Prison Journal: Jesus and Those People with Stones

For readers beyond these stone walls, stories from prison can be depressing. With an open heart some can also be inspiring, and inspiration is a necessity of hope.

March 30, 2022 by Father Gordon MacRae

Readers may recall the great prison film, The Shawshank Redemption starring Tim Robbins as wrongly convicted prisoner, Andy Dufresne, and his friend, Red, a role for which actor Morgan Freeman received an Academy Award nomination. The film was released in theatres on the same day I was sent to prison in 1994 so it was some time before I got to see it.

Readers of this site found many parallels between those two characters and the conditions of my imprisonment with my friend, Pornchai Moontri. For the film's anniversary of release, I wrote a review of it for Linkedin Pulse entitled, “The Shawshank Redemption and its Real World Revision.”

My review draws a parallel between the fictional prison that sprang from the mind of Stephen King and the prison in which I am writing this. One of the elements in my movie review was a surprising revelation. At the time Stephen King was writing The Shawshank Redemption, 12-year-old Pornchai Moontri, newly arrived from Thailand to America, had a job delivering the Bangor Daily News to his home.

One aspect of my review was about our respective first seven years in prison. I spent those years confined in a place that housed eight men per cell. I described the experience: “Imagine walking alone in an unknown city. Approach the first seven strangers you meet and invite them to come home with you. Now lock yourself in your bathroom with them and face the fact that this is what your life will be like for the unforeseen future.”

Pornchai spent those same seven years in prison in the neighboring state of Maine commencing at age 18. Those years for him were the polar opposite of what they were for me. He spent them in the cruel torment of solitary confinement. Years later, Pornchai was transferred to New Hampshire and I had been relocated to a saner, safer place with but two men per cell. We landed in the same place, but came to it with polar opposite prison anxieties: Pornchai had to recover from years of forced solitude while I was recovering from years of never, ever, ever being alone.

We survived together with a camaraderie that mirrored the one between Andy and Red that sprang from the mind of Stephen King. So you might understand why, in all the years of my unjust imprisonment, the year 2016 was personally one of the most difficult. After 11 years together in a cell in that saner place, Pornchai and I were caught up in a mass move against our will that sent us back to the dungeon-like place with eight men to a cell. We were told that it would be for only a few weeks. One year later, we were still there.

However, others suffered in that environment far more than we did. It was two years after we had engaged in the spiritual surrender of consecration “To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” We had inner tools for coping with loss and discomfort while others here had far less. Pornchai and I were well aware that many of the men with whom we had been living in that other, kinder place were also relocated. I was impressed to witness, in our first night there, Pornchai going from one eight-man cell to another to make sure our friends were safe and that the strangers now among them were civil. Pornchai had a knack for inspiring civility.

The Cast of This Prison Journal

After just three days there, one of the strangers assigned to our crowded cell with us decided he would ask to move because, as he put it to one of his friends, “Living with MacRae and Moontri was like living with my parents.” This was solely because I told him that he is not going to sell drugs out our cell window. His move came at just the right time. We were able to request that our friend, Chen, move to the now empty bunk in our cell. Speaking very little English, Chen had been thrown in with strangers. On the day I went to his cell to tell him to pack and come with us, it was as though he had been liberated from some other Stephen King horror story.

I live with an odd and often polarized mix of people. Among prisoners, about half become entirely engrossed in the affairs of this world, consuming news — especially bad news — with insatiable interest. The other half seem to live in various degrees of ignorant bliss about all that is going on in the world. They never watch news, read a newspaper, or discuss current events. They play Dungeons and Dragons, poker, and video games. While I was hunched over my typewriter typing “Beyond Ukraine” a few weeks ago, my current roommate had no idea anything at all was going on there.

Just as in the world, there are many evil things that happen in prison. People here cope with them by either blindly accepting evil as a part of the cost of living or they just never even acknowledge evil’s existence at all. These are not good options, nor are they good coping mechanisms. Acknowledging evil while also resisting it with all our might is the first line of defense in spiritual warfare. Many of the men in prison with me never actually embraced evil. They just didn’t see it coming.

Many readers have told me that they shed some tears while reading “Pornchai Moontri: A Night in Bangkok, a Year in Freedom.” Pornchai has often told me of how his appearances in these pages have changed his life. This was summed up in one sentence in his magnificent post: “I began to realize that nearly everyone I meet in Thailand in the coming days will already know about me.”

All the fears that Pornchai had built up for years over his deportation to Thailand 36 years after being taken from there just evaporated because of his presence in Beyond These Stone Walls. I once told him that he must now live like an open book. Exposing the truth of his life to the world could be freeing or binding. The truth of his life in this prison could be a horror story, a bad war movie, or an inspirational drama that people the world over could tune into each week, and what they will see would be entirely up to him. I do not have to tell you that his life became an inspiration for many, including many he left behind here. The evil that was once inflicted on him was gone, and only its traumatic echoes remain.

A few years ago, I began to write about some of the other people who populate this world. Some of their stories became very important, and not least to their subjects. Prisoners who had little hope suddenly responded to the notion that others will read about them, and what they read will be up to them. Some of these stories are beyond inspiring. They are the firsthand accounts of the existence of evil that once permeated their lives, and of actual grace when they chose to confront and resist that evil and turn from it. Their stories are the hard evidence of something Saint Paul wrote:

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”

— Romans 6:1.

Getting Stoned in Prison

My subtitle above does not mean what you might think it means. There is indeed an illicit drug problem in just about every prison, including this one. As long as there is money to be had, risks will be taken and human life will be placed in jeopardy. I recently read that the small state of New Hampshire has the nation’s highest rate of overdose deaths among people ages 15 to 50. This is driven largely by the influx of illegal drugs, especially lethal fentanyl.

But in the headline above, I mean something entirely different. The Gospel for Sunday Mass on April 3rd, the Sunday before Holy Week this year, is the story of the woman caught in adultery and her encounter with Jesus before a crowd standing in judgment and about to stone her (John 8:1-11). You already know that some prisoners are not guilty of the crimes attributed to them, but most are, and most of those have stood where that woman stood before Jesus. When prisoners serve their prison sentence, the judgment of the courts comes to an end, but the judgment of the rest of humanity can go on and on mercilessly.

It should not be this way. Our nation’s expensive, bloated, one-size-fits-all prison system leaves too many men and women beyond the margins of social acceptance. The first two readings this Sunday lend themselves to the mercy of deliverance from the past, not only for ourselves, but for others too.

“Thus says the Lord, who opens a way in the sea and a path through the muddy waters ... Remember not the events of the past; the things of long ago consider not. See, I am doing something new! Do you not perceive it? In the desert I make a way; in the wasteland rivers.”

— Isaiah 43:16-21

“Just one thing: Forgetting what lies behind, but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling in Jesus Christ.”

— Philippians 3:14

When this blog had to transition from its older format to Beyond These Stone Walls in November 2020, we learned that most of our older posts still exist, but must be restored and reformatted. In our “Beyond These Stone Walls Public Library” is a Category entitled, “Prison Journal.” In coming weeks, we will restore and add there some of the posts I have written about the inspiring stories of other prisoners.

But before that happens, I want to add my voice to that of Jesus. Please read our stories armed with mercy and not with stones. That is the Gospel for this week’s Sunday Mass, and it is filled with surprises. We are restoring it so that you may enter Holy Week with hearts open. Please read and share:

“Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote on the Ground”

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Two important invitations from Father Gordon MacRae:

Please join us Beyond These Stone Walls for a Holy Week retreat. The details are at our Special Events page.

Also, thank you for participating with us in the Consecration of Ukraine and Russia on March 25, the Solemnity of the Annunciation. We have given the beautifully written Act of Consecration a permanent home in our Library Category, “Behold Your Mother.”

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You may also like these relevant posts:

The Measure By Which You Measure: Prisoners of a Captive Past

Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being

Cry Freedom! Saint Paul and a Prisoner of the Apocalypse

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

From the Grip of Earthly Powers to the Gates of Hell

At the dawn of 2021, Covid-19 wreaks havoc in prison, Pornchai Moontri remains in unjust ICE detention, the free press and free world seem less so, and our politics exploded.

Many writers have expressed concern that this Christmas must have been especially painful for me given that it was my first in 15 years without my friend, Pornchai, present with me. I can only respond with the words of Red, Andy Dufresne’s friend in the great prison film, “The Shawshank Redemption,” “This empty place just seems all the more empty in his absence.”

But I am far more painfully troubled, not by Pornchai’s absence, but by the deeply unjust continuation of his imprisonment. I am not a person who tends to see all things in respect to myself.

A few years back, I was asked to write a review of Stephen King’s novella-turned-prison-classic (linked above). Its focus was on the highly unusual redemptive friendship between Andy and Red (portrayed in the film by Tim Robbins and the great Morgan Freeman). I reflected in the review that one day my own friend will depart from prison while I remain in its emptiness. Of that, I wrote, “Still, I revel in the very idea of my friend’s freedom.”

I stand solidly by that. I do revel in Pornchai’s freedom as it is very important to me. I worked long and hard to help bring it about. So the insult and injustice of Pornchai’s ongoing ICE detention months after his prison sentence has been fully served is as painful for me to bear as it is for Pornchai. I very much appreciate the selfless efforts made by Bill Donohue and others to call attention to this injustice (see our “Special Events” section) and we hope you will take part in this effort, but to date the hoped-for justice remains out of reach.

It was a central tenet of President Trump’s bold initiative for criminal justice reform — the First Step Act — that when a prison sentence is fully served and paid in full, it should not continue on in ways that are unjust such as unemployment, the denial of housing, or the restoration of a person’s freedom and good name. I respect and support President Trump in this. But now, after paying in full his debt to society, Pornchai is now entering a fifth month beyond his sentence in the worst prison conditions he has ever known. He is still an ICE detainee in a grossly overcrowded for-profit ICE facility in Jena, Louisiana.

The factors that contributed to this are a combination of Covid-19 (which has been more of an excuse, really), bureaucratic ineptness, greed and corruption, and no small dose of something that plagues too many public sector employees: abuses of power and a lack of transparency and accountability to the very public sector that pays the bills. That post must be written and it will be written. In the meantime, please support and pray for the rapid repatriation of Pornchai Moontri.

Our Crisis of Partisan Politics

One of the factors that made me feel the most bleak about the hopes for justice for either Pornchai or me came just after I wrote “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri.” That was my first glimpse of the folly of hoping for justice in an election year. That post mentioned truthfully the pressure I had been receiving to present what was happening to Pornchai as President Trump’s fault. I pointed out with honesty and candor that this had nothing to do with Trump.

Pornchai was first ordered deported in 2007 during the last year of the administration of President George W. Bush. The State of Maine nonetheless felt it necessary to extract from Pornchai every day of the sentence imposed on him when he was 18 years old. He is now 47. That post went on to quote an article by the left-leaning Human Rights Defense Center which bestowed on President Barack Obama the title of “Deporter in Chief.” These are factual elements that were not contrived by me, but unless I became willing to publicly blame President Trump, there would be no help from anyone on the left.

That fact was driven home when I was contacted by a political activist in Pennsylvania who represented an endeavor to combat human trafficking. The person urged me to “take a giant step away” from helping Pornchai because “your name is already sullied in the public square” and “your posting on this cut the legs from democrats who might help him and you.” Needless to say, I did not take her up on the offer of “help.” It came with conditions reflecting a whole other layer of dishonesty.

I hope it is not lost on readers, on human rights activists, and, if he ever sees any of this, on the President himself, that I ask for no consideration at all for myself. What happened to Pornchai in America is a giant stain on America’s claim to be a mirror and champion of human rights for the the world. Thailand as a nation has been dragged before United Nations panels for the exploitation of children, but everything that happened to Pornchai happened in America, and now America only expels him.

As events of recent days made clear, there will be no political help for either me or Pornchai. It is not yet time for me to comment on everything that happened in Washington on January 6. The intransigence of all the players is still too heated for any comment of mine to do anything but erupt it again. Much more will be written of this, by me and others, but for now I just want to raise one point about the grave danger we are in as a society builds upon respectful human rights and civil liberties.

As a result of our political differences, Facebook and Twitter have permanently suspended the accounts of the current President and others of his mindset. Who will they come for next? What are we in for? As John Derbyshire wrote in a recent issue of Chronicles, “While low-level grumbling by persons of no importance may be tolerated, only opinions compliant with the state ideology will be allowed to air in the public forum.” This will be the most frightening outcome of the events of January 6, 2021.

A Catholic Parting of the Ways

Like so many people I know, as I look back over my investments of the last year, I come up feeling a little empty. I am not talking about financial investments for I don’t have any. I earn all of two dollars per day helping prisoners traverse the legal system. My “investments” refer to the places where I have invested my time, my energy, and most especially my mind and heart.

Being where I am, you might think that I am immune from the empty social media quest for “likes” and other signs of acceptability. It never sits well with me that my posts could be subjected to such artificial approval. I cannot even see Facebook or other social media, but I know without doubt that it blocks and distorts conservative political and religious viewpoints.

But social media is also where the world lives out its arena of civil discourse. It is not all evil, and some of it presents an under-utilized opportunity for evangelization. So, with the help of friends, I have a social media presence carefully presenting the Gospel in a minefield of otherwise twisted ideas. To garner some help in this effort, I have found dozens of faithful Catholic public and private Facebook groups that promote positive discourse about our faith. Many of these groups have welcomed me, and routinely post what I present.

Then I decided to risk digging a little deeper. I sought out a Facebook group for priests. My friends and I found only one, and it had several hundred members. So the first post I submitted was one I wrote in 2020 entitled, “Priesthood, the Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times.”

It was only hours before I found myself faced with one of the sins of the times: hypocrisy. A message came from the unnamed moderator of the priests’ group: “Given your situation, we do not think it is prudent for us to post anything you write.” Like so many untreated wounds, this one festered. It started off as anger, then humiliation, then hurt, then anger again.

This presented me with a full frontal experience of a phenomenon I have encountered in so many others. All the positive regard in the world cannot match the power of one unjust rejection from someone whom I would otherwise have respected. I have challenged penitents and counseling clients on this question for decades. Why does the negative so outweigh all the good that is said of some of us? Why do our psyches empower the negative?

There are lots of answers to this almost universal phenomenon, but they are too many for a single blog post. One of the answers, and perhaps the most important one, is a long neglected New Year’s resolution to identify where my treasure lies. This inquiry comes from a single, haunting line in the Gospel: “Wherever your treasure lies, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6:21 & Luke 12:34) Saint Luke especially framed this in a way that requires insight:

“He began to say to his disciples, ‘Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the rooftops.’”

— Luke 12:1-3

That is what I walk away with in this story. My only response to the priest who passed such harsh judgment on me is to never be that priest. My only response to the priest who walks by the man left for dead in the famous parable (Luke 10:25-31) is to never be that priest.

Which brings me back to my friend, Pornchai Moontri. Catholicism in America is a vast apostolic network of faith in action. I am so very proud of all of you who have sent in Bill Donohue’s Petition to the White House on our “Special Events” page. And I am immensely proud of Bill Donohue for taking this up. The response from our ranks should be thunderous. If the leaven of the Pharisees is hypocrisy, then the leaven of the righteous is faith found in selfless action.

The Trials of a Year in a Global Pandemic

All of the trials of 2020 in prison were lived in the shadows of the global pandemic of Covid-19. Amazingly, as prison systems across America became giant super transmitters of the coronavirus, this one managed most of the year with but a single case among prisoners and only a manageable handful among prison staff. The price for such an almost Amish removal from the mainstream was costly. Prisoners here have had to surrender all contacts with loved ones as the facility embraced a massive lockdown last March.

All visits, chapel activities, volunteer programs, most education, and virtually anything from outside these walls was curtailed. The limits on our lives became more severe as the year progressed. Since September, starting just at the time Pornchai Moontri was taken away on September 8, we have been in a state of near-total lockdown and isolation. Even this could not halt the virus from spreading. In just the last few months, even with all the lockdown measures, 81 prison staff and hundreds of prisoners here have contracted the virus. Due to contact tracing, the numbers placed in quarantine have been vastly greater.

Present1y, I live in the only housing unit that is not yet fully engulfed in quarantine. Currently eight of the twelve units here are fully locked down in quarantine. Presently, three dormitories, the weight room and the gymnasium have all been cleared out to make room for quarantine bunks. The wave of fear that has moved through the prison seems worse than the wave of Covid cases. Presently, I cannot leave my cell without a mask.

The State of Louisiana, where Pornchai has been held unjustly for over four months awaiting transport, has the fourth highest rate of Covid infection in the country. Detainees by the hundreds from Central America, with just a few Asians mixed in among them, are housed 70 to a room with no testing, little screening, and no obvious preventive measures. America, on either side of the aisle, does not seem to have the political will to address this.

Those from Central American countries seem to be moved out in large numbers while Pornchai and other Asian detainees are kept in horrible conditions for much longer. I plan to write in much more depth about ICE in an upcoming post.

Until then, I can only say thank you for being here with us throughout the trials of the past year. Your prayers and your support and friendship have been priceless, and have made a very great difference. I especially thank Bill Donohue for the courage and sense of justice the Catholic League has stood for. If you are not yet a member, please join me in that important cause at www.CatholicLeague.org

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae:

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like the related posts referenced herein:

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

Priesthood, the Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times

And BTSW has a Library! Unlike most blogs, our past and present posts are slowly being organized by topic in 28 categories of special interest. This is a work in progress, but check it out, and come back for updates.

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