13) Redemption
One of the neighborhoods I lived in during my time in DC was Cleveland Park, a few blocks north of the National Zoo. Right on the main strip of restaurants lining Connecticut Ave is the neighborhood's library, a place I visited often since it was so convenient. I adore libraries - I'll spend hours in them reading, browsing, just soaking up the atmosphere of books. There's nothing more exciting to me than the possibility of a good new book, so bookstores and libraries are magical in this regard - the promise of a new adventure literally sitting within reach.
In one of my first conversations with a librarian in Cleveland Park, I asked for a recommendation for some light reading - something fun, like a mystery, that I could read before bed every night. She suggested that I check out Anne Perry, a current British mystery writer who sets most of her stories in late Victorian England. I generally trust librarians' recommendations - especially when they hone in on my love of British literature - so off I trundled that evening with a bag full of Anne Perry mysteries, and was promptly hooked. They weren't books you'd be discussing in a literature class alongside Austen or Woolf, but after a long day at the office they were the perfect escape.
One of the things that interested me about Perry's writing was the focus on sin and redemption in each of the plot lines, which ran along fairly predictable lines of a police detective solving a murder. While never stated quite so explicitly, every book - of which I ended up reading quite a few - tended to have a theme, and that theme was often a moral one. It wasn't until I had been reading her books for about a year that I happened to read the back of one of the jacket covers, which gave a brief description of the author's life. In it, much to my shock, it mentioned that the author herself had committed murder when she was 15 years old, and had served five years in prison for it. Her family had been living in New Zealand at the time, so that is where both the crime and punishment occurred. After she was released, Anne Perry returned to her native England and managed to become a very successful writer. A number of films have been made about her unusual life - a documentary, as well as a movie by Peter Jackson, starring Kate Winslet. The movie was made entirely without her knowledge, evidently.
I went for a number of years without reading any of Perry's books but was browsing Amazon prime video recently and stumbled on the documentary. Thanks to COVID-19, I have significantly more time on my hands to do things such as browse Amazon prime video and watch obscure documentaries. This particular one fascinated and unsettled me, because of the questions it raised - quite on purpose - about redemption. Perry has spent her entire adult life attempting to make herself good enough in the eyes of both friends and strangers so that she will be accepted and forgiven for the horrible thing she did as a young teen. The documentary made clear that she is still striving to do this. But I couldn't help compare her situation - a white English woman, convicted of murder as a teenager - to someone else I've met who is trying to do the same.
I'd only been volunteering for a few weeks inside San Quentin State Prison when I met Curtis. He was one of a few "lifers" allowed to come and go pretty freely because of his good reputation. Everyone called Curtis "Wall Street," which he was always happy to explain, in his hurried, slight stutter. Curtis looks young for his age, so I was surprised to find out when we talked that he and I were the same age - both born in 1979. Curtis grew up on the streets of Oakland, where I was living at the time, right in the middle of the crack epidemic. His mother and other family members were serious addicts, so he learned to steal from a very young age to supply their addiction, and just to get food to feed the family. He was in and out of homeless shelters growing up. When he was 17, he was involved in an armed theft where someone was shot. Curtis was convicted of felony robbery and murder, and received a life sentence. Like so many other black and brown men in this country, his life practically ended before it had even begun.
But Curtis is a fighter if ever there was one. When he went into the prison system he was completely illiterate, but taught himself to read using the stock market pages of the business section after someone explained to him that this was where - as they put it - "white people kept their money." Curtis started studying the stock market, investing in the stock market, and teaching other inmates about what he was learning. He founded a non-profit called FEEL - Financial Empowerment and Emotional Literacy. He's been featured on NPR, Ted Talks, and has been interviewed by Van Jones of CNN. When I first got to know him, he was co-teaching the FEEL classes with Robin Williams' son, a Wharton graduate, someone who shared Curtis' vision for teaching the inmates financial literacy.
Two such different life stories - and yet Anne Perry and Curtis Carroll share the common experience of having been shaped by a crime they committed in their teenage years, and the subsequent punishment they received for it. Anne was given five years for her crime - which meant that she was twenty when she left prison, still young enough to build a life for herself. Curtis is now 41, and is still behind bars. Is he a better person for it? Is society better because it has paid for him to spend 24 years growing up, becoming a man, in state prisons? Thankfully, California passed a law several years ago that revised its punishment of juvenile crime, so Curtis is finally up for parole this summer. But I can't help feeling that it's too little, too late.
When Anne committed her crime, she and her friend took a brick and physically bludgeoned her friend's mother to death. It was violent in the extreme. Curtis' crime was more accidental; it wasn't planned or personal. It's made me reflect on the arbitrary nature of our laws, and who they are really for. I understand that punishment needs to happen in order for there to be law and order in society, but sentences like we give to our black and brown men - where we lock them up and throw away the key - are effectively saying that they have no worth, no value to society. But all you have to do is spend a few minutes with someone like Curtis - and the men in San Quentin - to realize that they each have tremendous worth, and a lot to contribute - if we would but give them the chance.