how we become unwilling, unasked, volunteer sacrifices. Most, but not all, The Campaign to End the Death Penalty, thankfully and laudably, a part of the not all — Most death penalty abolitionist groups continue to aggressively advocate in favor of life without parole as a so called reasonable alternative to the death penalty of lethal injections. Worse, many of these groups pointedly promote the harshness and suffering of a life spent incarcerated in the worst prisons, without any hope of release. They trumpet the finality of the sentence, devoid of all those pesky appeals and do-gooder lawyers. In some exceptionally egregious recent cases, these champions of civil rights and progressive thinking have actually sought to pass initiatives that would make a horrible sentence even worse, cynically winking one eye at the left and the other at the right, while throwing gasoline on the pyre of prisoner abuse and dehumanization.
What this means on the ground in prison is those hopeless, abandoned 50,000 men and women, living under a constant attack from both sides of the political debate and those terrible prisons with nothing meaningful to do, are the identified and acceptable targets for abuse by the system. To be one of these prisoners is to live in a state of hyper awareness, of constant preparation for assault from all sides; the system, the guards, the politicians, even our purported allies. It’s to be reminded every single day for the rest of your life that you are not a member of the human race and no one cares about your fate. It’s to be forever defined by the worst moments of your life, no matter what you might accomplish later on. It’s to be killed long before you die. I live on a facility with a high concentration of life without parole sentenced prisoners.
Many of us have known each other since we were young men filled with the irrational excesses of youth. Now, we’re mostly a bunch of old guys suffering the inevitable consequences of decades of substandard medical care, constant stress, and the inherent declines that come from the passage of time itself. Worse, we all ache from decades of fighting to retain some semblance of dignity in the face of endless assaults. We are all tired, existentially tired. Recently, someone I’ve known since our days back on the yard at old Folsom, when we were wayward boys, developed lung cancer. He’d served about 30 years at that point. Over the course of a year, I watched him fall apart, as is the nature of lung cancer. Toward the end, he came to me with a glint of hope in his eyes and said, “They’re going to let me out on a compassionate release, so I can die with my family.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that although he met the medical criteria for a compassionate release, he would be denied. No one sentenced to death, be it by a lethal injection or lethal term of imprisonment, is eligible for a compassionate release, is eligible for compassion. What he couldn’t get his mind around was he’d been killed a long time ago. He died on the prison grounds.
Life without the possibility of parole, like all other forms of the death penalty must be ended. Creating one method of execution for another is not abolition. To call that abolition is an insult to the word, and it’s a lie. To bargain with our lives and hold up our suffering as some kind of burnt offering is both immoral and duplicitous, and it should be beneath people engaged in advancing the standards of our society towards something better. Thank you to the Campaign to End the Death Penalty for this opportunity. And thank you, much more importantly, for your commitment to ending all forms of the death penalty. This is Kenneth E. Hartman, Executive Director of the Other Death Penalty Project from inside California’s prison system.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
