In Keene visit, Father Greg Boyle urges 'circle of compassion'

Jan. 16—Father Greg Boyle, founder of a national gang-rehabilitation program, urged area residents Monday evening to "plant [themselves] on the margins" and imagine a world of compassion beyond binary divisions, prisons and policing.

"You go from here with a particularity and an intentionality to stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless," he said. "You go from here to stand with those whose dignity has been denied and those whose burdens are more than they can bear. You go from here to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out, to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop, and to stand with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away."

Boyle's visit to Keene Monday for the city Human Rights Committee's Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration involved conversations with faith communities, city officials, area residents and local youth, where he imparted the idea of a "circle of compassion" with "nobody standing outside that circle."

"It's your task ... to imagine the day when policing is obsolete and prisons are empty," Boyle told local faith leaders in response to a question at a lunch hosted by The Community Kitchen in Keene. "It's OK to imagine that, because if you can imagine that, then we're going to walk our way to that."

Boyle, a Jesuit priest who the White House named a Champion of Change in 2014, founded the Los Angeles-based Homeboy Industries in 1988. According to its website, the organization provides an 18-month employment and re-entry program as well as substance misuse resources and tattoo removal.

At his community-wide speech at the Keene Public Library'sHeberton Hall at 6 p.m., Boyle said he served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood he said had the highest concentration of gang activity in Los Angeles. He began what would eventually become Homeboy Industries, where more than 10,000 people come through the doors every year, as a school for middle-school-aged kids who were gang members.

"I buried my first young person killed because of the sadness in 1988," he said. "Two months ago I buried my 260th person."

Wilber Acevedo and Sergio Basterrechea, both former gang members, joined Boyle in Keene and discussed their upbringings. Basterrechea, who was honored as Homeboy Industries' 2023 Homeboy Hero, spoke about his unstable childhood and how Boyle's organization changed him.

"I was able to locate the heartbeat of God inside Homeboy Industries," he said. "And in a way, I was forced to sort of understand my pain, what it was, what it is. It's not my fault. And because of Homeboy Industries I now use that pain as a place of strength."

The trio spoke to local leaders at an 8 a.m. breakfast hosted by The Community Kitchen followed by the noon lunch with faith leaders. At that event, Boyle discussed "love that never stops loving," with his own experiences through Homeboy Industries.

"We're more joined together than we realize, no matter what our faith community is about," he said. "We want to somehow recognize that loving is our home, and once you know that you're just never homesick, no matter where you are."

And in response to an attendee's question about his perspective on the War on Drugs, Boyle said people need to create healthier communities and reject dichotomies of "good people" and "bad people."

"We have ... to move beyond the mind that we have that, you know, wants to think that there's such a thing as a bad person," he said. "... You would have thought I might have bumped into, in 40 years, an evil person, a bad person. Never. I mean, I just, it's a preposterous notion. I bumped into a lot of wounded people, a lot of broken people."

He also advocated for faith leaders "to imagine the day when policing is obsolete and prisons are empty," in a nation that incarcerates people at higher rates than many others.

According to the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative, the U.S. incarcerated 644 people per 100,000 as of 2020, while New Hampshire incarcerated 328 per 100,000 people for the same year. Many other countries' incarceration rates fell significantly below both the United States' and New Hampshire's levels, with the United Kingdom incarcerating 129 per 100,000 people and Portugal reporting a rate of 111 people per 100,000, according to the organization's data.

The United States disproportionately incarcerates Black and Hispanic people, according to the nonprofit. It found that 813 Black people and 224 Hispanic people were incarcerated in New Hampshire prisons per 100,000 state residents in 2021, versus 144 white people per 100,000 state residents that same year.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, poverty plays a central role in mass incarceration, and people of color face much higher rates of poverty.

"We found that, in 2014 dollars, incarcerated people had a median annual income of $19,185 prior to their incarceration, which is 41% less than non-incarcerated people of similar ages," according to a 2015 news release by the organization.

Keene Mayor Jay Kahn helped introduce Boyle Monday evening, reflecting on the significance of the holiday and the ways Keene can reflect on Martin Luther King Jr.'s messages.

"As a person whose parents fled Nazi Germany, Martin Luther King was, for me, a voice of justice and equity in my country, and I needed that as a child. I needed that hope and that promise," he said. "In 1999, I felt the joy of New Hampshire becoming the last state in the country to embrace Martin Luther King's birthday as a state holiday."

While King's message of racial equity is still pertinent, Kahn said his focus on economic inequality is just as important.

"Today, as we recognize the work of Martin Luther King, it is economic inequity and injustice that I believe is the most serious issue we face as a society," Kahn said. "... There's a lot of work ahead of us to minimize the impacts of economic inequality ... but it is the communities that are the builders of supports that secure opportunity."

In his speech "Beyond Vietnam," which he gave exactly one year before his assassination, King said that the country "must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society."

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered," he added.

Boyle continued the discussion of King, encouraging the crowd to leave the room reflecting on an imagined, hopeful future.

"What Martin Luther King says about church could well be said of your time here at the library this evening," Boyle said. "It's not the place you come to, it's the place you go from. And you go from here to imagine a world that ... could look differently than it currently looks."

Christopher Cartwright can be reached at ccartwright@keenesentinel.com or 603-352-1234, extension 1405.

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