An evening redness pierces the sky, the last rays of the sun stretching out into the already blackened east. I’m used to passing through the gates of Santa Rosa Correctional Institution in Milton, Florida, under the day’s sun. But tonight I am late, and I’m let in past 6 p.m. There’s a hushed quiet descending over the camp.

I’m a priest of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee who routinely goes into the prisons in Florida’s panhandle (nearly 40% of Florida’s incarcerated population are confined in the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee). Santa Rosa Correctional, on the western end of Florida’s panhandle, is a massive solitary confinement camp where more than 1,000 men are warehoused. In the steel and concrete hallways lined with cells, men swelter in the summer heat, idle and bored.

The escort officer knocks on the steel door. We’re buzzed into the dorm. Inside, the wing is bathed in a powerful fluorescent light that, as one prisoner told me, makes its occupants feel like lab rats 20 hours a day. I hadn’t noticed before how overwhelming this light is because it was usually caught up in the outside sun. Now contrasted by the soft, milky moonlight in the distance, the fluorescent bulbs saturate the wing. As I arrive at F Dorm, passing by each cell door, peering into the scratched plexiglass windows, most men are already reclining in their beds.

Unspeakable Loss, Terrible Regrets

I come to Cornelius’ cell.

Cornelius is a light-skinned Black man in his late 20s. His tales from childhood would lead you to believe he grew up in Mosul, Damascus or Baghdad. Exposure to killing was routine. When Cornelius was 12 years old, his father was gunned down in front of him. His young eyes saw his father torn with bullets. Cornelius would never recover from that moment of unspeakable loss. Understandably so. Who could? But who’d hear his cries? Those unheard cries dug an emptiness in his soul that would be filled by rage. His brother, a gang member, as Cornelius identified him, overdosed on Molly — one more dead. Cornelius was pulled under by the powerful undercurrents of violence and death that surrounded him.

Surrounded by this darkness, Cornelius made a fateful decision to take another young Black man’s life. Sobbing in front of me one day not long ago, he spoke of his desire to make amends, to express his remorse to the man’s family. He can only repeat these terrible regrets to himself, night after night.

Tonight, he rushes to the window, appearing groggy but excited to talk — he had just woken up from a dream. Dreams can be magical windows opening for us new vistas to see ourselves and others.

“I just had this dream, Father, like just a few minutes ago.”

Naturally I’m ready to hear dreams. “If you’d like to share it, please do.”

“There was this ditch, muddy and all. I saw my father sinking into the ditch.” Cornelius waits a second or two. “Yeah, it was my father.” He says it a second time as though to confirm it.

“And my brother, yeah, he was sinking into the ditch as well.” I could tell Cornelius was still putting the pieces back together of a fragmented dream.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“I went into the ditch to help them. So, I’m sinking into the ditch, too. And my dad told me something. He told me his stomach was in pain, like right here.” Cornelius points at his stomach.

I ask, “Why might that be significant?”

“I think he was shot there — yeah, he was shot in the stomach.”

He went on: “Then my father told me he had something important to tell me. He wanted me to stay down there. Then, all the sudden, I realized this wasn’t just a ditch; it was a grave. That’s when I woke up. Man, Father, I couldn’t hear what he wanted to tell me!”

Visibly upset, Cornelius stares at me with a sad face. I could feel his regret, not knowing what his father wanted to say to him. I wondered how much time this young man spent wanting to hear his father’s voice, wanting to speak with him.

“Father, I wish we could talk more about this stuff, you know. Why can’t we just sit at a table and talk? Man, wouldn’t it be nice to sit, me not being chained up and all, share a cup of tea together?”

As Cornelius relayed this dream to me, he said how much he looks forward to the day when this steel door doesn’t separate us — when mercy restores us. Wistfully, I know that is years away since Cornelius likely won’t be released for another 30 years. How often I hear this among our exiled, how they hope for a day to share a space together without those barriers, intrusive reminders of their captivity.

Jesus Reaches Out

Jesus begins his ministry announcing liberty to captives, joy to the oppressed (Lk 4:16-20). Throughout all four Gospels we see Jesus enter the margins, the far reaches of Israel’s society, to preach liberty and to show mercy. Following his reading of Isaiah’s prophetic words (Is 61:1), Jesus encounters the ostracized repeatedly, be they lepers, tax collectors or others on the margins of society.

To let the oppressed go free — this is what Jesus says to those in the synagogue that day. Preconceived notions, biases and the sheer resistance to change can be hard-wired into our brain to the point where we don’t dare tolerate letting the contained go. We like to think freedom is what we all desire, but do we? I ask myself that question often. I think to be truly free must cause a serious glitch in the human matrix. And when we are invited to draw close to those ostracized and shamed, we feel the impossible and unbending weight of oppression — theirs and ours. The countervailing winds of trauma and chaos make death more real than life.

Nonetheless Jesus stands, takes the place of authority and frees his voice, letting loose living words to create a new society where forgiveness and reconciliation are molded into a community of truth and justice. These words are undebatable, iron laws of God’s kingdom. It’s no time to spiritualize them into some idealized and vague realm, unreal to the oppressed.

I’ve often imagined an updated version of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” Instead of a white-bearded man in the sky reaching out towards Adam, Jesus extends his hands, crossing the vast space of ancient religious customs and societal taboos, to connect with a condemned leper and recreate fallen humanity.

The religious and societal taboos resisting Jesus’ stretching out toward the unclean leper were powerful. The risk here must not be glibly passed over. He knew his actions would send shock waves among his religious kin, just as he did in Nazareth’s synagogue that day. He knew reaching out would provoke a forceful reaction, as it had with the prophets’ generations before him. Yet those creative headwinds of paradise prevailed. He reached out, breaking the barriers imposed by repulsion and disgrace.

We might consider the gravitational forces pulling against Cornelius and so many serving lengthy sentences for violent crimes. Years of shame, violence, penury and stigma must have weighed on him. Living among the lowest of the low, Cornelius, as with so many others in these confinement dorms, no doubt internalized all the toxic sediment that settles in low places. Having resigned himself to probable death years ago, the law of decay must have already set into motion his downward spiral. Think of what some people say when humiliated: “I could’ve sunk into the ground.” Does he dare let loose those chains tying him to death and reach out his hand? Even for desperate people, to experience love and the possibility of change can feel like a trial. And yet the leper did. He reached out. His faith restored him that day. But could Cornelius? Could I?

These solitary-confinement dorms must be some of the lowest of all places on this planet. Some words of the French priest and confessor Abbé Henri Huvelin, spoken about Jesus occupying the lowest spaces, have stayed with me from the beginning of my prison visits: “You took always the lowest place and did it so completely that no one ever since has been able to wrest it from you.” The only way I can describe it is to say that here I have picked up on the presence of the soul of our world in faces like Cornelius.

What I have routinely found in these prison camps is a kind of living death. Yet, and this is where I encounter a trace of something transcendent, faint echoes of hope can be heard in the dreams and aspirations of those condemned to these societal morgues. It is here, in our jails, prisons, detention facilities and juvenile centers, that mercy comes alive.

We should pray for the day our justice system better reflects the truth that — in the words of civil and human rights advocate Bryan Stevenson, author of the book “Just Mercy” and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative — we are all more than the worst thing we’ve done. Until then, however, perhaps our pastoral presence may hasten a day when the liberty that Jesus of Nazareth preached will have a greater impact on our criminal justice system. 

FATHER DUSTIN FEDDON is founder and executive director of Joseph House, a nonprofit ministry based in Tallahassee, Florida, that supports individuals returning to society after incarceration, and he serves on the board of the Catholic Prison Ministries Coalition. His first book, “More Than Half Way Home: A Story of Accompaniment in the Shadows of Incarceration,” will be published by Orbis Press in September.