JEREMY

JEREMY ROBERTO PACHECO

By Ike Griffin

Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.

Jeremy was tried as an adult at the age of 15 and incarcerated in the Ferguson Unit, known as “a gladiator school” in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Most of the inmates at Ferguson were young, average age about 23, but Jeremy was one of the youngest. He was approximately 20 years of age when we met on a Kairos weekend in 1986.

Though his father lived in Florida, Jeremy had moved to Texas with his mother when he was 8 years old. After his parents divorced, his mother re-married and moved Jeremy and an older sister to a town near San Antonio, Texas. Shortly after the move, his step-father began to sexually abuse him, as well as his sister. Unable to live with the pain and guilt, Jeremy ran away from home at the age of 10. Sexually abused children almost invariably report feelings of guilt regardless of their inability to prevent being abused. Jeremy lived on the street in San Antonio. Soon, he was picked up by a sugar daddy who gave him refuge, but who also demanded sexual favors and introduced him to drugs. Jeremy, being a very attractive, small statured kid with an innocent countenance, developed an income delivering drugs.

At the age of 12 Jeremy ran into his first serious clash with the juvenile justice system. Found guilty of dealing drugs, the judge first put him into foster care but was willing to turn him over to his older sister, who had also left the abusive atmosphere of their home and had established herself in San Antonio, working at a respectable day job. No one mentioned to the judge that she supplemented her income through prostitution at night. Jeremy’s life was marginally better living with his sister in her one bedroom apartment, but when she entertained her boyfriends at night, Jeremy had to sleep in the closet among the shoes and remain very quiet.

I have often tried to imagine what life must have been like for Jeremy at this point. Forced by circumstances of survival into male prostitution and drug running as an adolescent, he was known in the neighborhood for certain activities and he received no encouragement to change from his contemporaries. Life became painful enough for him that at age 14 he killed a man, was tried and sent to an adult prison a year later. The torments continued, following him into prison.

Being more clever than most inmates, Jeremy was able to find jobs in safer environments of the prison, primarily as a clerk in an office with supervision. When I met Jeremy, he was a Chaplain’s clerk, safe from harassment inside and anxious to shape a better life for himself upon his eventual release. Jeremy developed a team of eight or ten men who wrote letters to troubled youth, encouraging them to get hold of their lives, straighten up, ask for help, do anything to stay out of prison. Addressing each letter Dear Teen-Ager, the team of writers used their own lives as examples of experience to avoid. They were limited to both sides of a single sheet of paper to tell their story and make their plea. Each letter was hand written and original. Once a month, I would collect all the letters and distribute them to 9th grade counselors in the public school system, who would give letters to students that needed to hear from someone who had been through some of their experience and ended badly.

Needless to say, after a couple of years, I knew the writers’ stories quite well. It is interesting to note that the more often they wrote their story, the more honest and fearless they became exposing themselves. I was fortunate to see some of these men released and attended the wedding of one of the men after he was settled. This is the same man who had confessed to me that he had participated in the gang rape of one of the other men in the writing group. I was there when he sought forgiveness of his victim and the same was granted… the two men became friends who would protect rather than exploit one another.

Eventually, Jeremy grew too old for the inmate profile at his prison and was transferred to a new unit. He asked that I write a letter to the warden explaining his writing project and requesting he be given authority to continue. This outreach required special privileges in regard to access to supplies, congregating with a team of writers, and passing letters out of the institution via a trusted volunteer to local school counseling services. To my knowledge, Jeremy continued the project for 15 years, through 4 institutions.

I want to think that Jeremy will make a successful transition into society; he has certainly done much to build a support community for himself, seeking to leave the old sex offender label behind, but the odds are against him. The sex offender label is so limiting in where he can live, what jobs he can apply for, how he can be received by society even if they know him, respect him and trust him.

It was not the homosexual community that abused him. It was heterosexual men who tormented him, forcing him into prostitution, drug dealing and worse. Heterosexual inmates continued to torment him in prison. What he learned from them was how completely effective sexual abuse can be in dominating another human being to establish a pecking order. That is a particularly difficult truth to forget. Actually, it cannot be forgotten once experienced. One can only learn to live with the memory, and the memory can be tolerated if love and respect is found from another human being.