Just mercy

Just Mercy. That’s the title of Bryan Stephenson’s deeply compassionate (and best-selling) book about crime and punishment. More specifically, it is about those who are being punished for crimes they did not commit. The book, both thoughtful and angry, chronicles the efforts of Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative to free a number of innocent people (many of them Black, most of them men) who have been in prison for sometimes many decades.

It is not only easy to be outraged by these cases, it also easy to feel kind-hearted and sympathetic to the people in prison. They don’t belong there. They are innocent. It is the same for those who, because of the extraordinary efforts of various Innocence Projects across the country, are exonerated and released from prison. They didn’t belong there in the first place. It is also easy to feel compassion for a woman like Blanche Wright, the subject of a compelling New York Times story , who was, in fact, guilty of violent crimes but was herself the victim of an almost unimaginably brutal childhood and then later the victim of a certifiably psychopathic “boyfriend” who coerced her into evil.

But what Bryan Stephenson says about “just mercy” at the end of his book is this: “The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving.” The undeserving. Not just the wrongly accused. Not just the woman with the horrific backstory. Not just the people for whom we immediately feel compassion. For the others. The guilty ones. The ones who did bad things and deserve punishment. Do they also “deserve” mercy and forgiveness?

I think about this every time I walk through the three sets of clanging gates at Oregon State Penitentiary, the gates that separate my world from the world of the men, Lifers, convicted murderers, in the writing group I’ve been running there for now four years.

I am not a naturally forgiving person. I come from a long line of grudge holders. Working with these men, getting to know some of them better than I know most of my friends, I have discovered how shallow my well of compassion is for the “undeserving.” And I have worked on, am still working on, will always be working, digging a deeper well.

These are the men I wrote about in A Grip of Time: When prison is your life. This is the book’s official publication date.