Awe

I was standing before the judge being sentenced to 229 years to life. I can remember being so angry, frustrated, feeling so hurt and ashamed. I felt as though I was being made a public spectacle. Everyone in the courtroom was white. I didn’t know if someone was going to step out of the crowd and attempt to shoot me. I can remember my thoughts were everywhere at that time. It was as if I was having an out-of-body experience. I’m standing there watching myself argue with the judge during the sentencing phase of my trial, telling the judge that sentencing me to 229 years to life isn’t going to do anything. I was so angry I told the judge that I haven’t done anything that this country was not founded upon and I feel that I’m still paying for that statement to this day.

Institutions that embody moral beauty—universities, museums, cathedrals, courthouses, monuments, the criminal justice system—can inspire awe in those who live lives of privilege. For those who’ve been subjugated by such institutions, the feeling is often much closer to threat-based awe and its bodily expressions, shudders and cold shivers.

Once inside, Louis was transformed by an idea: a way he could bring peace to the confines of prison and stir an awareness in those on the outside about the kindness and courage of those on the inside, allowing a goodness so rarely considered its own speech

within prison. Moved, he has produced award-winning shows for San Quentin Radio on the illusions and costs of gang loyalty inside, living and dying with hepatitis C, and the stigma of AIDS in prison. For the San Quentin News, he interviewed the Golden State Warriors and people like Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, and Van Jones when they visited SQ. He is the only prisoner to have been elected to the Society of Professional Journalists.

Louis was one of four restorative justice facilitators that first day I visited San Quentin. RJ is grounded in principles of nonviolence: it centers upon perpetrators recognizing the harm they have caused, taking responsibility for their acts, making amends, and expressing remorse. It is a radical and ritualized implementation of the idea that if we allow people, even those in the heat of conflict, the chance for allowing goodness its own speech

, we can build more peaceful relations, often fragile ones. It is a cultural archive of moral beauty with a long past: RJ dates back to Gandhi and MLK, in our deeper history to Indigenous practices from around the world, and further back in our evolutionary history to mammalian peacemaking tendencies. It is grounded in the conviction of moral beauty, that all people, including those who have murdered and those who’ve lost loved ones and are overheated with thoughts of revenge, can find kindness and overcome.

A central practice of restorative justice is the talking circle, in which individuals sit in a circle and take turns sharing where they are that day while others simply listen. After my talk on awe, we broke into groups of ten, and Louis led the talking circle I happened to be part of. As we took turns speaking, the men in blue spoke of the following: their remorse, a cellie in his fifties dying in the infirmary, a son landing in prison, an upcoming appearance before the parole board, the latest thinking on sentencing laws, the school-to-prison pipeline, drug legalization, police brutality, and mass incarceration. The conversation often sounded like a graduate seminar in sociology. Louis provided a narrative thread to the disclosures with the slowly measured, grammatically pure clarity of someone used to narrating trauma and uniting warring sides.

On one of my last visits to San Quentin, I sat in a pew most of the day next to a white prisoner named Chris. He had been raised in a white neighborhood in Orange County, California, and fell into that region’s street life of skinheads. They required him to go on missions, to “put violent intentions upon other people,” namely, people of color. That led to many arrests, and a third-strike conviction for armed robbery, landing him in SQ. There he would join RJ. Here is what Chris said about what he was learning:

In order to make something grow, you gotta own a little dirt

My dirt, in order to grow myself