Yes, the arc of the moral universe is long, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, but it bends toward justice.
No matter how long, difficult, or discouraging it might be to bend that arc, nothing will stop longtime Prison Society volunteer Phyllis Taylor, 83, from working for justice.
“You keep doing it. You keep going and going and going,” she said. “Sometimes I’m burned out, but I don’t let myself be. That’s a luxury I don’t allow myself.”
Underlying all Phyllis’ work for the Prison Society is a lifelong passion to pursue justice – and compassion.
A retired nurse, Phyllis Taylor helps “explain complex medical terms and prison processes to families of loved ones incarcerated,” said Dzemila Bilanovic, prison monitoring manager for eastern Pennsylvania. Medical problems are one of the top reasons people call the Prison Society Helpline.
“I really love what I do,” Phyllis said. “I get the satisfaction of being able to journey with somebody, to let them know that they are not abandoned and alone.”
Phyllis has a message for anyone thinking about volunteering for the Prison Society: Do it!
“I really want people to know there is something they can do,” she said. “Even as one grows older and has other responsibilities, if you want to get involved, you can.”
Volunteers, she said, can count on support from the Prison Society’s dedicated staff. “I’m able to contact the staff and they are incredibly responsive,” Phyllis said. “This is an organization where you begin to feel a sense of community.”
Ask Phyllis how long she’s been a volunteer, and she hesitates before replying, “Decades?” Which decade? You can hear the shrug over the phone. It’s been so long that she can’t remember when she started.
When Phyllis learns of a medical issue, she urges the person in prison to fill out a form giving permission for the prison’s medical staff to share private medical information with her.
“I get all the reports,” she said. For example, she is currently in touch with a person in prison with bladder cancer. She sends him and his family information about the cancer and monitors his treatment. People have her phone number, and they call her.
While she lends her expertise statewide, she particularly focuses on jails in Philadelphia and SCI Phoenix. “Phyllis Taylor does immeasurable work with the Prison Society,” Dzemila said. “I quickly realized what a wonderful person she is and how lucky we are that she is dedicating her time to volunteer with us. Phyllis gives her time and knowledge graciously. Above all, she deeply cares.”
In earlier years, Phyllis, who has worked as a hospice nurse, designed a bereavement pamphlet to help people in prison who have lost loved ones, but can’t attend funerals or grieve with their families. The pamphlet, with 5,000 copies, is still distributed.
As a nurse, “it has always been my call to serve people on the margins – people who were old, who were a minority, who had an addictive disease, who are dying – those were the populations I was nursing,” Phyllis said.
Phyllis brings a unique perspective to her work as a volunteer. She has a special understanding of the challenges of being a corrections officer (CO) because she trained as one herself. As a chaplain in the Philadelphia jail system, she was required to go through corrections officer training.
“I have a sense of how difficult it is to be a corrections officer,” she said. “It’s hard work and it can be one officer to 52 people who are incarcerated. It’s really easy for CO’s to be overwhelmed.”
That’s why, when she goes inside prisons, she makes her background known. “I don’t want them to think that I’m an apologist for the incarcerated,” she said. “I’m an advocate, but I don’t want to be an adversary. So how can we work together to address their needs?”
Her work for justice has taken her to the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana, to Nicaragua, and to the suburbs where she and her husband lived with a Black couple in their home, which had been targeted by vandalism.
She has been arrested multiple times and once spent 10 days in jail on an arrest stemming from civil disobedience, giving her an additional perspective for her Prison Society volunteering.
For many years, Phyllis worked on various justice causes with her husband, Dick, whom she met at a civil rights seminar and married six months later. He passed away in October, but even his death has not stopped her from her work. They had been married 61 years and lived most of that time in Philadelphia, where she still lives.
“As I do all these things, all his legacy lives within me,” she said.
Phyllis’ focus on justice stems from her dual Quaker and Jewish faiths. “I’ve always wondered where the good people were in 1933 and 1934 as Hitler made his ascendency,” she said. “I never wanted to be the good person who watched it all happen and did nothing.”
“If people are quiet when there’s an injustice, then evil acts can continue.”