Lockdown on Rikers (9 page)

8

On a brisk morning in late November, Millie Gittens and a bundled-up Calvin were saying their good-byes. The details for Millie's drug program had been abruptly finalized, and Camille Baxter and the mothers were gathered around, waiting for officers to escort Millie and Calvin to the receiving room. Everyone was wishing her well, although I could also hear the murmurs: “It's not fair—how come she gets to go to a program?”

I still had mixed feelings about Millie, but as the officers arrived, I just hoped things would somehow work out for her in rehab.

And on the Mental Observation Unit, Annie Tilden was pacing the floor, awaiting the release that would send her home for Christmas. “Every day I'm in here feels like a year,” she said in our final session.

“It's almost over now,” I said. “You're coming down the homestretch. Soon, this place will be a memory.”

“Hey,” she said, “how will you and I be able to meet when I'm home?”

“Well—we won't, Annie,” I responded honestly to the question that had been cropping up of late. “But we'll always have nice memories, and as long as I know you're taking your meds and staying away from drugs, then I'll know you're fine.”

“Like I told you a thousand times over,” she sighed. “I'm done with drugs. And the medicine—you know I'll take it. You think I
want to start talking to Dan Rather again? I mean, he's nice and all. But, no thank you!”

The Monday after Thanksgiving, Annie Tilden's name was gone from the Rose Singer census, and I smiled. She was home now.

In early December, green plastic wreaths popped up on the clinic windows, and in the nursery the mothers put up a small silver tree. Even the dour Overton surprised everyone by bringing in a strand of colored lights that he hung over the inmate waiting area.

Although the festivities were less joyous and more restrained than on the outside, the holiday spirit still permeated the cold concrete walls, and modest party plans were under way. The students were asked to prepare a Christmas party for the mentally ill, and after work one evening, the three of us drove to a convenience store and bought bulk holiday candy, careful to avoid gum and anything in aluminum wrapping. Gum can be used to jam locks, and convincing badges can be fashioned out of aluminum, so both are prohibited.

We filled goody bags with chocolates, peppermints, and hard candy. One of the permanent staff members belonged to a church that donated toothpaste and other toiletries to the mentally ill, and we added these to the bags. The final step was permission for music. Since nothing—even something as innocuous as a tape deck and assorted Christmas tapes—could be brought into the jail without DOC approval, I assumed the job of getting the okay from the clinic captain. As the next level up from the CO in the correctional hierarchy, captains are easily recognizable by their white shirts.

The captain who oversaw the clinic was a hefty woman with thin brown hair pulled back into a tight little bun. With a cigarette usually dangling from an unsmiling mouth, Captain Murphy had a reputation for doing things “by the book!” But I wasn't worried. I expected my request to be nothing more than a formality, as small parties for the mentally ill were considered part of their therapy. There was always a line outside the captain's office, and when it was my turn, I laid out the party plans. She dragged hard on her
cigarette, mulling it over. “Come back tomorrow! I'll let you know then.”

I was a little surprised. But I didn't protest—after all, we were “guests in their house,” something that, I noticed, DOC never passed up an opportunity to remind us of.

The following day, I reported to her office, and she was ready with her decision. “You're cleared to bring in the tapes.”

“Oh, thank you, Captain!”

“But you may not bring in the tape recorder.”

“What?”

“Department regulations!”

“But what good are the tapes without the recorder?”

Ignoring me, she motioned to the person behind me in line. “Next!”

I stormed back to the conference room, fuming to my comrades, “These people are crazy!” Overhearing my ranting, Overton popped his head in. “You want to know why you can't bring in a tape deck? You see the signs around the island? No cameras, no recording devices allowed. It's because of that. A tape deck plays tapes—but it also
records.
”

“Aahh!” I ran back to Murphy's office, jumping the line. “Captain, if I can find a tape deck without a recording feature, would that be okay?”

“Yes, but I'd have to see it first,” she snapped.

I was now on a mission, checking tape players at home and enlisting the aid of friends and family. Everyone was on the hunt. But no luck.

A week before the festivities, it looked like our MO party would be a quiet affair.

In the meantime, we suspended the last nursery session before our winter break for a party. When Allison and I arrived, the silver tree was lit up and Bing Crosby was crooning “White Christmas.” Curious about the music, I traced it to a boom box that I inspected closely. Sure enough, the word
record
was right on it. Ha! According to DOC's own rules, this device should never have been in the
jail—but I wasn't going to point it out. Instead, I would walk it down the hall for the MO party later in the week, and return it afterward.

With my problem solved, I returned to the festivities, joining Allison in setting out plates of donuts with red and green sprinkles. In the living room, Marisol and baby Teresita were enjoying the tree. On the couch, Lucy held little Michael, giggling with him, playing peekaboo, smothering the laughing baby with kisses. It was nice to see Lucy laughing, as she ordinarily had an intensity about her, a determination that was exhausting.

Yet despite the tree and the music, the party was a bittersweet affair, as only a few of the mothers came. The others tended to chores or retreated to their cells. When I noticed tear-stained faces, I pulled Addie aside and asked her why she wasn't joining us. Choking back tears, she said, “There's no Christmas in here—when I get out, then it'll be Christmas again.” Separated from family, cut off from the world, incarceration during the holidays is especially painful for detainees, and many simply wanted to get it over with.

A few days later, there was an entirely different mood on the MO. The Mental Health staff set aside their paperwork and walked over to the protective unit where the mentally ill inmates were already gathered, eager for their party and relishing the unusual show of attention. Staff members dragged chairs into a widening circle, and Rose Singer's Mental Health chief stood up and said a few words of goodwill, and, as always, pushed the women to take their medication. “Make that your New Year's resolution!”

Wendy and Allison passed out the goody bags while I popped a tape into the borrowed nursery boom box. With the festive tunes playing, these fragile people, whose lives knew far too little joy, delighted in their treats, laughing and popping chocolates into their mouths. A good-natured psychiatrist, best known to them for looking over the brim of his glasses as he queried them about medication, donned a Santa Claus cap, which drew howls of laughter. When “Jingle Bells” began to play, everyone joined in on the familiar tune—
“o'er the fields we go, laughing all the way, HEY!”
Even the officers tapped their feet and sang along, and in the bubble,
Officer Timlinson was peering through the big picture window and smiling. As the women laughed and the singing continued, for a few blessed moments it felt like we were all transported out of the cheerless Mental Observation Unit, far away from courts, handcuffs, medication, and jail. When the singing slowly wound down, patients and staff sat for a moment in satisfied silence. The silence was broken by the little woman with the mismatched eyes who'd told me she'd seen the Easter Rabbit. “This is the best party I've ever been to—in my whole life.”

A few days later, the rosy hue of the party still lingered as I worked on my charts. I was humming Christmas carols when agonizing cries suddenly pierced the clinic. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Overton was yelling. Staff members rushed out of their offices toward Overton, who was pulling a sobbing inmate down from one of the seats. Above her was the string of lights he'd brought in, and stuck in her wrists and forearms were bits of broken colored glass. “Kill me—just kill me!” I recognized her as one of the women who frequented Sister Marion's office and had been on Rikers for a good year before we'd arrived. Always demure and polite, she was familiar to us as one of the women from South America who'd been arrested at a city airport for carrying drugs. I'd often noticed her in the nun's office, deep in prayer—praying for mercy, praying for compassion, praying for a miracle. But earlier in the week, her case had finally resolved. There had been no miracle, no last-minute reprieve, no dream team to swoop in and save the day. Her sentence for the nonviolent first offense of smuggling a small amount of drugs: twenty-five years in prison.

As she was rushed over to the medical side of the clinic, propped up by the unit chief on one side and a psychiatrist on the other, her shrieks grew louder—“
Mis niños, mis niños!
My children, my children!” The rest of us stood by, dazed, save for Overton, who was sweeping up the glass, muttering, “You try to do something nice, brighten things up for the holidays . . .”

I retreated to the conference room and clamped my hands over my ears, trying to block out the heart-wrenching cries. So, this was
the War on Drugs—up close and personal, the side that no one ever sees: a newly sentenced human life coming apart. How could these cruel sentences be the answer to the drug problem? Why was the solution to complicated social and psychological problems always a bigger hammer? Brutally punishing this woman meant nothing to the powerful drug trade. But for children waiting for their mother, it was everything. The thought of little children in some far corner of the world waiting for a mother who would never come home was one that would haunt me long after my internship was over.

* * *

As the semester wound down to the last few days, we kept up the vigil in our “anti-TB room,” quietly finishing term papers and wrapping up chart work, toiling away in a room that was now ice cold. To keep my hands warm but still manage a pen, I'd cut the tips off a pair of old gloves. Every time we considered shutting the windows, a new rumor would surface that someone else on the island had tested positive for TB. And with each new report, our supervisors told us to “think positive, work hard, get good rest, and you'll be fine.”

And with that, the first semester ended.

9

The winter recess brought a two-week hiatus from school, and I enjoyed the break from classes and the weary trek out to Rikers. I got to see a lot more of my family over the break, and by now I had much more to tell them about the women at Rose Singer and life “on the inside.” Mostly, I was struck by the unevenness of life, how these women had had to survive fragmented, impoverished families when so many of us are blessed with comfortable, intact ones. One of my brothers, Charlie, a New York City firefighter, was stationed in a busy firehouse in a rough section of Brooklyn, and he well understood. He told us about the neighborhood children who showed up at the firehouse doors, dragging in old bicycles with flat tires. “We fill them up with the pumps we use on the rigs, and we pull out tools and just try to get their bikes working. I feel so bad for them. They're just trying to have little-kid fun—not easy because they're growing up in a hellhole. When I'm doing my overnights, the neighborhood turns into a war zone—all night long, pop-pop, pop-pop! Guns! Unbelievable! I lay there and think,
My God!
Where the hell am I?”

My brother's report of gunfire came as a jolt. Oddly enough, despite working in a jail, I was far removed from the violence he described. Life at Rose Singer was orderly and controlled, although I was well aware that it was only one of the ten jails on Rikers, and that the other nine housed men. I also knew that, for the most part, the men were charged with more serious crimes.

I tucked away my brother's comments, and by early January I was back at school with fresh enthusiasm for the second semester. At the end of December, Wendy and I had been asked to start a support group for adolescent inmates between sixteen and nineteen years old. The “girls” were notorious for fighting, often sporting black eyes. Our challenge was to see if a therapeutic group might defuse some of the violence.

Since the girls attended school during the day, the plan was that Wendy and I would each run an evening group in their house, which was divided into two sides. For our first session, we walked through unfamiliar corridors until we reached the house, located in a remote section of the jail. We explained our mission to an amused housing officer. “Good luck! These girls, they're just gonna play you.” Nonetheless, we signed in to the logbook and split up, with Wendy going to work on the A side while I took the B side.

Inside the cellblock, twenty-five cell doors bordered a common space where a bunch of girls—one of them hugging a blanket and sucking her thumb—was crowded in front of a TV that was blasting a bawdy sitcom. Everyone else was running around, shrieking and laughing with youthful energy. No one seemed to notice me as I plunked down my papers on a round plastic table. I wasn't exactly sure what to do next, so a little self-consciously, I stepped to the center of the room and said in as loud a voice as I could muster, “I'm Miss Buser from the Mental Health Department, and I'm starting a support group in this house.”

There was no reaction. Either they didn't hear me or they chose to ignore me. I opened the box of donuts I'd brought along and placed it on the table. I'd learned the value of bait.

Just then, the officer stormed out of the bubble. “Get over here, ya ungrateful bitches! Can't you see this lady's trying to do something nice for you?!”

For a moment the silliness and roughhousing came to a stop and all eyes were on me. This was exactly what I did not want. I wanted them to come of their own accord, and I understood that this might take time.

“It's okay,” I said to the officer. “I appreciate what you're trying to do, but it's okay.”

“Well, I was just trying to help!”

“Yes, I know—and I appreciate that.”

“Whatever!” she sniffed, and retreated to the bubble.

An awkward silence followed; the girls looked at me and then resumed their horseplay. But two of them, a lithe Black girl and her shorter Hispanic friend, meandered over. The tall girl spoke first. “Hi. I'm Ebony, and this is Diana. Mind if we sit down?”

“Please do,” I said, offering the donuts, which they happily dove into.

“So you're from Mental Health,” started Ebony. “Well, we have a problem,” she said, glancing at the giggling Diana. “Do you do—what do you call it—couples therapy?”

“Are you two a couple?”

“Sort of . . . the problem here is that I know how I feel about Diana, but I think that when she gets out of here, she's going to flip back—and run straight back to her boyfriend.”

“I am not!” Diana protested. “You keep on saying that, but it isn't true!”

Flipping
was the jailhouse term for heterosexual women who were in relationships with other female inmates. Although most refrained from sexual dalliances, the sight of couples walking down the halls with arms interlocked was not uncommon.

As Ebony and Diana bickered, I simply listened and did a little mediating, aware that others were strolling by. One of them asked if she could have a donut. I told her she could, as long as she sat down with us while she ate it, my only requirement. She pulled up a seat and said her name was Crystal.

As soon as Crystal joined us, Ebony and Diana changed the subject. I could tell Ebony was disappointed, but she made an effort to switch gears, and the four of us chatted about nothing in particular.

When the hour was through, they asked me if I was coming back the following week.

“I'll be coming every week,” I said.

The three of them seemed a little proud that they'd befriended me and insisted on walking me the short distance to the bubble. As the officer buzzed me out, a stray shout came from the rear of the cellblock: “Good night, Mental Health!”

On the walk back, Wendy and I compared notes. Her experience had been similar to mine, and we were both excited about our first session. Although most had ignored us, a few were interested. “A good start,” we agreed. Definitely! We then discussed the problem of the well-meaning officer, who'd also yelled at the girls on Wendy's side. We decided it would be best if we chatted with her a little before things got started. Everything in jail works better if the officers feel included, an interesting lesson we were catching on to.

On a stretch of dim and lonely corridor, a couple of unfamiliar COs were walking toward us; with them, telltale IDs clipped to their shirts, were three male inmates. This was my first encounter with incarcerated men, but I remembered at some point being told that our jail and one of the men's jails were connected; this particular corridor was apparently a common hall. As they got closer, the inmates nodded to us. “Evening, ladies,” said the officers. We nodded back and kept moving. When we reached Rose Singer's brighter, more familiar halls, I felt mildly relieved.

Since it was evening, the jail was quiet, save for the STEP rehab regiment, which was in full swing.
“Hup! Hup!”
the women chanted. At the rear of the line was Tiffany Glover, a skinny little figure in an oversized uniform. Every time I ran into the STEP troops, Tiffany was struggling to keep up, the runt of the litter. I waved to her as they passed by, and she managed a weak little smile. Despite her high hopes, this STEP venture didn't seem to be going well, although she'd never let on in our sessions that she was unhappy. But a couple of days after this evening encounter, her misery spilled over. “I can't do it,” she said. “All they do is yell and curse at you, and half the time I'm just crying.”

Squirming in her seat, she said, “Miss B, do you think it would be terrible if I quit?”

“No, I don't.”

Her face lit up. “You don't?”

“No. Not everything we try is going to work out. What's important is that you tried.”

“Oh, thank you, Miss Buser! I just don't want people to be disappointed in me.”

“I'm not disappointed in you. I think you made a good effort here, and that's what counts.”

“Would you mind telling that to my mother?” she said, grabbing the desk phone and placing it in front of me. “Here—I'll dial.”

“Now wait a minute, Tiffany! Hold on! This is a call that you've got to make.”

Tiffany bit her lip, and with trembling hands retrieved the phone. I stepped away to give her some privacy, just catching the words, “Hello, Mommy. How you feeling today?”

* * *

The weekend after Tiffany Glover's decision to quit STEP, the city was hit with its first major snowstorm of the year, and the island was blanketed in downy whiteness. For a brief moment, the cold collection of jails could have been mistaken for a serene picture postcard. But the winter wonderland was thawing fast, and it wasn't long before the barbed wire was poking through the snow, glinting in the winter sun. The following Monday, as I trekked through a distant corridor, droplets of melting ice were pinging on the tin roof. My destination was the infirmary, always referred to as “way, way over at the other end of the jail.” A long walk.

I hoped to make this a brief visit. Just before the semester break, Janet had assigned a new case to me—a woman named Daisy Wilson. In the late stages of AIDS, Daisy was waiting on her “Compassionate Release,” a court-issued edict that would allow her to go home to die. Although I'd worked with several women who were HIV positive, Daisy was the first who was so gravely ill. I'd already met with her twice, and in those two sessions she'd made an
impression on me—an unsettling one. With a moon-shaped face and wide roving eyes, Daisy Wilson was pretty—save for a missing front tooth. In our first session, it was through a thick Haitian accent that she told me she'd contracted HIV through a dirty needle and didn't know how to tell her family that she had AIDS. She also said she wanted to make peace with God before she died. This would have been a rich starting point for our work together, but then she abruptly abandoned the topic to boast about her burglary skills!

I was a little taken aback, but I went along with it for the moment, finding myself easily drawn into her stories. If nothing else, Daisy Wilson was a skilled storyteller. I was especially taken with the rather amazing circumstances that had landed her at Rikers. “It happened while I was robbing a house in Brooklyn,” she stated quite matter-of-factly. “After I filled my shopping bags, I got hungry and fixed myself a little something to eat. Then I noticed these cute little stuffed dogs. They weren't worth anything, but I liked them and wanted them for me, so I packed them up. Then I sat down and smoked some crack, and that's when everything got crazy. Those little dogs, they jumped up out of the bags and started barking at me! I ran up the stairs, but they were right behind me—barking and barking! So I ran back down, but they had me up against the wall. I was scared! I panicked! So, what do you do when you're in trouble? Think about it.”

I shook my head faintly.

“You call 911.”

“What?”

“Yup—I called 911. Not too smart, huh?”

As I tried to comprehend this crazy scenario, she moved right along. “Next thing I know, cops are at the door. I'm coming down from the smoke now and realize I just made a
big mistake!
So I opened the door . . . prob'ly shouldn't have. But anyway, I did. I told those officers, real polite, that I didn't know anything about any problem—that I was just the domestic, and that maybe they had the wrong address. They were just about to leave when one of
them pokes his head in and sees my pipe on the kitchen table.
Shit!
So I say to them, ‘Look, I feel terrible telling you this . . . but these people who live here—they're drug addicts.' And you know—they
almost
bought it. I was
this
close!” she grinned, holding up thumb to forefinger. “But then they called up the homeowners at work to check out my story, and, well, here I am.”

When the session ended, I felt like I'd been on some kind of a wild ride. But I just assumed that the next time we met, we could set all this aside and focus on her illness.

But the next meeting was a repeat of the first. This time I tried to cut her off and get us on some kind of therapeutic track. But she simply ignored me, and off we went. After that, I didn't see her for a couple of weeks, although I regularly summoned her to the clinic. When someone repeatedly failed to show up, we assumed they weren't interested in therapy, had them sign a refusal form, and closed the case.

Tucked under my arm was one of these forms. When it came to Daisy Wilson, I had an uneasy feeling. There was something very different about this woman, and as much as I hated to admit it, I didn't like her. I felt guilty about this, as I had just assumed that there would be no one about whom I couldn't find
something
to like. But rather than trying to sort out my feelings, I figured it made better sense to just close the case. I certainly wasn't helping her to make peace with her death, and besides, she was leaving soon and would probably be relieved to sign the form.

“Comin' in, miss?” An officer's voice stirred me from my thoughts. He held the door open and I stepped into the infirmary, thoroughly unprepared for a grim site: long rows of cots with white sheets covering listless women who were coughing, moaning, quietly staring. Wheelchairs and canes cluttered the aisles. The eeriest part was that they appeared young—most suffering from AIDS, I surmised. In the center aisle, a veritable skeleton with hair was shuffling along with the aid of a cane. She stopped to look at me, the round brown eyes of her hollowed-out face seeking me out as if there was something she wanted to say. As we gazed at each other,
I realized that she wasn't more than thirty years old.
This was terrible.
Through the small windows was the river, and just across from it the city, bursting with vibrancy and promise, impervious to this death house in its midst. In the distance, nurses were quibbling about a coffeepot. The skeletal woman never said anything, but planted her cane and resumed her lifeless trudge.