Second Acts

(This is a special blog, based on the lay sermon I gave at my church on May 5, 2024 about the need for prison reform for older prisoners who are ineligible for parole in IL.)

Last Monday, my husband Bill and I drove to Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet. This maximum security prison is just a little less than 40 minutes from Elmhurst. After a quick stop through McDonald’s drive thru, we took 355 south and exited at Joliet Road.

As we got closer, I saw a water tower with Stateville written on the side near the grounds of the prison.  Bill put on his blinker and made right on Division street, and we made our way toward the entrance.

The mood in the car suddenly turned somber as this huge, forbidding, old concrete wall with guard towers at either end emerged on our left. The wall was so long. At the entrance, we turned left onto a drive riddled with pot holes, and we made our way to what appeared to be some newer buildings attached to the old, the visitors entrance.  Bill put the car in park and we sat for a minute in the parking lot taking it in.

On the other side of those walls and barbed wired fence was William Peeples, a prisoner I had written a letter to just three days earlier. I felt it was important not to have just read his inspiring story but also to see the place where he very well may live out the rest of the days of his life.

Against all odds, William Peeples is living a kind of second act within those walls.

Today is the sixth Sunday of Easter in the church calendar. I’ve never paid attention to that in past, but in having to prepare today’s lay sermon, I was considering in what ways Easter still reverberates beyond Easter Sunday and what the story of the resurrection could continue to teach us.

When Bill and I got home from church on Easter Sunday, we gathered at home with our family for a late lunch. In our family, from the influence of my father who is now gone, with my mom and sister and kids and friends, we tend to do things like storytelling and poetry reading around the table, so it wasn’t too surprising when my mom stood up and said, “I just want to share this article by Colin Fleming I read in the paper this morning. It’s really beautiful, so I’m just going to read it to you.”

The gist of it was that whether you are religious or not, the story of Easter, of Christ being brought back to life and coming out of a dark tomb is a metaphor for the idea that resurrections, or “second acts,” are possible for everyone.

My mom read to the table: “We have to find the next and better act, with ourselves, and with others, so that we may be a form of light in a world that always needs more of it….The next act is more important than the last, and there is always a next act if you cede the entirety of yourself over to the creation of one.”

That’s what William Peeples was able to do. Behind that forbidding prison wall he was able to find his way out of the darkness, along with the help of someone else who shined her light on him, and in turn created her own next and better act.

William Peeples has spent the last 33 years of his life incarcerated, 13 of those years on death row until Gov. Ryan commuted all death row sentences in 2003. William Peeples told Bryan Smith, a journalist who reported on this story, that he felt like an invisible man. He didn’t know when he had begun to feel invisible, but after so many years in prison, he had accepted it as true.

But, in 2017, with push broom in hand, William was sweeping the chapel when he saw a woman with dark hair talking animatedly to the chaplain. He would come to learn that that’s how this woman always talked. He had heard people talking about a real Northwestern professor who was teaching classes on philosophy and law in the prison. There she was, Jennifer Lackey.

William was nervous about approaching her, but he didn’t have to because she saw him and offered him a warm, “Good morning,” and extended her hand.

He said, “I’ve heard about you. You’re the one who’s been teaching a class. I want to take your class.”

She told him, “That’s great. But unfortunately the class started two weeks ago and it’s full. Next time, she said.

“No,” William told her. “I need to take this class now.”

There was something about the earnestness of the way William said it that made her pause and say, “Ok. There are six readings. If I get those to you, can you read them and get a paper done on each one before the next class? “It’s in one week.”

“Yes,” William told her.

“Ok,” she said.

Now Stateville prison isn’t exactly conducive to studying and writing papers. The prison was built in the 20’s and is notorious for putting the likes of Jahn Wayne Gacey to death in the electric chair. It’s old and run down. The water is undrinkable. Instead, inmates receive 23 water bottles a week. For six months a couple of years ago there was no hot water. If both inmates our standing up in their cell, they bump into each other. The lighting is bad. You have to use cardboard boxes propped on laps to write on. And inmates can use only the bendy inside of a pen to write because the plastic on pens can be fashioned into weapons. There’s no access to computers or email.

But as Bryan Smith notes, “Mostly it’s the noise, noise, noise, noise” bouncing off the cinder block walls which makes it nearly impossible to sleep for more than two hours at a time. People blast rap music, they scream and yell.

William was determined to get those readings and papers done. And he did.

Jennifer Lackey teaches philosophy at Northwestern. She grew up in a single family home with her mom and two siblings in a western suburb of Chicago. Her mom put herself through school after she had her children. She instilled in her kids the power of education to transform lives.

When Jennifer was making her communion at the age of 11, they had to do some volunteer work. Instead of babysitting and going to senior living facilities to help out, like other confirmands did, Jennifer wrote on her yellow care bear stationary to the warden of the Chicago jail asking if she could come and visit and spend time volunteering with some of the female inmates. And she did.

She believed then as she still does that inmates are as deserving of compassion and humanity as anyone else. She had a conversation with her mother alongs the lines of people don’t just do bad things; rather, it’s the lack of opportunities, like access to education, housing, and equality that often lead people to end up in prison.

Jennifer didn’t know it at the time, but that was William’s backstory.

William and I are the same age. 60. It makes his story even more profound to me by comparison, the systemic injustices that led me, a white girl, to get to get to grow up in Elmhurst, attend York H.S., go to college. While William, a Black boy, grew up in the Robert Taylor homes on the south side of chicago, which were condemned and torn down in the early 2000’s. Him being physically abused as a child, getting into drinking and pot at the age of 11. Being drawn into a gang. Dropping out of school, abusing drugs, and then to support a deepening drug habit, murdering a neighbor to rob her, hence his life sentence.

Years after being incarcerated, eventually, he started what he calls his transition. He started reading voraciously, studying the dictionary and reading writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright. He became a Muslim and a model inmate. And then he met Jennifer Lackey.

Jennifer Lackey began teaching a philosophy class at Stateville in 2015. But by 2017 she had a radical idea. She wanted NW to create a real prison education program that would allow prisoners at Stateville to take real NW classes, like psychology, chemistry, journalism, statistics, sociology, physics, taught by real NW professors and to earn a bachelor’s degree from NW. And she wanted the atmosphere in the classes to mimic the ones on the Evanston campus, Even acquiring funds to purchase the same desks that students at NW use.

As you might imagine, the university was not on board at first. But Lackey and others worked tirelessly to raise funds and convince the powers that be to bring this idea to fruition.

Lackey knew the transformative power that a program like this could have on individuals to see their self worth and to attain something that had never been accessible to them.

Finally, in 2021 with everything ironed out, Lackey handed William Peeples a stack of papers and said to him, “These are applications for NW’s degree program.”

Peeples was a little intimidated and wasn’t sure he was ready for a full-time course load. He had taken all the classes so far that had been offered and had excelled, but this was something else.

Jennifer looked William in the eye and said, “You can do this—if you want it.”

He returned to his cell and filled out the application writing the most heartfelt essays of his life about why he should be in the program. He described the events that had brought him from the Robert Taylor Homes to death row, and how his conversion to Islam and the courses he’d taken in prison had reframed his view of himself and led him to search for ways to atone for what he’d done, an act that still haunted him.

That was 2018.

On a Wednesday morning last November in 2023, William Peeples, along with 15 other inmates at Stateville, proudly walked across the stage of Stateville’s auditorium, each dressed in graduation robes featuring the signature purple and white of Northwestern’s colors, along with their mortarboards and tassels, as they received their NW diplomas, along with handshakes and hugs from Jennifer Lackey and the other dignitaries who were there to witness this amazing experience. As author Ta-Nehisi Coates, their commencement speaker said, “When they invited me to come speak to you, wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

William Peeples was also one of the speakers this past November. He recalled to the crowd of family members and friends who had gathered there (along with security guards stationed at every corner and entrance) his journey:

“Family, friends, and loved ones. This moment is literally the culmination of 30 years of people pouring into me. When I first arrived in prison, I was defined by drugs, violence, and ignorance to the max. And instead of judging and condemning me, the people in the NW program loved me.”

He talked about Jennifer Lackey, the woman he had met six years earlier, while sweeping the prison chapel, feeling invisible. She had made him feel seen. “I won’t bore you with the story. But what I will say is that there have been very few times in my life where a stranger had made me feel as accepted and valued as that woman there.” And he pointed to Lackey.

Peeples has applied for clemency, but in the meantime he’s been hired by NW as a teaching fellow for a biology course being taught at the prison.

As Bill and I drove away from Stateville in the warm enclosure of our car each and other, I thought about what William Peeples said to the reporter Bryan Smith who wrote this story about him. William told Bryan: I may never get out of prison, may never be able to apply my degree outside these walls, but it’s another step on a path toward personal redemption. And guiding me is this central question: “What am I doing substantively to make the world, and this environment in here, a better place?”

I wrote to William Peeples because I wanted him to know that I see him—his potential, his humanity, and that I admire him.  and that I was going to share his story with you, in the hope that all of us here will be inspired to continue  our own second acts of fighting for equality, access to education, and justice in our communities for ALL people.

Sometimes that radical second act starts with learning to love and accept yourself, to recognize your own self worth, as William is learning to do.

And sometimes, you need the help of someone else. For God so loved the world—so loved each of us—that he sent his only son.

So my friends, let the story of Easter continue to play out in your lives, as you seek your next and better act, no matter how radical or surprising it may seem.

Our world needs the possibility of billions of second acts to bring the tenet that Jesus spent his brief but compelling life preaching: love, forgiveness, charity, but the greatest of these is LOVE.

Here in the midst of graduation season, and the graduation last November of William and the other inmates, I was reminded of a favorite song of mine, a Beatles song that’s about second acts and was inspired by the civil rights movement.

On Sept. 29, 1957, my mom and dad were living with my mom’s parents in Helena, AK. All four of them were gathered around the black and white tv watching a landmark act of the civil rights movement, when 9 black students were being ushered by federal troops into a formerly all white school in Little Rock, AK, in accordance with the mandate to integrate the schools. Many white people jeered, spat, and threw things at them.

Paul McCartney was living in Scotland at the time. He said:

“I was sitting around with my acoustic guitar and I’d heard about the civil rights troubles that were happening in the ’60s in Alabama, Mississippi, Little Rock in particular. I just thought it would be really good if I could write something that if it ever reached any of the people going through those problems, it might give them a little bit of hope. So, I wrote ‘Blackbird.’”

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.”

I think of William Peeples and the tremendous courage and dedication against the greatest obstacles to take flight, even in a place as unlikely as Stateville prison. Imagine if we dedicated ourselves to helping all people take flight, out of the darkness into the light.