I started my work at Green Haven Prison on October 5, 1967 and it was the beginning of my thirty-five-year journey in the dark world of New York State prisons. It didn’t take very long to realize that Green Haven was a different place than Rikers Island. After about six months inmates began to talk and share with me their experience with Warden Follette. When he first arrived at Green Haven the inmates went on strike to protest his appointment. They all refused to come out of their cells. I was told by inmates that in order to break the strike he had the guards go cell to cell and drag each inmate out. They were stripped naked and made to crawl on all fours, make the 
sound of pigs, or yell, “My mother’s a whore.” As they crawled down the gallery they were savagely beaten by a long row of guards. One inmate told me that he saw inmates whose whole bodies were entirely black and blue. One pastor in the outside community told me that there were guards who were life-long friends who no longer would speak to each other when one realized how brutal the other had been. Then inmates began to share more stories about Follette’s record at Clinton Prison.
When I realized the kind of place this was in which I found myself, I decided I wanted out. I even began to explore returning to parish work outside. Then I happened to read in the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer about his contempt for idealists. He believed that their main concern was to “stay clean.” I began to realize that was also my main concern. I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to be tinged by the dirty situation in which I found myself. I guess I thought that to run from it would keep me pure. I pondered this for several days and then decided I would stay and set some long-term goals and be willing to get dirty if I had to in order to achieve them. That’s when the real work began