Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Too Close to the Flame with Joe Ingle

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

When you think of prisoners on Death Row, what imagery comes to mind? Author of Too Close to the Flame, Joe Ingle, joins Sharon McMahon to talk about what it is like inside America's death penalty system. After spending 45 years working as a spiritual advisor to men and women on Death Row, Joe vulnerably shares his experiences of the final moments before they are executed, and sheds a light on how the legal system disenfranchises those who can not afford a lawyer. What is an alternative to the death penalty, and what might restorative justice look like? Special thanks to our guest, Joe Ingle, for joining us today. Host: Sharon McMahon Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Production Assistant: Andrea Champoux  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here's where it gets interesting is now available ad-free. Head to SharonMcMahon.com slash ad-free to subscribe today. Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. My guest is Joe Engel, who has written a book about what it is like inside America's death penalty system. He has worked inside the system for decades as a spiritual advisor to people on death row, and he has a new book out called Too Close to the Flame. And I think you are going to find this

conversation very instructive, but also just fascinating to listen to his experiences. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I'm really excited to be chatting with Joe Engel today, who has written a book called Too Close to the Flame. Thank you for being here. Well, I'm glad to be here and discuss the book with you. I want to start, first of all, with the premise of your book. What is this a story about? Well, the book provides the reader a keyhole so that they can look into what has become

what I mentioned in the subtitle. It's called Too Close to the Flame with the Condemned Inside the Southern Killing Machine. So the reader is going to be able to look into that killing machine that is existing in the South. And it is a machine. Clarence sees a joke. You're caught up in the whole death penalty process. And the reason you're caught up is not so much because you've committed a horrible crime, but because you can't afford a lawyer. 90% of the people can't afford a lawyer who are facing a death penalty trial. And once you get into that system, it's very hard to get out, no matter how good your conduct may be once you're in prison. So I want the reader to understand how this so-called system works, and I call it a criminal

legal system. It's not a criminal justice system. There's very little justice in this whole system. It's criminal, it's definitely legal, and it's a system, and it's snarfed up about 3,000 people on death row and about 2.2 million people in mass incarceration. And then you've got another six plus million people on probation and parole. So we have this enormous machinery of capturing people and trying to figure out what to do with them. And we don't do a very good job of it. So I want everybody to understand how this system works. Then we can move to a discussion about what an alternative system that would be better, which would be restorative justice. I think the average American who cares about this issue wouldn't necessarily think that a mature white man from the South, which is, I think, a fair characterization of who you are. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know about the mature part.

You don't fit the demographic of who somebody might picture as caring significantly about the incarcerated and caring significantly about America's criminal legal system, as you put it. What is it about this topic that ignited your interest, that made it so that this is something you wanted to dedicate your life to working on? Well, that's a very good question. And I guess the simple answer is I came through the back door. I grew up in North Carolina, graduated from a public school system in North Carolina, went to St. Andrew's Presbyterian College, majored in philosophy and religion, then said, I want to do more studying of that, so I went to Union Theological Seminary in New York City. They had a program there that really

appealed to me. Now, this is the late 60s. So I'm involved in the South and protesting the Vietnam War. And I am involved in the South of being all for civil rights. In the South, this is not a popular position. And so I needed a break from all that. I went north, lived in East Harlem, participated in the East Harlem Urban Year, which is a wonderful experience. So the East Harlem Urban Year is you're living in an economic ghetto. That's what East Harlem was in the early 1970s. 45% African American, 45% Puerto Rican, 10% everything else. I was in the 10% everything else. And my second year there, I'm looking at my fuzzy black and white TV in my tenement apartment,

and I watch Attica unfold in the fall of 1971. And I realized watching this and reading the New York Times, I had never been in a prison and jail. So I decided to spend my 20 hours a week of my senior year of seminary going to the Bronx House of Detention, which is just across the river from East Harlem. So I go up there for the first visit, and I had my little badge on my shoulder where the chaplain had oriented me, and I take the elevator up a few floors. A guard meets me at the door and opens the door, and I walk in. Now, you see TV movies and everything, so you think you know what you're going to see when you walk into a situation like that. I was stunned. There's this huge cage. I mean, an enormous cage. The guard says, come this way. So I'm following him down,

and I'm looking down, seeing all these guys locked up in the cells. And we get to the corner, and the guard gestures over here and says, this is where clergy and lawyers visit. In other words, you can go in this little area, this little room and visit with one of these prisoners. But I'm a naive seminary student. Let me in here with the guys. I'll talk to them. The guy looked at me and he shrugged, opened that door and I stepped across the threshold into what was the cell block. Now, in my cursory look, I had assumed each one of those cell doors was closed.

So I'd be visiting through the cell doors of each cell. Every one of those cell doors was open. So I was right there with these guys. He slammed that door shut. I can still feel that if I stop and just think a minute. This is my reaction. It was, oh my God, he's locked me in here with these animals. And no sooner did I have that reaction, the guy in the first bunk looked up at me and said, man, what are you doing in here? Well, I'm coming to visit you guys. And he said, here, have a seat. So I sat on his bunk. We talked. He took me down, introduced me to everybody else.

I spent that year visiting those men. And what did I learn? I learned, one, how I and most people in this country are socialized to regard people in prison. They're less than human. We may not think of them as animals, as I first thought when I walked in there, but we are conditioned to think that somehow they are less than who we are. And I learned quite the contrary. They're just like you and me, except they are poor. That's what gets you into a jail, which is, this is a giant jail, the Bronx House of Detention, meaning you can't post bond. Doesn't mean you're guilty.

You just can't post bond, so they hold you into your trial. And so I visited these guys, and they were all African American or Puerto Rican, except one guy. My ability to help these men is very limited, but they helped me. They helped me in a lot of ways learning how the system worked, for all these guys were awaiting trial for an average of 18 months. Think about that. They're not guilty. They're just awaiting trial in jail for 18 months because they're poor. So that was a big revelation. And the other revelation is I thought through my experiences and shared them with my friends in the East Harlem Urban Year. We processed all this in light of the Bible and what the scriptures had

to say about prisons is my own attitude of righteousness. You have to have a presumption of self-righteousness to look at someone as being less righteous than you. So when I finished that experience in New York, I'd always wanted to come back South and I wanted to get involved somehow in working with prisons and jails. I just didn't know what it was, but that was a tremendous experience for me. What was their reaction to you? Here's this young white guy that just shows up every week and he talks to us. You mentioned that you didn't really feel like you had much to teach them, that you were the person who was doing most of the learning. What was their reaction to you? And in what way were you changed from that experience? Well, their initial reaction was curiosity as the first guy asked, what are you doing here?

He took me down, introduced me to everybody. And so we got to know each other in that first visit. And when I went back to East Harlem after that first visit, my life had changed because all my illusions of what I was going to be dealing with were shattered. This system I'm talking about is not a TV show. We see these kind of crime shows on TV and think that's the way it is. No, no, that's entertainment. And these guys taught me how the system works. It taught me that they're there because, frankly, the cards were dealt from the bottom of the deck for them when it came to

being born in a certain place and raised in a certain family and having opportunities in life. They just didn't have the same opportunities I had. Didn't make them worse people. And I learned that each one of these individuals has a story. And if you take the time to listen and hear that person's story, you realize you're talking to a brother or a sister. I've listened to some stories that are pretty horrific, but I have never felt in any of those stories that the person I was hearing this from was anything less than a brother or sister of mine. We share a common humanity. And that was the great gift those guys gave me that

year. You know, they treated me as one of their own. And we could talk about anything and did and felt fully comfortable. So what in essence I did was make friends. That's what that whole experience was. And that was my teaching lesson for when I came back South. I realized when I go into a prison or anything in the South, I am not there to pound a Bible on somebody's head. I am there to be with them. And they accept that. And you build relationships on the basis of that relationship of honesty and why someone's there. So you spend a year visiting these men in this detention facility. Your year in New York ends. And what happens next?

After that year of experience, did you realize this is my calling? When I came back South, I didn't have a particular job that related to what I wanted to do, which was work in prison. So I ended up in Richmond, Virginia, where I'd spent some summers as a camp counselor. And I did that for a year. And then I had a feeling I needed to make a change. I came to Nashville, where I hooked up with a fellow named Will Campbell, who is a bootleg Baptist preacher from southern Mississippi, very active in civil rights, the only white guy who was at the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference founding, good friend of Martin Luther King's. So we started Southern Prison Ministry in January of 74, then met with folks from all over the South saying we wanted to set up a regional organization where we'd address mass incarceration and the death penalty. So that was the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons. And we set up projects in eventually eight Southern states. And so we became involved in trying to stop the needless construction of prisons and also stop the death penalty in the South. So that, as you can imagine, was an arduous task. You mentioned in the subtitle, and you mentioned it before, that this is the Southern killing machine. And I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. First of all, why is it in the South? The second thing is, from your perspective, having worked in prisons for all of these years, why does the killing machine exist? control set up primarily for blacks and poor whites that we called criminal justice. And

from Virginia, it just metastasizes out. I mean, you look at the 13 colonies, virtually all of them were slave states. Even your New England colonies had some slavery to begin with. That fades out. So this goes way back. So it's evolved over the years, but it hasn't changed from the beginning. It's all about race and class. These are the people who are in prison. These are not the people who are your most dangerous people necessarily, but they are the people who are, as the death penalty shows you, one Steve Bright, a veteran lawyer in fighting the death penalty, says, Joe, it's not those who commit the worst crimes that get the death penalty. It's those who have the worst lawyers. He's absolutely right. that in 1991, it was the first time in 50 years,

a white person had been executed for killing a black person. 1991, 50 years before that, that never happened. And when you look at these stats, they are just appalling. I mean, we had 18,600 executions up to the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decisions reinstating the death penalty. And out of those 18,600 or so exec for killing a black person. And you have to bracket 10 of them because they were executed for destroying their property. They were slaves. So that's how endemic this whole thing is in Georgia. If you are a white or a black person and you kill a black person, you probably don't have to worry about it too much. But if you kill a white person,

your chances go up all the way from 11 to 22 times greater than if you kill a black person. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments.

So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. What is the reaction, especially amongst Southerners that you interact with or that you encounter, when you say that death penalty is rooted in racism, that this is based on the class of the citizen, the race of the perpetrator, the race of the victim. Do people say, huh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Do they accept it?

Or do you find that there is a reticence to having the system labeled as a racist killing machine? Well, you know, I think really there's a lot of people who are making a lot of money off of the system, so they don't like it one little bit. But having said that, it's not like in the 80s and 90s. When we were doing this work in the 70s and 80s and 90s, I mean, I got death threats. It's very ugly, very ugly. The national polling reflects that there now is a majority of people in this country against the death penalty, whereas in the 80s, for instance, it was like 75 to 80 percent for the death penalty. So the whole conversation, the context of the conversation has changed.

That's not to say you don't get people who disagree with you, because you do. But it's not with the vociferous and intensity that I've seen in the past. For the people who are not familiar with this, who is making money on this system? Because it seems like it costs the taxpayers a lot of money. It costs taxpayers a lot more money to execute somebody than it does to just incarcerate them. First of all, I think a lot of people don't realize that, that it costs taxpayers way more to execute somebody. But who is profiting off of this? And what kind of influence do they have when it comes to people who are advocating for dismantling the system? What are the forces that are pushing back against you?

Well, I think for starters, you look at Corrections Corporation of America, which now has become CoreCivic. They have several prisons in Tennessee. And I'll just tell you one anecdote. I'm sitting there talking to the warden secretary in a regular Department of Correction prison where Death Row is here. She's a wonderful woman. We're chatting and she gets a phone call and she picks up the phone and she's listening. Oh no, really? Oh, I'm so sorry. And she hangs up. She says, Joe, you want to know what that was? That was so-and-so over there in Trousdale prison. And what's going on is Trousdale is a core civic prison. It has horrific violent rate because they don't staff it properly. They don't provide medical care. They don't do everything you need to do to run a prison properly.

They're trying to make money off of it. It's a private prison contract. They get a contract from the state. They run the prison. They shave every possible edge off they can to maximize their profit. Their health care is terrible. So that's how it works. And even in the state prisons, they contract their health care out. They're making money off of it. Private prison companies, Department of Corrections is getting huge. You

build more prisons, you have more employees, you pay more guards. There are buses running around Nashville, Tennessee with big ads on it. Come work for the Tennessee Department of Corrections. $42,000, $5,000 bonus, etc. They can't hire people to do these jobs because people know they're just so hard to do and the working conditions are so poor. I would love to hear a little bit more about what conditions are like inside death row facilities. Because again, most people have never been to a prison. And, you know, maybe if I say, well, the conditions are terrible, they might be like, yeah, well, they should be terrible. They're criminals, right? Like they, I don't care if they're terrible.

They shouldn't have done the crime. First of all, what are the conditions like? But what would you say to somebody who's like, I don't care if the conditions are bad. They shouldn't have murdered somebody or, you know, done some other terrible thing to land themselves on death row. Well, everyone's opposed to murder. There's no doubt about that. So I can understand that instinct and that feeling. Well, obviously, more people punished. Question is, how are you going to punish them?

Now, that's the issue. Obviously, more people punished. The question is, how are you going to punish them? Now, that's the issue. And what we say is there's something called restorative justice. And I've worked with one victim's family in a death row case. And it's a voluntary situation where the family, their daughter was murdered, and they wanted justice. Justice to them was not the death penalty because of their Christian beliefs,

but the DA wanted the death penalty. So they were in a conundrum. They didn't know what to do. And we talked, this was the Black family, Hector and Susie Black, wonderful people. And we communicated to the defense lawyer. I call it defense lawyer because I wanted her perspective on things and ask her if she knew what restorative justice was.

And she said yes. So what we want to do here is I've met with the family several times and they process their grief and everything. And they don't want him to be executed. They prefer not to have anything, really just a sentence. They don't have to deal with this. They don't want to reopen these wounds again. She said, well, you know, the DA is very strong about this. I said, I understand that. What can we do to address that? And she said, well, maybe they could write the judge a letter. So I got with Hector and Susie.

They, we wrote three or four different drafts. Finally got one I thought was really good enough, and I sent it to Susan, and she gave it to the judge. The judge was in Atlanta, which is where the murder occurred. And he looked at the defense lawyer and said, Ms. Wardell, are you willing to accept a life sentence here? And she said yes. Well, it turns out, as we got into this, Susan

Ordale's client, Ivan Simpkins, as an infant watched his mother drown his sibling, she tried to drown him unsuccessfully. She's on medication to get through life because he'd been so damaged in his upbringing, and he was off his drugs when he committed this murder. So when Hector and Susie found out about all this, they just said, oh, man, there's no way you can, anybody would want this man executed. I mean, Tricia wouldn't want this man executed. And so what happened is they came into court there, and Hector got up there and testified, and it was beautiful, and he talked

about how much they love their daughter, Tricia, and how much he's hurt them by taking Tricia away from them, and then he says, we don't hate you. We hate what you did. We forgive you, did. We forgive you, but we hate what you did. And Ivan Skips breaks down and starts crying. And the judge sends him to the wife. And then Hector, after some negotiations we work out, is able to visit Ivan Simpkins in Georgia. And they send him Christmas presents. So that's a model of one way of doing this. It doesn't put someone on a death row. And a death row is basically you're in a six foot by eight foot cell,

23 out of 24 hours a day. And you're there with a lot of other people. So it's total lockdown. As one of these guys said to me, Joe, the DA has frozen me right at my crime, which was over 30 years ago. It's like I'm frozen in amber. That's who he thinks I am. I am not that person. So people change, Sharon. And neither you nor I want to be judged by the worst thing we've done in our lives, much less have it hang over us our whole life and then maybe lose our life because of it. What would you say to somebody who feels like these people are too dangerous to deserve compassion? And by and large, if you are convicted of a first degree murder,

you're generally not going to get out of prison. Some people feel like, what's the point in showing somebody compassion who didn't show any compassion to their victims? Why should we be compassionate to you now? What would you say to somebody who feels that way? Well, I think you have to understand exactly who you are when you make that statement. I mean, that's more a statement about who you are and what you believe than what that person's done. Because we know that person can change. We know that person can become someone else. The question is, can you become more forgiving? Can you become more understanding?

That's the question. Where are you getting this position of righteousness from? Sure, people commit murder. Yeah, it happens. But if your response is, that's it, you forfeit everything, that says a lot about how you view human beings. You don't think people are redeemable? You don't think people can change?

And if you're a Christian, which I happen to be, we would have a long conversation about who Jesus was and what Jesus taught, because it's very clear. Jesus did not teach that kind of revenge or hate. We're supposed to be about something completely different, which is love and reconciliation. We're supposed to be about something completely different, which is love and reconciliation. Why does America have such a problem with violent crime and mass incarceration?

It's easy for some people to compare us to Europe, where they don't have nearly the rates of violent crime as we do. And some people would say our mass incarceration rates are reflection of our violent crime rates. Now, that is not necessarily accurate. That's right. It definitely is not accurate. But nevertheless, just our gun violence crime, like not even including the murder rates, et cetera, just our gun violence crime is astronomical compared to much of the rest of the world. Some of it has to do with the availability of guns. That's no, there's no question about that. But what is it about America that makes people commit these kinds of crimes that they don't commit in other societies?

Well, again, it's all about race and class. And having said that, it's all about availability of guns. There is no way you should be able to have the gun access that we have in this country. We should be doing exactly what they're doing in Europe and make it very difficult to have a gun. Then your murder rates would plunge dramatically. You don't see too many people dying of knife wounds. So, number one, you know, with all due respect to the Supreme Court, you wonder where these folks are coming from,

because we just need to eliminate easy access to guns. It's that simple. Any serious scholar who looks at the Second Amendment and knows the history of these development of these institutions, knows that, holy smokes, you know, we're going to say, oh yeah, that's the way it was originally written, so everybody's going to be able to have an AR-15. No, I don't think so. So, you know, we just need to get rid of the guns. The murder rate would drop dramatically. Then we can maybe deal with all race and class questions because,

you know, rich people have guns. Rich people shoot people. The rich people are not on death row. What role do you feel that poverty plays in violent crime rates? It drives it. In the South, we have had segregated communities after World War II. You know, the GI Bill comes through, and guess what? The GI Bill is for white guys, not for black people, and so we have segregated communities coming out of World War II, and this is after 150 years of slavery, New Jim Crow, and segregation. We have segregated communities still, and so when you have segregated communities, you're able to confine a group of people in an area and control. That's what you're trying to do. And as the laws evolved and African

Americans receive more rights, they get out of those communities able to do more things. But a lot of them are confined in extreme poverty. When you put people in those kinds of situations, crime is going to happen. What do you hope that somebody who reads Too Close to the Flame, what do you hope that they take away from this book and that they, you know, tuck into their pocket when they close the last page. What do you hope somebody learns or comes to know? I would hope that they realize there is no reason for any state in the United States to be killing its citizens. Simply no reason whatsoever. That it's all enmeshed in politics, racism, classism. It has nothing to

do with justice. And I would hope having learned that they will then take steps to make sure it ceases. Well, I really learned so much from your stories in Too Close to the Flame. It's one of these topics that you, if you care about the criminal justice system, which we all, frankly, in my estimation, we should. It is something that the citizens of a country are entitled to a fair criminal justice system. And also, even if you never have any encounters with the criminal justice system, you should still want a fair criminal justice system for others. This is an issue that affects all of us in some way. Learning more about how the system works is really foundational to being able to improve

it. And you've spent a career, a long career, on the inner workings of how America's criminal legal system, as you call it, works and how it can work better. And I just found your book to be very, very instructive, but also really impactful for people who care about this issue and who want us to have a more fair system that cares about victims, but also believes in the power to change. Exactly. And that's why I have the vignettes in the book about victims and people offenders, so you can see them as human beings. Because I cite the statistics because we need to know that, but it's really the stories of the people that's so important here. We're crushing human beings. I've spoken to Bryan Stevenson, whose work I'm sure you're very familiar with. That's one of the things he says. We don't actually have any programs that help victims

of violent crimes. Our version of helping a victim of violent crime is to kill the person who did the crime, as though that is supposed to heal their wounds or, you know, locking them up for long periods of time. Again, nobody's saying like, oh, hey, let all of the serial sex offenders out to just rape more people. That's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is that the people who are the victims in this scenario, we don't help them. And we act like, oh, just locking them up or killing the perpetrator. In some cases, we're locking up or killing the wrong perpetrator. But we act as though that is supposed to fix the victim's issues. Right. We could talk for so long,

but I would love to hear when you are a spiritual advisor to somebody on death row, what do you tell them? Well, really, people should read the book because it's right there. There are several people I work with who were executed, and you get to know them, and hopefully you get to love them because you're seeing them through my eyes. There are lots of stories here that are flitting through my mind. It's so much pain, to be honest with you. But let's talk about Morris Mason. Morris Mason, African American from the eastern shore of Virginia, and it's getting down to the end. So I fly over and we go to the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond to be with Morris for the

last hours of his life. So we're in the basement of the penitentiary. There is a mob, only way to describe it out outside the penitentiary, chanting, you know, kill the inn, you know, whatever, you know, fry the coon. I mean, you know, just it is ugly. And so we're in the basement of the penitentiary, and there's Morris. Morris is a small guy. He's like Elfin. He's like five, two, or three inches tall. He has the mind of a third grader. He's profoundly mentally impaired. He committed a horrific crime. There's no doubt about it, so here we are. Morris is in the cell. I'm talking with Morris. And Morris is saying, it's okay. Everything's going to be fine. I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be strong. I'm going to make you proud. And he gives me a little picture of himself. A little black and white picture.

This guy's two hours from getting electrocuted. And we're talking and he says, you know, Joe, I want you to tell Gerentano and those other guys on death row after I'm executed, I'm going to come back and beat them in basketball. He really believed. So that's the level of intelligence you're dealing with. That's who the state of Virginia thought we needed to kill.

And they come to get him shortly before midnight. They chain him all up, chain his hands to his waist, chain his ankles together, lead him around the corner to where the electric chair is, and put him in that electric chair. He's so small, they have a hard time getting the straps to fit, and he's trying to be so brave, and they throw that juice on him, and I don't know what was wrong with the chair,

whether they miscalculated on what his weight was, or I have no idea. But it was a botched electrocution. And they had to do that three times. So you see these guys like Morris, and you're thinking, what are we doing? What does this accomplish? And that's just one example. So that's what you're going to learn by reading this book. You're going to meet these individuals. Joe, thank you so much for your time. This has been just like a really, really enlightening conversation. If this is interesting to you, the listener, you're going to get so much more out of reading

the book than we have time to talk about today. But I'm really grateful for your time. I'm grateful for your work and really appreciate you making time for me today. Well, it's been my pleasure. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you. You can get Joe Engel's book, Too Close to the Flame, wherever you buy your books. You can go to simonandschuster.com or bookshop.org. Thanks for joining me today. This episode is hosted and

executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. Our production assistant is Andrea Shampoo. And if you liked this episode, we would love to have you share it to social media or to leave us a rating or review. All of those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here and we'll see you again soon.