The Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) lies just west of the Albuquerque city limits on a desolate desert plain that overlooks the Rio Grande Valley.  The heat, the silence, and the view have often taken my breath away as I've exited the constantly conditioned air, the consistent buzz of the fluorescent lights and fire alarms, and the constricted concrete walls of the facility.  A bold, impenetrable blue shines down from the New Mexico sky, which curves endlessly, holding the city below in the palm of its hand.  Purple mountains in the distance cast no shadows, their cragged, rocky faces stoically gazing over the green strip that follows the river through an otherwise barren valley.  From the jail, the city appears to shimmer silently, as the flat-roofed buildings that sparsely dot the landscape and stretch to the north and south reflect the sun’s harsh rays.

Outside of the MDC’s walls, I can sometimes hear the faint echoes of handball games and laughter, and on more than one walk through the parking lot I’ve been struck by the privilege of my freedom to come and go as I please.  More than once, I admit, I’ve felt a flash of desire to take the men in my classes with me.  I would never truly consider it, even if I could, but there’s so much authenticity, emotion, and dignity in these men that I often forget that they live in a high-felony pod with more than 70 other inmates.  The wary acquaintances that have turned to friendships, the light-bulb moments that have been my own as often as they have come for the guys, and the warmth that has radiated from each person who has entered my class make me want them to have something different than the oppressive, punitive environment that so often only compounds the pain and trauma from which their violent actions have sprung.

With our classes, the other facilitators and I try to bring a sense of freedom, creativity, and interdependence to the participants in our groups, so that they can keep remembering that they are human.  Now, along with the men in one pod of the MDC, we seek to build what Barb Toews, a practitioner of and writer about restorative justice has called a restorative space, “in which we actively work to promote the well-being of offenders, within the context of assisting them to take responsibility for their actions.”  Based on restorative values, which drive an underlying assumption of human dignity and a commitment to compassion and healing as we address the roots of conflict and crime, one pod at the MDC can become a safe space for personal growth, strengthened relationships, and even a culture of peace.

After the first few days of our experiment in pod saturation, it seems that that space will begin within those who join our program, and will potentially emanate from the pod classroom. 

On Monday, September 14, I arrived at the jail with Wendy thirty minutes before her writing group was to begin.  We made our copies of rosters and handouts, walked through security and down the long hall to the felony units of the jail.  We set Wendy’s supplies—her dry-erase markers, her pack of pens, and her still-unapproved composition notebooks—in the classroom outside of the pod, and entered the sally-port.  A buzz and the large door opened, releasing us into the chaotic scene of 80-plus men in orange.  We gathered the 20 men on Wendy’s list amidst the noise of men playing cards, doing push-ups, microwaving their styrofoam lunches, and playing handball, and took them back into the silence of the sally-port.  When that heavy door opened to spill us into the hallway toward the classroom, our experiment had begun. 

Though the classroom down the hall has long been a part of Comienzos programming, and many of the men who joined us there have been in Comienzos classes before, I have rarely witnessed so quickly such a depth of connection and intention within the walls of that small room.  Though I missed the introductions, the opening reading that Wendy offered, and the brainstorm about identity that crept across the board because I was frantically looking for a pencil sharpener (the woes of a first day of an expanded educational program inside a jail), when I finally did join the group I was immediately carried into peaceful creativity as we all took our pens and pencils to paper to write.  Supported by the scribbles of 21 other members of this writing community, I wrote more and more easily then than I have in the last hours in this coffee shop.  And when we read—90 percent of us in the room—I felt chills at least once each time someone told his (and her) story.  Triumphant for their courage to open up, and connected by the diversity of their voices—from rhymes to simple biographies to lyrical prose—the inmates writers group trudged back to the pod.

After a brief peanut butter and jelly lunch, Wendy and I returned to the pod, which was now much emptier because of lock-down.  I handed my list to the Correctional Officer sitting behind his desk and control panel, and he went around gathering a new crew.  8 men, Wendy, and I piled into the decidedly more cramped classroom that sits inside the pod, across from the two tiers of cells that stare back into the little room’s window.

I had planned to introduce myself and the course I wished to be a part of, to offer an overview of nonviolent social change and the “teachers”—men like Gandhi, King, and Mandela—who would guide us with their wisdom.  I had planned to write King’s first principle of nonviolence, “Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people,” and to have a rich dialogue about the meaning of courage before doing an exercise that would offer a glimpse of the “heart” of nonviolence, universal human needs.  Excited and nervous, with my first words I tried to dispel all of that planning from my mind, and to simply connect with those who had arrived.  I asked why each of the 8 men in front of me had shown up.

As we went around the circle I listened to each man share his reasons and his intentions.  Some were curious about the title, Nonviolent Warriors, and were skeptical about the meaning of nonviolence.  Others gave the oft-repeated explanation that they were there because they wanted something, anything, new to apply to their lives.  Most said they’d seen me in the pod, and just wanted to check it out.  They had no real expectations, and had no idea what was in store.  My eyes fell on the last man in the circle, sitting to my left next to the whiteboard.  Tall and lanky, with beige skin and dark hair pulled back from his long face, he had smiled more with his eyes than with his teeth as I had wordily talked about Nelson Mandela’s 30 years in jail, and my desire to co-create a space in which we could develop skills for nonviolent action and sustainable change, and my hope that we would all take leadership roles as the class unfolded.  Still leaning back in his chair, his smile spread across the stubble on his cheeks.  “I came here,” he said with the same cadence with which he had read his poetry to the writing group before, “because I’m a Nonviolent Warrior.”

I loved this group immediately.  I wrote King’s quote up on the board, and the conversation bounced back and forth electrically across the room as we tackled the difference between pacifism and nonviolence, and the importance of pride and respect in their worlds.  We agreed that nonviolence is the harder road than habitual patterns of violence, and struggled to find common ground about when it was applicable.  We discovered that fearlessness means moving beyond fear, not living without it, and built an understanding of courage as “living with heart”.  “Yeah,” said one man, “on the outs we say that someone has cor—you know like heart in Spanish—when they don't back down.” 

Throughout the conversation, the tall, lanky man in the corner spoke up with words of wisdom here and there.  My favorite moment came early, when he suggested that we each tell everyone in the room something good that we see in him or her, because we don’t always remember those things for ourselves.  I shelved it in my mind for later. 

After we all meditated together, imagining our perfect life, I harvested a list of words, including peace, freedom, togetherness, belonging, family, friendship, support, and happiness to represent universal human needs; not surprisingly, this list mirrored that of so many others I've been a part of creating all around the world.  As we were coming to the end of the class, I explained that this list would become the heart of future classes, and we would learn to direct our energy through these qualities, which already exist within us.  All the while, my wheels were turning about how to include idea of affirming each other. 

Just as the men outside of our classroom were released from their rooms, and began to spread into the pod, we came to our closing.  We stood in a circle, with nine of us on the outside and one person in the middle.  In turn, the person in the middle looked into the eyes of each of us on the outside, and we each said a word from the list on the board that represented a quality we see in him (and her).  Amazed, I listened as each person received 9 distinct pieces of himself.  When I took my turn in the middle, I was touched by each of their smiles, and all of their sincerity. 

Before we finished and left the room, I noticed curious eyes looking in on our ceremony, surveying the words on the board, and silently watching each of us slowly spin in the middle of our circle.  Before Wendy and I said thank you to this group of powerful men and began the journey out to the parking lot and the blue sky and the distant mountains, I wondered if any of those curious eyes would join us in our next class.  I felt excited, knowing that we had begun something new that might spread beyond our little classroom…