“Is there a right way to forgive?” Lety Z. Montoya wondered outloud. “If I don’t feel these positive things that come after, did I do it wrong?”
A few of her classmates nodded their heads. “Thank you for saying that,” said Kristen Discola, a sociology professor at California State University Los Angeles. “People often think that it would be a betrayal of their brother, their mother, their son if they allowed themselves to forgive.”
Discola studies forgiveness among individuals who lost loved ones to homicide. Her research looks at what factors lead people to forgive—or not—those who killed their friends and relatives.
Forgiveness is a topic that this particular group of students grapple with often.
Collectively, the 23 women enrolled in Discola’s course have spent hundreds of years in prison. Many were convicted of violent crimes, which is why Discola’s research resonates with them so much. They see the relevance of her work for their victims and themselves.
“Studying forgiveness gives me hope for myself and for the survivors of my crime,” one student, who asked not to be named because she didn’t want to retraumatize her victims, said from the back of the classroom. “Just because they are not forgiving me, it doesn’t mean that they are stuck in a life of trauma.”
Exploring forgiveness through an academic lens helps the women examine their own experiences of causing harm and being harmed. By studying societal and theoretical views of the topic, they confront their own histories.
An emotional transformation
Every Monday evening in June and July, Discola drove through rush hour traffic to the California Institution for Women in Chino. The sociology course is part of a liberal-studies degree offered through Cal State LA—one of the two bachelor’s programs available to women in the state’s prison system.
Discola studies criminal victimology, a subfield of criminology focused on the victim experience. Her 2021 book, Redefining Murder, Transforming Emotion, is based on interviews she did over the course of three years with people who lost loved ones to homicide.
For Discola, forgiveness is not an emotion, but rather a process of emotional transformation. It looks different for everyone. Some people never forgive their perpetrators and continue to harbor anger, a concept Discola calls “unforgiveness.” For others, it might mean letting go of negative emotions like hatred but still wanting to see someone held accountable—that is, a kind of “forgive but don’t forget.” Other people might eventually get to a place where they can even extend empathy and goodwill towards someone who caused them harm.
Those are distinctions that Discola’s students understand almost intuitively, but the class provides an opportunity to put their own experience into a broader context and gives them a vocabulary to describe it.
Discola said that some people might mistakenly equate forgiveness with condoning the act itself. She describes how one student, who killed her ex-husband, found this insight particularly helpful in understanding her children’s difficulty forgiving her. This new perspective allowed the woman to separate the concept of forgiveness from condoning the crime, providing a way to untangle complex emotions.
Many of the students are also focused on the potential for those affected by their crimes to find inner peace and healing through forgiveness, Discola said.
There are a lot of self-help groups and other rehabilitative programs in prison focused on helping the individual deal with trauma, but incarcerated students often mention that studying subjects like psychology and sociology gives them unique insights into what led them to make the choices that landed them behind bars.
Cycles of violence
Many of these women are both victims of and perpetrators of crime. In California, about a quarter of women incarcerated for homicide are serving time for a crime directly linked to their experience of intimate partner violence. Nationally, more than three fourths of incarcerated women have been physically and/or sexually abused prior to prison.
Students in the class spoke about first being victims and then causing harm to others. They said that although they had participated in self-help groups, they continued to be angry as they struggled to forgive their own abusers.
Multiple women said that reading Discola’s book instilled empathy because it allowed the class to hear victims’ stories and understand the forgiveness process they go through. One woman likened the class to restorative justice events, which encourage perpetrators of crime to take accountability and meet the needs of the victims to repair the harms resulting from the crime.
Some of the students in this class have also lost loved ones to violence. Years before Montoya went to prison, her brother Jimmy was murdered at the age of 21. His killers have never been found, so Montoya doesn’t have a specific person to forgive. For a long time, she believed she needed to hold onto her anger to validate the pain from his death.
But now, she has empathy for whoever killed Jimmy. “I’m assuming they were young, lost in the lifestyle, and trying to fit in,” she said. “I forgive them, but that does not mean I don’t want them to have their day in court and serve time.”
Her experience echoes Discola’s findings about some of the factors that lead people to forgive: identifying with the perpetrator and understanding the rules by which they were operating. Many of her interviewees who said they forgave their loved ones’ killers came from the same communities and could understand the factors that might have led to violence. “They are the same kind of people that I am,” Montoya said.
Receiving forgiveness
In 2012, at the age of 32, Montoya was convicted of a gang-related murder. She was originally sentenced to 51 years to life. Last year she was re-sentenced to 25 years to life.
“My victims said that they forgive me, yet they still don’t want to see me free,” Montoya said. “I get it.”
Montoya and others have realized that people can let go of their anger and rage without extending any goodwill towards them. “It’s almost like it gave these students hope that their victims can still find healing and still find forgiveness, even though they want them to stay in prison,” Discola said.
Sometimes, though, the idea of forgiveness sits in the middle of an uncomfortable tug-of-war between accountability and belief in second chances.
Last fall, Bernice DeAnda, 59, went before the parole board for the first time after serving more than 25 years for murdering her boyfriend. She said it was the first time that she had been in proximity to his family since her trial in the late 1990s. She had long held out hope that they might eventually forgive her, she said, but when her victim’s brother testified at her parole hearing he said she should not be forgiven at this time.
DeAnda’s victim’s family members stated that they do not want her to get out of prison but they know that she will come home someday, according to transcripts from her parole hearing.
DeAnda will likely be getting out of prison sooner than expected. She was originally sentenced to 36 years to life, but she is now eligible for parole because of recent sentencing reforms for older prisoners as well as receiving time off her sentence for participating in prison programs and education.
Because of the class she has learned that she cannot have expectations that the family will ever forgive her. She takes full responsibility for her actions, she said, but has “accepted that I haven’t been forgiven and I can no longer let it stagnate me emotionally because it may never happen and my life needs to move forward.”
Other members of the class expressed similar sentiments. Laura Lutrell Purviance, who is serving a 50 year to life sentence for murder, said that the class has helped her understand that people are going to feel how they are going to feel and she has to be OK with that. “That doesn’t mean that I have to stop living my life,” she said. “It’s just being able to respect that’s what their position is.”
The hardest journey of all might be learning to accept forgiveness. One woman said she was given “an undeserving amount of forgiveness” at her trial and she didn’t know how to handle it.
For her part, Montoya was paralyzed with guilt for the first several years of her sentence. She felt unworthy of laughing or enjoying a meal. But she eventually realized that by not forgiving herself she was continuing the harm to herself and her own family.
She started doing self-help groups, became a drug and alcohol counselor, started a gang intervention program, and enrolled in college. Next year she’ll go before the parole board for the first time. She said that Discola’s class has made her want to strive to do more, regardless of the outcome of that hearing. “I feel really good about the trajectory of my life,” Montoya said. “Guilt, shame, addiction, abandonment no longer hold me prisoner.”
This story was co-published with Slate.