Newsday editor Jim Smith
Newsday
Chaplains are uniquely positioned to see changes and similarities in the prison population over the years. The Rev. Lillian Frier Webb, 85, of West Hempstead, retired in December after spending 25 years as one of the women’s chaplains at the Nassau County Correctional Center in East Meadow. She spent her career in a variety of helping professions, as a teacher, counselor, writer and as pastor of Mount Olive African Methodist Episcopal Church in Port Washington from 1985 to 2002.
Webb was a co-founder of the correctional center’s “Women at the Well” rehabilitation program, and her “Church on the Inside” worship service has helped transform the lives of many inmates.
She talked about life on the inside with Newsday editor Jim Smith.
How did you first come to be involved with the jail?
Rev. Tom Kennedy from the Long Island Council of Churches heard me speak. He approached me and asked if I’d be interested in doing some chaplaincy. I went there and recognized the skills I had were needed at the jail. I’d been working with the Nassau County Department of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. I was skilled in dealing with women in difficulty. I saw it as a call.
Did the population change much over the years?
The ratio was always about the same - about 80 percent nonwhite, mostly black.
How about the types of crimes?
Most of the crimes women were in for were minor, like carrying a lover’s gun while he was robbing a liquor store, doing petty theft.
How about the atmosphere?
I was quite comfortable. They accepted me, and I accepted them. I was nonjudgmental.
Do any inmates stand out in your mind?
There was a young girl, 17-18, who told me she was in because of the manslaughter of a priest. It occurred to me that she was talking about a friend of mine, a Presbyterian minister from Freeport who’d been murdered.
I was quite angry. But here I was, positioned between an inmate who is my client and my friend who was killed. She claimed she had nothing to do with it. But she was an accomplice, with her boyfriend. How do I treat the situation? I had to wrestle much with that.
I dealt with it that she was coming out of her life space. When we work out of a life space that is limited, there is limited behavior. I eventually told her that it was my friend. I told her how angry I was. And she said, “And you still talked to me?” That was the point at which she decided to deal with some of her issues. She went upstate, got her BA and told me she was going to go into social work.
What techniques did you use as a chaplain?
My skills as a pastor. The No. 1 thing was to get them to recognize their error, recognize the power of forgiveness, and that forgiveness is a healing process. And to understand that there are consequences for your actions.
I told them it’s not the end of their lives because once they recognize the behavior is a consequence of their limited world, they can widen their world.
I don’t know how many I reached, but inmates have come to me and said that [my work] was not a labor done in vain. One woman told me she was arrested 18 times, but each time she came back, she knew she could meet with me and not be judged and not be reprimanded. She now works with inmates and their families.
Is jail a fertile place for people to find religion?
Just like there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no atheists in a jail. There’s the “cell conversion.” It’s a resolve that they’re not going to do what they did again.
Did recidivism bother you?
Jail is a structured environment. However, the inmate is unstructured. Then, society releases the inmate into an unstructured society and expects a very structured person. It was always my theory that there needs to be something in between — a transitional treatment process.
How many women attended a worship service?
At my first service, we met in a laundry room. I had eight women. It was a male place. Males had the chapel. But the most I ever had was 100.
Did the proportion of women inmates increase over the years?
Oh, yes. The Rockefeller drug laws definitely had an effect. That, and the fact there were more women using drugs. It really doesn’t make sense to me to put women in jail for years because they carried a small amount of crack for their husbands. But the sentences got longer, and they had difficulty when they came out, so recidivism was common.
There were times when I said I was quitting. But then I would go to a service on Sunday, look into the faces of these women and say, “I’m not going to quit this week” because they’re so needy. They have a need to be loved. I’m not saying they were innocent. They were guilty, guilty as hell. But they were also victims of an institutionalized process. Prisons are an industry. You get the men in jail and families degenerate.
Would inmates confide in you?
Officers are there for security, to keep the peace. They’re not allowed to individualize or see the inmates as human beings. Touching can be so comforting, but officers are not allowed to touch. I was. The females would come to me with issues they could not take to the officers, even something as benign as them needing special hair-care products.
It was like my congregation, my evolving congregation. I’d become part of their world. We connected some of them to God and made a difference in their lives. Most of them had had unpleasant experiences with males, particularly their fathers. For them to understand a benevolent male God was tough after having gotten black eyes from their boyfriends or pimps or having been involved in incestuous behavior. Many had been raped.
So a God who comes with that cloth of judgment and power was tough [to understand]. We had to try to change their idea of God and help them understand that spirituality is not necessarily genderized. It was tough. But when I’ve seen the process begin, hey, what joy!
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