Green Haven Correctional Facility, Delgreco McQueen, 55, waited for his friend Yohannes "Knowledge" Johnson, 64, in what McQueen calls the go-back — a space that people were corralled into at the end of their work shift — before going back to their cell blocks. Johnson would come from the Green Haven library, carrying books and newspapers under his arms like he had just finished a day of school, his green shirt buttoned up all the way to the second button from the top, his boots shining and not a wrinkle in his pants.
Johnson is serving a 75-year-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in upstate New York for murder, attempted murder, and 3 counts of robbery which he committed in 1980. Johnson was convicted in 1982, but that has not prevented the man from expanding his knowledge over the last 38 years. In prison, he has become an elder whose purpose is to atone for the life he took by mentoring younger men who come through the prison system, to see them on a path that does not see them return to prison.
"When he speaks, you humble yourself to listen," says McQueen. "It's a draw to anybody who's trying to get insight — get wisdom."
His quiet and steady transformation is precipitated by his embrace of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and their embrace of him. Johnson was convicted in a time when judges could exact particularly harsh sentences on repeat offenders, which Johnson was. Today, Johnson is seeking clemency, the power allotted to the governor to pardon or reduce the sentencing of an incarcerated person. Johnsons' application was submitted by CUNY School of Law Defenders Clinic, and will land at the Executive Clemency Bureau, who will review the application before Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo will sign off or reject the application.
When Governor Cuomo granted clemency to 3 individuals earlier this year, his record on clemency has not been great. Meanwhile, recidivism for elderly ex-inmates is just 3% according to the Justice Policy Institute.
In the three years that McQueen was incarcerated with Johnson, Johnson was known to hole up in his cell with the books that he had brought back from the library — and when he was done with them, he would pass them on to others. They would often talk about the historical, political, social problems that plagued Black Americans. McQueen in particular was disdainful of younger generations who continued to align themselves with gangs, even in prison. Johnson expanded his understanding, knowledge and empathy for these men, saying that the gangs and the projects are often all these men know. Having had 40 years to look back, Johson acknowledges the impact one's environment can have on their choices.
Johnson made his first drug sale when he was 11 years old, sitting on an upside-down garbage can with a Marvel comic book in his lap and a can of Canada Dry orange soda is his hand. His 15-year-old sister, Linda, had given him a brown bag filled with smaller glassine bags that she told him to distribute to people who came his way after they made their purchase from her. It was also around then that he started talking drugs.
Though Linda was his gateway into the drug culture, the two were very close. When Johnson was still young, Linda stitched him a sheriff's costume for his school play, A Town in England. After she left home, Johnson would walk past her room, open her door and peep inside to look at her sewing machine sitting by the window — a fragment of her past self that she had left behind. Each secretive, longing look at the machine drove Johnson to run away, days or a week later, to his big sister's, where she would feed and keep him, until he was ready to go home again.
"Linda could be one of three people in a room and you would overlook her," says Johnson. "She was nothing special to other people but she was special to me — because she was my sister."
Living with Linda also gave Johnson the freedom to explore the streets of Harlem. By 1971, Johnson was selling drugs well enough to buy his own clothes and do anything that the sizable wad of cash in his pockets would allow. That same year, Linda left for a six-month stint in Long Island to curb her heroin habit. At the end of that year, at 15 years old, Johnson identified his sister's body in a hotel room.
Life after Linda's death is a blur. Johnson went from dealing drugs to robbing drug dealers. He picked up at least four arrests between 1973 and 1980, and was incarcerated twice in that time period. During his first stint in '74, Johnson would write letters to his father that his father never returned. He found out later that his father had died from a heart attack and his mother had not wanted him to know, worrying that another death might push him over the edge.
Johnson looks back at these deaths — especially the death of his sister — as factors that propelled him further into a life of crime. Being released in 1980 did Johnson no favors. On the night of the crime of conviction, Johnson had been intoxicated on drugs and alcohol. He was robbed at gunpoint, and as a man who had spent the last decade as a "predator," he felt vulnerable and ready to lash out. The greatest charge that he was convicted for was the robbery and murder of Errol Blackwood, a cab driver, at a phone booth. Johnson was arrested the next day.
Almost immediately after he was convicted in 1982, Johnson began to think of the tremendous pain he had caused his family by his actions and slowly, whenever he thought about his family, he thought about the victims' families and their pain, regretting having entered their lives in the way that he had.
Early in his incarceration, Johnson was taken under the wing of an older gentleman he had known from one of his previous sentences. He introduced Johnson to programs in Sing Sing, where he began his sentence. In the following weeks, Johnson became involved with the NAACP almost immediately after his conviction, and was eventually appointed vice president of community affairs. When Johson was transferred from Sing Sing to Auburn and then to Green Haven, he continued his work with the NAACP.
Since his incarceration, Johnson has spent decades working in community improvement programs and fundraising with the NAACP and Lifer's and Long-Termer's Organization. While in prison, Johnson has also repeatedly participated in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Johnson says the most important thing he has accomplished with the NAACP is just to have been an active member for as long as he was. He also says being involved with the Lifer's kept him busy — he says he could have fallen into more trouble in prison had he not kept busy. He attributes the early years of his drug-dealing, in part, to idleness, boredom, and "hanging around" with no cause or purpose.
Between 1985 and 1987 at Green Haven, Johnson took note of a group of volunteers who came to the prison every Friday and began attending their prison worship services. He met Mary Cadbury, 96, a member of the volunteers who came in to conduct these services. She is a woman he calls his "spiritual mother." Cadbury recalls while Johnson was slow to participate, over time he began to talk more and show some of his deeper vulnerabilities that prison had seemed to snuff out.
The services begin with a half-hour quiet Quaker worship that implored the men to look into themselves, before breaking into a program that consisted of a discussion of interest. Sometimes, there would be discussions about criminal and social justice. Johnson credits Cadbury and the prison worship group for "keeping his head above water" and for helping him untangle the knots of guilt, anger and sadness that he had tied within himself.
In the early 1990s he was nominated as the Clerk of the Quaker prison worship group — but not without some tension. One of the members of the group — a white man called Tito asked Johnson, a black man, whether his membership in a black empowerment group would impede him from fairly and justly carrying out his duties as clerk.
"That occasion was so memorable that I can still see it. The group held its breath in a sense," says Cadbury. "First of all, that the question was asked — to feel free to ask, and that Knowledge could receive it without anger!"
Cadbury says that in characteristically quiet and reflective fashion, Johnson softly explained why he believed it would not and to Cadbury's relief, Tito accepted the response, fully satisfied. Unfortunately, Johnson could not remain clerk for long. He was transferred out of Green Haven in 1997, and he was deprived of attending a Quaker prison service until 2013, when he was transferred back to Auburn — but the Quakers never left his side. The strength of the relationship between Cadbury and Johnson saw them exchange letters for 30 odd years. Cadbury has kept every single letter Johnson wrote to her, crammed into three file cabinets in her home in Rhinebeck, New York.
Having been incarcerated for so long, with many of his close associates being transferred or released, Johnson struggled with developing close friendships. One of his closest friends is another woman with the Quakers, Solange Muller, 65, who first met Johnson in the spring of 2017. She's his primary nutritionist and also one of his best friends, having logged around 360 meeting hours with Johnson. Although her weekly visits have turned into monthly ones since COVID-19, she and Johnson exchange emails and letters and talk on the phone most weeks.
"There are three people I love dearly," says Johnson. "My brother Charles is the first, Mary Cadbury is the second and Solange is the third."
Muller grew up in a white neighborhood, being told that she was not to stop at 125th on the subway or walk the streets of Harlem at any cost. These were Johnson's stomping grounds and they both talk about how they might have met much sooner if she had ever stopped. Like Johnson, Muller found her spiritual home with the Quakers later in life. She became an official member in 2015. In 2016, she was part of the committee that discussed and approved Johnson's Quaker membership — before she had met him.
If Johnson receives clemency, he will be welcomed by his Quaker family who will give him a job as their clerk and provide him housing.
"This is an opportunity to allow a community to support a man that they really love," says Muller. "And he's beloved. He is beloved to us — to every one of us."
McQueen, who was released three years ago, says Johnson is a man who deserves to be home now.
"I've lived around prisoners and there are some who I think to myself I would not want them on the street around my family either," says McQueen. "Knowledge is different. I wouldn't have stayed in touch with him if he wasn't."
by Shehzil Zahid
When Clemency is a Lifeline
12/13/2020
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