Lessons from a Prison Riot

The first warning was a loud boom. Then came the sound of breaking glass. Suddenly the chaplain announced the bad news: "There's a riot underway!" Sheila Anderson's worst nightmare had just come true: trapped in a federal prison during an inmate uprising.

On the evening of October 19, Sheila had gone to the federal prison at Talladega, Alabama, where she is a volunteer piano player for the men's choir. Little did she know that inflamed rhetoric during the Million Man March, coupled with an ill-advised congressional vote, would put her life in peril.

When the riot exploded, the chaplain herded Sheila and two other volunteers into his office. "We can't let them get hold of her," said one of a group of inmates guarding the door.

Everyone prepared for the worst.

After several minutes the noise began to subside, and the group decided to head for the nearest guard station.

Courageously, the inmates formed a circle around the chaplain and the three volunteers. But just as they turned a corner, a large gang of rioters armed with baseball bats and barbells spotted them—and charged.

Back into the chapel they fled. "We will do whatever it takes to protect you," one inmate said to Sheila. "We will kill or be killed." The rioters arrived, bringing with them a terrible din of malice and confusion.

"Greater love has no man than he who would lay down his life for his friend"—this Scripture sounded itself in Sheila's heart as she listened to the rioters destroy the chapel. "But I was never afraid," she later told us at Prison Fellowship. "It was like there was an invisible wall between us and them. The peace of God was so great."

After some 45 minutes the rioters were dispersed and the guarding inmates led the volunteers to safety. I have to agree with Sheila, who believes she was protected by angels.

What caused the riot? A few days before, inmates were inflamed when they watched the Million Man March on television and heard Louis Farrakhan speak about a "racist plot."

It is a fact that violations involving crack cocaine, the preferred inner-city drug, bring harsher punishment than regular cocaine, which tends to be used by whites. That means more blacks in prison, hence, in Farrakhan's logic, a racist plot.

A few days later Congress rejected a recommendation by the independent, nonpolitical U.S. Sentencing Commission to bring parity to cocaine-related sentencing. It's an example of how the Congress is increasingly susceptible to political manipulation.

Fairness would demand that violators of both forms of cocaine be treated equally, regardless of one being a white-collar recreational drug and the other being used by inner-city blacks.

Riots are wrong. But if we permit injustices in our legal system, the result will be more tragic outbreaks of frustrated violence. Our legislators should reconnect fairness with sentencing. Otherwise, inmates will be giving the devil his due.

But then, as Sheila Anderson proves, God has the last word.