Letter from Prison

 HS #66 2021.1.14

 

Letter from Prison

 

This past year some have felt like prisoners in their own homes, and have described both positive and negative aspects of it. The negatives are obvious. One positive is the opportunity for contemplative silence needed for deep thinking. Perhaps that is why influential literature has come from the incarcerated: Martin Luther King Jr., Paul the Apostle, Adolf Hitler, John Bunyan, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison.”   

 

I became interested in the plight of the prisoner several years ago upon reading an article in GQ magazine about solitary confinement. On any given day, the U.S. has 90,000 people in solitary confinement. That’s double the population of Holland. 

 

My interest was rekindled recently by an article in Popular Mechanics.  It described how Christopher Havens, a 10^thgrade high school dropout serving a 25-year sentence for a drug-related murder discovered the joy of mathematics, established a research relationship with mathematicians, and has recently published an article. Describing his research, he writes, “Continued fractions are beautiful and pure and they even have a pulse – they beat to the rhythm of a leaping arithmetic pattern.” That is poetry – it gives me goosebumps. 

 

Wanting to help other inmates experience the same, he founded the Prison Math Project. I wrote him to volunteer, and subsequently we have been corresponding by phone and email.  

 

He sent me his story, and I found it so moving that I want to share it with you. The following is Christopher Haven’s letter from prison: 

 

Our mission is not only to help inmates make positive life choices through the study and exploration of mathematics, but also to show them that a lifestyle exists where they can live in the pursuit of beauty and embrace their passion for mathematics. 

 

I once lived a completely different lifestyle to what I know today.  I began my sentence as another of the cliché "convicts" that media portrays the prisoner to be. After six months of this, I got into serious trouble and I ended up in what we call "the hole". The hole is an isolation unit, full of nothing nice. A prison within a prison. 

 

It didn't take long before I began passing my time solving puzzles. After months of this, the challenge was gone. All I had left was the noise of the screams and the yelling. I remember watching the scenery though a narrow window in my steel door. I picked out patterns among the scenery. I could predict when certain guards and nurses would walk through and which doors they opened first. I could predict the behavior of the other residents. One of these patterns was an older gentleman visiting a specific sequence of doors. He would pass envelopes through the doors, and repeat the process at a later date. This gentleman was distributing packets of mathematics. 

My door number was soon added. The math in the packets was basic algebra, but it was my first real exposure to mathematics. Man, I soaked it up like you wouldn't believe. For me, the computations were like little puzzles. Mathematics was like a seed in the fiber of my being. The isolated environment was precisely the condition I needed to finally slow down enough to realize that mathematics was what my life was missing. 

 

I spent hours and hours every day. I was hooked. The gentleman soon ran out of new material to give me, so I began buying books. That's when my questions really began! It was at just this time when I thought to myself, "I've got 25 years. I could become a mathematician."  

After my enjoyment began turning into a passion, something happened. I noticed that my thoughts were changing. My values were changing and my actions were being thought out instead of acted on impulse. I was changing, and I noticed it like the contrast between night and day. I'm not referring to a few changes. I'm talking about changes that made me question who I really was anymore. I won't go too deep into this story, but I want you to see that I was experiencing the transformative powers of mathematics.

Mathematics has led me to so many things that give my life meaning. It led me to taking responsibility of my life. This led me to empathy, which led to a complete restructuring of my practice of everyday life. I then learned to love things including myself. Self-rehabilitation was occurring, all through the lens of mathematics. This is how I define justice.