San Quentin is where I learned to take personal responsibility for my actions (including my crime), as have thousands of other men within San Quentin’s walls.

THE CIRCLE: Explaining my crime and recovery

WHAT-HOW-WHY is our family cipher. We use it to solve just about any issue. I use it here to explain my CRIME.

When asked to explain my crime, I do not intend to provide crime-porn nor dance to the twelve-step in written form.

WHAT-HOW-WHY is our family cipher. We use it to solve just about any issue. I use it here to explain my CRIME.

The WHAT of my crime was driving drunk and committing gross negligent vehicular manslaughter. The HOW I thought it acceptable to take such risks and the WHY I have spent long hours, weeks, years discovering.

San Quentin is where I learned how to take this solitary psychic discovery journey, face my crime and take personal responsibility for my actions (including my crime), as have thousands of other men within San Quentin’s walls.

I have asked myself WHY every day since the accident, rightly called MY CRIME. If there is a grace to serving at San Quentin, it is the array of groups that provide psychic tools to delve into the mind. I had taken full advantage of these opportunities. San Quentin is where I learned how to take this solitary psychic discovery journey, face my crime and take personal responsibility for my actions (including my crime), as have thousands of other men within San Quentin’s walls. In THE CIRCLE: A Family Discussion, I seek to squeeze my hard-won realizations into a communicable essay. My goal is to share what I had learned about myself over long years of prison work and seclusion. What follows is a tool more than an essay.

Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture. If the structure of culture is disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything — anything — to defend ourselves against that return. “… the very fact that a general problem has gripped and assimilated the whole of a person is a guarantee that the speaker has really experienced it, and perhaps gained something from his sufferings. He will then reflect the problem for us in his personal life and thereby show us a truth.” Peterson Maps of Meaning

“I sought to understand my recklessness. I learned to free past facts from their story-wrapping. Painfully, as facts are dangerous things — they can cut you no matter how deeply they are wrapped or buried in the past if you’re not careful,” I told wife.

As I walked the San Quening Visiting Room with my ex-wife and mother of our two children (WIFE), she looked at me with the worry of a loved one — hoping I had not completely lost it. I grabbed her hand. “These story-wrapped facts become proof of our successes and justifications for suffering. Once wrapped in story, the story becomes the truth,” I said. It was important for WIFE to understand my rehabilitation consisted of examining the facts of my crimes and their impact on victims, families (both my victim’s and my own), community, and self.

If you are curious about prison life and the real work that goes on there, read The San Quentin News or listen to Ear Hustle.

She could not understand this growth was possible for me in only one place — in the CIRCLE.

NOT in her arms at night.

NOT in church.

NOT in a psychiatrist’s office.

How do I explain the power of the CIRCLE held in our VOEG group?

Victim Offender Education Group (VOEG) is one of a myriad of volunteer-organized rehabilitation programs at California’s San Quentin State Prison. It meets once a week for two hours and usually consists of a dozen inmates, one inmate facilitator, and two volunteer moderators. VOEG’s purpose is to help inmates develop empathy for their victims, communities and even their prior selves. A component of restorative justice, VOEG helps offenders learn to demonstrate accountability for their crimes and develop new habits to respond to life’s challenges.

Our CIRCLE was powered by death — A most potent source of power. We needed great power too if we were to accomplish our goal. Each member brought death to the group. A wife stabbed twenty times, baseball bat beatings, drunk-driver destruction, crack and meth dreams. Even the moderator, trapped in motherhood at 15, she had been the killer of her children’s dreams just as we had all destroyed those of our victims and their families. Our small group met in a circle so that all were invited to participate equally in this discovery journey.

We all had whys and reasons for our crimes too. Each rationalization used to leverage our climb higher up Mount Narcissus. These stories we had created to wrap the hard sharp facts of our lives. The enthralling pleasures of these stories (and the actions these stories gave us permission to do) blinding us to the abyss we approached. Each of us was going to “get mine” funded by lies, drugs, alcohol, bank robberies, looting, identity theft, kidnapping, torture and abuses of every kind. All such acts justified; allowing us to hide as if we were in someone else’s skin. Seeking achievement by money or sex or blessed forgetting — again and again, becoming safe with a drug, weapon or new identity. We came to the CIRCLE to learn the source of our malcontent.

Some people seem to get stuck there, though. Sadly. Some people like the additional pain. They stay antsy every day, all day; causing fights, acting strange, forcing themselves into this and that. Even when physically doing nothing, you could see them racing around in their heads, anxious and guilty of their procrastination with reality.

It is human nature to put all data into context in order to tell a story, re-create the world by this means, and thereby be able to predict outcomes (causality). Most of the incarcerated operate under a warped narrative that they are unable to change on their own.

We did not go to the CIRCLE alone; we came bearing wrapped gifts — the explanations of our CRIMES (each fact wrapped in story-stuff). Mind you, we offered ourselves up to join the group and form the CIRCLE. None of us understood what that meant. What it would cost.

Victim Offender Education Group (VOEG) was one of the myriads of volunteer-organized rehabilitation programs at California’s San Quentin State Prison. Our group began with ten inmates, one inmate facilitator, and two volunteer moderators. After two AD-SEG roll-ups, a transfer, two dropouts, and one release, we ended with only four inmates. Still, the CIRCLE held true to its purpose.

While these losses were common on the Main Line, none of us could have guessed the CIRCLE would birth an additional death as well; one of our group. We all were trapped by the powerful siren call of rationalizations for our crimes as these rationalizations protected our self-image. In the CIRCLE, we sought to discover how to defuse our delusions by unwrapping them. None of us anticipated becoming witnesses to more death in the process.

You may have heard sages and mystics teach we live in dreams of our own making. What VOEG has taught me is that no such dream can sustain itself without a kernel of supporting facts (like a grain of sand in an oyster, we make pearls of it as our life story). Painfully, I have learned explicitly what I intuitively had always known, that facts are dangerous things — they can cut you if you’re not careful.

THE GIFT

Of all that lives on earth, humans are unique as we can take facts, put them in a box made of our culture.

“Much more of our sanity than we commonly realize is a consequence of our fortunate immersion in a social community….If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to [socialize]…They fall further and further behind, as the other children continue to progress…” Peterson 135),

As an individual, we then wrap them (the boxed facts) with the colorful paper of story and rationalization (“Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios.” Wilson 120). Our existence is but a dream based on narrative.

Most people don’t understand facts LIVE. Once immobilized, these facts are now safe to handle. They often become PRESENTS (THE GIFT) to be admired and can have many uses. Each man anxiously brought such story-wrapped facts to the CIRCLE. We spend about six months going over these stories; again and again, so that each person could share their life.

All of us were prepared to display our GIFT. We knew it was pretty to look at, but would that be enough? Would it be admired and appreciated? After all, these GIFT/presents are proof of our successes and justifications for suffering. This is STORY, humanity’s most powerful tool. Once created, STORY often becomes permanent; it fixes facts in place until we believe the story is fact. Rare are the occasions anyone actually opens such gifts and examines the facts they contain. VOEG was such a process.

If you were to read up on VOEG (“H-Unit VOEG graduates prepare for survivor panel”), you’d discover that its stated purpose is to help inmates develop empathy for their victims, communities and even their prior selves. This is a component of restorative justice intended to help offenders learn to demonstrate accountability for their crimes and develop new habits to respond to life’s challenges. Inmates evidence such development by participating in a Survivor Panel between victims of heinous crimes and the group. At the Panel group members would tell the unvarnished truth about their crimes and share the grief of survivors.

“Memory is not a description of the objective past. Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and your can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thinking happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not ‘to remember the past.’ It’s to stop the same damn thinking from happening over and over.” Peterson 239

Much work must be done to prepare for a Survivor Panel. In our case, the process took more than eighteen months. That work consisted of examining the facts of our crimes and their impact on victims, families (both our victims and our own), community, and self.

Our VOEG group started with setting the rules and each member taking turns explaining the act, context, and consequences of our crimes. VOEG started like a Christmas morning “secret Santa gift exchange” where each member of the group brought their carefully wrapped GIFT/PRESENT (public persona) for the group to examine in the CIRCLE. The main difference with a gift exchange is that in VOEG no one else in the group can unwrap the GIFT/PRESENT to see the facts it contains. However, thoughtful and detailed questioning may allow them to detect the shape of such facts even better than the offender. Ultimately, the offender must do the unwrapping. After all that work to box, pack, wrap and tie, the group invites them to unwrap the GIFT/PRESENT and display the facts. Such is only possible if you can access real power within the CIRCLE. In our case, the give and take of unwrapping took over eighteen months.

If you are curious about prison life and the real work that goes on there, read The San Quentin News or listen to Ear Hustle.

He almost hit me, so… [Why did you have to chase him?]

I would show my wife… [What did she do but tell of her pain/fear?]

I hurt so much I need to… [Why alone, why take instead of earn?]

By unwrapping the GIFT/PRESENT and displaying the facts inside (seeing them for the first time with adult eyes), the past is called back to life in the CIRCLE. The facts are brought to life once freed from their story-wrapping. We seem to instinctually sense that the reason we wrapped them in a tight web of story was to immobilize them. Sharp loose facts spinning around can shatter a self-image after all. That is much more difficult to build than wrapping a mere PRESENT. Pain takes on a new meaning when you begin to use these sharp facts to remove the armor made to mold and protect your self-image.

I so wish to have status, acceptance, happiness… [So stealing is okay, even a life]

I must be better, faster, stronger because I have no self-worth… [I can handle drinking alone that is what I deserve, to be alone]

I hurt so much don’t they SEE, I’ll show them… [Justice delayed or denied, then I will take it]

THE CIRCLE

The power of the CIRCLE is manifest thus. “TRUST the PROCESS” became our mantra as the unwrapping progressed.

As you watch the presentation of the story-GIFT/PRESENTS of others in the CIRCLE, you learn the true potential of the CIRCLE. A CIRCLE has no corners. If the group can hold the CIRCLE (given we started with ten and finished with four, no easy feat), power is manifested. This takes tremendous integrity but is worth the gathering and release of power. As power gains force in the CIRCLE, the past is awakened and the impossible becomes real, the offender will be able to:

First, examine and acknowledge the PRESENT that was so carefully wrapped in stories. We have claimed, sometimes for decades, that there is no need to unwrap it because we know what is inside. Those facts are fixed and they justify our choices if not the results.

Second, as the group (always with curiosity and often sadness) acknowledges the beauty of the story-wrapping, it is drawn to the shape of the PRESENT as well and questioning the facts it contains. The shape of the PRESENT does not exactly fit the facts we have so carefully claimed as being inside. The group invites us to unwrap the PRESENT by making guesses about the facts it contains.

Third, the group encourages the presenter to unwrap it. Only the offender can be the one to pull the hard sharp facts out and display them to the group. Even if the group members can discern the facts, they cannot open it. The presenter can, safely, in the CIRCLE.

While never a straightforward process, each group member attempts to unwrap his GIFT/PRESENT thus loosening the sharp facts. Once freed of their wrapping, he can examine them anew, with mature eyes and use them to begin cutting through the armor worn to protect the self-image.

The value and reformative nature of confinement is, at least for me, not necessarily to develop into a different person, but to properly face the strange, painful, difficult, and almost inexplicable person you might really be. The person who isn’t even really a person, but the thing that lacks a complete and obvious person, but longs relentlessly for one. The truth of what you might be, that you went to great, massive efforts to otherwise avoid. And instead, you direct your efforts to learn how to live with this, rather than always lashing and flailing away from it.

This armor serves a purpose, but we have worn and admired it for so long that we can’t recognize it as separate from self. Only with true power and nowhere to hide (after all, we are in the CIRCLE) can we find the strength to use these newly unwrapped facts to cut off the armor and reveal the self.

Here is when transformation can happen, in the CIRCLE. In such a group, by unwrapping facts you can:

Discover the source of your compulsion to buy happiness which drove you to steal identities and get busted in possession of seventeen different driver’s licenses and bank accounts — all bearing your likeness, if not your true name. What choice did your child-self have when a father made you watch when he killed your puppy or had your mother wash the dishes with razor blades in the soapy water. Demented discipline driving you to escape — to BE someone ELSE — and you still do.

Discover that you stabbed your wife, the mother of your four children, because you could no longer repress your homosexuality even though your NFL-player father and community expected you to “be a man.” You had to escape your false life. You found love in prison with a transvestite named Crystal. You could not even bring yourself to admit Crystal began as a man named Gary.

Discover that your life as a bank robber and addict was powered by stolen innocence; Five banks, five banks to support your family, your image, your habit. You were shame personified and desperately sought happiness and success from a gun and glass crack pipe. A twelve-year-old cast out by a mother, stepfather, and half-sisters, therefore became prey as you found comfort and enjoyed the attention of a pedophile counselor. To your young-self, it seemed a fair exchange to be taken to Raiders games, restaurants, and then to his home to be used. The abuse never recognized until the CIRCLE. The shame, anger, and pain of a young boy used in abominable ways — echoed in your actions as a man.

Discover that your inability to face your PAIN as a boy-abandoned-empty-worthless-allowed you to use alcohol to hide from your existence as an Ivy-league attorney, husband, and father. Your life-long defensive reaction to this PAIN was predicated on the lie that you always had to be BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER — but alone always alone as you had no worth in your own eyes. The shame and fear of being vulnerable allowed in the CIRCLE.

In VOEG, we learn to face the consequences of our crimes because — well we did them, however, our crimes are not all we are. Those of us in the CIRCLE do not seek forgiveness or understanding per se. By differing degrees, each of us took responsibility for our crimes; however, we also acknowledged these acts were power manifest. The CIRCLE created a means to discover not only the HOW but the WHY as well. Next, we sought to discover what FACT lay at the headwaters of our destructive rivers of malcontent. What had created and empowered our tragic excesses generated as a defense against this pre-memory FACT?

Once discovered, the natural inclination is to build a wall around the FACT so it cannot happen again. This is merely another form of wrapping the FACT and hiding from it. If you are an alcoholic, avoiding bars makes sense; but such actions do not address your underlying compulsion to drink. In the CIRCLE, we seek to dismantle the power of that pre-memory FACT upon our very self.

And so, as we maintained the CIRCLE and removed our armor of self-image, the goal became searching for the FACT that had empowered our tragic excesses. For those of us in the CIRCLE, these excesses included horrific crimes. Though not one of us denied these crimes or their consequences, still, we all sought to understand what compelled us to commit them. None of us wished to stay caught in the currents of such excesses.

We needed the power of the CIRCLE to face the consequences of our crimes and with that acceptance came the desire to become true adults of honor. Disconcertingly, it is human nature that once you confirm you that are not evil, you want to believe someone or something compelled you to commit such malevolence. This became the heart of the next stage of our journey of self-discovery. Discovering that there is no one else to blame for our actions — that takes power too. We learned that no one and nothing controls a human. We choose to act and must face any consequences such actions bring.

But how can we assure ourselves that we won’t continue to commit high crimes?

Not everyone could meet this challenge. Some skulked off, never to be heard from again (thus our CIRCLE shrunk). They could not bear to discover the trigger wrapped in rationalizations. Others never could open their GIFT/PRESENT and sought to continue in their delusions (never able to admit their own power to action). This has a cost of course. Thus, death visited our group again. Thirty-six hours after release, the knowledge of the blood debt weighed too much and a man sought the comfort of an old friend delivered by a needle. His heroin overdose the final act for a man caught in a web of blood death and unable to family demand he kill again.

First, you must find the psychic tools that will allow us to access that part of yourself you have avoided all our memory-life. For so long have you imprisoned this facet, you have forgotten it even exists and renamed it — monster. It is not a monster you have locked away, but you were right to do so. You needed to lock it up so you could survive the pre-memory time. It has a true name and seeks its rightful place in our DELUSION HOUSE and to participate in our LIFE. Letter to My Younger Self

As for me, I unwrapped my crime and learned to face the harsh glare of its consequences. Next, I went to destroy the cultural box I had used to hide my painful FACT from my consciousness. This was the most difficult part of my journey of self-discovery.

You begin to better accept it, learn how to live with it, and use it properly, now that you know what’s been there causing most of the problems. Granted this is all just my experience, and I don’t wish to portray it as anything but that. Nor do I wish to portray any conclusive awareness as to how I might turn out and what this all might equate to when my term is over, and I’m finally released back into the world.

Doing this has allowed me to serve. I could not help my victim nor her family now locked in the past, however, other victims were still in need. Our Victim Panel had individuals still hostage to their grief. It was my honor to serve as a substitute for that frightening monster that had ripped open their lives. By standing in the glare of these victims’ grief, I hoped they too could be freed from the hypnotic fixation on the crime-memory just as I had been held in thrall by its cause. Then, maybe, they could mourn and continue with their lives; to transform from victims to survivors — [a mother whose son was taken on his wedding night, a daughter whose father was stolen at eleven, and a wife that would never dance with her husband again].

Such is my hope for them. My hope for myself.

“How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything. But the alternative — the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless individual — is clearly worse.” ― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Free of the twin distractions of mobility and community, I spent my time pondering deep concepts — one was survival on the Main Line in an infamously famous and brutal prison, San Quentin.

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Wayne Boatwright: Identified as CDCR # AN0094, the author was formally known as Wayne Boatwright. He is a fifth-generation Californian and inmate serving 92 months for gross negligent vehicular manslaughter. He still remembers being a husband, father of two pre-teens and a deacon of his local Church before donning CDCR blue. To create in any form takes courage, I have found mine through the chrysalis of prison.