A Vision of Mutual Transformation, by Chris Hoke

A Vision of Mutual Transformation

BY CHRIS HOKE

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What led you to prison reentry organizing? hen I graduated from University of California Berkeley 17 years ago, I volunteered doing Bible studies in a jail. I thought I would learn radical theology and leave. I didn’t expect to like the young gang members so much, and for them to like me back. They invited me to one-on-one visits as their pastor. I didn’t want to be their pastor, but they insisted. So I became a gang pastor. I visited their apartments, saw their children, and heard their stories of unspeakable trauma.

I saw how many of the guys I grew to care for were not released into the community, but instead sentenced to long sentences and sent to maximum security prisons around the state. I stayed in touch with them through letters and collect calls, and these relationships began to really affect me. I found a quality of communion that I didn’t have with my high school or college friends: a depth of sharing, self-indictment, selfexploration, and laughter that pulled me in.

When you created Underground Ministries, you began using resurrection as a vision for reentry. What do you mean by that?

Sociologist Orlando Patterson talks about American incarceration as social death, so to welcome these folks out of the tombs of incarceration is a type of resurrection. I began Underground Ministries based on the direct accompaniment of gang-affected individuals in their reentry—to help this resurrection. Then I heard that there’s the same number of churches in Washington State as there are folks who are incarcerated. This haunted me: There are churches in every town, every community, gathered in the name of forgiveness, 12

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grace, community, and the resurrection of the dead. What if every church, large or small, rallied with embrace and reentry support around one person coming out of the prison tombs into the local community? This led to the One Parish, One Prisoner program.

Instead of funneling reentering citizens through government programs or even nonprofits, One Parish, One Prisoner tries to help people build relationships of repair and integration within their own communities. To stop throwing away the most-harmed communities. We mobilize spiritually concerned communities to practice a response to crime that acknowledges the person coming home has committed harm while also helping restore that individual and recognizing that they themselves are walking wounds and have many layers of harm in their own lives. We’re building cultures of repair rather than cultures of punishment. The relationships formed through this program and the restorative work we’ve done illustrate on a small level how the world could look if driven by restorative justice.

Your mission statement talks about how opening such new reentry relationships in the community leads to “mutual transformation.” What does that look like?

Underground Ministries partnered with was a progressive church who immediately volunteered to help. They wanted to interrupt mass incarceration. We introduced them to the person with whom they would be partnering—at this point he was still incarcerated, and the first step in the process is to start exchanging letters and building a reentry plan. We tell the team not to Google the person—would you like if someone could Google the worst things you’ve ever done?

One of the women at this parish reached out to me and said, “Chris, I did what you told us not to do. I Googled this man’s crimes. And I have some problems with what I saw.” This man had some pretty heavy domestic violence charges, and it turns out this woman was a survivor of domestic violence herself.

I offered to meet with her, and we talked for an hour over coffee. She told me all about growing up with violence in her house and how the man who abused her was a leader in the

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Chris Hoke is the director of Underground Ministries, a nonprofit in Washington State whose mission is to open new relationships of trust between the incarcerated and the communities to which they return for our mutual transformation and resurrection. AMOS spoke with him about his vision for a world governed by restorative justice.

church. She had a similar energy to the guys I talk with in prison—like this story was fresh and coming out hot and wasn’t something she had really talked about before. I asked her how it felt to talk about this, and she told me that it felt good, like it was probably something she needed to do more.

The only reason she could talk about the domestic violence she experienced was because someone who can’t hide their own history with domestic violence was approaching the community to be in relationship with members of the church. And rather than saying, “You evoke our fears and we need to keep you away”—which is what mass incarceration is—she and the rest of the congregation welcomed him home with a new sense of their common wounds and how they might help each other heal.

Even before this guy came home, the church began to talk about domestic violence. They didn’t avoid talking about his charges and offer some sort of fake forgiveness. They did a whole workshop. Teachers came in to talk about how to make churches safer places and how to notice the signs of domestic

“Churches need folks coming out of prison just as much as folks coming out of prison need churches.” violence. They talked about how to welcome people without facilitating repression, silence, and shame.

Father Greg Boyle from Homeboy Industries says something I love: “If we despise our own wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded.” That’s the core of restorative justice for me: We need one another to heal. Repression and disposal of others in the community works as well as repression and disposal internally, in our psyches. We get more fractured, lost, violent. Churches need folks coming out of prison just as much as folks coming out of prison need churches. These returning men and women have hard histories that can help unlock the skeletons in our own closets, where our own hidden wounds, addictions, and secrets need healing as well. And that’s what members of this church realized. This is the future we imagine for our communities.

Has there been a situation that’s forced you to confront how the courts currently operate?

A few years ago, we partnered a church with a guy who expected to go into clemency, which is a type of legal mercy that releases people early, and who thought he would have a release date in the near future. Thirty years ago, when this man was in his early 20s, he had taken a woman’s life in a pet store stickup and had stabbed her many times. He was high on crack and traumatized, and this angry young man viciously took the woman’s life. When the victim’s family found out, their outcry was immense. They wrote furious letters opposing his early release. And so his lawyer eventually had to withdraw this man’s application.

This story is an example of how the justice system fails victims’ families. The guy in prison has been able to do a lot of growth and healing—he is a mentor and has founded restorative justice groups. But locking him up for 30 years has not brought his victims an ounce of healing. Instead, their pain has continued through multiple generations. The woman who was murdered had two little boys. Once she died, her husband had to take on two jobs to take care of his family. The boys basically lost both their parents, because their dad was hardly ever home.

Now, as adults, they are estranged. They got into some trouble as they got older. Their grief just keeps ripping forward.

Our justice system is not working. If we really wanted to help this family, we would have paid their rent for five years so that father could stay home and help his boys grieve. Instead we put all this money into throwing someone away.

So what can you do now?

I can’t do anything to help the victim’s family—I wish I could.

I wish I could reach out and just be present to them as a pastor.

But Underground Ministries has been able to continue working with the man in prison. Multiple parishes have gotten wind of his situation and formed a community around him. There is a growing community of faith that is banding around him and saying, “We aren’t minimizing his crime, but we’re not satisfied with someone just being left in a box for years. This is someone we want in our community.”

Punitive practices are based on communities saying, “We don’t want this person. Throw them in the trash.” But restorative justice instead makes the shift to saying that everyone is wanted. Despite doing bad things, they are beloved members of a community.

How did this experience affect your understanding of restorative justice?

The work of healing is hard, and the gods of punishment and retribution are always popular and renewed. The American mythology of good guys vs. bad guys is deep and will be hard to undo. But rarely are people purely monsters. There are normally wounded people whose wounds are hard to look at because they remind us of our own wounds. But a world run by restorative justice is one where we do not look away.

During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after apartheid, they didn’t just let things slide. There was a long process of reckoning and justice. Perpetrators needed to come forward and fully own what they did. But this didn’t happen in a vacuum: They sat face-to-face with the people they had harmed. They were forced to face their brutality and rape in front of their victims.

Something happened when people are face-to-face that repairs. People who commit these crimes lose sight of the human beings whose lives they are destroying. Listening and repenting and service won’t take back the pain or bring back those who have been killed. But I think it would repair. And that’s the kind of justice I want to invest in.

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