CV: In our last interview, we started talking about rehabilitation in connection with prisoners sentenced as juveniles. Let’s take that one step further today, and talk about release. What, in your opinion, does it take for a prisoner to successfully rejoin his or her community?

EPJ: I could talk a long time about this. From the prisoner’s side, it starts with thinking the right way. Someone who is ready to be released needs to be able to do four things—those things are what we call cognitive reframing issues.

First, they need to communicate in their own words why the crime they were convicted of is wrong. Second, they should be able to express their understanding of how crime impacts victims, communities, and survivors—of what other people have to deal with as a result of their behavior. Third, they need to recognize any distorted thinking patterns or triggers they have, that could result in criminal thinking. And the fourth thing is that they should develop coping mechanisms for dealing with negative impulses.

CV: So, moral awareness, awareness of others, awareness of self, and constructive skill-building for impulse control.

EPJ: That’s the first part, yes. Another big issue is the type of support system a prisoner has. Having supportive family and friends is huge. My personal observation has been that, overwhelmingly, the prisoners who receive regular visits from their family and friends readjust to society better than those who do not. There is research data to support this.

Other factors that deter people from re-offending are having a place to live, having a job, being over the age of 30 (usually less impulsive), being married and being a parent. It’s like a stack of weights that gets added up: the more of these factors a returning citizen has in her/his life, the better their chances of living a productive, crime-free lifestyle.

But we also have to talk about the community. Many prisoners develop distorted views of how society will treat them when they return to the community, based on negative media reports and stereotyped portrayals of prisoners on television. So if the community around them treats them negatively when they are released, this reinforces their negative perceptions.

CV: They “knew” they wouldn’t be accepted on the outside, and now they see it happening.

EPJ: They experience even more rejection and isolation, and it’s devastating. Bear in mind that prisoners generally make a conscious effort to avoid physical contact with other prisoners because it could result in getting into a fight or being seriously assaulted. Physical contact between prisoners can also be interpreted by staff as fighting or assaultive behavior, and result in being placed in solitary confinement. Physical contact is prohibited between staff and prisoners. A simple gesture like a handshake between a staff member and prisoner could be considered overfamiliarity and result in the staff member’s job termination.

Now think about the fact that, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections, only 12% of Michigan prisoners receive visits from family and friends. That’s fewer than 5,000 prisoners who got visits last year. The other 34,000+ may not receive physical contact and affection from family and friends for years, or even decades. They become disconnected from other people physically and emotionally.

Again, add the daily experience of shame that incarceration brings. Shame alone has been proven to be correlated with violence, depression, addiction, and destructive behaviors. According to neuroscientists, the brain uses the same area to process physical pain as it does to process the pain of social rejection or isolation—those things are processed in the same way.

Bring everything together, and you have millions of prisoners living their daily lives broken, experiencing despair, and feeling devalued. Their desperation to feel connection seeps into every aspect of their lives, and because they don’t get to experience connection, they repeatedly play a tape of feeling rejected in their minds.

If that rejection continues on the outside, if they are shamed and demonized and not accepted by the people around them, it becomes much easier to live out their distorted image of themselves and return to thinking and living in criminal ways.

CV: Which is to say, “nobody cares about me, and I’m no good, so what does it matter?”

EPJ: If there’s one thing we can learn from history, it’s that people become on the outside what they believe on the inside.

CV: Why do you think some people judge prisoners so harshly?

EPJ: Some people have a tendency to only look at a person’s crime and not at the person themselves. They often hardly know anything about a prisoner other than their crime so they define them by that. Cynics also look for the worst in people rather than their inherent dignity and ignore the possibility of redemption in others.

The truth of the matter is that no one is defined by a single event or mistake in their life. People are a culmination of all their actions and choices in life and that’s how they should be judged. It is unproductive and unhealthy to condemn people for their flaws or mistakes when we have never even taken the time to get to know them or learn more about them.

CV: Then, if you could give the public advice about interacting with prisoners who return to their communities as free citizens, what would it be?

EPJ: Welcome them. Offer them encouragement. Show them by example how to treat others like they would like to be treated. Returning citizens are leaving a space where civility is unpopular and kindness is scarce. Modeling kindness will let them know that people are concerned about their success and wellbeing, and encourage them to begin a new chapter in their lives.

Each day I witness how much acts of kindness and words of encouragement mean to prisoners who have no one in society to offer it to them. Most of them just need people to listen to them with compassion, and offer them encouragement and validation. This acts as a catalyst for them to begin making better choices. Studies show that 43% of people who feel valued and cared for are more focused, motivated and productive.

One of the great things about this country is the belief in second chances and the concept of redemption. If the Parole Board determines a prisoner has served sufficient time behind bars, and s/he will pose no danger to society if released, it is only fair that they be afforded an opportunity to rebuild their lives.

There is a Yoruba proverb that says, “If a fence does not have props it will collapse.” Likewise, if returning citizens do not receive the support they need, we are sabotaging their success and creating a culture for them to fail. Each time they fail, it destabilizes families and communities. We need to invest in growing civility, success, and forward thinking, not fostering failure.

CV: Over the years, you’ve seen friends from prison be released as their sentences ended. How are some of those people doing today?

EPJ: They’re busy! (laughs) We’re talking about people who in a lot of cases have rebuilt their lives to become best-selling authors, public speakers, directors of organizations, youth mentors, business owners, professors, scholars, conflict resolution facilitators, and other assets to their community. They are homeowners and some are fathers, married, and building a family.

These men are people who participated in the same programs I have, advocated for prison reform alongside me, and endured the same struggles I have during my incarceration. The difference is they received the opportunity to utilize their skills to contribute to the world as free citizens.

Since we’ve been talking about resentencing, let me add that the same positive pattern is holding true for newly-freed prisoners who were serving life without parole sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles. Not a single one has reoffended or violated the terms of their parole. All of them have remained free and continue being productive taxpayers.

These returning citizens are demonstrating the need for society to acknowledge that redemption is possible and people are deserving of second chances.

CV: And we give them a second chance and they succeed—sometimes beyond our imagination. What does that mean to us as a society?

EPJ: I think we should celebrate prisoners who are able to exit prison better than they entered it because it takes tremendous courage, strength, and determination to accomplish that. It is much easier to fail than succeed against the seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against them.

In prison, people are rarely encouraged to do good or succeed. Prisoners have to create their own opportunities for good in most instances and forge new paths where none exist against the current of an environment that has an aversion to them getting a foot on the ladder of opportunity.

Being able to leave prison stronger and wiser than a person entered is exceptional. I would go further to add that if a person is able to do it, they can thrive virtually anywhere in society after their release because they have learned to survive, cope, and make countless difficult decisions about their lives and interacting with others.

CV: Looking back to the start of our conversation, as we’ve talked about the things that help a released prisoner succeed: for someone in the position of being wrongfully convicted, as you are, where does that put you personally? Do you think you need to work on—for example—the four cognitive reframing issues, even though you never committed a crime?

EPJ: I believe everyone should do introspective work on themselves and strive to perpetually improve their lives. If they are not guilty of committing a crime, doing introspective work can prevent them from offending in the future, teach them to become critical thinkers, develop emotional intelligence and problem-solving skills, and help them avoid giving in to negative impulses. People who develop greater clarity about their feelings and emotions become better pilots of their lives.

I would tell everyone who is wrongfully convicted, even if you didn’t commit a crime, you should make the most of each day of your life, and not just throw it away because the system made a mistake. The moment you give up your power and begin to let incarceration define you, your life freefalls into a downward spiral. In the words of Swiss philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel, a person who doesn’t fight to protect the sanctity of his inner self becomes “a slave to his surroundings.”

You have an incredible opportunity, in spite of everything, to use your experience to transform your life and the lives of other people in the process; and to leave prison stronger, wiser and better than you entered it.

CV: But if you are a wrongfully convicted person, coming up to a parole hearing or resentencing, you have a problem. Many people feel strongly that a prisoner needs to admit guilt in order to prove that he or she is truly rehabilitated. How do you answer those people?

EPJ: Many people don’t know that 95% of all people arrested for crimes enter guilty pleas and never go to trial. Think about that: every single year, hundreds of thousands of people appear before judges across the country, and admit guilt or take responsibility for crimes. Of that number, 67% of them later commit new crimes.  Their admissions of guilt and taking responsibility were meaningless in terms of actual rehabilitation. They said they did it and still went on to reoffend. The data disturbingly reflects that people who are perceived to have demonstrated remorse actually didn’t, and that they statistically have a greater chance of recidivating according to the numbers. This isn’t my personal belief, it is reflected in the data. Notice, I’m not suggesting that we should ignore the remorse issue altogether. However, we do need to examine it more closely and figure out how to improve things rather than turning a blind eye to such a high failure rate.

This is why I believe the four cognitive reframing issues I mentioned above are more important at improving a prisoner’s success once released, because they give insight into the person and their thinking process. It demonstrates that they have examined their lives and can demonstrate the change, not merely say words they think a judge wants to hear to receive a more lenient sentence.

As for those who are wrongfully convicted, judges are well aware that there have been nearly 100 exonerations of wrongly convicted prisoners in Michigan, and hundreds more across the nation in just the past 30 years. Many of these people spent decades in prison before they were vindicated, and most of them refused to admit guilt to their crimes.

If you did not commit a crime, you have a constitutional right to maintain your innocence. The Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that, “A court cannot base its sentence even in part on a defendant’s refusal to admit guilt.” (People v. Hatchett, 477 Mich 1061 (2007); People v. Jackson, 474 Mich 995 (2006)).

The court also ruled that, “It is a violation of due process to punish a person for asserting a protected statutory or constitutional right.” (People v. Ryan, 451 Mich 30 (1996)).

If a person is guilty of committing a crime or offending another person, in any way, I believe the morally proper thing for them to do is admit guilt, take responsibility, and apologize for their actions. When a person did not commit a crime, however, they are under no obligation to admit to something they didn’t do.

CV: Now, if you meet John Q. Citizen in prison, and he says, “Man, I didn’t do it,” how would you react to that claim? Or how would you decide if he’s telling the truth?

EPJ: I have met several innocent people in prison and the one common denominator has been their unwillingness to admit to something they didn’t do. This is especially true for people who have never wavered about maintaining their innocence for decades and done so since the moment they were accused.

It’s the general consensus of professionals who have vast experience working with Innocence Projects around the country that the longer a person refuses to admit guilt to a crime (which they assert they did not commit), the greater the likelihood the person is telling the truth. That has also been my experience interacting with people I believe were wrongly convicted.

Another thing that stands out to me is a person’s consistency with the details of their defense, a willingness to answer repeated questions, and to be open about every aspect of their case—to make their transcripts, police reports, medical reports, and other related documents available for people to examine. People will generally not invite that type of scrutiny, which could produce additional evidence of guilt, if they committed a crime. It would actually work against their interests.

For example, my private investigator, Paul Ciolino, has worked for decades as the lead investigator to two Innocence Projects. He has been a tireless advocate for justice and his work helped prove that over a dozen prisoners on death row were innocent in Illinois. It resulted in the Governor commuting the sentences of over 100 people on death row to life in prison.

When Paul first meets clients, he tells them if they are not truly innocent not to waste his time. He is brutally honest and makes it abundantly clear that if evidence surfaces during his investigation of their guilt he has an ethical obligation to turn that evidence over to law enforcement. A guilty person inviting a highly experienced investigator like Paul Ciolino to turn over every stone in their case would only bury themselves in prison.

CV: What would a person gain by refusing to admit guilt after they have been convicted?

EPJ: Absolutely nothing. Refusing to admit guilt for decades if a person is guilty is of no benefit to them. Prisoners have a better chance of being released if they admit guilt even when they didn’t commit a crime. No one is going to volunteer spending more time in prison when admitting guilt could possibly get them home sooner.

If they were guilty they could have attempted to negotiate a plea agreement for a reduced charge and more lenient sentence from the onset. Guilty people are always the first to pursue deals for lesser time. They don’t wait around for 20 or 30 years and torment themselves with years of avoidable incarceration before trying to get out of prison.

CV: Back to yourself: you wouldn’t go with your “gut feeling” or use someone’s expressions and mannerisms to come to a decision about guilt or innocence or even, let’s say, remorse.

EPJ: That is exactly what anyone looking at a case should not do. Whether it’s an issue of innocence or an issue of remorse (in the case of a guilty person), science demonstrates that we cannot afford to take the risk of judging appearances. I like to cite Dr. Susan Bandes on this: she’s a professor at DePaul University, and does research in the fields of emotion and law. Here’s one thing she says: “People are far less adept at evaluating demeanor than they believe. … There is currently no evidence that remorse can accurately be evaluated based on facial expression and body language in a courtroom.”

And here’s another: “There is little evidence that remorse can be distinguished from stigmatic shame in a courtroom; yet shame is not associated with a desire to behave better in the future, and in fact has been correlated with higher rates of recidivism.” (1)

Research tells us that people also can’t determine whether someone who is crying or exhibiting sadness in a courtroom (behavior often correlated with remorse) is doing so because of the harm caused by their actions, or because they were caught and are going to prison. You might think you can interpret remorse or guilt by reading facial expressions and body language, but think again. These outward signs can have more than one cause.

In a peer-reviewed article by legal scholar Jeffrey Murphy he states, “Remorse connotes an internal state — a condition of the soul. The determination that one is appropriately remorseful is more a judgment of deep character than an evaluation of state of mind.” (2)

Remorse is a process, not something magical and instant. It’s so complex that many researchers believe it can’t be assessed or even observed by outward signs.

CV: So, wait a minute! You step on my toe and say you’re sorry, and I’m not supposed to be able to tell if you mean it?

EPJ: (laughs) No. You can’t tell.

CV: Not even if you give me tickets to a football game the next day?

EPJ: Well…. Seriously, no. That’s an apology, but it’s kind of a token apology. When a person says they’re sorry, that they take responsibility for their actions, and they will try not to offend again—that’s an apology and outward expression of regret. It expresses the intention to be remorseful, but is not remorse itself. Remorse is evidence of whether or not the person actually meant those words by engaging in the process of change in thought and behavior.

We can’t tell if a person is actually remorseful until some time has elapsed after they say they are sorry and take responsibility. They will have to demonstrate their remorse for it to be genuine through their actions. Just saying the words can be a verbal performance to negotiate reduced charges and lenient sentences. Often, for many people, that’s just what it is. Research and common sense tell us, however, that saying and doing are two different things. The saying part is the apology and the demonstrating part is the remorse.

Here is something to consider as well. If offenders are truly sorry for their actions why do they wait until they are resentenced to say they are sorry months after their arrest? How many people are arrested and immediately apologize to the police, or ask the police to convey that they are sorry to their victim? Instead, they wait until they negotiate a deal before expressing they are sorry to a judge.

So looking back to what we talked about earlier, we don’t know that 95% of people are remorseful. We only know that they apologized, and in 67% of cases, that apology did not stick. Why? Because the vast majority of them do not understand the reality and process of remorse.

When I teach classes to prisoners about emotional intelligence, and we talk about remorse, I explain that to truly be remorseful is to be able to demonstrate the enduring change they committed to making over a period of time. Not just temporarily. Not just days or weeks, but months or years. Show it in the way they live their life, make decisions, and treat others.

I explain that people can express they are sorry and take responsibility and be genuine, but if they do not follow through with the internal change, they are not demonstrating remorse because they have not completed the process required for remorse.

CV: We think of remorse as something so simple, and yet you’re saying that most prisoners don’t understand it at all.

EPJ: Of course not. If the majority of prisoners had the tools and knowledge and desire to foster internal change, they wouldn’t have committed the crimes that got them sent to prison. Most of the prisoners in my classes don’t even know the dictionary definition of the word “remorse.” The average prisoner has a fifth-grade reading level. Less than 40% ever got through high school. A huge number were abused as children, or exposed to violence, and have never experienced a healthy, supportive family. There are 10 times as many people with mental illness incarcerated, as there are institutionalized in mental health facilities. Or, if you want a really grim statistic, a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that approximately 106,000 teens are in custody in U.S. juvenile facilities, and that nearly two-thirds of boys and three-quarters of girls have at least one psychiatric disorder.

CV: And then—I’m thinking about our earlier interviews and what it’s like to live in prison—then they walk into a violent climate where nothing is normal, where a person can go crazy just trying to survive; and somehow, they are supposed to learn about empathy, and emotional intelligence, and personal transformation.

EPJ: What’s amazing is how many succeed.

CV: But then we go back to a courtroom climate where remorse cannot be proven or assessed, and everybody, from the judge down to the jury, down to the local newspaper reporter, is trying to decide who’s remorseful and who isn’t.

EPJ: Correct. First of all, in my experience, almost no one coming through the court system into prison truly understands remorse. They may feel regret, and they know the right words to make an apology, but they do not understand the transformation that needs to happen to be really remorseful.

But the second thing is, we have a huge problem here. A judge can’t accept a guilty plea until s/he is convinced that the person is guilty, and isn’t supposed to consider giving any leniency unless convinced the person demonstrates remorse.

So what’s really being assessed is demeanor. Except that nobody agrees what that demeanor should look like. There’s a study published—Dr. Zhong is one of the authors—that asked dozens of sitting judges, how can you tell whether an offender is remorseful or not? And it looks at the simple issue of eye contact. (3)

Well, here’s what happened. Half the judges said, “Hey, yes, I know he’s remorseful if he looks me in the eye.” And the other half said, “I can tell he’s remorseful because he’s looking at the floor, and that means he’s ashamed.”

They might as well have flipped a quarter. But that doesn’t even begin to show the depth of the problem, because we have so many people coming through courts with mental illness that’s undiagnosed or ignored. That factor, along with poor education, can profoundly impede someone’s understanding and their ability to express regret. So even if sentencing bodies could decide what remorse looks like—and this would be an inaccurate concept, regardless—there would still be a number of people entering courts who are handicapped in their self-presentation through no fault of their own.

That might be one thing if no one’s life were at stake, but we’re talking sometimes about death penalty cases. Dr. Susan Bandes gives a great interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge, where she cites another study about that. She says, “There’s a Capital Jury Project that interviewed many jurors after they had determined life or death sentences in capital cases, and these jurors said that remorse was either one of three important factors or the most important factor in determining whether someone would be sentenced to life or death.”

CV: I wish you were joking.

EPJ: Yeah, think about that. Guilty or innocent, alive or dead. Based on one thing we think we can measure, and we might as well be flipping a quarter.

CV: So when we talk about the idea that the presence or absence of remorse predicts whether or not people will offend in the future, we’re really identifying the outward expression of regret—not transformative remorse—as our marker.

EPJ: Most of the time, yes. Research shows that expressing regret for wrongdoing can be a marker that an offender recognizes what s/he did was wrong, but it cannot predict the future. Additionally, I think it could help if decision-makers would ask offenders to define remorse and then ask if they are remorseful. It’s not a complete solution, but at least it’s a starting point, and a big improvement on guessing.

This is why I return to my belief that learning and being able to convey the four cognitive reframing issues I proposed earlier in the interview are better indicators of reoffending than conveying the trio of guilt, sorrow, and responsibility.

I have worked with prisoners up close, treated them as human beings worthy of redemption, and helped them rebuild their lives. It explains why my formerly incarcerated friends who I worked closely with in prison have gone on to live productive lives upon their release, while others that the MDOC has treated with a hands-off approach continue to recidivate. We can’t objectify people and treat them without compassion and expect them to become better.

I believe the system must do a much better job about not only ensuring people understand what they did is wrong, but also teaching them the skills to do the introspective work and cognitive restructuring that correlates with the change that must occur in their lives. If not, we’re going to see terrible numbers in recidivism—again and again.

CV: And with that, we’ve reached the end of our time today. Next time, I want to ask you about one of the biggest influences in your jury’s decision to convict you of first degree murder—a piece of advice that it’s hard to believe any attorney ever gave a client.

EPJ: But it happened.

CV: It happened, and that will be the subject of our seventh installment of this interview. Thank you.

EPJ: Thank you.

 

1 Susan A. Bandes, “Remorse and Demeanor in the Courtroom: Cognitive Science and the Evaluation of Contrition,” in “The Integrity of Criminal Process: From Theory into Practice” 309, 312 (Jill Hunter et al. eds. 2016).

2 “Remorse, Apology, and Mercy,” 4 Ohio St. J. Crim. Law (2007)

3 R. Zhong, M. Baranoski, N. Feigenson, I. Davidson, A. Buchanan, and H.V. Zonana, “So You’re Sorry? The Role of Remorse in Criminal Law,” 42 Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 39 (2014)

Part 7 of this interview coming soon.

Efren Paredes, Jr. is a Michigan prisoner and subject of the new multi-channel documentary film installation, “Half Truths and Full Lies.” He is also a blogger, social justice advocate, proud father, and loving husband. You can learn more about Efren by visiting www.fb.com/Free.Efren and www.tinyurl.com/Efren1016.