50 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
his pushups—“It’s incredible,” he said—
and Dennis seemed to appreciate a
chance to show off his strength. In front
of a vending machine in an adjoining
room, away from the other visitors, he
placed his thumbs on the linoleum floor,
stretched out his legs, did a few push
ups, and swore he could do many more.
Back at our table, we settled once again
into plastic bucket chairs. His next in
terview was set for August, 2019, and he
sounded pessimistic about his odds. “If
you killed a cop, you ain’t got no hope,”
he said. He was tired of the whole ritual:
“You go to the board, they sit up there
and smile at you. They crack jokes. You
go back to your cell, and they hit you for
two more years.” The last time, however,
they had hit him with only fifteen months.
“Everyone says it’s a good sign,” he said,
“but it’s not a good sign to me.”
Yet he seemed buoyed by the com
mitment of his volunteers. In the eight
years prior to their first visit, he had had
only one other visit, from his brother
Melvin and his wife. The first time he
met the volunteers, he admitted, he had
been uncertain of their intent. They
looked “mad young,” he told me. “I said
to myself, ‘What is this? Is this going
to be a playground thing? Something
for them to bide their time until they
get something better?’ ” But they had
earned his trust, coming to see him three
times in four months, and, after the
board denied him parole in May of 2018,
they had agreed to continue working
with him to prepare for his next hear
ing. He called them all regularly, catch
ing one or the other on the phone every
few days. “What surprised me about
them was their sincerity,” he said. “I trust
very few people if I trust anyone at all.
They have a real naturalness.”
In the months since they had started
working with him, he had tried to con
nect with each of them. He knew that
Olivia Button liked to box, so he gave
her advice on how to train and sent pages
with exercises to do. When he learned
that Gina Lee’s parents were from South
Korea, he wanted to hear more; he’d al
ways been interested in Korea. He dis
covered that John White liked yoga, too,
and talked to him about yoga techniques.
When the volunteers told him how they
got to Auburn—leaving New York City
at 4 a.m. in a rental car, driving ten or
twelve hours round trip—he assumed
that they must be getting paid for their
work. They told him that they were vol
unteers. But every few months he would
ask again, as if he could not quite be
lieve that they were helping him with
out pay. He had little to give them in
return, except for his advice on working
out and healthy eating. When Lee was
sick, he suggested that she try chewing
on garlic. When Button’s birthday came,
he mailed her two birthday cards. In his
letters to them, he had expressed his
gratitude. “Thanks again for all the help
you are giving a person such as me,” he
wrote, three months after they met. “I
have not been a happy or hopeful per
son in a very long time.”T
here is no official mechanism to
require people confined in New
York’s prisons to confront their guilt, to
grapple with questions of remorse and
responsibility, to think about how they
might make amends to a victim’s fam
ily. At times, the legal system even seems
to work against these goals; at trial, de
fense attorneys typically downplay the
defendant’s culpability—or deny his
guilt altogether—in an effort to mini
mize his punishment. Often, a defen
dant, long after he is convicted, will cling
to the narrative of his crime that his
lawyer told in court. The imprisoned
individual may go years, even decades,
without ever speaking honestly about
his crime. The state prison system did
start an “apology letter bank,” so that
incarcerated people could write to their
victims, but most people in prison do
not know that it exists.
The most successful programs to help
people reckon with their crimes have
often been started by incarcerated or for
merly incarcerated people. In the mid
twothousands, José Saldaña and two of
his peers at Shawangunk prison launched
A Challenge to Change, an eighteen
week workshop, led by incarcerated men,
which was later expanded to other pris
ons. “We wanted a program where a guy
would come in and confront what he
did,” Saldaña, who was released in 2018
and is now the director of the RAPP Cam
paign, told me. “We wanted total hon
esty.” Saldaña described the group ses
sions as “more difficult than we imagined”
and “at times very, very emotional.”
Among the program’s objectives is to
counter the notion, common amongpeople in prison, that there is a hierar
chy of crimes; individuals who commit
ted sex offenses were considered to be
at the very bottom. “The murderer thinks
he’s better than the rapist,” Saldaña said.
“We dispelled all that stuff.”
Kathy Boudin, who was imprisoned
at Bedford Hills, a maximumsecurity
prison, for two decades, told me that
most of the women with whom she was
confined did not speak honestly and
openly about their crimes, “because there
is no safe place inside the prison system
where people have a chance to do this.”
In the visiting room, they often lied to
their children out of a sense of shame
about what they had done, but the truth
inevitably became harder to conceal.
“You’re in prison for eighteen years, and
you’re, like, ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,’
and your children read on the Internet
and they know you did it,” she said.
When Boudin was released, in 2003, she
had an idea to start a program that would
“help people examine their lives and
come to terms with what they did” and
to “deal deeply with the harm” they had
caused. She hoped that the program
would “allow them to be able to talk to
their children about it, to talk to their
families about it, to not feel like they’re
living in total shame all the time.”
The program that Boudin envisioned
became the Longtermers Responsibil
ity Project, which, for the past decade,
has been run by the Osborne Associa
tion—a nonprofit group that works with
incarcerated people and their families—
at Sing Sing and Fishkill. In the pro
gram, twelve people convicted of murder
related crimes meet with a facilitator
for weekly group sessions over four
months. Laura Roan, a program man
ager at Osborne, facilitates some of the
sessions. “‘Oh, I never meant to hurt
anybody.’ That’s the story I hear over
and over,” Roan said. “Well, why did
you load the gun, then?” She continued,
“It’s very hard to live with that idea that
you are somebody who is really able to
take the life of somebody else.” Perhaps
this is why, as she found, many long
termers do not seem to have a coher
ent narrative of their own crimes. “You
tell everybody something different,” she
said. “You tell yourself one story, you tell
your prison peers a different story.” But,
Roan went on, “the parole board is ask
ing them to tell a different story they’ve