By ANGIE BASIOUNY,
The News Journal
The men are exceedingly polite.
Entering the room one at a time, they shake hands with their visitors, introduce themselves and offer the guests a seat on white plastic chairs.
It's almost like any other social exchange. Except this is the Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna, and these 10 men are doing hard time for some of society's most violent crimes.
They are murderers, rapists and thieves.
They are also desperate for forgiveness, aching to be seen as something other than monsters.
They are members of the prison's Social Justice Committee, a volunteer group headed by inmate Joseph M. Walls, who is serving life plus 99 years for robbery, kidnapping and assault.
On a recent July night, Walls invited members of the public into the prison for a Community Healing Impact Panel. It gives a chance for the men to talk about their crimes, the consequences and the future. Their goal is somewhat intangible: They want to become better people.
The panel is the second since March, and a third is scheduled for November.
"While the guys in here have committed some very serious crimes, they're very, very sorry for doing so," Walls tells the visitors. "They are looking for a way to atone for their crimes. We're interested in hearing from you because we want to know what we should be doing to make amends."
The men take turns rising from their chairs, which are placed in a large circle, and telling the guests what they have done.
The recitation is sobering: "I committed a rape," says one. "I stabbed a man to death," says another.
"At the age of 15, I was involved in a burglary," says Linwood L. Shields. "At the end of the day, I was charged with rape and murder. I've been incarcerated for 34 years."
Mary An Love, program coordinator for Parish Social Ministry of Catholic Charities, listens with an open heart.
She's known some of the men for a while now, having taught a seven-week course in the prison that began in November called Salt and Light.
Each week, the course focused on a principle of Catholic social teaching, including good stewardship, human dignity, unity and the treatment of the poor and vulnerable.
When Walls asked for her help in creating the Community Healing Impact Panel, Love sent out e-mails to nearly everyone she knew, inviting them all to participate.
She knows some will criticize her for doing this. She emphasizes that her work is not meant to slight the victims or their families.
"Nobody is ever forgetting the victims or denying the horrible things that were done," she says. "If anything, it's based on the recognition that all of us are sinners. Their sins are more obvious to the world."
Also human
For Love, the program is among the most satisfying things she's done as a Christian. She recalls the first time she met the inmates and they questioned her ability to approach them without judgment.
"A man asked, 'How can you come down here and be with us, because we are what they say we are? We're murderers and bank robbers,' " Love said. "I said, 'You're also human beings.' And he said, 'Thank you. I haven't heard that in a long time.' "
"When we look inside any person, we are to see the face of Christ," she said. "We're taught the face of Christ is most visible in the poor and the oppressed. It's true. And it's easier to see Christ in them."
It's also easier to see their frustration. Anger over lives wasted, the inability to make it right, take it back, do it over.
Stuart Skinner, 42, is 18 years into his 65-year sentence for the murder of Edmond Hammelbacher, a man he killed in an argument over a woman and drugs.
"If I could turn back time," he says, not finishing the sentence. With a note of exasperation and sadness, Skinner asks the 15 visitors what more he could do to pay for his crime.
"In your eyes, truthfully, how much is enough?" he says. "I'm not a dangerous person. I made a mistake. I killed a man for no good reason. That's my fault. I live with it day in and day out. But how much of this is enough for society?"
The answer from state Sen. Colin Bonini, R-Dover South, is a tough one.
"We want you to serve your time," he says. "The people I represent, they want people who commit crimes away from them. They don't care where you are or what you are doing, as long as you're not in their neighborhoods."
Bonini, who is running for lieutenant governor, is among four state legislators attending the panel. The others are Reps. John Kowalko, D-Newark South; Pamela Maier, R-Drummond Hill, and Pamela Thornburg, D-Dover West. Because of their presence, the conversation often takes a political turn, with the inmates appealing for help with rehabilitation programs and more jobs inside so inmates can be productive.
The discussion is frank.
"We are being honest with you, and we want you to be honest with us," Walls says. "It helps us grow as individuals. If you think we need to be taken out back and shot in the head, if that's how you feel, that tells us we have more work to do."
Walls, 54, was convicted in 1988 for a Newport home invasion in which he terrorized two men and hit them with a baseball bat.
He was also convicted of first-degree kidnapping. In that case, a jury found him guilty of barging into a Marshallton couple's home with an accomplice and handcuffing the husband while the intruders looted the house of cash and jewelry.
Walls, who has been an active leader with the St. Dismas Catholic Community inside the prison for years, says he's not the man he used to be.
"I was drinking and drugging," he says. "I was terrible. You did not want to meet Joe Walls back then."
Walls met Jackie Foster, a Newark-area mother and volunteer with Holy Family Church, when she came to the first panel in March. Foster returned for the second panel, bringing Kowalko and Maier.
Impressed by sincerity
She said the experience has been eye-opening.
"These gentlemen want to make amends," she said. "They cannot bring back the lives they took or return the people they have raped back to their prior status. But they want to make amends. I am impressed by the sincerity of their remorse, and I know there are so many people who do not want to hear that."
Foster is especially concerned with Walls, whom she has begun writing to, and Shields. And she wonders whether anyone imprisoned for a long time is given the tools to transition into society when he is released.
"I am completely convinced that every human being has dignity," she said. "And I'm not entirely sure that our correctional system has dignity."
Shields, who is serving a 90-year mandatory sentence for the 1974 murder of Phillis Lenhart, doesn't think about getting out.
"I don't know how much is enough," he says. "It's still real for me. Not only do I not see light at the end of the tunnel. I don't even see the tunnel. I try to maintain my sanity because I don't have a lot to do."
Just 17 at the time of his trial, Shields was one of the youngest defendants in the state to face murder charges, and his crime made headlines for years. He was convicted of raping and strangling Lenhart, a 54-year-old bank employee who went home to meet her sister for lunch and found Shields burglarizing her home.
In 1993, more than 200 of Lenhart's friends and relatives signed a petition opposing Shields' bid for pardon.
Foster said she was bothered when she first met Shields that he seemed "a little disassociated" from his crimes.
"I thought about it, and of course he's remote," she said. "He committed those crimes when he was 15 years old. He probably can't even relate now to that 15-year-old person he was."
It seems that way as Shields, in a quiet voice, tells the panel how he feels. "I've been thrown away," he says.
Then he tells the group his fondest wish: "I'd like to be able to sit on my porch tonight and listen to the crickets."
The panel lasts just over an hour before the men are told by guards to return to their cells.
As the prison gates lock behind them, the visitors venture back into the summer night. Some have a renewed appreciation for their own freedom. Some have a sympathy they did not expect to feel.
Love urges the panelists not to forget the experience.
"Even though we don't see them, they are still members of society and they want to make up for what they've done," she says. "They are reaching out to the community and saying, 'Remember us, accept us.' "
Contact Angie Basiouny at 324-2796 or abasiouny@delawareonline.com.
