Tower and Town, April 2018

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Human Writes

Human Writes is a UK-based organisation, founded in 2000, which finds penfriends for prisoners on death row in the USA. In spite of members being against the death penalty, the organisation is not a campaigning group.

There is, happily, a steady decline in the death penalty in the USA, with twenty states having abolished it. However, there are still almost three thousand prisoners on death rows around the United States.

My own penfriend, who I have been writing to for eight years, was on death row for thirteen years. While the death penalty is still on the statue book in his state, and there are about one hundred and fifty prisoners on death row, there have been no executions for almost twenty years.

I visited my penfriend last year and I was pleased to find that he had come off death row (his sentence changed to life imprisonment) and he had moved into the general prison population.

The restrictions for death row prisoners are harsh, with visiting hours limited and a glass screen between the visitor and the prisoner. The death row inmates spend twenty-three out of twenty-four hours in solitary confinement so a move to the general prison population is very welcome.

I visited my penfriend in this more relaxed atmosphere and spent several hours with him on several successive days. I was accompanied by my American grandson, Carlos, who drove me around the neighbourhood in our rented car. He joined in the visits and I was grateful for his wide knowledge of modern film and media which he shared with my penfriend.

I got involved with Human Writes because of my strong opposition to the death penalty. I cannot believe that the USA, one of the friendliest countries in the world, should be there with such savage tyrannies as North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China (China executes criminals to order, to supply the human organ trade).

I remember how chilled I felt, travelling through the town of Huntsville, Texas, where hundreds of executed criminals are buried. Huntsville is execution capital of the state and most of the local employment is concerned with death.

In all jurisdictions there have been innocent people executed over the years, which should take the death penalty off all statute books: here in the UK, many will recall the execution of Timothy Evans in the 60s for the murder of his wife. The murderer was later found to have been Christie, his serial killer lodger.

David Chandler