By: Wendy Smith, Ph.D., LCSW

In 2015, I traveled to Pelican Bay State Prison at the northern border of California.  Its massive concrete blocks rise ominously, in stark contrast to the wildly beautiful coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean just a few miles away.  Home to those who commit some of the most violent crimes, this prison, known as a “supermax” has one of the state’s large Secure Housing Units (SHU), designed to hold prisoners in long-term solitary confinement.  

I was part of a volunteer group of advocates, lawyers, and law students who traveled to California prisons to provide workshops on SB260, a groundbreaking state law passed in 2014 that established a new parole process for individuals whose crimes took place when they were under 18 years old. 

Spurred by scientific advances in the understanding of juvenile brain development, SB260 allows parole boards to consider the youthful development and early life experiences of men and women who committed their crimes as teenagers. For those who received life sentences while not yet 18, the new hope for an early release was nothing short of a miracle.

As a social worker and psychotherapist with expertise in the effects of trauma, my role was to lead “insight groups,” teaching the men how to develop insight into their crimes and the factors that might have played a part in their criminal behavior.  

Another of my roles that day was to lead a meditation.  This was the thing that had kept me awake in the nights before our visit.  It seemed so improbable that I could persuade these men to join me in a meditative experience.  As I stood at the front of the room, looking out at 65 men, many heavily tattooed, mostly Black and Brown, shifting in their seats, I wondered whether it would make any sense to them at all that someone like me, a middle-class White Jewish woman, an academic with no lived experience of incarceration, was inviting them into a meditative experience.  When I asked them to relax their bodies and close their eyes, would they? Or would suspicion, skepticism, and the need to maintain vigilance prevail, and the men be unable to step away from their immediate surroundings mentally?  I had no real plan for what I would do if they balked or were simply unresponsive, so I was both relieved and profoundly moved to see and hear almost all of the men in the room place their feet on the floor, relax into their seats, close their eyes, and begin to take deep breaths.  The sound of my voice, female and softer than what they heard on their usual day, had a greater impact than anything I said during the meditation, offering a human connection and a soothing experience more akin to a lullaby than speech. 

Photo Courtesy: Before Their Crimes / Wendy Smith

The next day, we entered the Solitary Housing Unit (SHU).  It’s easy for an inmate to get sent to the SHU—suspected gang affiliation, a variety of both serious and petty infractions—but it is much, much harder to get out.  The windowless blocks of the SHU weighed down upon us; the heaviness was physical and mental, like the smashed, emptied-out feeling that comes when someone you love has died.  Here, there was no congregate visiting area, only long halls lined on both sides with individual cells. 

We spent our day moving slowly through the hall between cells, positioning ourselves to be able to speak to men in four cells at a time and then moving to the next group, so that we could reach every person in the SHU who might be affected by SB260.  We spoke to the men through metal doors perforated by hundreds of smaller, round openings, each just big enough for the tip of a finger to fit through. These small openings permit the “Pelican Bay Handshake,” in which inmate and visitor can touch fingertips when placed on the same hole.  Poignantly, many of the men put their fingers on these openings, inviting us to ‘shake.’  Some told us they hadn’t physically touched another person in years.  Our visual images of one another through the tiny holes were broken and distorted.  Sometimes we could see just one eye of the other person, and they of us, but it didn’t matter–human connection was powerfully present as we moved from cell to cell.  Our time with each foursome was necessarily brief, focusing on what the new legislation might mean for them.

It happened that I was able to speak individually with a man who had recently renounced his Mexican gang ties in a ‘debriefing process’ during which he told officers everything he knew about the gang.  He and I met in a different corridor, where the door of his holding cell permitted us to see each other more fully.

A solidly built middle-aged man with a deeply lined face that told of too many painful experiences, he had been incarcerated at 17, already the father of two young children. We did not discuss his crimes or his gang life before and during his imprisonment.  He wanted and needed to talk about the rocky course of his marriage over many years, how his wife had given him the courage and fortitude that helped him to get sober, and the religious faith that strengthened his will to leave the gang life.  

The conversation was wrenching.  He wept as he told me of the pain and guilt he felt about how he had lived his life and his tenuous hopes for the future. I wept too.  Only recently, he said, had he begun to see that events from his early life had an impact on him.  His baby brother died in childhood, and his mother’s grief consumed her.  She turned on him cruelly, pouring scalding water over his hands, a terrifying experience that was repeated more than once.   

We spoke for 20 minutes, one human being to another.  His relief was palpable. I could feel how the simple act of telling his story to a person who wanted to hear it was a restorative moment.

We learned that even the briefer group meetings with the advocates had an impact.  A few days after we left Pelican Bay, we received a letter from one of the men there that read, in part: “Many years of jail, years of prison, not even the SHU or worst punishments could change me or break me. Punishment, torture, that don’t change people! It only makes us worse because to survive it, we have to become tougher, harder. Today I learned something, compassion!  You guys don’t know us, but you treated us as humans and showed affection and caring towards us, and made us feel human.  We feel and have a longing to open up to people, to be accepted. You humble us. Make us want to change.”  Jose Flores

About the Author: 

Wendy Smith, Ph.D., LCSW, is a retired clinical professor of social work who served as associate dean of curriculum development and assessment at the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, where she taught courses on child and adolescent development. She is a licensed clinical social worker, specializing in the treatment of individuals, couples, and survivors of childhood maltreatment. Her new book is Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding About Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing.