Touching Lives in Prison

 
When Neil White was sentenced to 18 months for bank fraud at the Federal
Medical Center in Carville, LA, he thought of it as a brief time out.  “Daddy is going to
camp,” he told his 2 children.  When he emerged from this combination of prison and
leprosarium (leper colony) on April 24, 1994, he was single and a broken camper,
destined to depend on the very friends and family he had defrauded.  He emerged with a
changed heart and a rebooted social conscience.  His transformation is told in his 2009
book, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts .  Neil’s guru held no Ph.D. in philosophy or criminal
justice, nor was she a social services employee at the prison.  She was a black,
wheelchair-bound, legless leper, Ella Bounds.  Ella had been brought to Carville by a
bounty hunter some 60 years earlier.  She radiated the spirit of love, died in 1998 and is
buried in an unmarked grave outside Abita Springs, LA.
 
Neil writes, “To my wife, Debbie, a remarkable partner, editor and friend, who
stepped in where Ella left off.”  Ella had 2 words of advice for Neil.  Her first words,
spoken while passing him in the corridor on his first day in prison were, “There’s no
place like home.”  Her last words, as his dear friend were, “Don’t forget to go to church.”
 
Corrections officials have become so consumed by policy and procedures and
defending lawsuits filed as creative pastimes that they have lost the human touch.  The
atmosphere within prison is one of long, laborious, repetitive routine designed to protect
and defend the status quo.  At Maine State Prison, as at many penal institutions across the
U.S., that insufferable routine is gift-wrapped in a high tech, antiseptic facility that finds
both staff and prisoners pointing to longevity and aging as their only measurable
accomplishments.  It is only when an Ella Bounds, thrown away by family and society,
begins to touch lives in quiet, self-sacrificing ways does a spark of life begin to kindle
community. 
 
Sometimes an Ella Bounds appears in the form of a security guard who takes the
time to teach a prisoner how to read or listen to his story.  Sometimes she appears as a
lifer who, instead of feeling sorry for himself, helps a short-timer pull together the
resources to be a success when he gets out.  Often she appears as a chaplain or a teacher,
a nurse or a volunteer who risks going beyond those carefully drawn lines of protocol to
demonstrate, “I care.”  The loudest voice against caring is a self-righteous public, not yet
caught in their own compromises and indiscretions, who have driven public officials
toward a harsh, Spartan, warehousing mentality. The higher you go in the corrections
food chain, the more callous and bureaucratic and detached are the players.  They live by
the numbers.  Most have long ago lost touch with their own humanity.
 
Neil White is now in high demand throughout a world seeking human answers to
clinical, bureaucratic obsessions.   His is a story of the value of the human touch in an
otherwise hopeless environment of society’s thrown-away citizens – convicted prisoners. 
On September 4, 2008, he wrote these words:
 
Sometimes I am lost.  Other times, I encounter my old friends.  And sometimes, I
see Ella.  She glides in her chair down the empty corridors.  She sways to music I cannot
hear.  She reminds me there is no place like home.  And I know I will always be able to
find her.  Ella will be waiting for me.  In the breeze(way).
 
 
 

Rev. Stan Moody, Ph.D.

POB 240
Manchester, ME 04351
207/626-0594
Cell: 207/607-3055
www.stanmoody.com