Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Ore., May 19, 2021.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
Ethan Thrower grew up in Portland. He’s a social worker who is married and has two kids. He got good grades in high school and ran track. That’s how he first introduces himself in his children’s book, “A Kids Book About Incarceration.” He then writes about the choices that landed him in prison and about how his family has been affected by his incarceration. Thrower answers a series of questions in the book including: “Why were you in prison?”; Why did you commit a crime?; and “What was it like?” He joins us to tell us more about his story and his efforts to educate kids about incarceration, the justice system and the power to change.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. We start today with Ethan Thrower. In a new book that’s coming out in January, he introduces himself as a dad, a husband, a social worker, a former high school track star who got good grades, and someone who was incarcerated. Thrower spent 8-1/2 years behind bars after he was convicted of armed robbery. His book is called “A Kids Book About Incarceration.” It’s part of a whole series put out by a Portland publisher. The books are intended to introduce young readers to big topics, things like racism, empathy and anxiety. Ethan Thrower joins us now to talk about incarceration and what he wants kids to know about it. Ethan Thrower, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Ethan Thrower: Thank you for having me.
Miller: The word you use most in the first couple pages of your book when you’re talking about what leads people to be incarcerated is “choices.” Why emphasize that word?
Thrower: I think from me, one of the things that’s really important, I also am a parent. And as I navigate decisions and things that I do daily when I’m particularly talking to young people, I think it is important for decisions we make and choices we talk about to be named. And so I think in the same vein, it’s really important for me to name my story as one of many stories. As I start the book, it starts with me getting people to know me, and understand that this book is a book about my experience with incarceration. Hopefully it promotes and excites people to start to entertain this idea that there’s a lot of stories out there.
It’s a big word, and I name it because I like to start off with owning my own level of accountability. And I also feel like that doesn’t mean that a person has to own the behaviors of the systems that they become a part of. So I can own my choices, without owning the responsibility of how those systems operate. And it also doesn’t mean that because I can name that I had choices in my behavior, that all people incarcerated even have a choice.
Miller: Well speaking of your own choices, can you give us a sense for what led a 17 or 18 year old who, as you note in your book, you basically had what you needed, the choices that led you to take part in a string of armed robberies?
Thrower: I think that’s a complicated one with a lot of answers. But I think one answer to it would be what I thought, or didn’t think about. These books are big topics, and “A Kids Book About” got it right when they said kids are ready to have them. And I wish more of those kinds of topics were talked to me about. And I think more and more as I reflect on some of the books there and incarceration in general, a lot of stuff that I see young people, even working in a high school myself, do are because they didn’t slow down or didn’t have a chance to be able to be slowed down to make decisions right.
Miller: How much have your own kids asked you about incarceration?
Thrower: Well, that’s a big part of me writing this book. I have a nine year old and a six year old. My kids ask me stuff now on a regular basis. I’m sure my children will be curious about this interview, and have a whole ton more questions. But early on, me and my wife made a really conscious decision to lean into this idea of just having honest conversations with our children. And I think the first big step was just naming it, and being developmentally appropriate. So for example, I said “dad’s been to jail” or “dad’s been to prison,” and open the door for those definitions to have a lot of questions. For anybody listening to the show that has children, they will know once you name something, a lot of times children will lean into the other part and just take the lead on asking a lot of questions. And so it was just super important for me and my partner to be the ones having the conversation with our kids. And also move away from this idea that it’s healthier for our kids to live in silence, and have thoughts and wonder about big topics. We actually believe if you don’t have these conversations with their kids, our world teaches them about these big topics in other ways.
Miller: What questions from them have been among the hardest to answer? It’s one thing to say “I believe in openness and developmentally appropriate conversations about big topics.” But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to have those conversations.
Thrower: I think that all of the questions that my children ask can be really scary or hard. I think it’s okay to name that, and it’s okay for me or other people to name that they don’t even always have to have the answers. But I think if I’m being specific, some of the harder ones are like, “Why’d you do it? How long were you there? Was it scary?” The fascinations go really big. And my answers vary depending on if I’m talking to my six year old or my nine year old, in terms of the depth of it. But ultimately sometimes when I answer the questions with my children, I don’t always have all the answers. But what they do have is a lot of certainty around, “Dad was scared. It’s okay to be scared.”
There’s a layer of “why?” that comes out of transparency, and their not thinking that there’s things in life that they should navigate with secrecy. It shows up, and I shared this before with other people, when I put my kids to bed, and once you’ve opened that door, they start asking like “what was bed like for you?” In the grocery store, my daughter asked me when we were picking up spaghetti for dinner that night, “Well, wait a second, what did you eat in there?” And so some of them, from a young person’s mind, are just genuine curiosities. And a lot of times it comes back to wondering are you okay? Will you ever have to go back?
Miller: What’s interesting about all those examples is that you’re talking about the curiosity of your kids, and you could see it easily as a stand-in for curiosity of a bunch of kids. But I could also see it as curiosity from an 80 year old who hasn’t been to prison, hasn’t been incarcerated. All of those things could very well be the kinds of questions that an adult would have as well, about sleeping, about food, about daily life. How much did you think about adults when you were writing A Kids Book About Incarceration?
Thrower: I really appreciate you asking this because I believe young people are geniuses, and their curiosity is what provokes change. It’s why I want these books to be talked about. The answer to your question is, whether it’s been a college class that I’ve talked to, the high schoolers, I currently serve, my own children, my nieces and nephews, so many of the questions asked are similar, and I think they’re absolutely able for adults to start to understand. I think a lot of times, I don’t profess to have to be the expert at everything with this topic, but I do think that these books are really designed to provoke questions. And the Kids Book About does a really awesome job of supporting me in having a glossary of terms, and words that come up for incarceration. But just starting to open up a conversation for questions, that’s what these books do, is they provoke people to learn. My father is 83, and he asked me a lot of questions after we talked about this book, just alongside my five year old.
Miller: There was one page that just stopped me short. You wrote that your mom wrote to you every day while you were in prison, and then you actually give us the number of what that means, that she wrote you 3,103 letters. Why did she do that?
Thrower: Well, my mom is a superhero. That’d be my quick answer. But I think that there’s a value that my mom picked up really quick about how you take care of people and what that means, and seeing the whole side of a person, which is a layer within this book that I think I talk about for people when they’re working with young people. Seeing the human side of an individual, or understanding the idea that love can exist from afar. There’s other ways to take care of individuals.
But you know, one cool fact about that page is that the impact that had on me was, indescribably powerful. And I named that because um I’ve come home from prison and still run into so many challenges and so many barriers, and a lot of those challenges are blind spots to a lot of people. And so I named that because that level of compassion and love and support that my mother showed me, it’s not there for everybody. And I think that there’s a natural consequence to how people show up back in the world when they do show back up, if they don’t have that level of nurturing or that level of empathy or human side of a person,
Miller: Do you have a sense, can you imagine what your life would be like now if you didn’t have that daily reminder of love, a kind of rock from the outside, that never left your side? Without that, do you imagine how your life would be different now?
Thrower: I aspire to believe that I would navigate with a lot of the optimism and strength based mindsets that people who often know me describe me. But there’s another section in the book that kind of speaks to this idea of impossibleness. And I put that in the book not because I think that situations like mine can’t happen, but there are so many stories in regards to incarceration that I get excited that people will talk about, but also are really heartening and hard to think about. I know a million of those answers to your question, and I could easily see myself landing in the circumstances of a person that gives up, or a person that doesn’t see potential in themselves, or doesn’t take that next step. I described it in the very end of my book, that a goal for the rest of my life is to be a part of making positive change in the world. And that includes bringing big conversations to the table.
Miller: You work in an alternative high school as a social worker, you worked in high school for 14 years now. Have students that you’ve worked with ended up behind bars themselves?
Thrower: Absolutely. I think I’m saying these things because I think there are plenty of people out here who don’t know them. But there’s millions of people incarcerated in the world, and statistics say that so many people know and have people incarcerated, and no one talks about it. So it just sits there and it’s unknown. And so, yes, I have had students that I’ve worked with, students from the community, or even just stories that I’ve heard from other communities that impact me just from learning about it.
Miller: How much did you think about the victims of your crimes when you were writing this book?
Thrower: I appreciate you naming that also. If one thing happens, this book lands in classrooms and homes, and a lot of this book operates from questions. So I thought a lot about it, and it was a goal of mine also to educate people, so that people can heal, learn, and understand. And so those three pieces really had influence on a book that provokes questions. I want someone who has been incarcerated, someone who was a victim to this, to circumstances, or also people who haven’t had this experience, to be able to ask their own questions in their home with their people.
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