It was about 3 a.m. on May 7, 1987, and Jesse Coddington had been drinking. He arrived back to his home in Ferndale, Michigan, and was fixing himself some beef stew when Julie Mendoza, the woman he was seeing, came into the kitchen. She told him she was pregnant with his child, and they started to fight.
Coddington’s sister-in-law, Jean Coddington, heard the commotion and came running. Jean jumped on Jesse’s back and started scratching him. He swung around and knocked her to the floor. Then he grabbed a gun and shot both women in the head. Both died, and Coddington was sentenced to life without parole.
Since 2015, Coddington has been trading letters with Patti Oates-Ulrich, a churchgoing woman from East Lansing, Michigan, not too far from where he’s locked up. Once she would have agreed, like most of us, that there should be no mercy for a brutal double murder. But over the years, something’s changed. “I feel like I’ve seen firsthand what redemption looks like,” she says now. “This is it.”
Oates-Ulrich’s change of heart was brought about by a program in Michigan called the Good Neighbor Project. The project is run by the American Friends Service Committee, founded by the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, a Christian denomination that believes that there is a piece of “God in every person.” The project connects people serving life sentences with community members on the outside, setting it apart from typical restorative justice programs that match convicts with the victims of their crimes. Instead, it seeks to transform how locals like Oates-Ulrich see their hidden neighbors, people like Jesse Coddington.
The project was designed by a former convict, Ronald Simpson-Bey, who spent twenty-seven years in a Michigan prison for trying to kill a police officer. He became a paralegal while in prison, and was able to get his conviction overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct. He also studied restorative justice, a process in which victims and offenders work together on healing solutions in the aftermath of crimes.
The project was designed by a former convict who, while in prison for trying to kill a police officer, studied restorative justice, and how victims and offenders can work together on healing after a crime.
On Father’s Day in 2001, Simpson-Bey’s twenty-one-year-old son was murdered by a fourteen-year-old. Knowing enough to fight his revenge impulse, he wrote letters to the judge requesting that he try the murderer as a juvenile. His son’s killer was released at age twenty-one.
Not long after Simpson-Bey was himself released from prison in 2012, he came across an opportunity to create a restorative justice-inspired project for the community in his native Michigan. Natalie Holbrook, the program director of the Quakers’ Michigan Criminal Justice Program, wanted to build a program that would connect lifers and community members. They hired Simpson-Bey to design, launch, and facilitate it.
Whereas restorative justice programs are typically victim-centered, the Good Neighbor Project focuses on the secondary victim of the crime: the community. It launched in 2014 with about fifty participants, pairing violent criminals with community members, and having them get to know each other through letters and essays based on a set curriculum.
Outside participants read about institutional racism, the conditions that incubate crime, and the way violence is passed down through generations. Both tell their life stories, and go into their own personal definitions of justice, weighing the values of retributive justice against restorative justice. The exchange aims to help the offender think about his crime and what kinds of changes he can make. The co-mentor, by confronting the inmate’s humanity, develops an appreciation for second chances.
Holbrook says the Good Neighbor Project aims to create change from the bottom up, rather than relying on top-down policy fixes. “If we the public demand a system that is less about punishment and more about healing and transformation for all involved,” she says, “the policy changes needed to create that system will follow.”
As it stands, advocates and experts say America’s current criminal justice system fosters feelings of revenge as opposed to forgiveness, which in turn creates support for harsh sentences.
“The criminal justice system degrades and dehumanizes people and that influences the way we think about prisoners,” says David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “Knowledge tends to breed empathy. Distance and ignorance make it easier to objectify and turn prisoners into The Other.”
As University of Miami psychologist Michael McCullough explains in his book, Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, forgiveness can be fostered by creating three conditions: value, safety, and, as he terms it, “careworthiness.” In other words, McCullough says, people are more likely to forgive those with whom they feel close.
A former social worker with no experience in the criminal justice system, Oates-Ulrich was drawn to the program by a sense of “calling.” She says that if she didn’t get to know Coddington, she would have favored locking him away for life. But she no longer believes that evildoers are wholly evil.
Five years into his prison term, Coddington had a Christian conversion. He now studies psychology in order to understand the destructive thinking patterns that developed during his childhood, and teaches classes on substance abuse recovery, anger management, and communication skills to fellow inmates.
Five years into his prison term, Coddington had a Christian conversion. He now studies psychology in order to understand the destructive thinking patterns that developed during his childhood, and teaches classes on substance abuse recovery, anger management, and communication skills to fellow inmates. He’s earning a bachelor’s degree in Faith and Community Development.
“When he wrote his first couple of letters,” Oates-Ulrich says now, “I thought, this is a guy who has evolved so much already.”
The Good Neighbor Project has also worked a change in Delia Johnson, whose inside partner, Douglas Chmielewski, is a rapist and murderer. In 1987, at age sixteen, he was accused of raping and strangling his seventy-nine-year-old great-grandmother. He plead guilty to second degree homicide and first degree criminal sexual conduct. The judge sentenced him to life.
It’s hard to imagine a more heinous crime. And yet, when Johnson learned about Chmielewski’s childhood, it made sense to her that he turned out the way he did. He says two of his stepfathers emotionally, sexually, and physically abused him. He says he was also molested by a neighbor kid and an adult male who groomed him with drugs and alcohol. Chmielewski, now forty-seven, went into drug rehab at age fourteen. “He didn’t have a chance,” Johnson tells me. “How could he have turned out to be anything else?”
A 2016 letter from Jesse Coddington, incarcerated in a Michigan prison, to his Good Neighbor Project co-mentor, East Lansing resident Patti Oates-Ulrich.
“I knew that after God saved my life,” Chmielewski wrote to Johnson after surviving a suicide attempt in 2014, “that if I did not make the necessary transformation in my life that I was doomed to keep repeating my behavior.” He’s now in a criminal and addictive-thinking group therapy class, a twelve-step recovery program, and individual counseling. Chmielewski says Johnson’s support has been crucial.
Another Good Neighbor Project participant, Earl Lundy, says the program brought him a deeper understanding of institutional racism. Lundy grew up in the 1950s in the all-white community of Dearborn, Michigan. Though he’s since developed friendships with people of other races, it’s only now that he’s joined the Good Neighbor Project and learned about his inside partner Lee Dobine’s story that he’s really begun to see how our system is built on racism.
Dobine, who is black, was convicted of armed robbery for robbing a delivery van at age twenty-one; one of his fellow hijackers was shot to death by police. His public defender encouraged a plea deal; Dobine took it, figuring a jury from the surrounding white community would not look favorably on him. Before sentencing, Dobine thought he was going to get twenty to thirty years.
But because Dobine and his partner had tried to escape the police after their robbery, the judge sentenced him to life. Now forty-nine, Dobine has spent the past twenty-eight years in prison, where he converted to Christianity and enrolled in college courses. Now he’s helping facilitate leadership and pre-release classes. “I changed my life and transformed into the person I was called to be,” he says.
Lundy and Dobine talk three times a week; Lundy says he can hear Dobine’s smile through the phone. Lundy says he wishes Dobine had been put in a rehabilitation program after his crime instead of being locked up. “What has putting people in prison changed?” he asks. “Let’s look at why they’re there. Let’s look at root causes.”
All correspondence between the pairs is saved by the Good Neighbor Project, creating a database of transformation that the Quakers plan to present to state legislators as proof that people society regards as fundamentally evil are capable of rehabilitation.
The group hopes this will encourage lawmakers to approve several pending parole reform bills, including a compassionate release bill for the elderly and sick, and a bill that would guarantee parole to certain prisoners in Michigan once they reach their minimum sentence terms—a policy known as presumptive parole. Holbrook says the long-term goal is capping all sentences at twenty years.
This type of state-level initiative is critical to the current fight against mass incarceration. Most prisoners in the United States are housed in state prisons, and the prospects for reform on a national level under a Republican Congress and a Justice Department led by ultra-conservative Attorney General Jeff Sessions are slim.
In the 1950s and 1960s, prison populations were shrinking as a rehabilitative approach was gaining traction in the correctional system (though racial disparities remained). But then came a new wave of “tough on crime” policies and mass incarceration.
Today, the United States has the highest incarceration rate on Earth, with 2.2 million people in prisons and jails. That represents a 500 percent increase in the last forty years.
There is, on both the left and the right, a growing consensus that the United States incarcerates too many people. But just shortening sentences for nonviolent offenders won’t solve the problem. Violent criminals comprise more than 50 percent of the nation’s state prison inmates, while nonviolent drug offenders make up only 16 percent. The number of inmates sentenced to life has quadrupled since 1984, with about one in nine prisoners serving a life term.
Thus, any effort to reduce mass incarceration must include the release of a significant number of those locked up for violent crimes. That will require a shift in public opinion regarding who can be rehabilitated and forgiven. And such a shift will come only through humanizing rapists and murderers and armed robbers.
As Oates-Ulrich knows, this type of heart change benefits not only he who is forgiven, but also she who forgives.
One night in mid-September last year, Oates-Ulrich arrived home, opened her mail, and found a letter from Coddington. A giddiness rose in her as she folded herself onto her couch. She read the letter and reread it and reread it.
Coddington had written her about a play they’d both just read, in which two characters play the last residents of Hell, searching for the key to redemption. “Forgiveness is not only an act of kindness for the person you feel has done you wrong, but even more importantly, an act of kindness for yourself,” he wrote, and drew a smiley face. He wished her God’s peace and signed, “Your good neighbor, Jesse.”
Erika Eichelberger is an independent journalist based in Brooklyn.