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Photo: Abby Fox EGHS students went to the ACI last week to get first-hand accounts from inmates about drunk driving. BY ABBY FOX
Four prisoners at the Adult Correctional Institute in Cranston, doing time for killing people on the road while driving drunk, told more than 150 East Greenwich students their stories, last Thursday night at the ACI.
They spoke of their loneliness and self-loathing behind bars, of the constant reminders of the pain they had caused other people. The event was coordinated by school committee member Anne Palumbo who encouraged a record number of students to come.
The average sentence for driving under the influence and killing someone else is about 10 years. The inmates who spoke were each serving 12, 9, 10 and 10 years.
Every presentation was centered on the theme of “making choices,” such as a 24-year-old inmate named Brendan, who said, “I started making poor choices when I was about your age, partying, and smoking pot.” Describing “watching his friend die” the April in 2003, during his senior year of high school, he said, “I remember everything so vividly, that every night when I got to bed, that’s the last thing I see before I go to sleep.”
The inmates frankly said many people who used to be their friends don’t speak to them anymore. “People hate me, for taking people they loved away from them,” Brendan said. “’Sorry’ doesn’t cut it; ‘Sorry’ doesn’t bring anybody back. There’s nothing I could ever say to make these people get over their loss. The whole thing was 100 percent my fault.” Today, “the only people who come visit me are my parents. People go on with their lives; they forget about you.”
Dawn, 32, described herself as “a mother who has to live with taking somebody’s child,” which in her case was a 17-year-old boy.
Yet before the fatal car accident occurred, after a Christmas party, when she was 29, “you never think something like this will happen to you,” she said. “My friends and I would always have a designated driver; we thought we were being responsible. I didn’t get hammered and drive; I would have a couple of drinks and drive; I thought I was being responsible.”
She and others described the never-ending self-flagellation that occurs behind bars. “I feel like a monster, because only a monster would kill somebody,” she said. Her sentence is ten years, but “it’s going to follow me for the rest of my life.”
In people’s day-to-day routine, “you have no idea how important every decision you make is, and how many people can be affected by your choice” she said – until something big happens.
Brandy, serving ten years after killing two elderly women in a drunk-driving accident at 18, said she and others have given this talk many times, and “it still makes me sick to my stomach; it affects me so deeply.” She described her frustration, not only with not being able to take back what she did, but with the futility of persuading other people to not make the same mistakes. “Talking about the worst days of my life is all I can do to get through to somebody,” she said. “At 22, my life is filled with nothing but guilt and regret, and that’s sad. I hate myself for that [the deaths].”
Their confessions were followed by two parents who spoke about losing their children to drunk drivers, including Barrington father Mr. Converse, whose teenage son Jon, was killed 16 months ago. “I can only hope and pray you never become like us,” he said to the audience in the ACI cafeteria. Not only the people “involved in my son’s death were sentenced,” he said. “I was sentence to life, and my wife and daughter were sentenced to life.”
More than a year later, Converse said, he has left his 16-year-old son’s bedroom intact. “It’s so difficult to do anything with it,” he said. “Nothing’s changed since the day he died. He should be with me right now. I should not be here.”
Contrary to what people have told him about emotional “closure” after a tragedy, “there’s no closure from this; you don’t get over the loss of a child.”
The bluntness of the presenters left their mark. “That was really good,” said Carole Finn, who came with her husband and son. “It was unbelievable.”
Palumbo said the next day that she wants to have a similar presentation when the high school seniors go to prom, and said that the experience of going to the ACI, rather than have the inmates come speak to students at the high school, was very powerful.
“This definitely came from their heart,” Palumbo said of the inmates. “These people don’t have to do this. They don’t get any time off. They genuinely want to help.”
The student reaction was unmistakably grim, she said. “You did not hear a pin drop for two and a half hours,” she said. “That is unheard of. They came in loud, chatting with each other and then at the very end, everybody just walked away with a heavy heart.”
Tracey Poole, who coordinates programs like this at the ACI, commented that “East Greenwich is the only town so
far to have sent such large numbers, and I think it speaks well of the
level of motivation and interest on behalf of the community.”
Palumbo said the program, called Zero Tolerance, gave students “a much deeper understanding than if they were just hearing it from their parents, from their teachers, from a friend.”
Parents thanked Palumbo for setting it up, she said, and she replied, “Applaud yourself; you’re the one who took the night off. This is more important than a friend’s night out or your basketball game. Kudos to you.”
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