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Cyberspace: The final dating frontier
The mother of all years
Family myths, family realities
The Abandoned Newborn
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| THE FORGIVEN | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Some members of traditional support groups for victims' families find actions like Gayle's bewildering. "It sounds like an aberration rather than a natural instinct," says Waltrute Boudewyn, a member of Parents of Murdered Children, whose 19-year-old son Norman was murdered in 1987. "I don't know a single parent who would want that [relationship]. It sounds like an obsessive-compulsive way of associating themselves with the murderer." Sam Sheppard, who is a friend of Gayle's and a founding member of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, also worries about the passion with which she and others have embraced their relative's murderers. He compares it to the Stockholm syndrome, in which political prisoners begin to identify with their captors. "The general public doesn't understand them and some people are perceived as nuts, which is unfortunate, because I think they are sincere. But the family members need help, so that they can have a little better balance. Theoretically, my friend Aba is going to have to go through an execution with this man. She's setting herself up for a retraumatization." Sheppard would like to see the group form a mediation panel to help determine if it would be constructive for a victim's family to meet with the murderer or with another prisoner. "Then people can reconcile in a less intense, less volatile setting," says Sheppard. Sheppard, however, has met the man who he believes killed his mother -- a window-washer in the Sheppard home who is now in prison for another murder -- and he admits he feels an intense connection to him. "It's a marriage in a sense. The offender and the victim are forever linked." Sheppard has also met with another serial killer. "He taught me more about my mother's murderer than anyone in the world. He helped explain to me how somebody could come to do this kind of thing. In that case, he helped me." In some cases, killers who did not receive death or life sentences have been paroled through the intervention of a victim's family -- a situation that makes some fear that murderers may take advantage of those who are overly eager to make peace with them. Walter Everett, a United Methodist minister in Connecticut, testified at an early release hearing for the man who killed his son Scott. Michael Carlucci was released after serving two and a half years. Three years ago, Everett presided over his wedding. "There was no point to him staying in prison," says Everett, who was convinced that Carlucci, a drug addict at the time of the murder, had changed. "Prison should not be designed to punish, but to rehabilitate." But what if Carlucci killed again? "I really didn't expect anything to happen, but as Mike has said to people, there are no guarantees," says Everett. "You can't live in constant fear, you've got to do some trusting. If he had gone back to doing drugs and harming other people, I would have been sorry for what had happened, but I suppose I would not have regretted what I did for my own health." Everett may have been more sympathetic to Carlucci's drug problem because Scott had been an alcoholic. "Scott had been sober about a year and half, then his girl broke up with him," Everett says about the night of the murder. Scott came home to find his apartment ransacked. Furious, he ran out to the parking lot, then went back to his apartment only to find he had locked his keys inside. He began pounding on the door. Carlucci, who lived on the same floor, came out of his apartment to see what the racket was. "Get out of here or I'll shoot," he said. Scott told him he was trying to get into his apartment, then pushed his way past him to the security entrance. Carlucci shot him. After his son's murder, Everett starting going to a traditional support group for victims' families. "I could see people carrying a tremendous weight of anger 15 years after the murder. I said, I don't want that to be me, but how can I get out of it?" Then Everett went to court for Carlucci's sentencing. "I heard Mike say, 'I'm sorry for what I did. These probably sound like empty words, and they can't bring him back.' Someone with me said, 'He can't possibly have meant that. He is trying to impress the judge.' But I decided to write him a letter." On the first anniversary of his son's death, Everett wrote to Carlucci. "I told Mike about all the anger and how I had trouble figuring out how anyone could do what he did. I also said, 'I want to thank you for your words on the day you were sentenced, and as hard as this is to write, I forgive you. If you want to write back, I welcome your letter.'" When Carlucci got the letter, Everett says, he thought Everett was just out to harass him. His counselor at the prison offered to look at it first, then said, "'I think you ought to read this.' Nobody in this life had ever said 'I forgive you' to him before," says Everett. A few months later, Carlucci asked Everett to visit. "It hit like a ton of bricks," says Everett. "The only time I'd ever seen him was on the day he'd been sentenced. I wrote back and said that I wasn't sure whether either of us was ready, but I think we need to give it a try." But when Everett arrived at the prison, Carlucci wasn't there. He had been transferred to a medium security facility a few days before. "I felt a tremendous sense of rage that the state would take the guy who murdered my son and move him into medium security so soon," he recalls. "It was completely irrational, especially coming from someone on his way to visit him to talk about forgiveness. "A lot of people think you need to feel forgiving in order to forgive," says Everett. "I don't think so. It's an intentional act of the will to say, 'I want to begin healing,' but it's a process that will occur over the rest of my life." Everett drove to the new prison. He laughs now when he recalls that as a clergyman, he had been able to walk right in to the dozens of prisons he visited, but that day he was frisked. "They were probably pretty sure I was coming to harm Mike," he says. While he waited for a few minutes that seemed like an eternity, he tried to think of what he would say. "When he walked in, I said, 'Mike, you've gained weight.' He said, 'Yup, 55 pounds in five months.' He'd been living on drugs and alcohol and probably would have been dead in a few months. Soon we got into more meaningful conversation. On my way out, I was going to shake hands, but instinctively we embraced." Though it may have been risky for Everett to help free Carlucci, there is a small amount of evidence that criminals who have reconciled with their victims have lower recidivism rates, according to Dacher Keltner, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in emotion and conflict. "Reconciliation is fundamentally important to social relationships and at a broader level for society," he says. "We live in a rights and punishment based society, and it's a very sensible outgrowth that most victims would seek punishment and retribution. A certain degree of a sense of injustice is good, but where does revenge become dysfunctional? Anger causes health problems and makes relationships worse. The alternative is sympathy and forgiveness. Those people who are feeling those sentiments aren't in denial; they're abiding by a whole different moral approach to wrongdoing." In fact, the research Keltner cites has spawned programs in San Francisco and New York that bring offenders together with victims, though not necessarily those linked by the same crime. Donald Goodman, an associate professor at the prestigious John Jay College of Criminal Justice, runs one such program, Alternatives to Violence, at Greenhaven Prison, a maximum security facility in Stormville, N.Y. Goodman believes that, in general, prisoners tend to obsess over their crimes without taking responsibility for them -- and that the criminal justice system works against remorse. "Immediately after your arrest, you start thinking of defense. You get a lawyer and in effect start to try to find ways of denying responsibility for your actions. And then during the trial, you're acting under the directions of your attorney, who will often tell you not to show any emotion. There is a brief moment before sentencing when you have time for a statement, but you've been told that your case is going to be appealed, so any statement you make could be taken as a confession. Then you're sentenced and you go off and there's not much of a place to explore your feelings." Conversely, in sessions where inmates encounter victims, Goodman says, they begin to take responsibility for what they did. Another program, Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, or RSVP, is run by San Francisco Assistant Sheriff Michael Marcum with the help of a grant from billionaire George Soros. RSVP has 62 offenders at a time working on a nonviolence curriculum that includes meetings with victims. Most of them are domestic batterers, not murderers, but Marcum also has a keen understanding of killers -- he served seven years for murder himself, after killing his father when he was 18. Marcum says he used to caution people against getting too involved with inmates. "I spent a lot of time when I first got out many years ago discouraging people from falling in love and bonding with prisoners. There's this sort of repulsion and attraction. Some of it is romantic -- it's sort of the outlaw image -- but it is more complex than that." After 30 years of working with prisoners, however, Marcum says that seeing the communication between victims and offenders in the program has reenergized him.
Marcum believes that most people in prison are capable of
sympathizing with their victims. "If you knock off the 5 percent that
are really psychopathic, the others might brag about what they've done out of
fear, but they know it's bull. Every prisoner I ever did time with or
worked with knows that. They don't really want to be an animal; they
want a chance to be a human. And when people have hurt someone else,
part of that chance is making amends."
Michelle Goldberg is an editorial assistant at Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PART TWO: A woman forgives the man who cannibalized her daughter - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - If your child were murdered, could you ever find it within yourself to forgive the killer? Join the discussion in Table Talk. |
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