Alive Inside Exoneree Retreat in Ohio
The men in these photos were incarcerated for something they didn't do.
Collectively, the men in the last photo served a sentence of over 100 years time. And they were innocent.
Last weekend, funded with a generous grant from the Ohio Transformation Fund, we took You're Going to Die's prison program, ALIVE INSIDE, for our third trip to Ohio. Our first night & morning there, we went into two new prisons - London Correctional Institution & the Ohio Reformatory for Women - hosting open mic listening space for community to be vulnerably witnessed. And two hours before we flew home, we hosted an event in Columbus with Death Penalty Action, Think Make Live Youth, & the Horizon Prison Initiative, all organizations deeply invested in caring for community impacted by the prison system, prison as a threat, prison as their home [sometimes for life], or prison as a place they don't belong. I'll say more about our non-stop 72-hour prison program tour in another post.
But for now I want to focus briefly on these men & their communities.
The heart of this trip, between the prison visits & the event in Columbus, was to facilitate a retreat with the Ohio Innocence Project for exonerees of the prison system & their partners. Exonerees are people who have been incarcerated, often for a decade or more, for something they did not do. We've been meeting with many of these people on Zoom over the last year, to make room for grief, offer deep listening, learn, & hopefully, I pray, to offer some kind of communal connectivity & healing.
I often share about our work at the edge - the edge of our mortality, the edge grief brings us to, the edge cancer patients live at, the edge hospice patients hang from - but these edges are best defined for me as the place where what matters most crystallizes, coming undeniably into focus, becoming confrontingly clear.
These men & their partners, their families, their communities, have lived & still live at the edge. It is one of the honors of my life to meet them there, to learn from the impact of what they've survived, not just as a reminder for what matters, for what wisdom we can bring back from the dark, but as a glaringly obvious opportunity to face what's broken in our country, with its unjust systems that perpetuate violence against us, but especially against our BIPOC communities & the economically disadvantaged.
I wish I could take all of you to these events. But since we can't, our commitment is to bring the stories, the humans, the wisdom, the knowing, back from the edge to you... in the ways we can here on social media, but especially in our general community workshops, open mics, concerts, & everything else we produce that's open to the public. I've never been clearer about our work to bridge these realities at the edge to a community who recognizes the need to lean into the heartbreak, to feel into what's broken, to be cracked open & present to the truth...
We share responsibility for these men & their communities.
Many of us benefit from the same systems that destroy lives like theirs.
We are responsible for their heartbreak, trauma, &, ultimately, their healing.
To lean in more, start by checking out the National Registry for Exonerations & find out more about the 3,233 exonerations since 1989 amounting to more than 27,200 years lost: https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx
And get tickets to our next event to hear [& feel!] more from our nonprofit's work at the edge: http://www.yg2d.com/eventsandworkshops
