12/6/2024

Real Story

Carol
She was a young white woman in her 20s – college-educated, well-meaning, and holding down a job in a Philadelphia nonprofit where she thought she was making a difference, working for the good.
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Anyone who has ever raised money for any worthy cause – from selling homemade cookies at a bake sale to landing large donations – knows how exhausting it can be. There are goals to meet, and an organization’s mission hangs in the balance.

So, when someone makes a significant donation to the Prison Society, development director Emily Cheramie-Walz wants to understand why. When a recent gift came through from a new donor, Carol Menaker, Emily picked up the phone and called her. 

What she heard so buoyed Emily’s spirits that she had to share Carol’s story. “It’s the personal stories of the lives we are affecting that make our work completely worth it,” Emily said.

“For me, it’s everything,” she said. 

Although Carol is a recent donor, her motivation stems from something that happened to her nearly 50 years ago.

She was a young white woman in her 20s – college-educated, well-meaning, and holding down a job in a Philadelphia nonprofit where she thought she was making a difference, working for the good.

Then she voted to send a Black man to prison for the rest of his life. She was 24, and the man, Muhammed Burton (then Frederick Burton), was just a few years older.

Now 73, Carol has spent the last decade struggling with that decision she made as a juror in Philadelphia in May 1976, a decision she rarely questioned in most of the intervening years.

She began to do some research to understand how it happened and came to see her decision as part of a broader pattern reflecting racism, classism, and the relentless churning of the criminal justice machine.

Carol channeled her research into a book, “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done: One Juror’s Reckoning with Racial Injustice,” published last year by She Writes Press.

Carol discovered the Prison Society online while researching Muhammed’s cases, the political climate at the time, and the roots and effects of mass incarceration.

She learned the Prison Society sent volunteers to visit people in prison. Because she lives in California, she asked the Prison Society to send someone to check up on Muhammed at SCI Somerset. That’s where Prison Society Volunteer Steve Wiser came in.

“Steve Wiser went to visit Muhammed, bless his heart. It was the first in-person visit that Muhammed had in a very long time,” Carol said.

“If Steve Wiser can drive to Somerset and have a visit and treat Muhammed like the human being that he is, I’m there,” she said. “So, you can thank him for my gift, because Steve Wiser taught me that there are people who care about people in prison.”

Steve also helped Carol when she finally managed to visit Muhammed in December 2023, walking her through the process. “I was really nervous about going to the prison,” she said.

“You put your cellphone in a locker. You can buy the little debit card to buy them food, which is better than the food inside. Don’t touch any money before you go in because there might be marijuana residue on it. No zippers. Wear sweatpants. No underwire bras.”

As anxious as she was, the visit turned out to be pleasant and comfortable, and the two forged a connection. Carol bought Muhammed a tuna sandwich, and she remembers that he told her that he had nearly forgotten how tuna tasted.

Carol notes that learning about criminal justice “made me an advocate for criminal justice reform,” in general. She is committed to doing everything she can to address inhumane conditions faced by thousands of incarcerated people everyday.  

What drew Carol to the Prison Society was its involvement in improving the everyday situations of the people in prison. “There are so many pieces where this system is broken that just getting justice is formidable, but helping people in prison is less formidable,” she said. “If the Prison Society can bring some humanity to a situation which has so little, it’s worth it.”

Fundamentally, Carol donated because one human being, Prison Society volunteer Steve Wiser, was kind to another human being: Muhammed Burton, 78, incarcerated at a state prison near Pittsburgh.

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