The best class I had in seminary, titled "Ministry to Captive Structures ", was taught by Dody Donnelly at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. The class included about a dozen students both women and men. Dody was a nun in a Roman Catholic order that, if I remember correctly, was the Sisters of St. Joseph. Dody was a firebrand: to be around her was to feel a part of a social movement. She exhorted us to become "contemplatives in action." No grass grew under her feet and her eyes flashed with love, humor and wisdom. Not long after meeting her, I simply accepted that she knew more about everything pertaining to life than I did; it was just undeniable. I don't know how I wandered into her class, perhaps on the basis of the kind of rumors that circulate about good teachers in any school. The only time I saw her feathers ruffle was when a student questioned her about the reasonableness of celibacy. She thought the question impertinent, based on a shallow worldliness and so she refused to dignify it with much of an answer.

The course title was a bit mysterious but the fundamental questions Dody was concerned with were: What is a prison? And what is a Christian response to such institutions and the people in them? Forty years later, I can't remember the texts we read for the class or all the discussions we had, but the tours we took of Folsom, Vacaville and San Quentin prisons are indelibly imprinted on my memory.

The first prison we toured was Folsom. It is located out in a bleak California valley. I know, it would seem impossible to find a bleak valley in California, but somehow the builders of Folsom did. It must be one of the older California prisons because it is made of big stone blocks and the entrance is flanked by a peak-roofed Victorian guard tower. The solid iron gates and stone walls are reminiscent of a demonic redoubt of Sauron in Lord of the Rings. Every paintable surface was an oily gray-green. We had been warned to let our guide do the talking and that we should look and learn but not respond to inmates as we toured the prison. We knew that Folsom was the maximum security prison where most of California's worst lifers were housed, including Charlie Manson. As we stepped through the gates, I started trembling and shuddering with dread as if I had taken a polar bear plunge. There was the sense of entering a place of torment and hatred from which one may never return. I concealed my trepidation as best I could, but I'm sure that to prisoners I might as well have had a sign around my neck. As a group we huddled together for a sense of security but the tremors of fear predominated even in our collective psyche.

Inside, the lasting impression was of a cave because even the cellblocks were made of stone. The prisoners stared at us without restraint satisfying their curiosity and perhaps thirst for anything from the outside world. They catcalled and whistled at us. I particularly remember one cell block corridor in which several lifers had taken up the craft of painting. All the images were lurid. Many were beach scenes at sunset with topless women in the foreground. They were desperate imaginings of freedom and poignant only because of the context of imprisonment. One dared not laugh at or despise their naked, unschooled appeal because of the suffering that engendered them. At one point on the tour, our co-leader, a Jesuit who had had experience as a prison chaplain, paused to listen to a prisoner who immediately launched into a rant boiling with hatred. I can feel that prisoner's searing hate in my face to this day.

The second prison we visited was Vacaville. It was terrifying also but in a completely different way. My first impression of Vacaville was that it reminded me of my public high school but surrounded by chain-link fences and barbed wire. It was far less intimidating from the outside but inside it was horrifying by virtue of its familiarity. It had the same vinyl floors, long corridors and benches built into the walls, oak doors and only a few windows made of safety glass all of which could have been reconstructed from the materials of Lincoln Southeast Public High School. I recognized the efficient architecture of schools, industrial modernity and the power of the state in its contemporary, antiseptic brutality. The prisoners in Vacaville seemed like inmates in a mental institution rather than men in a prison. There was a chaotic vibration to the violence as if one was descending into insanity rather than into the ancient lair of evil as one felt entering Folsom.

San Quentin looked like a Mediterranean country club at first sight. Its location overlooking beautiful San Francisco Bay and its stucco walls had a calming effect or perhaps we were just getting used to tours of the beast. But San Quentin also concealed horrors. Perhaps the most revolting and fearsome sight I have ever seen was the gas chamber. The guard who led us on our tour cheerfully described how it worked and we could see inside the chair and the little cistern where the cynanide pellets hit the solvent and become gas. The chamber's hexagonal design was made of a riveted steel, frame and panel construction with heavy glass windows. This is the symbol of the power of the state pushed cruelly beyond reason and caring. Such implements are the black holes of civilization that destroy our humanity.

What did I learn from these tours and this class? I learned something about society's bottom lines, the power of the state, coercion and cruelty. I learned what a pressure cooker of violence feels like even knowing I had a free pass to leave. I learned that some prisoners are virtually irredeemable and others are unlucky victims of injustice and all of them suffer horribly in a totalitarian institution. I learned I sure as hell never want to be imprisoned.