From the fourth floor of the prison, Sterling stands by the barred window staring at the yellow hydrant. The last time Sterling had been out in the world, on a city street like the one he could see off in the distance, the movie Shawshank Redemption was playing in theatres. It was the story of a man sentenced to life in prison for committing two murders, just as Sterling had been that year, 1994.
Sterling would never refer to his cell as his “house,” as others did, nor would he think of the penitentiary, the ten acres surrounded by the twenty-five-foot concrete wall, as his “community.” To him that would be an act of surrender. It would mean giving up not just his identity as someone other than a prisoner. It would mean giving up a sense of his personal agency, the severely battered but persistent idea he held to that he might have control of his own life someday. That he too might touch the hydrant. He had been working toward that day for almost a decade, his complicated legal case alternately inching forward and plummeting backward. Meanwhile, he continued to live what he could make of the only life he had. Ironically, the work that he did, his prison employment, was in some ways more productive and more meaningful than what many were engaged in outside the walls.
Sterling’s job as the chapel clerk was, in the context of the world of the prison, a plum position. He had responsibility. He had some autonomy. His work made a difference. His bosses—the Buddhist chaplain and the rabbi—respected him. But possibly more important than all of that was the fact that he was able to work in a small, private, very quiet office space. This was an extraordinary luxury, and he knew it.
He was in charge of the monthly schedule for all that happened within the prison chapel’s domain. Thirty-four different religious groups were recognized inside. All of them had something planned—services, events, meetings, support groups, special projects—maybe not every week but often enough so that Sterling had to juggle as many as 220 different events each month. He scheduled time and space, both of which could be logistical nightmares. There were very few spaces in the entire prison, and only two up in the chapel area, that could accommodate groups of any size. Those spaces, when they were found, needed to accommodate the needs of the event, from chairs, tables, podiums, whiteboards, and microphones to urns of weak prison coffee and stacks of Styrofoam cups for those events fortunate enough to include such extravagance. The events had to be scheduled when there was sufficient staff to monitor and oversee them. Many events, programs, and groups depended on the participation of volunteers from outside the prison, whose visits also had to be arranged so they coincided with staffing and supervision. Sterling acted as the liaison between the institution, the dozens of religious groups, and the scores of volunteers.
One of the most important programs sponsored and supported by the chapel was not associated with any religious group. It was the restorative justice initiative, which had come into the prison via the college class Sterling had taken several years earlier from Nathaline Frener, then a University of Oregon law professor.
Sterling had been an enthusiastic and involved student in that class, a sponge, a thought leader. He knew he could not make amends for his own crime, that no matter how many years or decades or lifetimes he spent behind bars he could not undo the harm he had done. Nothing he could do would bring back the lives of his victims. His time in prison punished him, but it did not heal the wounds of the families of those victims. He held out a sliver of hope that he might, someday, be able to sit in a room with those families and try to speak of his shame and hear their pain. But the restorative justice work Sterling was involved in inside the prison was not about him. It was about exploring, analyzing, and changing both the internal life and the social culture of the two thousand men whose world was that maximum security penitentiary. Under the auspices of the chapel, with Sterling’s scheduling assistance, direct participation, and often leadership, study and discussion groups began to form. The men gathered in small groups to talk about the trauma in their own lives and how those experiences had made them who they were. They talked about the work it would take to deal with their pasts, to learn from those experiences and move forward to live healthier lives. They talked about a concept few knew the words for but so many embodied—toxic masculinity—and how the prison environment encouraged and sustained that. Was showing emotions showing weakness? Was the only way to get respect to show force? They talked about nonviolent communication and the intricacies and challenges of conflict resolution. One group called itself Peace on the Inside.
One afternoon Sterling is leading a discussion with a small group of men that includes a young white guy with a swastika tattoo inked on his forearm, two Black men, and a Hispanic guy. Just the fact that they are sitting in a room together is astonishing. They are talking about the chaos of the lives they lived before they landed in prison. “So many things made me who I am,” one of them says. Sterling picks up on that immediately. “Right,” he says, “but the first thing is…” he leans forward, making eye contact, “the first thing is we have to own the shit that we’ve done.” He has learned that this is how to move forward. This acceptance of responsibility is the place from which to do this work. He moves the conversation to the heart of the issues, the reason they are gathered and will continue to gather.
“How can we shift the paradigm of this place that is full of negativity, hostility, and suspicion?” Sterling asks them. “How can we take what we do right here among us and apply it on a larger scale?”
One of the Black prisoners turns to the man next to him, the Hispanic guy. Out in the yard, things can get bad between groups of men who look like these two men. But these two now know each other. They can sit in the same room next to each other and talk. They can look beyond gang affiliation, beyond race. Is that something they can take out to others?
“A lot of these guys, they want to stay out of trouble, they just don’t know how,” the Black man says. The other guy listens and nods. Conflict inside hurts everyone, winners and losers. All end up being punished, privileges taken away, maybe sent to the hole, maybe transferred to another prison. And whatever the resolution of that particular altercation was, there is almost always no real resolution, just the intensification of hostility and plans for retribution. Whatever is learned—or reinforced—through this cycle of suspicion, hostility, and violence, this trigger-response way of interacting with others is part of who these men are and will follow them outside the walls when they are released. Unless the work is done here, inside. For Sterling, these intense discussions, these groups he helps organize and sometimes lead, the dramatic “play” that he created for the public event a few months ago, are not just about training others to recognize incendiary situations and douse the embers before they become flames. They are about transforming the self-reinforcing toxicity of prison culture. As long as he is here, which might be, despite the efforts of his legal team, for the rest of his life, he wants to live and work in a healthier, saner environment. “I cannot reduce the harm I’ve already done,” he told me once. “But this is a way, maybe, I can make amends.” Then he was silent for a moment, looked down and shook his head. “No matter what I do, it will always be overshadowed by what I did. It is a deficit I can never, ever make up.” Still, the chapel work sustains him. Some days, the good days, he allows himself to think that he is making a difference.
And then everything changes. In early March 2020, the prison shuts its gates to all outsiders. Events are cancelled. Teachers cannot come in to continue their classes. Volunteers cannot come in to run programs, give talks, or lead groups. Families cannot come in to visit. It is the beginning of the COVID-19 shutdown, which feels at that moment like it might be temporary. Just a few weeks, maybe a month, maybe two. Up in the chapel, Sterling all of a sudden has almost nothing to do. Small groups of prisoners still meet to continue their transforming trauma and restorative justice discussions, and some religious services are continuing to be held. But mostly the calendar is empty. Sterling tells himself this will free up time to exercise more, to read, to write. Maybe he will finally teach himself how to play the guitar. He wants to play Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Maybe the shutdown is not such a bad thing. Prison is a place of isolation anyway, a place of quarantine away from society, how bad could this be? Inside the prison, few are masked, and social distancing—then a new phrase, a new concept—is impossible given the six-by-eight-foot, double-man cells, the narrow hallways that run the length of the tiers, the long pill line for meds every morning, the congregate chow hall. And some inside, just as some outside, do not believe the threat is real. Or perhaps some feel that there are so many daily threats already, so many reasons to be on high alert, to be anxious and worried, that this new one hardly registers. At least at first.
A few weeks later COVID-19 officially arrives at the prison when a guard tests positive. He is a guard in cell block A—Sterling’s block—who, in the course of his job, has exposed all two hundred men there to the virus. A-Block goes on lockdown, which means no one is allowed to leave his cell. No work. No waiting in line to make a phone call. No going to chow hall. Meals come in paper sacks or plastic trays delivered to each cell. During his decades behind bars, Sterling has lived through many a lockdown, all of them reactions to violence, yard fights, gang threats, or some variety of prisoner unrest. He knows how to handle a lockdown. He knows how to handle isolation. He has experience—too much experience—living months at a time in the hole.
He calls the cell block lockdown layered on top of the institutional shutdown his “COVID-cation.” He makes good on his goal to do more writing. He is working on a play, Austin’s Echo, an ambitious project that had earned him a competitive PEN America fellowship. It was not his first recognition from that organization. A few years earlier a story he had written about his work as a hospice volunteer in the prison’s infirmary had earned a national award. But this play presents an extraordinary challenge. He has constructed it as a cross-time dialogue between Austin Reed, a real-life prisoner in the 1830s and the first African American to write a memoir of incarceration, and a twenty-first-century prisoner, a fictional stand-in for himself. He described it in his proposal as a work in which “similarities of prison dynamics, reform debates, and social issues are compared through poetic narration, theatrical elements, and music to demonstrate how prison is virtually the same after 185 years.” The concept is complicated. The structure is convoluted. He is trying to create a theatrical work that has narrative force about big, thorny issues. He wants the play to make a point, but he doesn’t want it to be preachy. He is struggling. He wishes he could talk to the few people who have helped him with his writing in the past, editors, mentors, teachers—I was and am one of them—but he can’t leave the cell to make a phone call. He sits on his iron cot in his cell, stuck.
He spends much of his time reading. One of the stories he comes across is a personal essay written by a correctional officer at a prison in Michigan. She writes about her fear working in the prison, her worry that she could take the virus back to her family. She begins the story, published by The Marshall Project, stating that it is “impossible to practice social distancing when you work in a prison.” And Sterling thinks, maybe for the first time during his quarter of a century behind bars, about the similar lives lived by prisoners and guards. Taking a break from the play that is going nowhere, he writes what turns out to be an op-ed that is published in the state’s largest newspaper. He writes: “We’re all afraid… [W]e are all in this together. Nobody here, prisoner or employee, wants a COVID-19 outbreak. The virus doesn’t care whether we’re here for punishment or a paycheck. It doesn’t discriminate based on social status. COVID-19 is a shared threat because of our shared humanity.”
Two weeks later, the first person dies of COVID-19 in the prison, an inmate. As of that day, May 10, one hundred fifteen inmates and twenty-six employees have tested positive in the place Sterling will never call “home.” It is the biggest outbreak in the state. As the virus takes hold across the country, prisons are deemed “deadly hot spots” and “petri dishes.” The rate of infection for the incarcerated population is estimated at 5.5 times higher than for the general population. The entire prison is now on modified lockdown. The men are allowed out of their cells, but only one block at a time. Aside from yard time, there is nothing to occupy them. All activities are now suspended. Activities are considered “prosocial” because they encourage healthy interaction among a population, many of whom are considered to be antisocial. The activities give some structure to the days, some variety to the monotony, and they have a momentary, if not a cumulative, calming effect. Visits with family also have that effect. No one has seen family in three months. In the absence of anything to do, with illness in the air, a fight breaks out in the yard. Within minutes, the fight escalates into a riot involving more than two hundred inmates. The media, with no direct access to the prison, dependent on carefully crafted reports from prison officials, reports that the riot was not COVID-19–related. Sterling thinks otherwise. The riot doesn’t surprise him. What surprises him is that it took so long for things to explode. He knows that no efforts at conflict resolution would have helped, even if he or any of the RJ-trained men had been out there.
The week following the riot, eighty more prisoners test positive for COVID-19. Twenty-seven men are sequestered in “medical isolation,” which is what the prison was calling the hole. Sterling says the saying going around inside is “if you’re tested, you’re arrested,” meaning if you test positive you are taken to that place in the prison designed to inflict the severest of punishments. No one wants to go to the hole. You can’t bring anything with you. The cells down there are even worse than the one you are used to. The isolation is more than many can handle. And so no one wants to be tested. When the guards walk the tiers asking if anyone has a dry cough or a fever, no one admits to feeling sick even if—especially if—they are. Cell mates pledge loyalty to each other. If one were to test positive, the other would be sent to the hole too. They tell each other that if either of them gets sick they’ll just ride it out in their cell.
Sterling gets sick, the sickest he’d ever felt in his life. He is a healthy man in his early forties, and he is spiking a high fever, slammed with an intense headache and crushing fatigue, his throat so parched he can barely swallow. No sense of taste. No sense of smell. He doesn’t get tested. He rides it out. He stays in his bunk, crawling out once every evening to place a call to Cheryl. The one phone call permitted is the only link he and the other men have to the outside. He doesn’t tell her how sick he is, only that he is “not feeling all that well.” Maybe he doesn’t tell her because he doesn’t want to worry her. She doesn’t need to know how bad it is. But Sterling is probably keeping silent for another reason as well. Conversations on the prison phones are monitored. If it was overheard by those who monitor the calls that he is sick, he will be tested. And “arrested.”
He recovers. Slowly, his strength returns. It is August now, six months into the shutdown, six months since he’d seen Cheryl, six months since he’d been able to meet face-to-face with his legal team. But outside the walls of the prison, negotiations are continuing on his behalf. Sterling’s tireless lawyer, Ryan O’Connor, is trying to push the case forward through Zoom and Skype meetings. But in-person negotiations were what he believed the case demanded at this point, and that was not possible. Still, he was hopeful, as was Sterling, that an end was in sight, an end to the years and years of court cases and appeals, judgments, hearings, and more appeals.
O’Connor believes that the state wants to settle. The law is now on Sterling’s side. The Supreme Court ruling against life for juveniles along with federal and state cases that had been decided in Sterling’s favor have more than paved the way. But it is complicated. The state attorney general’s office has made it clear that it is deferring any ruling about release to the local district attorney’s office in the county Sterling had been originally sentenced. That local DA, in turn, has made it clear that his office would only agree to what the victims’ families agree to. Sterling, student of restorative justice, facilitator of conflict resolution, conceives of a way through this tangle: mediation. What if all parties—Sterling, his lawyer, the victims’ families and their lawyer, the DA, someone from the AG’s office—what if they all could sit together in a room? What if the RJ principles he has been studying for years and trying to practice in the prison could be applied to his own case? A negotiation. A mediation. If the state won’t propose a release date unless the local DA proposes a release date, and the local DA won’t propose a release date unless the victims’ families agree, then Sterling’s future is not so much in the hands of the legal system as it is in the hearts of those he had so grievously harmed. And wasn’t that what restorative—transformative—justice was all about?
What he can bring to the negotiation table, or the RJ “circle” he envisions, is his rehabilitated self. He knows—it is always in his mind—that his hope for a better future is offensive to those to whom he should be most accommodating. How can that offense be mitigated in some way? What can he do? What do they want? In his cell he imagines a mediation session in a room at the federal courthouse. If he only had a chance to look them in the eyes, the parents of those two kids. If they could only see who he was now. If the families could be actively involved in forging an agreement, some terms that would both give them closure and Sterling his freedom, he could be out in a matter of months.
When he hears that the families have agreed to a session with an outside mediator, he can’t help himself. He is buoyant. This could be it. This could be the breakthrough. Of course it is about his own freedom. But it is also about the chance to show his true contrition, the chance to show the parents of those kids that he is no longer the heartless sixteen-year-old kid who remains frozen in their memory. Even when he learns what really should have been obvious given the pandemic shutdowns—a face-to-face conference is out of the question—this does not diminish his joy. He has learned to celebrate any small victory, any movement forward. That learned attitude comes directly from the work he and Arnoldo did together. Celebrate that which does not crush you.
The mediation is set for late August. The prison converts a utility closet into a private space for him to use during the eight-hour session. There is a chair, a table, and a telephone. There is no window. The prison, sections of which date back considerably more than a century, has no air conditioning. The tiny room heats to above ninety degrees very quickly. Sterling sits, sweating. He had thought he could be participating by video—the others are together in a Zoom room—but whether technology is the issue or whether some prison official just nixed the idea, all he has is a phone. The session begins with everyone introducing themselves: the six attorneys, the mediator who is based in the San Francisco Bay area, the victims’ parents, and Sterling. When he hears Ian’s mother’s voice—Ian was the young man he murdered—his throat closes. He forces himself to take a deep breath. He tells himself he must remain calm, that unchecked emotion can sabotage the process, that he must speak from a place of reason and rationality. Sterling is surprised to learn that now, after the introductions, all the statements and discussions between the lawyers, the families, and the mediator will be filtered through the mediator to him. He will hear nothing directly. There will be minutes that turn into hours of silence as he holds the phone and wonders what is being said. When the mediator comes on the line to tell him, Sterling responds to the mediator, who then communicates these thoughts to the others. Sterling again listens to silence on the line. To complicate matters, there’s an overlay of technological difficulty on the other end, with malfunctions, loss of connectivity, starting and restarting the Zoom room.
Through all of this, Sterling, via the mediator, tries to communicate as best he can what he wants. He wants to find the terms and conditions that would make the families feel safe and would allow him to live some of his life outside prison. “I am not trying to get away with something,” he says to the mediator who will tell the others. “I am taking responsibility. I want closure for us all.” It’s not just legal closure he wants, not just an end to this tangled, decades-long battle through the courts. It is, he tells the mediator, “moral closure, spiritual closure.” He wants the chance to do good in the world, he says. All day he walks this tightrope between advocating for his dreams and hopes while owning his responsibility and shame.
From the mediator, he hears no inkling of compromise from the families, no suggestions of terms they could agree to, restrictions they impose on Sterling that he would promise to adhere to, anything that would budge them from their initial position, the position they have held for a quarter of a century, that Sterling should remain in prison for the rest of his life. The tone of the proceedings is oppositional, adversarial. Sterling can tell from the information the mediator conveys, and even the mediator remarks about the tone. Sterling wonders whether the families had actually been briefed about what a mediation was, the purpose that presumably brought them together this day. Still, they agreed to this session. That must mean something, he tells himself. All day he repeats that he will agree to whatever the families want in exchange for a release date. All day there is no response. The mediation goes nowhere.
Finally, in the last hour of this very long day, the temperature in the tiny room hovering in the high nineties, he makes an offer, his “final offer,” he tells the mediator. In exchange for a release date that would be no later than his fiftieth birthday—that would be seven years from now, far longer than he wants or had hoped for—he sets forth these promises: He will not live in the county where the crime was committed. He will wear a surveillance ankle bracelet for five years. (The usual time is one year, and it’s often removed in six months). He will agree to any kind of ongoing counseling that the families suggest. He will agree to contractual commitment of social service volunteer activities for the rest of his life. “I don’t have to be inside, in custody, to feel responsible for what I did,” he tells the mediator. “Please tell them that I don’t get to put down this burden of what I did. I will always carry it, for the rest of my life.”
If there is no agreement, he and his legal team have already decided that they will go back to court, where he has already won three different decisions. He doesn’t want to do that. It will take years, and the continuing challenge of living a life in limbo is overwhelming. But also, at the end of it all—which he believes and his lawyers believe will be his release—there will be no closure for the victims’ families. Transformative justice will not have taken place.
Sterling listens to silence as the mediator communicates all this to the families and their attorney. It is taking a long time. When the mediator comes back on the line, he tells Sterling that the family has asked for a few days to consider the offer. They can reconvene for another session. They don’t propose a date for the next mediation, but “soon,” they say. Sterling, who had been ready to give up hope just a few minutes before, is encouraged. Maybe this is the first time the families have realized that Sterling’s “punishment” could continue after release, that there were many things that could be done to make them feel safer.
It’s time for dinner, but all Sterling can think of is sleep. He goes back to his cell, drinks the warm can of soda he has saved, and folds his six-foot-three frame onto a cot made for a much shorter man.
***
A week later, with no word back yet about a second mediation session, Sterling’s world suddenly changes again. Unprecedented wildfires sweep across Oregon, burning more than one million acres of land, destroying entire towns, and filling the air with thick, hazardous smoke. More than 40,000 people are evacuated from their homes, including 1,450 inmates evacuated from prisons in the path of one of the most rapidly spreading fires. They are transferred to the penitentiary where Sterling is incarcerated. They arrive in buses with nothing. The prison is already at capacity. There is no room for them. They come to a facility that is a hot spot for COVID-19, where 150 inmates have now tested positive. The inmates from the other three facilities may or may not be infected. The evacuated prisoners had been given COVID-19 tests, but none of the results were back yet.
Outside in the yard, the air is literally unbreathable. Inside, the transferred men are sleeping on floors or makeshift cots set up wherever there is a few square feet of room: in the corridors that run the length of the tiers, in the program rooms, the classrooms, on the activities floor—and on the fourth floor in the cramped space that is home to the chapel, where Sterling works. With almost 3,500 men crammed into a space meant to house fewer than 2,000, there is confusion and chaos, long lines for everything, queues to get to the toilet, hours to get into chow hall. Fights break out. The guards use pepper spray to—as a prison spokesperson is later quoted as saying—“gain compliance.” The pepper spray mixes with the smoke that has infiltrated the building. Those with existing respiratory ailments and those who have or may have the virus have trouble getting medical attention.
Up in the chapel, two hundred prisoners from evacuated facilities sleep on the floor for seven days. Sterling does what he can to keep them busy. He finds board games and decks of cards, sets up a few of the prison’s ancient monitors so they can watch selected programming. He hunts for anything that might provide minimal comfort. He mediates conflict, using all of the de-escalation strategies he has learned. He has no time, no bandwidth, to think about his own future.