How Adversaries Found Common Ground
By Donnell Green
Reflecting on the unexpected meeting between an incarcerated student and Ian Gershengorn, a former acting U.S. Solicitor General.
I was just informed that a federal prosecutor wants to speak with me.
I’m in prison, so the last person I want to speak with is a prosecutor. I’m dissatisfied with my sentence and being held against my free will. A prosecutor put me where I am now.
But the meeting with him was unavoidable. As part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP), my fellow students and I are taking a legal studies class. Our professor, Terrence Truax, has been teaching us about the evolving nuances of the 14th Amendment. So, Terrence thought, it would be beneficial to have a prosecutor speak to our class.
To my surprise, it was not just any prosecutor but Ian Gershengorn—the former acting United States Solicitor General under President Barack Obama.
Thirty-five-foot prison walls obstructed any hopes of evading the meeting in the first place, but now, the prospect of engaging with someone like Ian intrigued me. To converse with a man deeply intertwined with history felt like pulling on a thread that connected past and present.
And, I admit, I thought the meeting could have the potential to inspire him to work further with us and create a phenomenon inside Stateville Correctional Center. I’m confident there is a place where incarcerated people and judicial officials from our nation’s capital can meet with the goal of starting new movements. A place where we can have our calls echoed, our stories circulated, and our value amplified. One can dream.
Our meeting took place within the education block at Stateville Correctional Center. Sitting at desks in a Northwestern-purple classroom adorned with a silhouette of the Chicago skyline, my fellow students and I faced a TV that Zoomed us to Ian's Washington D.C. office, mere blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
There I was, in a building that was nearly uninhabitable, while he sat in an office close to the most omnipotent piece of land in the world. It was a surreal paradox.
Yet, though we were separated by circumstance, I soon discovered that we were more alike than I had thought.
Despite the physical and metaphorical distance that separated us, I discovered that Ian was not the larger-than-life figure I had imagined. He spoke in measured tones, casually recounting his experiences with Supreme Court justices. At one point, the discussion turned to detainees' rights at Guantanamo Bay, revealing Ian's surprising empathy for the incarcerated who, in some cases, endured decades without due process.
To break any sort of tension between his prosecutorial role and our circumstances, we needed to hear this—we needed empathy from the other side.
As the discussion continued, our common ground extended beyond empathy. As Solicitor General, Ian's duty was to advocate for the president, a loyalty echoed in the oaths many of us had to our families, our cultures, and for some veterans in the program, our country. Loyalty, it seemed, was the thread weaving us all together into that room.
Toward the end of our discussion, Ian shared his ability to compartmentalize personal feelings when faced with challenging cases.
We, too, understood the necessity of compartmentalization—it’s a crucial skill in navigating relationships within prison. Managing relationships could be the difference between a smooth bid and a rough one.
As the class came to a close, something clicked for me: While our circumstances and upbringings differed, our interests and core values were the same. We all yearned for peace, love, and equality, not for some, but for all.
The meeting might have once symbolized tumult. But that day, it evolved into a conversation that bridged people on both sides of the criminal legal system. We realized there’s potential to carve out a space where respect for equality and due process could coexist with empathy and restorative justice.
In the past, such an exchange between a prosecutor and 20 incarcerated men might have seemed impossible.
