When JaNaé Bates, a minister and co-director of the influential progressive religious group Faith in Minnesota, told me a couple years ago that she married a man who is in prison, my thought was this: Jesus instructed us to visit the imprisoned, but he didn’t say you have to marry them.
She understands this response. A Bates friend shared the marital news with another friend this way: “She’s getting married to the guy who killed his baby’s mother.”
As Bates told me: “Bad ‘CliffsNotes,’” referring to the cheat-sheet summaries of classic novels. “There’s a bunch of ways to tell the story.”
Indeed, this is a story about whether we can reduce a person to a single sentence; especially a prison sentence. And whether redemption is possible even after you’ve taken a life.
‘A gun meant power’
Among Jamel Dontez Hatcher’s first memories: His mother leaving him at a crackhouse when he was 5.
“That’s when I became an adult,” Hatcher, who goes by his middle name Dontez, told me during phone interviews from Richland Correctional Institution in Ohio.
He and his younger brother Messiah were messing around, just being kids, when the drug dealer quieted them by sticking a gun in Dontez’s mouth.
This was during the worst of the early 90s Cleveland crack epidemic.
When he told his mother the next day what happened, she dismissively told him, “What do you want me to do? He’s got a gun.”
“My life changed because to me a gun meant power, and if you have a gun, no one will have power over you like that.”
He was playing with his mother’s boyfriend’s 12-gauge shotgun, as a 5-year-old, when it went off and hit his little brother, wounding him. (His brother Massai Fluker is now a Cleveland Police Department officer, I confirmed, but didn’t hear back when I requested an interview through CPD.)
Hatcher said his mother was convicted of child endangerment and sent to prison for a year.
He was in a bad foster home, and then a good one before his grandmother wound up raising him and his brother.
He began drinking and smoking weed as a pre-teen, which became a daily habit at 14. Schools had him prescribed powerful drugs like Ritalin and Adderall, he said.
Even then, though, JaNaé Bates saw something in him, and they dated in high school. He was the first boy she brought to church.
“He was so kind and gentle. There was something profoundly different about him as opposed to other 15- or 16-year-old boys,” she said.
They went their separate ways.
‘Everybody loved her’
Danielle Boone sang in the acclaimed Singing Angels choir in Cleveland. She played the viola in school and ran track, her grandmother Janet Jenkins told me. She and her husband Ernest raised Danielle from the time she was 2 years old.
“She had compassion and love and was very funny and everybody loved her.,” Janet Jenkins said.
In 2005, Danielle had a baby, Chyanne, with Dontez Hatcher.
Just weeks after baby Chyanne arrived, Hatcher said he was in a drunken rage about some other young man he was beefing with, waving his gun around when he accidentally pulled the trigger, striking and killing Danielle.
Danielle’s aunt Monica Boone doesn’t believe it was accidental, alleging the relationship was abusive until it became fatal.
Monica Boone expresses her views during an episode of the Netflix series “I Am A Killer,” featuring the Hatcher-Boone story. It was released Wednesday.
In a panic, Hatcher ran and went on a PCP drug bender, stopping at another woman’s house to try to create an alibi, before his arrest the next day.
Chyanne, just three weeks old, was left alone for 18 hours. Danielle’s mother Melanie Palmer, who had Danielle’s younger brother with her, found the baby, and Danielle’s body.
Palmer, who didn’t respond to an interview request, raised the baby Chyanne as her own, keeping Chyanne’s origins secret from her as a protective shield from the violence of that 2005 night.
There were 800 people at Danielle’s funeral, her grandmother told me. They could all be forgiven for scorning the possibility of redemption when a life had been wasted so pointlessly.
Before his conviction, Hatcher was ruled incompetent to stand trial. He said he was suicidal and and in a drug stupor, from both prescription psychiatric and street drugs and alcohol.
He finally pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2008.
Hatcher was at two separate Ohio facilities for violent offenders, Lebanon and Mansfield, and he described what prison life was like there.
“The person who minded their own business becomes a target. People take that for weakness,” he said. “They think they got somebody soft.”
Hatcher said that within 20 minutes of arriving in his cell in Lebanon, he saw someone stabbed. Another time, a crew of guys beat the man in the neighboring cell so badly that when he peeked in he could see the man’s skull, the flesh shorn off.
Inmates would throw hot oil. Put blunt objects in socks and use them as weapons.
They drank brown water and shared their cells with rats and roaches.
Correctional officers routinely ordered dehumanizing strip searches.
I can’t independently confirm what Hatcher told me, but given the data on prison violence and mortality, none of this sounds surprising.
While state prison populations have remained mostly flat, prison deaths were up 44% between 2001 and 2018, with deaths from homicide, suicide and drugs and alcohol skyrocketing during that time.
Hatcher said the only way to defend yourself in that environment is to self-medicate, and get gang protection.
“Everyone was ganged up. If you weren’t, you were going to be some kind of victim. I had my own clique, and I was losing myself in the gang culture.”
This also tracks with the data; 200,000 of the 1.5 million people incarcerated in the U.S. are affiliated with gangs, according to the Department of Justice.
Deaths from drugs and alcohol in prisons are up more than 600% since 2000, even as the incarcerated population has remained mostly flat, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
Hatcher said he spent years in jail and prison in a miasma brought on by weed and alcohol and an assortment of prescribed psychiatric drugs, like Depakote and Abilify.
This is consistent with the informed speculation of Wesleyan University scholar Ryan Hatch, that “the United States prison system is the single largest institutional consumer of psychotropic drugs in the world.”
“It almost destroyed me,” Hatcher said. “One day, I was looking in the mirror and I couldn’t recognize myself. Not my physical appearance but who I was becoming.”
In late 2010, Hatcher was just getting through another day, drunk and high and listening to music. This time it was Eminem’s album “Recovery,” which is about his battle with addiction, and the song “Going Through Changes” came on.
Daddy, don’t you die on me, daddy, better hold your ground.
“I felt like that was Chyanne talking to me,” Hatcher said.
He had an epiphany: “What kind of man am I going to be when I’m out of here and meet my daughter? The version sitting in that cell wasn’t suitable to be her father.”
Finally, Hatcher considered the future, and our obligations to it.
He got sober, and at the first opportunity got a job at another prison, where he could escape the gang atmosphere.
“That gave me the courage to reach out to Mrs. Jenkins,” he said.
Jenkins and her husband Ernest raised Danielle, and I could hear the pain still evident in her voice, but she was pragmatic about reconciliation in service of the future — her great-granddaughter Chyanne.
“He has a daughter, and we knew eventually they would meet, and we wanted her to meet a good human being who would be a positive in her life. And hopefully that would occur if he was in a good place,” she said.
Jenkins sent Hatcher books, and they talked about the readings during his calls.
He began studying cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a branch of psychology that trains the mind to correct the negative thought patterns that lead to bad decisions.
Together, he and Jenkins devised a class for inmates about toxic masculinity, communication and problem solving. It was called the “Danielle Project.”
Hatcher said 200 inmates went through the class. He said he was most proud to watch volatile inmates — known on the block for screaming matches with their loved ones on the outside — who learned how to manage their emotions and solve relationship problems with techniques they learned in the Danielle Project.
Hatcher said it was all in service of some undetermined future with his daughter.
“I had to watch her grow up — all the milestones I knew about but wasn’t able to witness. And when this little girl meets me, I’m going to have to have a resume — I need to spend a lifetime making up to her.”
He said he’s completed an intensive outpatient program in chemical dependency and trained to be a chemical dependency counselor’s assistant; earned an associate’s degree with high honors; completed vocational training for graphic design; and is currently studying business administration.
He helped organize a prison debate team. You can watch the team defeat Indiana University’s team, after which a Department of Corrections official thanks Hatcher for his work getting the team off the ground.
In addition to Chyanne, there was someone else Hatcher sought to impress, too.
Pastoral care to an imprisoned man
After JaNaé Bates and Hatcher parted, she attended Wilberforce University, the oldest private Black college in America, before a prestigious Fulbright to Scotland and time as a journalist.
She recalls being astounded by the news reports of Danielle’s killing.
Bates’ mother mused about how lucky JaNaé was not to have wound up with Hatcher.
In 2015, a year before she came to Minnesota for a communications job with ISAIAH — the progressive ecumenical activist group — Bates was pursuing her vocation as a minister.
Hatcher reached out, and she gave an address and said he could send a letter.
What followed was a thick envelope of correspondence he’d previously tried to send but had been returned over time, including pamphlets from programs he’d been running or participating in while locked up.
For Bates, it was not romantic. Hatcher was someone who needed pastoral care.
As it happens, she was temporarily taking care of three children of a close friend who was murdered.
“This is at a time when my friend had just been killed by a domestic partner. And (Hatcher) has also killed a domestic partner. I said, ‘Ok, God, there must be something here.’”
For Bates, who is now an auxiliary minister at Camphor Memorial United Methodist in St. Paul, God is not an abstraction; the Lord is deeply involved in the world and carving the paths upon which we tread.
For four years, they had a 15-minute phone call once a week, and while Bates provided spiritual counsel, they also rekindled their friendship.
For Hatcher, the spark never went away.
“JaNaé is JaNaé. That speaks for itself,” he said, which resonates with those of us who know her as a leader in Minnesota progressive politics.
“When I was younger and a bad boy or thug or whatever, she was the only woman my age who didn’t think none of it was cute. Just like today, she was trying to tell me what to do. But it was the right stuff,” he said.
Finally, in 2019, Hatcher gave Bates a poem he’d written to express his true feelings for her.
It ends with, “Do you accept my devotion?”
“I thought it was beautiful, but I was blindsided,” Bates said. To that point, their interactions had not been “flirtatious or vibey.”
She had been praying for a partner, “I did basically describe him, and I forgot to include he should not be incarcerated.”
They were married via Zoom on March 3, 2021, with nearly 220 friends and family, including Danielle’s grandparents, the Jenkins.
Digital breadcrumbs
Hatcher was terrified that his daughter Chyanne would discover her true origins without hearing his story first, so with Bates’ help he began leaving what she called “digital breadcrumbs” so that if Chyanne learned of Hatcher, she would see something other than news stories about Danielle’s killing.
The website includes an essay about his search for redemption: “I understand the magnitude of the pain I have caused by my choices,” he writes.
He also wrote a letter to his daughter.
“I want to love my daughter and have you one day love your father. What keeps me up at night is the thought of you hating me forever.”
Chyanne was now a teenager, a talented basketball player with a robust social media following.
After a series of online and real world twists and turns, Chyanne learned about her origins from Hatcher’s family — after a lifetime of believing her grandmother Melanie Palmer was actually her mother.
Bates had created social media accounts for Hatcher, and Chyanne messaged him one day with the weightiest of words: “Dad, where did you go?”
Chyanne and Hatcher and Bates quickly built a loving relationship.
The similarities between father and daughter are eerie, Hatcher and Bates say, from a loathing for mayonnaise to a similar gait.
In the Netflix documentary, Palmer — Danielle’s mother and Chyanne’s grandmother — said she’d planned to tell Chyanne when the moment was right, with proper counseling. She says in the film that she remains upset that she wasn’t the one to tell Chyanne.
Bates said with the help of Chyanne and the Jenkins, however, Hatcher and Bates have built a relationship with Palmer.
On Thanksgiving, 2022, Palmer called Bates. “I was uncontrollably sobbing,” Bates said. “She said ‘It’s time. It’s time to let it go. It’s time to heal.’”
Mass incarceration and America’s violence problem
For Bates, her husband’s story carries important political and policy ramifications.
“A lot of times when talking about restorative justice and how we think about our criminal justice system, we look for the perfect stories.”
The Hatcher story is far from perfect, but his is more uplifting than most.
Put another way, it’s easy to be for criminal justice reform and restorative justice when we’re talking about non-violent offenders, like, say, people caught up in the nation’s long-running drug war.
But you won’t make much of a dent in the effort to reduce incarceration that way.
Of the nearly 1.1 million people in state prisons around the country, nearly 675,000 are there for violent offenses, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Another 150,000 people accused or convicted of violent offenses are in local jails.
Hatcher said a first step in improving outcomes for inmates and victims alike would be to avail people incarcerated some resources so they can pursue reconciliation with victims who are open to it, to include counseling and communication.
“Some people who come here will not do what they need to do to earn redemption. But if it works for me it could work for everyone. And imagine if this was something that was more common.”
Hatcher and his family have engaged in their restoration project with almost no institutional help.
Hatcher also said the culture of the prisons — not the current one, but his first two — amped up the violent attitudes of the men it housed.
“It’s set up so that violence and aggression in prison life is the norm, on both sides,” he said, referring to the incarcerated and correctional officers.
This may contribute to recidivism: The rate at which a person with a violent offense will commit some criminal offense within nine years of release is near 80%, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Recidivism rates of people who committed property and drug offenses are even higher, however, and according to the Council on Criminal Justice, “People released in 2012 who were convicted of homicide were the least likely to be rearrested, with 41.3% rearrested at least once over five years.”
The vast majority of people in prison will be released. So the questions for policymakers: What environment will make people previously prone to violence less so? And what resources for incarcerated people upon their release will make them least likely to return?
“As a policy, restoration is not just the right and good thing to do morally,” Bates said. “It’s pragmatic.”
Bates argues we’ve tried the current system for decades. It’s given us astronomically high rates of incarceration compared to other wealthy democracies, alongside a shattered sense of safety in too many neighborhoods.
It all leads to a simple conclusion, Bates said: “What we’re currently doing is not working.”
A big family wedding
Hatcher is scheduled to be released to a halfway house next spring with the help of the good time he’s earned with all his prison programming, and he and Bates are planning a big wedding celebration for December of 2025.
Bates said Chyanne will be a bridesmaid, and Melanie Palmer and the Jenkins will be there.
After so much suffering, Janet Jenkins has found some solace. “He wound up a good man married to a great young lady. It evolved in the way I hoped and prayed for,” she said.
The terrifying fact of America’s gun fetish — and an admittedly bleak view of human nature — have seeded my skepticism about some criminal justice reform efforts, but whatever your politics or faith, we should recognize the timeless wisdom of Mrs. Jenkins:
“Forgive. Let yourself heal. And give it to God.”
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