It may have looked at first like simple "preaching to the choir"—showing a film about the personal paths of redemption for prisoners serving life sentences to a roomful of some 20 adults, many of whom have either served time in prison or have a friend or loved one who has.
But when the lights were flipped back on after the showing of “Living with Life” at Arian’s bar and restaurant Sunday, consensus proved elusive, and the deep and complex range of emotions and ideas about punishment started becoming painfully clear.
Speaking of prison, V.I. Prison Project co-founder Kim Lyons said, “That’s when they really learn to be violent. That’s where they really learn to scheme … If you want to see people get worse,” she said, “send them to prison.”
Started in 2004, the V.I. Prison Project helps facilitate communication between prisoners and their families and fosters awareness about prison conditions and the social and economic costs of incarceration.
Lyons, whose group sponsored the screening Sunday, was among several speakers who advocated for a more honest look at why society sends people to prison and what is expected as a result.
If the goal is rehabilitation, she said, one only needs to visit the Golden Grove facility on St. Croix to see how it dehumanizes those inside.
On her first visit to Golden Grove, Lyons said, “I felt like I was walking around a bone yard filled with live people.”
While acknowledging the need to protect society from violent criminals, she asked for some other solution than “painting them all with the same brush.”
“The crime problem is complex, and the solution is going to be equally complex,” she said.
“When you have someone in prison you are in prison. There is no escape,” one woman said, waving her hand in the air and thanking everyone present for her opportunity to be heard.
“Our society doesn’t give our youth anything to dream on,” she said.
Most people in the room squirmed in their seats or covered their mouths with hands or stood up abruptly in frustration when a woman announced that a man had been shot and possibly killed earlier that afternoon outside the cockfighting ring in Nadir.
While police told the Source that the man has survived so far, by the end of Sunday night, after the screening, police would announce that two men had been killed in separate incidents that day on St. Croix, bringing the number of V.I. homicides in the year’s first two months to 16.
“A piece of cold metal,” said Senate aspirant Clarence Payne Sunday. “That’s what this generation has been reduced to.”
Lamenting the lost generation of V.I. youth, Payne said the whole of V.I. society shares the blame: the parents and families of the offenders who know and do nothing; mentors who shirk their responsibility to mentor; and "concerned citizens" who complain but do nothing to draw their communities closer.
“We’re a culture that has sanctioned young men who are emotionless,” he said, repeating “emotionless” several times.
Bringing the conversation back from crime to punishment and what he called the “injustice system,” one man described how his brother had been “rented out" to the Wallens Ridge prison in West Virginia, where he was vocal about prison conditions there until he died under what he and his family believe were dubious circumstances.
“He told us to please get him home,” he said, “or he’s going to come home in a box. And a year later he came home in a box.”
The man walked off and out of the room, seeming emotionally drained by his testimony.
“The system is corrupt!” said one woman, who said the police enforce laws subjectively, sparing friends and family from the justice they mete out to others. The jails are filled with those who have no clout or pull, she said.
Lyons mediated the sometimes-heated and always-passionate comments after the film and encouraged everyone to keep a dialogue going about punishment.
“If the Prison Project is anything, it’s a dialogue,” Lyons said. “And with 14 homicides already, it’s really hard to talk about crime and punishment.”
“We need more healing and less retribution,” she said.
