THE HARDEST WORD

Here they are, all sitting in a circle: the killers and the rapists, the drug dealers and the drug users, the men who stole from others and the men who beat their girlfriends. It is December. There is tinsel strung up on the walls of the visitors’ room at Bay State Correctional Center in Norfolk. A sign above the double doors up front reads: “Visits end here.” But there are no visitors here today, just prisoners. And one of them, Joseph Allen Jr., says he would like to talk about the time his father killed his mother. B It was September 1982. He was 15, his parents were separated, and his mother was dating another man in their neighborhood in Milford. This did not sit well with his father, Joseph Allen Sr., who showed up one night when young Joe was gone, pulled out a .22-caliber rifle, and began pumping bullets into the couple. He shot Allen’s mother eight times and her boyfriend four before turning the gun on himself. But the bullet intended for Joseph Allen Sr.’s brain missed. He lived, later said he regretted not using a larger-caliber gun that would have finished the job, and was sentenced to life in prison. His son, who found the bodies and called police, was essentially orphaned overnight. B Joseph Allen Jr. did not do well on his own. Within four years, he armed himself with a .22-caliber rifle just as his father had and set out in search of trouble. In April 1986, he and another man finally found it in Bellingham. They cut the phone lines of a home in the middle of the night and slipped inside. There, they bound a 10-year-old girl with tape, abducted her 15-year-old sister at gunpoint, and then proceeded to rape the older girl repeatedly over the course of a day in Allen’s apartment. They documented their crime by taking pictures.

Murdering mothers and abducting daughters are to many people unforgivable acts. But here, in a class called The Nature of Forgiveness, there is no such thing. As Allen tells his story to the group, Ruth Henderson, a wisp of a woman, leans in and listens. She certainly isn’t the first to speak to prisoners about the importance of healing the wounds of the past. But it’s rare to find a course like the one she’s been teaching for the Boston University Prison Education Program. It’s part academics, part group therapy. Forgiveness, Henderson believes, is the key to coming to terms with the past and moving on. And that’s what Allen and other inmates desperately want to do to break the cycle of violence.

“My bad thinking got me here,” Allen tells me during a break. The father’s decision to murder did not lead directly to the son’s decision to rape. But it’s all connected. Here, now, on the last day of Henderson’s class at the prison, Allen admits to the group that he thought he had forgiven his father. But what he has realized is that he forgave the man for his act but not necessarily for what that act did to him. The victim – motherless, effectively fatherless, and filled with rage – soon became the victimizer. And that tangled history is still with Allen 25 years later. He and his father even discuss it. They live four cells apart at Bay State Correctional Center. “I just had lunch with him,” Allen tells the group. And there, in the cafeteria, they talked things over – again. It’s all part of what Allen calls his journey to peace, and it’s a journey that could have significant implications, not just for Allen, but for all of us. He’s more than 20 years into a 20-to-30-year sentence for his crimes, and whether he’s ready or not – and whether society is ready or not – one day Allen will walk free.

Henderson’s course, which she began teaching to prisoners in the fall of 2005, goes beyond your typical classroom experience. Henderson asks the 10 men to meditate in class and requires them to keep a journal. They read the works of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Archbishop Desmond Tutu and discuss them. The men learn from King that forgiveness is not forgetting. They learn from Tutu that the past will haunt them if they don’t deal with it. Discussions in the six-hour-long sessions inevitably lead to self-examination, and many of the men who take the class are soon talking about the people they killed, the mothers who abandoned them, the pain inflicted on them over the years, or the pain they inflicted on others.

“I think it’s completely unique,” says Robin Casarjian, a Boston woman who wrote the 1995 book Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom. Casarjian, who’s been working with prisoners since the 1980s, says she knows of no other course that combines these different elements and believes Henderson’s students are learning lessons that will help them down the line.

Henderson, 44, likes to think so. She is passionate about this work and will talk about it for hours on end, hardly stopping to breathe. As she gets more excited, her voice rises to a high pitch. (“This is deep stuff,” she exclaims.) And then, in an instant, her voice can drop into a slow, careful whisper as she reflects. Henderson is big on reflection.

She learned, in effect, from the master. Henderson, a native of Queens, New York, came to BU as an undergraduate in 1982 and took English classes with Elizabeth “Ma” Barker, the BU professor who started the school’s prison education program in 1972. Henderson was captivated by this woman working in the prisons and soon began to volunteer with her. After graduating with an English degree in 1987, Henderson stuck with it, teaching acting to inmates. “I couldn’t believe what was happening right in front of my eyes with these men,” she says, recalling how compassionate they could become through courses like these. “So I thought: ‘How can I keep doing this and get paid for it?’ ”

She received a master’s degree in arts therapy from Lesley College in 1993 and then studied at the Union Institute & University, a nontraditional school with locations across the country that allows students to build their own curriculums in conjunction with faculty. Henderson focused on narrative studies, exploring how people make sense of their lives through story. She earned her PhD in 2003 and got a job teaching English and creative writing at Endicott College in Beverly. But she wanted to return to the prisons and teach forgiveness, an issue she began researching around 1996. In 2005, she pitched the idea to the BU prison program. It was approved, and Henderson has now taught her forgiveness course to prisoners for three semesters.

The idea of prisoners forgiving themselves, Casarjian says, “is often as unacceptable to many as the commission of the crime.” But it’s an idea that also has some buzz – and a growing amount of research – behind it. Forgiveness is now believed by many to be crucial in helping people – in prison and out – move forward unburdened by hatred and anger. Casarjian calls self-forgiveness the only “sure deterrent to crime.” The idea is that a more forgiving person is a more compassionate person, and a more compassionate person is less likely to kill or rape again. “People ask me that all the time – ‘Oh, forgiveness. Who’s doing the forgiving? What’s being forgiven?’ ’’ Henderson says. “Everybody wants me to say that they’re apologizing and being forgiven for what they did.”

But that’s not what this is at all. The men in Henderson’s class aren’t looking for their victims’ forgiveness – not for them anyway. They’re just trying to come to terms with the past, face what they’ve done, acknowledge the pain they caused, and move on.

“Forgiveness is not forgetting and it’s not condoning and it’s not excusing,” Henderson says. “The people who are against what I do, they’re misunderstanding, they’re not hearing that. I’m not saying the act is right. It’s never right. But to separate what the person did from who the person is is super important. Otherwise, they’re forever seen as a demon.”

At least some prison officials agree. The reason comes down to numbers. Ninety-seven percent of the nearly 11,000 inmates in Massachusetts prisons will one day be released. Meantime, the state’s prison population is on the rise, up 9 percent in the last five years. Locking people up and throwing away the key may sound good to some. But it doesn’t work that way – at least not in the Commonwealth. That’s why Michael Corsini, the superintendent at Bay State Correctional Center, was happy to accommodate Henderson’s forgiveness course. He figured it might help inmates learn a little empathy. “I think a lot of them are incarcerated because they weren’t thinking about other people,” he says. “They certainly weren’t thinking about their families, their wives, their parents, their children.”

Even some victims can appreciate this thinking. When told recently that Joseph Allen Jr. was taking this course, the mother of his 1986 rape victim told me she thought it was a good thing. “There will come that day when, no matter what, he will come back on the streets, and I want him prepared for it,” she says. Her family has moved on. They wish Allen no ill will. But they don’t want to hear from him either. “He scares me,” she says, “a lot.”

Rick Saunders, 43, knows what it’s like to be feared and marginalized. He’s spent the better part of the last 20 years in prison for burglaries and thefts committed to fuel his cocaine habit. But his last crime, he says, was the most pathetic one of all. It went down in April 2005, just a month after he’d been released from prison. He was high again and needed cash. So he drove to his sister’s mother-in-law’s house in Lynnfield, broke in, stole some money, and then promptly passed out in a borrowed truck outside. He was arrested shortly afterward and sent back to prison for five more years.

Saunders, a bald man with sad brown eyes, enrolled in Henderson’s class last fall, thinking he’d probably quit the course sooner rather than later. Forgiveness, to him, was something of a joke. It was just apologizing for something – that was it. He wasn’t alone in his skepticism. Samuel Baker, serving a 10-year sentence for manslaughter in connection with his girlfriend’s death in Shirley in 2001, says he saw forgiveness as a “magnanimous gesture,” just something people said. And Doug, a 28-year-old who killed another man in a Lowell street fight and who asked that only his first name be used, says he thought forgiveness meant erasing the pain of the past. (As a condition for access inside the prison, the Globe agreed to grant anonymity to class members who requested it.)

Henderson disabused the group of these notions. Learning to forgive, she told them, is the opposite of forgetting, and it’s far more than just words. Forgiveness – especially self-forgiveness – requires deep thought about the past. But whether they actually learned to forgive themselves or others was up to them, Henderson told the men. Their grades were not dependent on that. The men could even take the class pass-fail if they wanted – something none of them chose to do. All she asked them to do was really consider things, walk away with some insight, and respect the men in the circle.

Right away, Saunders was impressed by the woman he came to call Dr. Henderson. He opened up to everyone on the first day, told the group he felt dead. And when Henderson listened – actually listened – he decided he’d stay.

“It’s changed me a lot,” he says on the day of the eighth and final session. “I was in such a bad state when I came into prison. I was like spiritually dead. And through the class and the program, I’ve got some spirituality back, some hope back that I can change. I could never say I was all done with drugs before. But now I have no wish to go through this again.”

ere in the circle now, time running out on the class, they talk about where they’ve come from and where they’re going. Allen says he will be working on his relationship with his father. Baker says he once thought forgiving others was a sign of weakness. But not anymore. Saunders thanks Henderson for being there for him at his crossroads. She smiles and finally hands back their final papers, some typed, some handwritten, each focused on a lesson they learned through the course and their reflections on it. And this is when it happens: Doug, who’s kept quiet about his past for much of the class, decides he has something to say.

“When I was 5,” he begins, his voice unsteady, “I experienced a home invasion.” Taking a long pause, he continues, “and my mother was assaulted.” Doug begins to shake and cry. “Take your time,” Henderson tells him. A minute or two passes in silence but for the hum of the vending machines nearby. Then Doug resumes telling the story of the night his mother was attacked in their home: how he was so scared but somehow found the courage to confront the two men assaulting his mother, and how chaos ensued and one of the men was injured when he fell into a hook on the wall of their home, and how they fled, and his mother was saved.

Right then, Doug says, he learned that rage was the answer. “I was filled with so much hatred, so much rage,” he says. “I can’t even express the feeling. And we never talked about that night.” But it changed him. He went from an innocent boy to an angry boy, a boy who, at age 16, would shoot and kill a man in Lowell because, according to court documents, he “felt like shooting someone.” His victim had a child, Doug recalls. And now he wonders if the man’s son is “the same scared boy that I was.”

“How do you process that?” he cries. “I don’t know yet. That’s the truth. I don’t know yet. But I’m working.”

Henderson looks at him. Doug is a man serving 18 to 20 years in prison for the deadly mistakes of a boy. He appears broken, his hand on his mouth, and not nearly as tough as he once thought he was. But this is a good thing, Henderson believes. Now, perhaps for the first time, Doug is not closed off. Not angry. Not in denial. And no longer thinking that a little forgiveness can erase the past. He’s thinking about the consequences of his actions and the life he still has to lead and how he can reconcile the two. One day, like most prisoners in Massachusetts, Doug will be free again. But his victim will still be dead, and he needs to learn to live with that. Henderson lets him keep talking about all the things he doesn’t know. Then she leans in and offers this advice to him in a whisper: “ ‘I don’t know,’ ’’ she says, “is a great place to be.”