Who Will Do the Work?

I could feel her desperation.

The desperation of a mother who has run out of options.

I scrolled through my phone, trying to make sense of the slew of emails.

There were six emails, all forwarded to me with no context. I passed my phone to Lillian, our intern for the summer, hoping she could make better sense of what the mother was asking for from me.

Lillian was silent as she focused on the chain of emails. After a few moments of visible confusion, I heard her click her tongue. She started to explain.

The mother’s son had been arrested by the police for violating his parole. Three years ago, he’d been released from prison. Since then, he’d experienced homelessness, drug addiction, and more. The State had released him with little to no resources and burdened him with unrealistic parole restrictions. A bad situation had gotten worse over time. The mother, desperate to save her son from further incarceration, had reached out to multiple organizations across Georgia seeking help. As evidenced by the emails, she’d been doing so long before her son was re-arrested.

Lillian read through the emails slowly. The mother’s plea explained her son’s situation in dire terms – she feared for his life. She needed help. The replies were nearly all the same – either she didn’t live in the county the various organizations served or they didn’t take cases like his or he didn’t qualify for their services for one reason or the other. While they couldn’t help, they knew an organization that could. They referred her to another group and wished her well, expressing genuine pity for her son’s plight.

A pattern emerged. Each group was just passing along her son’s case to another group. That group would then pass the case along to another group. An endless loop was forming, a chain of “pass-the-buck-ism.” No one was willing to help.

I’ll be blunt – as Lillian read the chain of emails to me, I burned with anger. These organizations weren’t small nonprofits that were starved for funding and resources. These were big-letter nonprofits, groups that host fancy fundraisers and have nice downtown offices and big-ticket donors. I subscribe to their emails – I see them advertising about how they helped so many people this month and how they advocated for whatever piece of policy last month. But when push came to shove, when a real person with a real problem was placed before them, when a real case, not just some policy, was presented to them, they (very cordially) declined to help. They kicked the proverbial can down the road to someone else, who then kicked the can even further down the road. As we read further and further down the chain of emails, you could tell the mother was getting more and more frustrated. I only imagined how the son must have felt as he sought treatment, learning again and again that he didn’t qualify or didn’t have enough money or that they didn’t take cases like his – a homeless 20-year-old with a rap sheet.

I wanted to publicly shame these organizations for caring more about policy than people. But I understood their plight. People are the hard work. Finding a shelter that will take in a felon requires patience, time, and knowledge of hyper-local resources. Finding a rehabilitation center for a 20-year-old with a felony conviction will cost you a pretty penny. Securing a job for a formerly incarcerated young man isn’t an easy thing to do.

My prayer is that this newsletter isn’t perceived as me trashing other nonprofits. The work they do is invaluable and the more groups that are working towards a more just and kinder world, the better.

But at the end of the day, we need people willing to work on the front lines, to get their hands dirty in the work. To help the people in need, to take the risks, to put in the time. To take on the hard cases, the ones where no one else will help.

There are lots of groups raising lots of money who like to advertise all the good work they do inside and around prisons. But here’s the skinny – I don’t ever see these groups inside the actual prisons. I don’t see them on a daily – or even weekly – basis. They show up from time to time, host a flashy event, take their photos or videos, then head back to their offices to post on social media and write splashy end-of-year reports.

And again, I get it. Working in prisons is hard. Just the other day my co-worker Grace drove nearly two hours down to a prison just to learn it was locked down. They turned her away at the door. She had to get right back in her car and drive back to our office. That’s not how you want to start your day.

Working in prisons requires driving out to the remote corners of our state, enduring searches and questioning from wary guards who don’t always care that you’re just trying to help. Working in prisons requires hours spent coordinating with correctional staff members who very much like to conduct things by the book and ensure that the “chain of command” is always upheld. Working in prisons requires you to be comfortable in an environment where things can change on a dime and violence can erupt spontaneously. Working in prisons requires you to spend hour upon hour working in a prison garden or a classroom with little-to-no air conditioning.

Don’t misunderstand me please, I love my job! Grace loves her job. Andrea loves her job. Chaplain John loves his too!

But at times, it’s hard. 

What I’m hoping to convey to you is this – this world need people who will do the work.

There are already lots of people posting on social media, taking legislators out to eat, writing on blogs about how they’re working to better the criminal justice system. We hope they continue to do that. But what we ask of you is to join us in doing the work, loving our incarcerated neighbors to wholeness.

Join us as we do the work on the problems society has left behind.

I invite you to volunteer with HeartBound. All it takes is one night, once a month. Start there by joining us at the Atlanta Transitional Center as we serve dinner to 70+ incarcerated men, lead them through songs of worship, play games, and share a message of hope and encouragement. Help serve dinner or lead us in song. For your first program, all we will ask you to do is shadow.

The work must be done. We can’t keep passing the buck.