More than Half Way Home: A Story of Accompaniment in the Shadows of Incarceration (2025, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY) by Dustin Feddon is a transforming journey. Father Dustin Feddon’s memoir of accompanying prisoners since 2013 is powerful and necessary at a time when grace and mercy have worn thin. Immigrants, students, and the homeless are demonized as criminals, raided, detained, and even deported—demonstrating again how the U.S. leads every nation in incarceration rates.
Yet Feddon presents a refreshing, upside-down-kingdom view where worth is not earned or tied to production and grace is scandalous. First, he is ordained not so much by church leaders (like his mentor Father Michael Foley) as by inmates. Some on death row have found him a caring, seeing, and listening presence in their abandonment.
Others, condemned as children, have been released into the transition home he founded in 2018 or met him at the gates when their release was finally obtained. This was a win for the Legal Defense Fund (founded by Thurgood Marshall) and for traumatized children everywhere, many from impoverished, underserved communities.
This is especially true in Florida, which leads all states in trying children as adults—over 4,400 majority Black children in a recent five-year period—and 904 children from 2017-18. Three-fourths were Black or Hispanic. Feddon notes that one in three Black male babies will spend time in prison, repeating a cycle of disappearing and forgotten Black men in our midst.
Feddon is a deep and inspirational writer who delves into the history of racial terror from slavery to lynching to Florida’s prisons. Founded in 1868, just three years after the Civil War, the Florida Department of Corrections’ first inmates served time in the state’s turpentine industry, feet rotting in pine swamps.
After receiving his doctorate from Florida State University in 2013, Feddon attended St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Seminary. He was mentored on death row by prison chaplain and former attorney Dale Recinella. For over six years, Feddon has also lived in community with those released to Joseph House, a transition home in Midtown he founded in 2018. It was named for the dreamers inside who called themselves brothers of the biblical Joseph, thrown into a pit, sold by his brothers into slavery, falsely accused and dispatched to prison again. There he continues dreaming and eventually rises to power and saves the land and his people from famine.
Without re-entry support, these men are at high risk (two out of three) of returning to prison. Feddon accompanied men in getting their lives on track, holding down jobs and living independently. Yet he also witnessed some ambushed by their old gangs (such as the Bloods or MS-13s) and forced back into crime and prison.
Between their heights of joy and depths of rage, Feddon “awoke to a faith, a truth I can’t shake: God prefers mercy, not condemnation. The more we cling to this truth, the more we feel and act in mercy.” The biblical Joseph dreamt big and was restored even to showing his brothers mercy and forgiveness unheard of in ancient literature, Feddon noted, “with love washing over the years of hurt and loneliness.”
Inside Joseph House’s second house in Midtown, Tallahassee, are Almira Malley, Development Director; Pre Shelton, Community Educator; and Fr. Dustin Feddon, Founder and Executive Director.
Notably, Feddon’s memoir is blurbed by Pulitzer-winner Gilbert King, author of Devil in the Grove, about Justice Marshall overturning false rape convictions against four Groveland, FL boys. Other endorsements come from Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, who describes it as “at once personal and universal” in his “dogged search for justice.” And also by Bryan Stevenson, New York Times best-selling author of Just Mercy. An attorney who obtained the release of the wrongfully convicted and marginalized in Alabama, he founded the Equal Justice Initiative and provided Joseph House with its first resident, Joseph Sullivan.
Sullivan, who struggles with multiple sclerosis, was condemned to life in prison without parole at age thirteen on unreliable testimony by older gang members. He was released in a wheelchair and became the Joseph House manager. Feddon compared such state-supported abuse toward children to the brutal Dozier School for Boys in Marianna where dozens of graves were found on the grounds.
Feddon dreams of a time when those “who have fallen the lowest may experience restoration, where they may be forgiven and loved for who they are, not held in contempt for what they did.”
In rich metaphorical language, Feddon likens prisoners to being forgotten in “societal morgues,” with only “faint echoes of hope in their dreams and aspirations.” They dream of reconciling with families, communities, and even their victims. Yet the criminal justice system makes this nearly impossible, he says. Many were raised in poverty, recruited by gangs, and experience further shame, cruelty and debased living in our prisons. For example, being served empty meal trays known as “air trays.”
Feddon wants to “reimagine prisons as places not for punishment but repair, …spaces that take the possibility of mercy seriously.”
He tells of accompanying Darryl Barwick to his execution and hearing his last words. Barwick first apologized for his actions as a nineteen-year-old experiencing a psychotic break and then pleaded for mercy for the condemned children inside: “The state of Florida needs to show some kind of compassion and kindness for each other with so many kids in prison. There are fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds serving life sentences.”
Feddon observed, “Those who accompany others become the stand-ins for the lost relationships and opportunities for reconciliation.”
Ultimately, Feddon’s journey is transformative and will challenge readers to rethink their basest instincts regarding the death penalty. Time and again Feddon has met prisoners who have done the work of redemption and repair and yet the system still wants revenge. Death row inmates wait for clemency until the last minute.
“As a student of religion and history,” Feddon adds, “I’ve known that a pure morality and high ideals can be used to justify cruelty. How can a supposed moral good cause us to act most cruelly toward another person?”
Feddon recognized our bondedness to one another in the cries of a prisoner calling out, “I am a man, I am a man, I am a man.” His ancestors had been shackled and deemed three-fifths of a man. When we insist some be condemned, “we, too, enter the house of the condemned… because we are interconnected.”
In light of state-sanctioned violence to trap, capture and kill, Feddon added, “God becomes the regenerative love that breaks trauma’s cycle and sets in place a new power.”
At Joseph House, he endured chaos from traumatized residents yet came to realize how “We truly belong to each other.” Acts of restoration might include “clothes and sheets in their favorite colors,” writing a “sober living policy” after some were hospitalized after smoking K2 (“spice”), or celebrating a first Christmas in their new home. “This moment is Zion…everything seems to drip with the sweetness of grace…a family has taken root.”
Feddon’s descriptions help us see people with deep stories: “When love is exchanged things are atoned, freed, released, repaired…personal history is revisited and acknowledged.”
He is inspired by a former gang member pushing Sullivan on a beach wheelchair at a housemate’s wedding where “eternity interrupts the ordinary.” Or by Jesus’s parable of the day laborers where all are paid the same no matter when they started. It’s “the scandal of grace. What’s given in no way is tied to what is earned. Your worth is not a function of production.” Joseph House recently expanded to a second home next door in Midtown, Tallahassee. There, support and social services are provided to both residents and non-residents who have moved on to independent lives and work.
Feddon will read from his memoir in coordination with Midtown Reader at The Hub at Feather Oaks, 6500 Miccosukee Road, on Wednesday, September 24 at 6 p.m. It is free and open to the public but please RSVP.
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