Locked Down, Locked Out (10 page)

There are, of course, former prisoners who wear other badges. Some—mostly folks who had middle-class backgrounds upon entering prison—secure well-paying jobs and cultivate close relationships soon after release. Others emerge to become great poets, artists, and writers, having honed their craft while in prison. One such former prisoner, Joe Loya, found clarity and a love for words while incarcerated, wrote a beautiful memoir (about, in part, his years as a bank robber), and years after his release became a valued mentor for me during the writing of a difficult article. Many former prisoners become activist leaders, sparking change inside and outside of prison. (See
Chapter 7
for more on this!)

But as Richard Shelton, a poet who ran workshops for thirty years in prisons, writes of prisoners’ futures, “They get brutalized or they get butchered or they get out, but precious few of them ... get out in a better condition than when they went in. Those few are the miracles.”
¹⁸

And if Sun Comes, How Shall We Greet Him?

In May 2013, Sable writes to tell me that she’s preparing to leave her Pennsylvania prison. She feels thankful to be paroling to her grandmother’s house, when she writes to me just before her release. But, she says, she’s seen how poverty, disconnection from
family, habits of hopelessness, and systemic unpreparedness have set up her fellow prisoners to fail when they are plopped back into the world:

Some women have no place to go so they are released to a “center”—that is smack in the middle of drug grounds. If you walk out the door they can “cop” at the corner. The environment is not healthy to keep people clean.... They can’t get a job.... Others make a choice not to care, not to try, and have reservations with their drug of choice before they leave. I see it every week. Women leaving just to come back.

A few weeks after her release, Sable writes me again, saying that although she’s got a place to stay, “Job hunting is nil.... I had a plan for most things, but now that I’m home I see my plans don’t really help. It’s all in coping with the ever-changing environment.” She’s working hard to stay out—to build a life in the altered world she now faces—but that world doesn’t know about the plans she’s made, and it certainly doesn’t bend to accommodate them.

Like Sable, Donna McDaniel, serving a thirty-year sentence in a federal prison in Texas, sees women leave “to come back”—that is, they’re coming back on purpose. With no loved ones left and no roof over their heads, “the older women here that don’t have family had rather stay right here. They get the medicine they need and three meals a day.... At least they won’t have to pay those bills every month.” Donna herself will be sixty-four years old upon release, and she is hazy on plans for post-prison living. She’s in the process of connecting—and disconnecting—the dots on her waning constellation of remaining family ties, and she isn’t sure who’ll be there to support her. She has one son but doesn’t
harbor any illusions that he’ll take her in; a couple of years ago, he simply stopped answering her calls.

Most prisoners depend on their families to help them pull through postrelease, both financially and emotionally. In an Urban Institute study, 71 percent of formerly incarcerated people cited family support as a key factor in helping them avoid a return to prison.
¹⁹
So those who “reenter” society without strong human connections are essentially deposited onto the edge of a cliff. Housing, food, health care, and the heavy labor of emotional readjustment can loom as insurmountable obstacles.

However, back in Chicago, Congressman Davis tells me that very often, the ultimate flashpoint—the “reentering” dealbreak-er—is a job. Work means money, of course, but a job also does other things for a person. We reside in a world, unfortunately, where “What do you do?” means “How do you make money?” Employment means a channel into the sphere of the Doing. Since many parolees are jobless, work is yet another thing that chops off this group from the rest of society. And if they live—have always lived, maybe—in a situation where many people don’t have work, or do work that’s criminalized, the barriers can feel even more calcified. The road forward is narrowed to the point that a life without some supplementation that brings with it danger of future incarceration seems unattainable.

The fact that some kinds of work—sex work, for example—are outside the law should not denote that they are not valid, valuable forms of labor.
²⁰
My objective in pointing to them here is to show the circularity of the current system: People are incarcerated for engaging in the informal or street economy, but upon release, the work available to them may well be limited to the informal economy. Tiffany, a pen pal of mine who grew up in Chicago but is now incarcerated in Georgia, talks about her fears
of the complete lack of “legit” jobs available, and what that void may yield. “I don’t want to be ‘free’ and broke,” she writes, “cause to me that ain’t living.”

Though new policies prohibit employers from officially barring people with criminal records from applying for jobs, it’s still tough to convince an employer that they should “take a chance” and hire you. Even employers in states with “ban the box” laws can still carry out background checks, and most will inquire about the inevitable gap in a formerly incarcerated person’s work history. Congressman Davis tells me, “They never get to show who they are.”

Harvey Fair, the brother of Barbara Fair (the New Haven activist whose seven sons were all incarcerated), talks with me over the phone about two and a half months after his release from prison. He’s just spent seventeen years incarcerated for possessing a gun, thanks to a federal mandatory-minimum law that dictates that one spend at least fifteen years behind bars for gun possession if their records contain prior felonies. Harvey is black, a factor that renders him nearly twice as likely to be slapped with a mandatory minimum-carrying charge than a white person who has committed the same crime.
²¹
Now fifty-eight years old, Harvey has spent much of his middle age, as well as most of his twenty-year-old son’s life, locked up. He’s currently living at a halfway house in Florida and looking for a job—a tough prospect, given his “felon” badge and the gaping hole in his work history. He says of a recent job interview at an auto dealership, “I explained that I’d been incarcerated, and the guy literally started shaking.”

When I ask Mauricio about his fellow prisoners who’ve been released recently, he writes to me with a tragic story:

A person I knew here that was released late last year, after twenty-one years in prison for bank robbery, was not able to cope with the environment of the halfway house and was sent to a hold-over [short-term prison facility] till March this year. After four months on the street, yesterday, he decided to rob another bank. After not being able to evade the police ... he pointed the gun to his head and shot himself.... I’m saddened by this, how can a man become so desperate after serving so many years in prison?

I look up Mauricio’s former neighbor online. Sure enough, Marvin Amerson of Memphis, Tennessee, held up a bank just months after his release. The local news story features a cop speculating that getting out of prison must be frustrating: “Not being able to get a job or start over ... you know, forget his past, that’s what he gets back into doing.”
²²
A message posted by Amerson’s son on Instagram was more straightforward: “Daddy I’ve been without you for 21 years and when you finally get home it’s only for four months. Now you are gone forever. RIP Pops.”

So, the “session with shade” doesn’t end as the Greyhound bus rolls out of the prison town, pointing toward “home.” There’s usually no dazzling morning, the sun predictably sliding through its journey across the curve of the sky. Usually, for former prisoners, when the sun comes, it’s someone else’s sun.

“Stuck on Stupid”

Mauricio, who has now served almost three decades in prison, confesses that when the same folks continually pop in and out of the doors, he sometimes gets angry—he feels they’re not acknowledging that they play a role in whether or not they return. He reserves a special name for a few recidivists who he thinks
could
have
made non-crime-related choices upon release, but didn’t: Stuck on Stupid (SOS). (“SOS” rings doubly in my ears—in addition to bad decision-making, it suggests the desperation that characterizes the circumstances of so many returning prisoners.) At one point during our correspondence, three recently released young men reappear in his prison. Mauricio’s so disappointed he can barely speak to them, he tells me; it kills him to see people “messing up” the chance he dearly wishes he’d had himself—the chance for a middle age spent outside the walls. Upon coming face to face with the young man he knows best, Mauricio says, “I just stared at him hard and said, ‘You must really like it here.’ Then I turned and walked away.”

The concept of “stuck” brings to mind a poem written by incarcerated poet Etheridge Knight, in response to Gwendolyn Brooks’s question, “When sun comes, how shall we greet him?” It is a meditation on the incomplete successes of the civil rights movement—a poem weighted with the continued oppression and incarceration of black people, despite the on-paper granting of many new “rights.” It also offers a vivid, sobering commentary on the effects of imprisonment. Knight begins:

The sun came, Miss Brooks,—
After all the night years.
He came spitting fire from his lips.
And we flipped—We goofed the whole thing.
It looks like our ears were not equipped
For the fierce hammering.

And then later:

The Sun came, Miss Brooks.
And we goofed the whole thing.
I think.
(Though ain’t no vision visited my cell.)

Release does not necessarily mean freedom, and rights do not necessarily mean reality, especially for formerly incarcerated people of color. “Stuck on Stupid”—“goofing the whole thing”—may illustrate the consequences of a system founded on disposability and isolation. When one’s ears are accustomed to silence, a sound is jarring. And when one’s mind and body are cordoned off from the rest of the universe, and are subsequently cast out, support-less, the effect can be paralyzing. This is not to say that formerly incarcerated people can’t—or don’t—make
choices
. But post-prison, the choices one can make are so limited by poverty, oppression, severed relationships, scant job and housing possibilities, and a felon label that it’s often extremely difficult to choose well.

And so almost no one emerges from prison to the music of freedom bells, but instead to “fierce hammering”—the harsh sounds of a world to which they’re ill-accustomed, a world that has forgotten them, a world that shuns them, a world in which it’s all too easy to get “stuck.”

“You’ll Get Through It”

In mid-June, my parents and I drive four hours to central Illinois to visit Kayla at Logan Correctional Center. Unlike her previous prison, Kayla’s current abode is a medium/maximum-security facility, and she has been assigned to a “maximum” unit. It’s a strange placement. The offense for which she’s incarcerated this time, we now know, is the theft of a bottle of perfume, intended
to be a Christmas present. (She’s stolen before, usually planning to sell the items for heroin money, but this time she got caught.) However, this spot is the location where almost all of Illinois’ pregnant prisoners are placed. Kayla is now housed with women who are serving very long sentences, and seeing the years that stretch out before them seems to have a sobering effect. Kayla had a big group of friends—affectionately referred to as “my girls!”—her last time down, but she’s not looking to re-create the scene. As we sit down at our table, after Kayla has hugged us so tightly that our ribs ache a bit afterward, she says, “I just want to keep my head down and do my time.”

We move on to an extended debate about what to purchase from the vending machine, and settle on Fritos, strawberry milk, and an immense packaged cinnamon bun. I am dispatched, as Kayla is not allowed to get up. But I promptly fail my mission. Glum and distracted, I leave our prepaid vending machine card—no cash is allowed in the prison—in one of the machines after my first purchase. Only the strawberry milk is salvaged. I return to the machine after realizing my mistake and ask, “Has anyone seen my card? It had $20 on it.”

“Ugh,
My,”
Kayla groans, humiliated. “This is
prison!
You’re not gonna see that card again.”

Resigned, I hold the milk carton out to her. She shakes her head.

“I can’t even think about it,” she says, and it takes me a second to understand that she doesn’t mean the milk. “It’s just gonna be so hard this time.”

You’ll get through it
, we say, though none of us can imagine carrying out a pregnancy while in prison, along with the agonizing anticipation of separation from her baby.

“I know,” Kayla says. “But what am I going to do?”

“Just think about the day you get out,” I say.

She pauses, and I realize again that we are talking about very different things.

“OK,” she says. “But what am I going to do the day after that?”

Chapter 5
Disposable Babies

She’s in the free world, so there are security considerations.

—Prison guard, explaining why Kayla can’t call us from the hospital after giving birth

It’s late July and humidity drenches the sweat-scented air of the visiting room at Logan prison. Kayla is shifting back and forth in her stiff chair, tugging at her pink polo shirt, which is standard attire for incarcerated pregnant women. The pink identifies them as particularly vulnerable bodies, should “something happen.” (The example Kayla gives is a physical fight: A person will get in more trouble, she says, if her adversary is pregnant.) She pushes impatiently at her belly, which is beginning to usurp the rest of her body. “I’m just moving Angelica around,” she explains. “She’s getting up in my rib cage.” Kayla’s a month and a half from her due date. We ask if her fellow prisoners avoid the topic of the pregnancy. Kayla shakes her head.