Criminologist Stan Stojkovic receives a letter from an incarcerated man who killed two people when he was a teenager.

Stan Stojkovic, PhD is Dean and Professor of Criminal Justice in the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). He has been a faculty member within the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare for the past 33 years. He received his Ph.D. in social science (with cognate specializations in criminal justice and criminology, public administration, and philosophy) from Michigan State University in 1984.

This story originally aired on March 17, 2017.

Story Transcript

I want to offer a disclaimer before I start. I’m not Dr. Phil. I get asked about ten times a day, am I Dr. Phil? I always say, “I’m smarter but he’s a lot richer,” so we’ll just go forward with that disclaimer.

My story is really a story about redemption and the opportunity for redemption, and something that really, most people in the criminal justice system, whether they are studying the system or they are studying criminology or they are working with individuals in the system, don’t really have any sense of.

My story is really about this, and it begins with a man named Andre. Andre is a prisoner who is in a Wisconsin prison for a double homicide that I’ll talk about a little bit later, but Andre killed his victims when he was fifteen.

There were particular things about Andre that made him so unique, because I get literally hundreds of letters from prisoners every year.

I work with the California Department of Corrections—I’m working with them now. I’ve been all over the world looking at issues of correctional—how to run correctional institutions and what the management issues and the implications. So when I get letters from prisoners, they’re pretty common.

They usually are along two dimensions. One dimension is, “My prison is a terrible place. It’s horrible. It’s awful, blah, blah, blah, blah. I shouldn’t be here. Can you help me?”

Or they give me a second type, which is, “I need legal advice,” and I’m not a lawyer. I mean, I can’t help them. I can’t really give them the kind of advice that they need.

But Andre’s letter sticks out. Most of these letters, you get and you can tell that they come from a correctional institution because they’ve got their number and they’ve got their name, and you know that it’s coming from a prison. And you start, you know, “Okay, I’ll read this letter.” Well, this guy’s letter was about fifteen pages. That’s unusual.

Most of my letters are cryptic. They are handwritten, maybe a page or two but his letter is really so profound. I’m reading this and I’m really enamored. “Wow, who is this guy? This guy writes better than most of the students I have. How is it that he writes so well?”

And so I get intrigued with this letter. Basically, his letter is about—and he has a whole plan for redemption, not only his own personal redemption but the idea of redemption as a correctional goal. He wants to take it there, and I’ll get to that in a few moments.

I’m certainly intrigued with this, and I decide that I’m going to read his plan—he has a redemption plan. I read this plan and I send off a letter to him and I basically say, “Listen, you have a lot of hope. What I hear in your voice through this letter is hope.”

But when I think about hope, I always say to students, “Hope is not a methodology. You can’t hope two variables together. You have to have a plan.” [That’s what] I always tell people. Okay, I’m going to tell Andre the same thing, and that began our story, which started in November 11th 2011, with me receiving his first letter.

As he started to write [to] me, he wasn’t asking for anything in particular. He wanted me to be aware. So I inquired in my letters, “Well, how did you find out about me?” What he had done was the prison apparently had taped these public-broadcasting shows that are in Wisconsin and they go across the state.

There was one in Milwaukee about incarceration. They had a bunch of keynote speakers and I was one of them and they were talking about, “All right, how do we make prisons better? How do we make their correctional system better? What are the kinds of things we need to do to improve this system?”

He had seen one of these tapes. It was in the prison library, and he writes all the details about how he got the tape. Writing can be very cathartic. You get an opportunity to interact with someone who is going to interact back, because most people, they send letters to people, and they don’t get heard from. They get thrown in a circular file and nothing really happens to them.

But he starts to tell me about his story and his life through these letters.  You read these letters and you think, “Wow, I’ve been working in correctional systems and evaluating them and working with people in the system. I’ve been doing research and writing about it for over four decades, so I have a sense of what he’s going to say.”

What he has to say though is really poignant about his story of how he got to prison.

That story really is what you would expect. Born in the inner city of Milwaukee, father he never knew, mother was sexually assaulting and physically assaulting him routinely, he and his brothers. Growing up on the street. This is not necessarily unusual. A lot of people have had this experience unfortunately.

He winds up going to a party. He’s fifteen years old, and at that party he gets drunk, he gets high, he’s on crack.  This was in the early ’90s when crack was still around and crack really hit Milwaukee later than the East Coast; it went across the country.

He winds up executing two fifteen-year-olds, his age. He had them bend down, took a gun, and shot them in the head—boom. A young girl and a young boy.  Killed them.

Shortly thereafter, he’s arrested. He admits to it, admits that he had done it, and there is no factual dispute in his case. He was the bad guy. He had done it and he went to prison. He got waived from juvenile court to adult court at fifteen, tried on a double homicide and gets a maximum sentence.

He’s sentenced under the old sentencing laws in the 1990s, which gave people the opportunity for parole, but his first parole hearing isn’t until 2037. That’s his first hearing.

He’s writing me and telling me about this, and I’m thinking, “What does he really want out of me?” We went around back and forth for about a year with the letters. I’m just asking questions about this, but he doesn’t really ask me for anything. He doesn’t ask me, “Can you help me get out of prison?” He doesn’t really say that.

But he tells me about ways that he’s trying to really improve himself in prison. The big message is, “I did everything. I took all the courses. I took everything from metal shop to writing courses to college courses,” even though Pell grants weren’t available to prisoners. They were not allowed under law. The prison could give him certain types of things, but he did everything.

He did everything they asked him and didn’t have a disciplinary problem, very well respected, but he was stuck. He wasn’t going to get his first hearing until 2037. So I asked him, “How do you feel about this?”

He’s like, “I don’t think it’s fair, but at the end of the day, I have to show that I’m redeemed. I will owe the city of Milwaukee forever for what I did. I will owe my victims’ families forever for what I did. I will never not own that. That will always be part of my redemption plan.”

I believe that you have to earn redemption; you don’t just get it. It would be nice if everybody just forgave people on their own merit, but that’s not reality, right? Especially a guy who commits a double homicide, execution style—brutal murders. So his story to me is, “This is what I’m trying to do—to redeem myself.” And what really runs through his letters is hope.

I start to think, “How does a guy have so much when there is so little room for hope? How does he do this?” So I inquire about that with him. “Tell me more about yourself. Tell me more about your story. This is a fascinating story that I really want to know.”

In the meantime, a lawyer gets a hold of me and he’s a law professor at UW Madison Law School. He’s like, “I hear you’ve been conversing with my client.”

I’m figuring he’s going to say, “Cease and desist.  Don’t do this anymore.”

I said, “No, I’m talking with him,” so then I get him on the phone. You’ve got to remember, I’ve never seen Andre to this day. If he was sitting in this room, I wouldn’t know who he was. I assume he’s African-American, but it could be false. I don’t know what he looks like. Do I plan ever to go see him? Yes, but not yet.

So I started talking to this lawyer, and this lawyer is part of a group in the Madison Law School that’s really helping indigent clients, people who are in prison who are seeking appeal. They are all appellate issues.

They are having law students basically work with these inmates, and Andre is one of these inmates, and so he becomes one of their clients, so to speak.

Here’s what he wants, but he doesn’t tell me this. The lawyer tells me this, the law professor. Andre wants a pre-hearing to his first hearing. Remember what I said a few moments ago, that his first hearing is 2037 so he can have under law, under the old law, a pre-hearing, which really determines his eligibility for the hearing.

That’s all he wants. He wants that prehearing because he figures he can convince people he’s done everything, and that they should let him out or at least give him an opportunity to get parole.

I said to them, “This story can’t end.” Now, what he’s done indirectly—and then I met his wife—he got married inside. I met his wife and we talked on the phone about his situation and what was happening with him. And I always say to her, “How does this guy stay so hopeful?”

 “Well,” she said, “He has nothing else. There is nothing else for him. Everything else is negative, and negative he understands is just a bad thing. It’s not going to take you anywhere.”

I said, “Well, are you guys still working on this case?”

“Yes, we are going to try to develop an appeal for him so that at least he can get this pre-hearing. “

So then I come up with the brilliant idea, which is, “How about if I talk to the district attorney that prosecuted you? The office?”

The district attorney that did prosecute him is retired and I knew him too. He had been district attorney for forty years in the county. But I knew the new district attorney, who was very, very smart, very, very enlightened, a guy who wanted to try new things. He believed in science; he believed in these types of things.

I really was able to segue to him with Andre because Andre was sending me all these articles about neuroscience and brain development, and how a kid’s brain at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen wasn’t an adult’s brain. And he believed [because of] his youth—and pf course, he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol—that ultimately, he could maybe get an appeal. The Supreme Court at that point in time had recently said that you can no longer execute juveniles so there was a whole issue going on. Could he get an appeal based on the neuroscience?

And his understanding of neuroscience was unbelievable and I’m getting these lengthy letters. I figured, ‘Well, that’s my in with the district attorney, is to talk about… let’s see if we can do something with this.”

I have lunch with him and he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. All he knows is that “Stan and I were going out to lunch, and that Stan’s a good guy and I’m a good guy and we’re going to have a great lunch.”

We sit down by the lake, Lake Michigan. We’re in a nice little restaurant. We start talking about general things and what’s happening in the city, and I finally say to him, “I have a request.”

“Anything you want.”

“Well, wait a minute. As an attorney, a district attorney, you probably don’t want to say that because what I’m going to ask you is pretty extreme.”

“Tell me what you want.”

I explained the case to him.

He says, “Stan, what do you want out of this?”

I said, “I don’t want anything. I want you to consider thinking about the sanction, the criminal sanction, in a different way. That’s really what I want you to do. I want you to really think about this.”

He says, “Listen, I’ll give you this. I’m going to go dig this file out.”

The murder occurred in 1995, and here it was about 2013, 2014, so this is a twenty-year-old case, just about. Well, you lawyers know what happens to evidence after twenty years. Witnesses die, they leave, they move, evidence is lost, wherever they placed the evidence.

But he decides he’s going to get the investigator, the lead investigator who’s retired, a Milwaukee police detective, and he’s going to try to find the families. Well, they can’t find the families; they’ve dispersed.

Remember, his family home was pretty fractured and shattered anyway so they couldn’t find these people. There was no way to find them. But he did talk to the lead investigator who remembered the case because of the brutality associated with the case, that this was such a brutal murder. This wasn’t a drive-by, which is bad enough—this was an execution-style murder.

He comes in about a month later and he says, “Stan, we’ve got to have lunch. I want to talk to you about this case.”

“Okay.”

We go have lunch and I said, “Listen, I can’t wait. Tell me what you’re going to do.”

“I’m not going to advocate for his pre-hearing.”

Not his hearing. Remember, that’s not going to happen until 2037, presumably.

“I’m not going to advocate.”

I said, “You won’t even write a letter saying that…?”

“No.”

“Tell me why. What is it about this particular case?”

He said, “This is a double homicide. This is an execution. I would be executed by the public, because I’m an elected official, if I started to advocate for someone.”

I said to him, “John, when is it enough? Can you answer that question for me? Can you tell me when it is enough? How much time is enough? He’s done now twenty-one years. He’s thirty-six, thirty-seven years old. He’s done everything the prison said and required, even by the warden and the other inmates, and this guy’s a model prisoner. And I know all of the correctional people because of the work that I’ve done with them. When is this enough? And when you know that, how do you know that? All of a sudden? Is it thirty years? Is it forty years? Is it the rest of his life? What is it?”

He said, “Well, I don’t have an answer to that.”

My position was nobody does, right? Nobody has the answer to that question within the realm of our understanding of the criminal sanction now. Because what have we done in the last thirty to forty years? Heavily retributive, lock away people, throw away the key.

Now, this guy, you could argue legitimately, if you were retributivist, if anybody deserves to go to prison for life, this guy does. But is there any room for redemption?

His redemption plan is rooted in what he believes to be the best science available. That’s not only, “Yes, I’m accountable.” Like he said, “I’m accountable until the day I die. I owe the city, I owe the families until the day I die. That’s going to be with me, and I have to do that.”

I write back and I tell him, “Andre, it’s not going to happen. It just is not going to happen. The district attorney is not going to do it.”

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll find something else. We’ll do something else.”

And so hope springs eternal. But his redemption plan is a redemption plan. He knows about risk, responsivity, need. He knows those principles and he points out to me in a very fascinating article and just said, “You know, at a time when they were locking up all these people, the science was getting a lot better. They were like countervailing trends.”

It’s ironic, at a time when all of these people were going to prison, we were learning more about what seems to work with what kind of defender, based on these principals, and he knows them. Andre is just symptomatic of larger issues that occur, it seems to me, in the correctional system. There are a million Andres.

So what I said to him was, “If we can listen to a guy like this”—and I’ve dealt with a lot of prisons, and a lot of prisoners over many years. You hear all sorts of stories about all sorts of things, but if you come to a point where you say, “How do we rethink this thing called the criminal sanction, and what is it that we are really trying to accomplish within that criminal sanction? If we punish simply because we can, aren’t we just cruel?”

Then you start to think about these things.

My last letter [from] him was about four months ago in which he said to me, “You know, I’m thinking about doing some other kinds of things so that maybe I can get transferred to another prison.”

I called him back. “Why? Why do you want to go to another prison?”

“I want to go to another prison because I think the wardens probably are better placed there, and I’ve got pretty much carte blanche.”

I said, “Well, it sounds like you’ve got a pretty good life in prison.”

He says, “And that’s my fear. Prison really does nothing for me anymore. If anything, it’s destructive towards me. I really get no benefit out of prison.”

I took that and I thought, All of us are really minimized under that approach, aren’t we? Aren’t we all, not irresponsible, but at the end of the day, are we our brother’s keeper?

What does the deserving—undeserving, I should say—deserve? It’s a question we always pose. But until we change the way we understand the sanction, we will have a dearth of choices—limited options.

I always thought to myself, This guy did more to educate me than I ever educated him. Why? Because he lived it, and he lives it right now.

Now, do I think that Andre’s going to get out of prison in the near future? Probably not. Do I think he’s even going to get that pre-hearing? Probably not. Wisconsin is infamous. Even with those people who are eligible for parole under the old law, nobody gets out. That’s just their message from the governor’s office: nobody gets out.

At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, how have we imprisoned our own selves in our thinking about criminals? If we can think, finally, about people like Andre, what does that say about other offenders who may not have committed those serious types of crimes?

If we can come to a point where redemption seems to make sense [for] people who’ve committed the most heinous crimes, can we think about things in the context of other kinds of crimes, less serious crimes?

That’s Andre’s message, and I hope to continue that story as we go forward. Thank you very much.