wfn.org | Bringing light to a dark place

[BethAH <BethAH@mbm.org>]

May 9, 2001
Beth Hawn
Mennonite Board of Missions
(219) 294-7523
<NEWS@MBM.org>

May 9, 2001

An MVSer’s purpose:  bringing light to a dark place

Grant Rissler is serving through Mennonite Voluntary Service as a
writer and photographer.  After spending a year as intern at the
Mennonite Central Committee United Nations office in Manhattan,
he is traveling for five months by bus to 20 other MVS and
Short-Term Mission sites, gathering the stories and experiences
of other volunteers and communities.  A weekly column by Grant
can be found on the web at www.MBM.org.

SAN FRANCISCO (CHM/MBM) – Some days as Marcia Boniferro leaves
work, she turns and waves to the men with whom she works five
days a week.  They don’t wave back.  Their cells don’t let them
look down on the street, or up to the sunshine.

Marcia Boniferro waves anyway, because she knows she may not see
some of them again, if sentences are passed and transfers to
penitentiaries are done in the dead of night.  So she waves, then
walks away from the San Francisco County Jail for another
evening.

Boniferro took this Mennonite Voluntary Service position with the
Northern California Service League (NCSL) because she wanted to
bring light to a dark place and “learn a lesson in compassion.”
After nine months on the job, she says she has had ample
opportunities to do both.

Working as a pre-release counselor, Boniferro, a London, Ontario
native, carries on the vision of the NCSL, an organization
originally formed 52 years ago as a religious ministry to provide
a “felt presence in the jails.”  In addition to the work
Boniferro and colleagues do inside the jails, the organization
also helps ex-offenders get jobs and runs a shelter for offenders
making the transition back into general society.

Though her duties include being a liaison between the 800-900
inmates and the outside world – providing crisis intervention,
teaching parenting classes for men facing life sentences,
facilitating visitations of children with their incarcerated
fathers, and spearheading the production of a periodic journal of
writing and art by inmates titled “The Can Opener” – Boniferro
sees her overall task as fairly straightforward.

”I see people who are in really dark places,” she said.  “People
are in such crises in their lives.  When I stand before them,
willing to listen, amazing things come out.  If [that] lifts a
little of that [darkness], I’ve done my job.”

“It’s a privilege,” Boniferro said, “that they would let someone
with my education and training go up there and be on the other
side of the bars 40 hours a week.  It’s a privilege, but there’s
also a cost.”

Boniferro said it took a while to get used to being in the jail
on a daily basis.  “The energy is just so dark and depressing.
And it was new to be talking through the bars with murderers and
sex offenders.  But those first couple of weeks, the thing I
realized was that it is so easy to love people.”

It is that compassion, she said, and learning the small joys that
remain in the jail, that have kept her going through the months.
“I still feel that ability to tap into compassion, and as I’ve
been there longer, that ability has increased.  As I’ve been [in
the jail] more, I’ve seen life.  I’m always amazed that people
can still laugh, that life can still exist there.”

Boniferro stressed that the people in the maximum-security area
of this jail, about half the population, have simply been charged
with crimes and have not yet been convicted or sentenced.  What
makes that important, she says, is that “there are really
horrible things that go on there and some of [those incarcerated]
will walk out of here as free as you and me.”

Probably, Boniferro said, “Many did the crimes that they’re
accused of, but there are definitely those who are innocent.  But
they’re up there in the meantime.”

Her role as a liaison for those in the jail, and her numerous
conversations, also add an extra task to her job.

“That’s one question I get asked when I’m up in the jails,” she
said.  “‘What do you say about us?’  It’s really important [for
me to try] to de-mystify” the image most people have of inmates,
and to raise awareness of realities in the U.S. penal system, she
said.

“There’s a way,” Boniferro said, “that I become a voice, without
realizing it, for those who don’t have one.”

She told a story of a visit she helped set up between an
incarcerated man and his newborn child whom he had never seen.
“When I had to bring her back downstairs,” she said, “he just
cried.”

She also told of visits between fathers and older children.  One
visit she set up was between a child and a father who had only
talked on the phone since he had been imprisoned.  When the
father and daughter finally were given the opportunity to see
each other, the child would only talk with her father using a toy
phone.

Yet, getting the voices and realities heard is often difficult,
Boniferro says, because many people are disconcerted by the
stories.  “In some ways, I don’t want to hear those things,” she
says.  “I’m not surprised if the public doesn’t want to hear
those things [either].”

She recalls a statistic she heard recently.  For every one
African-American male in college, there are four that are
incarcerated.  “I hardly ever deal with any white people up
there,” she says.  “It’s obvious that Blacks or Hispanics don’t
have the same rights as others because they’re the only ones up
there.  The United States is failing its minorities.  But Canada
isn’t much better.  We just incarcerate Native peoples.”

The experiences of the past months have led Boniferro to question
specific injustices, and the system in general as well.  And, she
says, “Those are the questions I want people to start asking.
Who is really suffering?”

“All I see here is suffering,” she says flatly.  “Suffering for
those who are incarcerated, suffering for their families,
suffering for their children.  You’re making a generation of
children suffer to make men pay for what they’ve done.”

“The longer I’m here, the more I just think it’s wrong to
incarcerate people.  I feel like it’s a blasphemy against God to
incarcerate people.  I’m very aware that everyone is a child of
God, and that,” she says nodding at the jail, “is no way to treat
any of God’s children.”  She pauses.  “I don’t believe God looks
down on this place and smiles.”

“I wanted to be in the darkest places,” she says.  “There are
times I feel like what I’m doing is completely worthless.  I
can’t open the doors.  I can’t stop California from incarcerating
Californians.  My perception is that the U.S. justice system is
one of the darkest [places] in the world.  [But] every day I feel
like I’m bringing light to [that] really dark place.”

Mennonite Voluntary Service is a joint program of the Commission
on Home Ministries of the General Conference Mennonite Church and
Mennonite Board of Missions of the Mennonite Church.
* * *
Grant E. Rissler       PHOTO AVAILABLE