As I have said before, I am writing a book about forgiveness. Not personal forgiveness but what I call social forgiveness. Maybe you sense it too, but I think American society has become spectacularly unforgiving. We cast out those who transgress, turn our back on those who stumble, and treat the damned with inexcusable severity. What it will take for us to become the opposite? How do we build a forgiving society? That’s the book.
In writing it, I’ve come to see that when someone does something very wrong, we consistently ask the wrong questions, both of those who erred and of ourselves. These questions channel our thoughts in a way we probably don’t even notice, but that make it seem like the most natural thing in the world is to be unforgiving. So, the book is built around these questions. Each chapter asks and answers a different question, using the story of a different person in every chapter to show us the choice between a forgiving and an unforgiving society. All of the people I write about have done something terrible. This is not a book about innocence; it is a book about human frailty. And though each chapter profiles a different person, I realized as I was writing that all of them shared one vital thing in common. They changed their life trajectory when they realized that someone believed in them.
***
Eric was incarcerated 30 years at the Louisiana State Prison, known the world over as Angola. If your mental vision of a prison is a single building with high walls topped by razor wire and monitored by a solitary guard tower, get that out of your head. Angola is not a building, it’s not even a cluster of buildings. Before the Civil War, it was a plantation and today it is a prison farm. An enormous, sprawling farm that stretches for miles across the fields of Tunica, Louisiana. It’s the biggest maximum-security prison in the country. The idea of eighteen thousand acres doesn’t mean a lot to me, but you get some sense for its size when you consider that you could drop the entire island of Manhattan onto Angola and still have more than one square mile of space left over.
In 1994, a New Orleans prosecutor asked a jury to sentence Eric to die for the murder of a two-year-old child. For many years, Eric thought the jury had voted 11-1 for death. Because the law requires that a death sentence be unanimous, Eric believed his life had been spared by the lone holdout. He’s not sure where he got this idea but seems to remember it came from his lawyer. Wherever it came from, it’s wrong. I tracked down the prosecutor, who remembered the case even three decades later and told me he had saved his copy of the verdict sheets from the case. He emailed them to me and it turns out eight jurors had voted for life and only four voted for death. But Eric didn’t learn that until I told him; for decades, he thought that one, unknown juror had believed in him, and that belief made all the difference. “If a single person saw me at my very worst, when all they knew about me was the absolute worst thing I had ever done and ever could do, and they still thought my life was worth saving, then it meant that one person could make a difference. One person could change somebody’s life. I resolved to be that person with everyone I met in prison.”
In 2015, Eric became a mentor in prison. His current lawyer has assembled letters from men whose lives were transformed by Eric’s mentorship. Page after page of testimonials: “Eric played a crucial role in helping me to make the changes that I desperately needed to make. … Though our backgrounds are different, we connected. He understood the humanity in others and was able to gracefully encourage guys, myself included, that life beyond all the gates and bars was worth fighting for. It seems crazy that a man who only dreams of life outside of prison encourages and fights for guys who will be released in a matter of months.… His attitude really influenced my drive to make changes in my own life.” “Inspired me to not only join the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, but to complete it with earning an Associate and Bachelor’s Degree in Christian Ministry.” “He has become the only person that I turn to when times get tuff. Any time I come to him he always has soft words of wisdom for me. There has even come a time when I needed Eric’s advise [sic] on an important matter, he calmly got up out of his sleep and like always gave me the kind words that I needed.” He has “changed lives in the prison, equipped guys with tools to make a good honest living upon release, and to do these things just because they are the right thing to do.” “I’ve always marveled at his patience dealing with difficult people. Countless times, I’ve observed Eric nurture healthy and safe relationships with men, young and old, necessary for continued growth.”
I saw for myself Eric’s effect on people. During one of my first visits, a young man rushed up to him—he looked to me no older than 20—and said, “Eric! I want you to meet my mom,” gesturing to the woman standing next to him. “Mom, this is the guy I been telling you about. This is Eric.” Eric extended his hand, which the woman took and held for a long time. Looking directly into Eric’s eyes, she said simply, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank. You.” Eric muttered something about not being the one who did all the work, then said, “Well, I’m a hugger, so if you’re ok with it….” The woman gladly accepted the invitation and the two embraced for a long time. When I saw Eric a few months later, he told me the young man had been released and was home. The woman was thanking Eric for returning her son, in more ways than one.
Because there are so many letters, and because they all speak to the same qualities—his grace, decency and wisdom—they risk blurring together. Then we recall that each represents a separate life turned patiently in the right direction:
I have nothing now to hide from any man, woman, or child and therefore say what I know to be correct from deep in my soul: I find that Eric Matthews is one of the most sincere, most remorseful, most understanding, most appreciative inmate that I have ever come across in this penitentiary, which I have been incarcerated for over 30 years now!
There is not a day that passes when Eric has not been tormented by the enormity of his crime. He can still recall sitting in the Orleans Parish Jail awaiting trial when an account of the murder came on the news. He sat and sobbed, horrified by what he had done. If he allowed it, the memory of his crime, and of the beautiful, innocent life he took, would crush him. More than once he has thought he deserved to be crushed, and if it were only his life at stake, he might have let that happen. But giving up would dishonor the memory of the single juror who believed in Eric. It would prevent him from helping other men in prison. To manage his grief, Eric carries a small figurine. He often took it from his pocket during our visits. It is a carving of an elephant. The elephant in the room. It never leaves his side.
***
Lucas served 25 years in New York for a murder he committed when he was 17. About halfway through his bid, when he was yet again in solitary confinement (“the box”), a CO said he had visitors. They chained him up and walked him to the visiting area. It was his two brothers and a younger cousin. He hadn’t seen them since he got to prison and wondered why they came. They gave him the news. “I remember not having an immediate reaction outside of just shock. And like, the rest of the visit is kind of a blur. I don’t really.… I just remember feeling kind of numb. And like, separated from myself. And it didn’t really hit me until I got back to my cell.” Kim was dead.
Lucas met Kim when he was 13 and living on the street after one too many beatings by his step-father. “She was awesome. Like, it’s such a cliché to say that everybody loved her, but really everybody loved her.” They were on-again-off-again for years but Lucas was too addicted to rage and violence to maintain a healthy relationship. “We would be together for a little while and then like something would happen, I would get in a fight or do something crazy. And she would leave. And then we would bump into each other somewhere or I would get drunk and call her and we would get back together and I would try. And things would fall apart. We’d break up and I go from tailspin to nose dive. And she’d come save me.” Somehow, Kim always saw past the rage and the failures. “She was the only person in my whole life that believed in me. That really believed in me. And I knew it. And I felt it. Every time we were together.” (In order to protect her family’s safety and privacy, Lucas asked me not to use Kim’s last name).
When Lucas was arrested and charged with homicide, Kim visited him regularly in the county jail. They talked about getting married. Then he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison and Lucas eventually stopped hearing from her. “I figured she smartened up and realized that I wasn’t coming home.” Part of him thought it was good that she had moved on and given up on a loser like him. She deserved so much better. But part of him clung to the faint hope that she would always be there for him, somehow, some day. When everything else was absolute shit, there was always Kim—one perfect memory, one precious hope, one cherished life.
And then she was gone.
After he heard the news, Lucas drifted. Time was a blur, a haze. For three days, he didn’t eat and barely slept. “I felt like…. Like it wasn’t right. Like it wasn’t supposed to happen somehow. Somebody had just done something that changed the way the world was supposed to be. And that the world had jumped its tracks. And I just felt like, there must be something somebody could do to make it right. And I knew there wasn’t.” By this time in our interview, Lucas was sobbing. He paused, grabbed a tissue, and wiped his eyes. “I felt like the world would never be right again.” Somewhere in those fevered, grief-stricken days, “I realized that how I was feeling was exactly how I made John’s family feel.” John Morgan was the 19-year-old that Lucas and his co-defendant had killed. In the box, the enormity of his crime—the pain he caused and the guilt he felt—struck him as it never had before. “We tortured John and strangled him to death and poured a bottle of bleach down his throat. It’s fucking heinous,” he told me. “It made me feel terrible about myself. It changed everything.”
Though the pain never goes away, grief like this doesn’t last forever, and at some point, Lucas caught a glimpse of something in a magazine that made him laugh. “And when I laughed, I realized that I wasn’t gonna feel like that forever. And I immediately sat down at the desk and started writing. And I wasn’t writing about anything that I was feeling or anything that I was thinking and somehow it was about all of that. And I made a promise to myself that whatever it was that Kim saw in me, I was gonna live up to it. And I just kept writing. When I found out she died, I died. And I came out a different person. Someone committed to being better.”
Today, Lucas is in college with plans for graduate school in English Literature.
***
I’ve written before about Dante, who is still in prison in Colorado for a triple homicide when he was 18. A Colorado prosecutor sought the death penalty against Dante as well, but the jury turned him down and the judge sentenced him to three consecutive life sentences. Born and raised in Compton, Dante spent his childhood in thrall to the Corner Pocket Crips. His mother was a Crip, as were his uncles, brothers, and cousins. His father was in prison. “By the time I was 10, 11, that was my life,” he told me. “By the time I was 12, I was holding a gun, selling drugs.” By his fifteenth birthday, Dante estimates he had been to one funeral for every year of his life. I once asked Dante to describe a typical day growing up. “Just smokin’ weed all day and lookin’ for violence,” he responded.
“Now, lookin’ back on it,” he said, reflecting on his life in the gang, “to know you were part of so much destruction, it’s insane. It’s embarrassing. And to think it’s ok. You kind of know it’s wrong—that’s why you suppress it with weed and alcohol. But it’s the only life you know.” The Dante that arrived in the Colorado Department of Corrections more than two decades ago no longer exists. The change did not come easily—change never does—and for Dante, it was the hardest thing he’s ever done. “Being who I was was easy,” he told me. “It was bein’ someone else that was hard.”
The tipping point for Dante came with empathy. “When you start to care about others,” he told me, “you can’t do nothing but change.” It’s automatic, and irreversible. But how did he come to care for those outside his narrow and deadly world? It was a process that unfolded over time, and began when he was in solitary confinement. For all its cruelty, the fact is that isolation gives some people a chance for sober reflection, and when he was in solitary, Dante recalled the dreams he had as a young boy, before the gang became his life. At some point, he said he had “a moment of clarity.” When we met, he replayed both parts of the conversation he had with himself again and again. “‘As a kid, before you got into the life, when you was 5 or 6 or 7, what did you want to do?’ ‘I wanted to be a decent person.’ ‘Be there for your kid. Not be like your dad.’”
But Dante still wasn’t ready to make a change. When he got out of solitary, he reverted to his old associations. Abandoning the identity that had defined him for so long was a step into the unknown. Yet a voice inside had been awakened, and needed only encouragement. For that, he credits the prison staff around him. “It happened when staff, case managers, COs, captains, lieutenants, saw potential in me. They started to believe in me.” Over time, their faith had a transformative effect. “When I got in trouble, it felt like I let them down. They would push me to better my life but I took advantage of it.” It was a pain he didn’t want to experience twice. “I didn’t want to let them down.”
Dante is done letting people down. If you want to know what he’s doing now, check out this article from last year.
***
Eric, Lucas, and Dante are not the only people I profile in my book and these are not the whole of their stories, but this essay is long enough already. Learning their trajectories awakened me to a question we all must answer on the road to a forgiving society: Who believes in you?
