Better Together
As a young child, I remember going with my mom several times to visit my uncle in a prison somewhere in Georgia. I don’t remember much of anything about the facility. What I remember is my uncle being glad to see his sister and her two children. His face lit up when he saw us, and I felt his warmth and his love in what I would later realize was a cold and unforgiving place. My mom never told my sister and me why my uncle was behind bars. She only said that he was a good man who had made some poor choices. I am thankful she never said more because it allowed me to have an untainted, nonjudgmental view of my uncle. To me, he wasn’t a convicted man; he was my uncle—“Little Robert.”
Early on, my school teacher mom taught me to look beyond the mistakes people make and love them. She didn’t voice her lessons in words but, rather, in her actions. Extending love to all people no matter what they have done would be tested decades later. On a hot August day in 2009, decades after he’d been released from prison, Little Robert was sitting on the front stoop of a boarding house where he lived. He was approached by two 20-year-olds who began hitting and kicking him and robbed him of his cell phone and what little money he had in his pockets. My uncle, the one whose eyes lit up when he saw us, never regained consciousness from the beating. He died 12 days later from complications of blunt force head trauma. He was 60 years old.
My mom and sister sat through grueling testimony and hard-to-look-at photos during the 2014 trial in Valdosta, Ga. I didn’t go because I did not want to be in the same room with the men who murdered my uncle. I wasn’t sure that I could look past their poor choices and consider them worthy of love. Perhaps keeping my distance would somehow allow me to “love” them from afar. My mom, however, drew near. Once again, she loved through her actions by extending grace and forgiveness to the men who took her brother’s life.
For the first time since the 1970s, I made a prison visit in February 2022. Through Exchange for Change (E4C), I visited Everglades Correctional Institution for a facilitated, face-to-face group conversation with incarcerated men through their partnership with The Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, a program that promotes the shared humanity between those in prison and those on the other side of the fence. Following the example set by my mom, I drew near and shared space, stories, laughter and humanity. All of us are flawed people needing to be loved. That visit brought back memories of my uncle—a good man, a smart man who made some poor choices but a man who loved and was loved.
There is something about sharing spaces and being together. Stereotypes, prejudices and differences are broken down and human connections are formed despite physical barriers. Most educational programming in prisons outside of GED classes only accept students who will soon re-enter society, excluding those with longer or life sentences. However, E4C provides high-quality, college-level learning experiences to incarcerated students through educational and communication skills-building courses regardless of prison sentence length to as many as possible across six state and county correctional institutions in Miami-Dade County and one in Polk County.
E4C would not exist without the generous contributions of individual donors and organizations dedicated to doing good. The Miami Foundation President and CEO Rebecca Fishman Lipsey recently posted the following African proverb on LinkedIn to emphasize that building a stronger Miami is a team sport: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go FAR, go together.” E4C is thankful that The Miami Foundation selected E4C as a 2023 Community Grant Partner and gave $40,000 to support programming that amplifies the humanity of the incarcerated. Together, we will build a stronger, more equitable Miami.