Anne-Marie Cusac

"Cruel and Unusual was the hardest thing I've ever done," Cusac admits. "My poetry books were challenging in a different way, but this was really difficult. Actually, having written poetry helped me, because doing that work made me more careful with my language selection."
In addition to examining torture, the book looks at the evolution of punishment in America from the Colonial era through torture of Confederate soldiers in Yankee prisons to today's environment of punishment in prisons.
Cusac says that over the last 35 years pun¬ishment in the United States has changed enor¬mously. "Our laws are harsher now. Convicts serve longer sentences than they once did for identical offenses. As a result, our prison and jail facilities are more crowded than those in Anne-Marie Cusac other Western democra¬cies," she writes.
While many Americans were shocked when they learned of torture being used at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay deten¬tion facilities, Cusac was not.
"At the time I thought, why are we surprised?" says Cusac. who recently discussed the topic and her book as guest lecturer at the University's annual Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation Matthew Freeman Lecture. "I thought, 'Why are my friends upset about Abu Ghraib when I never heard they were upset at what's been going on inside domestic prisons?' In fact, too often all I've heard people say about our inmates is, 'Oh good, they deserve it.'"
Cusac acknowledges shedding tears on behalf of prison inmates who have had to endure excruciating pain while being exposed to punishment devices such as restraint chairs and stun belts.
However, she's hopeful that her book, published by Yale University Press, will get Americans thinking about the kind of punishment practices that are being used and condoned, as well as how to change the culture of punishment that has been pervasive in more than just prisons.
"I want people to recognize that punishment is not isolated to prisoners in cells but is really a large part of our culture," says Cusac. who links America's culture of punishment in her book to changes in religious beliefs, child-rearing practices and television police shows that became popular in the 1970s.
"For instance, treatment of children in school historically has had a strong parallel with treatment of prisoners in jails and prisons," says Cusac, who points out that whipping posts and dungeons were once built inside American schools. "Even Harvard would whip kids, and these days, we have lasers in some elementary schools," she adds.
She credits Americans like Sister Helen Prejean, a death penalty opponent, and Chuck Colson, the one-time convicted special counsel to President Richard Nixon who has worked extensively with the Prison Fellowship organization, for working to make change.
She hopes others will follow their lead.
"I've always looked forward to the day when I could actually do something else and stop being known as the punishment lady," she says. "I'm a little hopeful things will change."
You can contact Anne-Marie Cusac at acusac@rooseuelt.edu.

Torture remains controversial issue
At a time when controversy over torture is sweeping the nation, Anne Marie-Cusac's new book offers context.
Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America suggests the American public has never really come to terms with the issue. "Powerful ideas about punish¬ment and tor¬ture were part of America's ideology almost from the country's inception," Cusac writes in the book.
She says Americans have been led to believe that the "country would go about things in a new way, a more humane way." This belief at times has led to kinder treat¬ment for prisoners, but it also has caused a backlash — a cultural shift, if you will, that began during the 1970s when the "American public decided to stop believ¬ing in its own humaneness."
She says there are many possible reasons for the shift, including reaction against the culture wars of the Sixties, revival of con¬servative Christianity and sensationalism about crime in the media and movies.
Such context can help explain why Americans are currently conflicted over the torture issue. Polls show most believe harsh interrogation methods, such as waterboarding, electro shocks and restraints, constitute torture. However, the public is evenly divided on whether these methods should be used in some circumstances.
It also provides perspective on the dilemma for President Barack Obama. He's assailed by the right for going too far with con¬demnations and disclosures on torture and he's attacked by the left for not going far enough.
Cusac harbors no illusions that her book will change strong opinions on the issue or how it's being handled. However, she hopes the book will help the public recognize that it can't have it both ways — that is, she says, we can't believe we're humane when methods of punishment that physically hurt people are being used.
- LAURA JANOTA

ROOSEVELT REVIEW I SUMMER 2009

LIKE MANY AMERICANS, Roosevelt University Assistant Professor of Journalism Anne-Marie Cusac didn't have a lot of sympathy for convicted criminals when she first began looking into how stun belts were being used inside American prisons in 1996.
More than a decade later, the former investigative reporter for The Progessive magazine believes prison punishment devices such as the 50,000-volt stun belt are not only medically dangerous but should be outlawed as inhumane.
"I know it's hard to sympathize with prisoners, but we shouldn't be hurting people, and if we are, we should know we're hurting them," says Cusac whose recently published book. Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America, has been favor¬ably reviewed by critics.
In the book, Cusac reports that devices like the restraint chair and the stun belt are frequently used inside prisons and jails all across America. Her research on these devices has made national news, including an ABC News Nightline piece on the restraint chair and considerable news coverage on the stun belt in connection with an Amnesty International campaign against use of the belt and a United Nations Committee Against Torture condemnation of both devices.
"The book puts some punishment issues in perspective that I nev¬er really considered before," says Joel Goodman, who worked for the Bureau of Prisons for 31 years. "A lot of people don't realize what's happening in U.S. prisons, which operate away from public scrutiny. Things are going on in there that shouldn't be going on."
Cusac found that 11 people died after being strapped into restraint chairs, which use belts and cuffs to prevent a prisoner's arms, legs and torso from moving. In response to Cusac's work, Amnesty International discovered four more deaths related to the device.
And, she personally discovered what it feels like to be shocked by a stun gun. "I felt a powerful smack and was immediately fatigued," says Cusac, who convinced the stun belt trainer at her hometown jail in Appleton, Wis., to let her shock herself.
"He had me sit in a chair, press the prongs against my leg, look up at him and pull the trigger," recalls Cusac. "My arm and leg jumped apart in reflex," adds Cusac, who was shaken by the experience, even though it lasted less than a second, far less time than some prison inmates have had to endure.
The author of two books of poet¬ry in addition to her book on torture, Cusac joined Roosevelt's Department of Communication as a journalism fac¬ulty member in 2006, in part because she was attracted to the University's historic mission of social justice.
I KNOW IT'S HARD TO SYMPATHIZE WITH PRISONERS, ROT WE SHOULDN'T BE HURTING PEOPLE, AND IF WE ARE, WE SHOULD KNOW WE'RE HURTING THEM."
-ANNE-MARIE CUSAC
ROOSEVELT REVIEW | SUMMER 2009

Fabu

‘To be black is to be political'
Madison poet laureate Fabu doesn't pull her punches
On the first Saturday night in May. while rowdy college kids roamed the Mifflin Street block party in search of their next keg, a quieter crowd gathered at Escape Jav Joint on Willy Street. In the art gallery coarsely decorated with organic fair-trade coffee sacks, over 50 people sat in folding chairs and in the aisles. Madison's new poet laureate, Fabu CarterJ3risco, took the mike.
A fiftyish African American woman in a purple dress and patterned headscarf, she smiled at the diverse mix of folks in front of her: whites, blacks and Latinos, students with cell phones and backpacks, gray-haired couples in jeans.
Fabu, as she's professionally known, was introducing the evening's guest, renowned poet Martin Espada. But first, she had a poem of her own to share. "It's pretty new and pretty raw," she said in a delicate voice.
She began a politically charged poem, and it wasn't until the last line that the audience realized it was an anti-Hillary Clinton piece. Fabu's voice rose as she arrived at the poem's final punch: "On the treacherous journey to power/she may have once believed/that white privilege was not her right/corruption was not her goal/and everyone had equal opportunity to be president. Until...Barack Obama."
There was a split-second of stunned silence, and then the crowd applauded. It was a tough subject to tackle at that May Day event organized by the progressive Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative. Fabu knew she would be reading to an audience not necessarily sympathetic to that poem, as Democrats and lefties across the nation duked it out over who would be the better candidate.
"I feel it took courage to read that to that particular audience," she says when asked about it later. "I knew what their sentiments would be. And if all the poem did was have people think more deeply about the issue, then I feel very happy."
As a poet, Fabu doesn't pull punches. To read her work (is to be confronted with what this country's racist past has done to African Americans. And as a columnist for The Capital Times, she's written about how she's felt betrayed by white women; how she fears for black children in Wisconsin, with its dismal reading scores and high rates of incarceration for African Americans; how racism is alive and well in Madison and beyond. "To be black is to be political," she says. "Just the fact that I exist is political."
Yet Fabu has a graciousness about her that makes her a natural community leader, and not just in the African American community. She's worked to encourage the poetic talents of schoolchildren and has brought African American history to several schools. She has led a citywide Kwanzaa celebration and helped bring the Wisconsin Book Festival to the Harambee Center on South Park Street, so literary events could reach a more diverse audience.
So when she was named Madison's third poet laureate last January, it fit with what she's been doing for decades — not just writing her own poetry but also promoting poetry across a wide spectrum of the community. And she's aware of the significance of her role.
"I've had people come up to me and say. 'We never thought it was possible for an African American woman to be Madison poet laureate.' That's a responsibility, and that is a joy."
The emotional one
Fabu arrives for our interview late, apologizing for having lost track of time while engrossed in reading. But she immediately draws me in with her warm, friendly manner. As we talk over iced tea, the conversation is unhurried and meandering, a holdover from her Southern upbringing. A question about the role of politics in her poetry leads to a 20-minute digression about her time in Kenya, her work in Madison's schools, and the differences between the racism she experienced as a child and the internalized racism of her son's generation.
Born Phyllis Ann Carter, Fabu (who officially changed her name at age 21) was always a creative child. "Poetry was everywhere, and that was during the black arts movement," she recalls of the 1960s. "I always wrote. Artistic children, you are identified early in life. I was considered the daydreamer, the emotional one "
Her mother was from rural Mississippi, and her father was a career Army man from Poughkecpsie, N.Y., whose job took the family to many states and overseas, including France and Memphis. Tenn.. where Fabu spent much of her childhood.
After graduating from the University of Memphis with a B.A. in magazine journalism, she came to Madison in the late 1970s for graduate school, earning one master's degree in African languages and literature and another in Afro-American studies. She then went to Kenya to do her Ph.D. researching Kenyan oral and written literature, drawn there by her interest in radical writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. But when an attempted coup shut the borders down soon after she arrived, she was unable to conduct her research or return home. Instead, she began teaching, married a Kenyan man and had a son. At one point, she thought she'd found her new homeland and would live in Africa the rest of her life.
But the marriage took a turn for the worse, and knowing that it wouldn't be possible for her to live as a divorced woman in Kenya, she grew concerned about her fate and that of her son. So the two of them returned to Madison. Last year she remarried, changing her name from Fabu Mogaka to Fabu Carter Brisco.

Words are power
Though Fabu never completed her Ph.D., African and African American culture are major themes of her poetry. Her chapbook, In Our Own Tongues, examines language through three generations of women in her family. Growing up, she recalls that her grandmother used so many African retention words ("buckra" for white person, "pjckaiiinjiy" for child) that Fabu often had to get an older cousin to come translate. "Oooh. she'd get so upset about that." Fabu laughs. "But she loved me anyway."
One of Fabu's longer poems, "The Mary Turner Lynching in Valdosta. Georgia," is written in the Southern black English of the time: "since me be a lil gal chile/me hear bout lynchin/me know bout lynchin/plenty colored mens wimens chirens lynched/in valdosta georgia."
That poem graphically describes a horrific lynching that took place in 1918. Others deal with personal struggles under slavery, the civil rights movement and life in the Jim Crow South. But her poetry also celebrates the sensory details of the South — greens simmering, her grandmother's garden, the rituals of a black woman getting ready for a night out in Madison. One poem declares, "I grew knowing that words are power in a woman's mouth./...Poet synthesis of African continent and Mississippi dirt roads/I am recreated from the flesh, bones and tongues of my mothers."
Since returning from Kenya in the late 1980s, Fabu has worked with children and families at community organizations such as Mentoring Connections, the Nehemiah Community Development Corp. and Ujima Counseling and Advocacy Services. She also serves as a private consultant in literary arts, African American culture and education. She conducts workshops for Dane County Human Services and works with area schools.
Plus, she's a mentor to young aspiring poets. She spent a recent afternoon at an all-school poetry presentation at Gompers Elementary, even taking one sniffling black girl in pigtails and a denim skirt aside and helping her overcome stage fright. "Sometimes a poet cares so much about the words that it causes tears," she said into the mike, her arm around the sobbing first-grader, before they recited the poem together.
"She's very inspiring," says Tuneija Tornai-Jackson, a Gompers student whom Fabu has been mentoring. "I was thinking about dropping poetry, but then when Fabu came we started doing all these poetry assemblies." The bright-eyed 11-year-old launches into a polished recitation of her poetry, using her hands in the air to emphasize the rhythm of her words.
Fabu is teaming up with local publications — Madison Magazine, Capital City Hues. The Madison Times, Asian Wisconzine and possibly La Comunidad — to get local poets of all ages published. "It's about which voices are heard in Madison and how do we help ' people's voices get heard," she says. .
Despite her successes and a confident exterior, Fabu doesn't hide her personal disappointment at not having published nationally or achieved more recognition for her work. Several years ago, she was so dejected when she received a rejection letter from UW-Madison's MFA program in poetry that she went back to bed in the middle of the day. "1 was feeling sad about why aren't I published? Why aren't I having books out? It's part of the poetic process to share your work."
But then she heard a heartbreaking story about a black woman sculptor during the Harlem Renaissance who destroyed her work because she couldn't get recognition. "So I had to make a decision as an artist. Who do I write for? If I'm never known outside my family or community, is that enough? I made a decision that if I never win competitions, if I never am part of the overall American literary movement, then I'm writing for myself and the people I represent, and that has to be enough. So I turned the corner on that."
Very harsh truths
As Madison's poet laureate, Fabu will continue in the footsteps of her predecessors, John Tuschen and Andrea Musher, who were involved in the community and in social justice work.
This year, the position was formalized by the Common Council and added to the Madison Arts Commission. Fabu is also working on building the John Tuschen Poet Laureate Memorial Fund, seeded by Musher and the Madison Community Foundation, for future poet laureates. Currently there is no stipend for the position.
Musher basically tapped Fabu to be her successor. "What is amazing about Fabu is that she can tell somr very harsh truths ," says Musher, a women's studies and literature professor at UW-Whitewater. "And you can even perhaps totally disagree with her or feel just overwhelmed by, for instance, the horrors in her poem about lynching. Or she and I might feel differently about Barack Obama and Hillary. But she has a graciousness in her ( personal style. She has a depth and integrity that allow you to hear her truths."
On the night Fabu introduced Martin Espada, she quoted a line from his poem "The Soldiers in the Garden," about Pablo Neruda and the persecution after Chile's 1973 coup.
"There is only one danger for you here — poetry," she said. "There is only one danger for --:, .you here — poetry," she repeated. "There is only one danger for you here — poetry."
.. .: And with that, she turned the mike over to him..

Jerry Hancock

Picture caption:
'You can't go1 inside the walls _ and see and help what we do and remain silent.' r
The Rev. Jerry Haneeet?. meets with inmates at Ct


Box
You, too, can go to prison
The Prison Ministry Project, of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Madison, is directed by the Rev. Jerry Hancock. The church, at 1609 University Ave., is affiliated with the United Church of Christ in Madison.
The project uses volunteers to run a series of prison ministry programs. To learn more, call Hancock at 608-658-6630 or email him aijhancock@firstcangmadison.org.


After three decades in law enforcement Jerry Hancock turns his focus to prison ministry
By Esty Dinur
Much of what the Rev. Jerry Hancock has to say about the criminal justice system sounds reasonable coming from a clergyman who heads a Madison-based prison ministry program. But when you consider that he's spent more than 30 years as a lawyer in this system, many of them as a prosecutor, his perspec¬tive is positively stunning.
"It's true," says Hancock, 61. "I made my bed in the justice system, and it was a very nice one. Now I get to question it. I see the world differently now. For me, the current system will never be just."
Since 2006, Hancock has run the Prison Ministry Project, through Madison's First Congregational Church. Its mission is to serve prisoners and their families, engage the wider church in prison issues and advo¬cate for prison reform. Hancock and the pro¬ject's 60 volunteers do three things: facili¬tate Christian worship through church services; do one-on-one pastoral counseling with inmates; and run nonreligious pro¬grams, particularly in restorative justice.In the nearly three years since the project was established, its members have made more than 600 visits to prisons and jails.
"I try to speak truth to power," says Han¬cock. "You can't go inside the walls and see and hear what we do and remain silent." He writes articles, cooperates with other organizations and pushes prison-reform issues.
Hancock's most famous client is Eric Hainstock, who was 15 years old when he shot and killed Cazenovia's Weston High School principal, John Klang, on Sept. 29, 2006. Hancock was asked by the Public Defender's Office to counsel Hainstock. "I told them I'd be happy to do so — but they wouldn't hear anything about it."
This relationship, which began when Hainstock was in the Sauk County jail, is the same as the ones he has with about 15 other inmates he sees at least once a month. They can talk to him in complete confidence. Hainstock, now 17, is incarcerated at Green Bay Correctional Institution, serving a life sentence. His first parole eligibility will be in 2037, when he'll turn 46.
"We talk about God and stuff like that," Hainstock told Isthmus in an interview from Green Bay prison last June (see "Eric Hain¬stock: Free At Last," 8/1/08). "He's really helped me with a lot of stuff. He's helped me to look at who I am, that I'm not a terrible person. I just made mistakes." Hainstock says Hancock "urges me to forgive people," and it's worked. He says he's forgiven the kids who used to pick on him at school ("I know they're young"); now he's working on forgiving some of the adults in his life.
Shouldn't Hancock be more concerned about crime victims than perpetrators? Han¬cock, who's written to Klang's family, has no qualms about assisting Hainstock. "We need to recognize all the suffering in this case, not just part of it," he says. "That's how I understand this ministry"

The possibility of change
Wisconsin, laments Hancock, is notably unwilling to seriously consider alternatives to prison, instead "using the language of fear." Every politician and judge talks about being tough on crime; local officials are busily adding police officers to "make the streets safe"; school boards make it sound like class¬rooms have become war zones.
Hancock is especially incensed about Truth in Sentencing, one of Wisconsin's tough-on-crime measures, enacted in 1998. He describes it as "evil," for embracing a concept of punishment that denies the possibility of personal transformation.
"It says you'll never change, so there should be no good time, no parole," he says. "The single biggest change I'd like to see in the legal system is a recognition of the possibility of transformation." Hancock offers this perspective deliberately, based on his own experience of seeing inmates change in significant ways. He calls on society to "be smart and dedicated enough to figure how we can recognize that change." He adds that, in this time of fiscal crisis, this could also save the state significant sums.
Wisconsin incarcerates three times more people than Minnesota — at an average of $33,000 per inmate per year — and keeps them locked up for longer periods.
In Minnesota, each county pays for the upkeep of its inmates, which creates an incentive to provide alternatives to incarceration, like drug and alcohol treatment, In Wisconsin, the state pays, and the focus here has been on building new prisons. And because so much is spent on incarceration, little is left for treatment, meaning that many offenders will be recidivists.
Isthmus made numerous calls to state Rep. Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Horicon), as well as calls to Reps. Steve Gunderson (R-Water-ford) and Stephen Nass (R-Whitewater) and Sens. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Alan Lasee (R-De Pere), all supporters of Truth in Sentencing, requesting a response to Hancock's views. None of these calls were returned.
Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard, a Democrat, says the state's Truth in Sentencing law was well-inten¬tioned, since in the old system the time peo¬ple actually spent in prison was much less than the sentence they received. That was unfair to victims.
But Blanchard "believes doing away with parole, as this law did, was a mistake. Judges must now predict how a person will be years down the road, based on current information. Change is possible and does happen, says Blanchard, so we need a good, strong parole system that acknowledges victims and also the possibility of change. "I really support what Han¬cock does," says Blanchard. "It's wonderful work."
Process vs. justice
Jerry Hancock became a lawyer in 1972, but his experience with offenders goes back even farther. As a law student at the UW-Madison, he interviewed inmates in jail.
After law school, he worked as a public defender. Then he became one of Jim Doyle's two deputies from 1976 to 1982, when the lat¬ter was Dane County district attorney When Doyle was elected attorney general, in 1990, Hancock worked for him again, as head of the state's crime lab and office of consumer protection. He finished his state career with five years at the Justice Department, doing environmental protection.
Toward the end of his state service, Han¬cock began to feel that God was calling him in a different direction. At the same time, he became increasingly unhappy in the justice system. He felt it is preoccupied with follow¬ing rules, and values process over justice.
To illustrate his point, Hancock offers a scenario: a young black man from Allied Dri¬ve and. a young white man from the UWs dorms are convicted of the same drug offense. Both get probation with certain: con¬ditions' get treatment, move out of the area, stay in school. The white man has health insurance through his parents and is able to receive counseling. His parents move him out of the dorms, lie stays in school and fin¬ishes his probation.
The black man left school in the ninth grade, lives with his grandmother and has no access to treatment other than through the county, which has a six-month waiting list. Without the support net that keeps the white man out of trouble, this black man is very likely to return to jail.
Studies by UW-Madison sociology profes¬sor Pam Oliver have shown that, in recent years, young black men in Dane County have been between 50 and 208 times more likely than white men to be locked up for drug offenses. Hancock says it shows how a fair process — both men in the above scenario were given the same penalty and offered the same way out — can produce unjust results. "What is needed is a more expansive con¬cept of justice that recognizes the inequities in the larger society and acceptance of the respon¬sibility to address those inequities," he says.
"I know the people in this justice system aren't racist," he contends, "but as Sister Helen Prejean has said repeatedly, this sys¬tem will let an innocent man be executed as long as the process was fair. A fair process and trial are not enough — but they are what the legal system can produce, at its best."
Dead Man Walking, Prejean's book about H her work with death row inmates, had a profound effect on Hancock. "I realized that if I was going to do ministry to people in prison, I also had to be present to the victims of crime," he says. "Our ministry occurs in the common suffering of victims and offenders." Hancock has regrets from his time in the legal system. As a public defender, he set-tled for outcomes he now abhors. As a pros¬ecutor, he was at times so intent on prose¬cuting that he ignored "all the suffering that was before me — of the victims and their families, the families of the perpetrators. Those memories are still fresh and inform what I do now. What I've come to see most clearly is the suffering: victims, defendants, the whole commu¬nity."
In his 50s, when he was still a state worker, Hancock enrolled in the Chicago Theological Semi¬nary Five years later, in early 2008, he launched the prison min¬istry at First Congregational. He says his wife, artist Linda Han¬cock, and two adult children were "surprised but supportive" of his change of heart and direction.
Bob Selk, now retired from many years in the state's legal system, is an old friend and col-league. He says Hancock was always interested in doing more than just keep things running. When be oversaw police training as a division head in the Department of Justice, Hancock pushed community policing when that concept was still young.
Selk, whose office was across the hall from Hancock's, was surprised by his colleague's change in focus. "It doesn't happen often that a lawyer makes a transition like that," he says. "But once he decided, I saw him going through the process. I think he's very hap¬py doing it."
Recognizing the suffering
Hancock's study at First Congregational is comfortable and lined with books. A cartoon on the wall says: "Our extended global fore¬cast includes global warming and the cata¬strophic end of the human race. But for the weekend, it's looking like sunny skies, mild temperatures and a general apathy toward environmental concerns."
It's hard to imagine Hancock arguing pas¬sionately before a judge. He seems more thoughtful than forceful. His statements are often preceded by long, silent pauses. He returns to points to correct himself and restate his case. His expressive hands begin moving before he speaks; then his face changes into a sometimes painful, some¬times questioning or puzzled look.
A big part of Hancock's prison ministry concerns restorative justice, which brings perpetrators in contact with crime victims. Hancock says the goal is "to put things right for crime victims by recognizing that you need to involve the community and the offend¬er. Through restorative justice, I can do things that I never could do as a lawyer — recognize the suffering the justice system ignores."
For offenders, it's a way for them to under¬stand the "ripples of harm that their crime caused to the victim, the victim's family, their own family, and the community. Once that happens, they begin to repair that damage."
The offenders must look at their lives and motives and acknowledge their own losses. "For me," says Hancock, "it offers a sense of hope even inside a maximum security prison because it shows inmates that they can live a life of integrity within their own community and, hopefully, outside the walls."


Oakhfll School
William Payne, an inmate at Columbia Correctional Institution, is a graduate of Hancock's restorative justice program. He's serving a 45-year prison sentence after being convicted in 1997 of felony murder, party to a crime, in connection with a robbery.
In a letter from prison, Payne praises the program as the best thing that's ever hap¬pened to him. Hancock "showed me a new way to live my life...changed me for the bet¬ter. He made you come face to face with your problems. You can not bullshit him."
Payne, whose spelling mistakes are cor¬rected here, goes on to say "some of us been hurt when we was little but was scared to tell someone or felt like it was something we'd done." But through participation in the program, "some of the bad guys, like myself, break down and cry ..the things Hancock was teaching us will stay with us forever.
"To us, Hancock is a hero. He showed me how to give back, talk to people that could be going down the same road I did and help them not to."
Gina Golding, who is not a member of Han¬cock's church, volunteers with the program. She facilitates relaxation, meditation and spir¬itual discipline classes in prisons. These are talking groups in which men are asked diffi¬cult questions: "How do you react when some¬one tries to force their opinion on you?" "Who's your God and how have you come to know that God?" "Who was your mentor?"
The purpose is to have the men reflect, be listened to and connect. Golding says they may find spirituality and community in a place that is "very macho" and doesn't gen¬erally offer such opportunities. There is no debating or arguing.
"This work," says Golding, "shows me the need to work with at-risk children. These men are so talented and bright, and their talents are wasted because there was no early intervention. These are human beings whose many needs were never met. They've done criminal things, and they also had crazy lives that we couldn't fath¬om."
Besides, Golding believes working with these men does society good. Most will even¬tually come out and may again endanger the public unless they "straighten out their ideas and begin to understand things about themselves." Program participants often show deep remorse and aspire to work with young people, to keep them out of trouble.
Golding calls Hancock "a pretty magnif¬icent guy, to give up being an attorney and come into the walls. He is a truly compas¬sionate man. It's a big gift to those inside, for him to come and be with them in an authentic way. The men like and respect him, and he likes and respects them."

Love and be just
Hancock acknowledges that some Christians use the Bible to justify many of the vindic¬tive policies he works against.
'As a Christian, I find it difficult to under¬stand people who want to use the Bible to advance a public policy to put barriers around the commandment to love thy neigh¬bor," he says. The Bible is full of cruel passages and laws, he allows, but it also calls on peo¬ple to love and be just.
"For me," he says, "in the Bible every conflict, law and rule is overridden by what Jesus called the Great Com¬mandment — to love thy neigh¬bor as thyself, even if that neighbor is in a Supermax prison. This commandment supersedes all others." Hancock sees prison as a tragedy for every inmate, although each deals with it in different ways: Some are dev astated, some irrevocably altered, some barely survive, " and some come out stronger, "I've seen every single one of these reactions in prison," he says: "The difference is that the tragedy of prison is entirely a human construct., so we have more control of the out come.