Folsom Prison Blues

The first time that I encountered Carl, he was singing. He was singing about how near and how real his Jesus is to him. He had a strong beautiful voice, and he sang the Jamaican chorus loudly and unfailingly.

“Hello,” I said, extending a hand once his song had finished. “I’m Betsy.”

Carl was one of many inmates at Tamarind Farms Correctional Institute, a prison in Spanish Town, a noisy, busy, and intimidating area just off of the Mandela Highway in St. Catherine, Jamaica. On Friday mornings, I leave the gullies and hills of St. Andrew to engage in a prison ministry program run by a church in Stony Hill. There are a number of prisons in Jamaica that house drug offenders, murderers, and petty criminals. These prisons are hard places to be; there is no visitation with one’s children and there is no time off for good behavior.

Kingston is the murder capital of the world, and Jamaica is known for its violence, its drugs, and its overall hardness. However, the men with whom I work at Tamarind Farms are not the hardened criminals that I imagined when I first began work at this ministry.

The men in these prisons have had hard lives; they have suffered. Many of them have done bad things, but many of them are victims of circumstance. Many of them gave in to the desperate situations that they faced on a daily basis. For some, their only crime is poverty.

However, I find myself forgetting all that when I visit the prison; I see men who want to shake the volunteers’ hands so that they may remember the feel of human touch. I see men who yearn for a one-to-one conversation so that they can tell you about their children, about their friends, about getting out. I see men who scramble to sing and to pray aloud at the worship sessions. I see men who ask probing questions about the bible study that is presented. They are angry and hurting, they are kind and teasing. They are the devout and they are atheists. They are philosophers and they are artists.

Although the wardens and barbed wire make it hard to forget where I am, I have ceased to view these inmates as criminals. They are people at the heart of it and they are people that need hope, love, and encouragement as much as, if not more than, the rest of the population.

When I look at the inmates, I see the little boys who run barefoot in the streets, kicking a bottle filled with grass and rocks as their soccer ball. I see the third-graders shoving each other in the schoolyard of Mount Friendship All-Age School. I see the teenaged boys in their khaki uniforms chasing the bus to get to their high schools. I see men who have struggled and suffered greatly in their lives—are they to blame for their current situation? Or, are \years of oppression and unjust institutions that punish the poor really at fault?

Carl, in his holey white shirt and khaki pants, reminds me that Christ loves us all and no human being is better than another one. Carl was released from Tamarind Farms a few weeks ago, after serving several long years. The life to which he returns is as hard as life in a prison; to be poor in Jamaica is no joke.

Prisoners have given me many things over the past few months; they have given me tiny bouquets of wildflowers, plants potted in cardboard boxes, a painting; the list goes on and on. But most importantly, they have all given me something to think about.