Locked Down, Locked Out (2 page)

When I look back on that time, I can only comprehend it by acknowledging the insidious, persistent role that prison occupied in my mind. It was closely connected to the role it occupies in larger society: Incarceration serves as the default answer to many
of the worst social problems plaguing this country—not because it solves them, but because it buries them. By isolating and disappearing millions of Americans (more than 2.3 million, making us the most incarcerated nation on the planet), prison conveniently disappears deeply rooted issues that society—or rather, those with power in society—would rather not attend to.

“Prison,” writes Angela Davis, “performs a feat of magic.” As massive numbers of homeless, hungry, unemployed, drug-addicted, illiterate, and mentally ill people vanish behind its walls, the social problems of extreme poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, drug addiction, illiteracy, and mental illness become more ignorable, too. But, as Davis notes, “prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.”
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And the caging and erasure of those human beings, mostly people of color and poor people, perpetuates a cycle in which large groups are cut off from “mainstream society” and denied the freedoms, opportunities, civic dignity, and basic needs that allow them a good life.

In many jails and prisons, incarcerated people are tossed into a dank, dungeon-like solitary confinement cell when they are determined to have “misbehaved.” It’s dubbed “the Hole.” Isolated and dark, it shuts out almost all communication with fellow prisoners and the outside. Guards control the terms of confinement and the channels—if any—by which words can travel in and out. The Hole presents a stark symbol of the institution of prison in its entirety, which functions on the tenets of disappearance, isolation, and disposability. The “solution” to our social problems—the mechanism that’s supposed to “keep things together”—amounts to destruction: the disposal of vast numbers of human beings, the breaking down of families, and the shattering of communities. Prison is tearing society apart.

This country’s most marginalized communities bear the overwhelming brunt of the devastation. But ultimately we are all caught up in the destruction, as the politics of isolation ruptures the human bonds that could otherwise hold together a safer, healthier, more just society.

The behemoth that encompasses the prison is called by many names. The most meaningful ones, I think, are those that convey the pervasiveness of its power: the way it infects the world outside as well as the people within.

Scholar and activist Beth Richie uses the term “prison nation,” describing it as “a broad notion of using the arm of the law to control people, especially people who are disadvantaged and come from disadvantaged communities.”
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That control can take the form of prisons, jails, surveillance, policing, detention, probation, harsh restrictions on child guardianship, the militarization of schools, and other strategies of isolation and disposal particularly deployed against poor communities of color, especially black communities.

Others have used “prison nation” simply to demonstrate the system’s vastness—how it infiltrates our culture and fuels our national politics, often in invisible ways. “Prison-industrial complex” (PIC) is another key term; Rachel Herzing of the prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance defines it as “the symbiotic relationship between public and private interests that employ imprisonment, policing, surveillance, the courts, and their attendant cultural apparatuses as a means of maintaining social, economic, and political inequities.” The concept emphasizes how financial and political powers use prison and punishment to maintain oppression, making it look natural and necessary. Prison doesn’t stop at the barbed wire fence, and it doesn’t end on a release date.

Ninety-five percent of prisoners are released. They’re emerging from their isolation poorer and more alienated than when they went in. They’re coming out with fewer economic opportunities and fewer human connections on the outside. Some come home to find that “home” no longer exists. Many, like Kayla, fall into harmful patterns, sometimes in order to survive, sometimes because they feel they have nothing much to live for. Others are reincarcerated for the flimsiest of reasons as “parole violators,” especially if they’re black or brown or Native or gender-nonconforming or poor. More than 40 percent of those released return to prison within three years.
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Isolation does not “rehabilitate” people. Disappearance does not deter harm. And prison does not keep us safe.

We Can Do Better

A society built on the principles of freedom and shared humanity is possible. In fact, its seeds have already been planted, and they are growing every day. The second half of this book looks at what people are doing right now to dismantle the prison nation and deal with problems—both individual harm-doing and larger social wrongs—through connection rather than isolation.

All over the country, people are implementing community-based accountability and transformative justice strategies, making human connection both their jumping-off point and their objective. They’re cultivating environments—classrooms, neighborhood programs, workplaces, homes—that foster antiracist, anti-classist, pro-humanity approaches to justice. They’re combining new models of doing justice with larger movements for change, taking on the deep structural issues that drive the current system.

Overcoming imprisonment isn’t just about climbing out of “the Hole.” It’s about collectively imagining and creating the
culture in which we want to live, once we reach the surface. What follows is a portrait of a society coming apart—and some glimmerings of ways we can begin to come together.

Part One
Coming Apart

Chapter 1
The Visiting Room

Loneliness gnaws at the essence of who we were. The hunger for connection with the outside world is what, in the end, turns us callous, creating delusions that we are better off lonely.

—Abraham Macias,* Pelican Bay Prison

When my parents and I visit Cook County Jail for the first time in February 2009, it is a Saturday and the place is jam-packed. We squeeze into the slow-snaking security line, which curves around several ropes and bumps up against the doorway. Some visitors stare at their feet, hands stuffed in their pockets, trudging forward every few minutes when the line loosens. Others shout to their children to stay within the roped boundaries, fearing that they’ll be booted out for causing a disturbance. A thin, shivering woman standing in front of us is shaking her head over and over, rocking a blanket-covered baby in her arms.

As we inch closer to the metal detector, a guard pulls a tall young woman off to the side, gesturing to her short skirt and scoffing, “You think you can come in here like that? Huh?” After a few hesitant protests—“Sorry, sorry, I didn’t know”—she walks away slowly, toward the exit, face in her hands. We follow commands, removing our shoes and socks, stepping through the
metal detector, raising our arms for the pat-down, following the officer who escorts us across the yard.

After a three-hour wait, we’re called into the visiting room, and we file through the narrow door. It’s a short, dim corridor lined with wobbly stools facing a thick wall of plexiglass with several barred holes. On the other side of the plexiglass, Kayla shuffles in with a few other women. They scrunch down in a row, each opposite their visitors, and lean toward the holes. We start talking—well, screaming—back and forth. We don’t scream because we’re fraught with emotion, though we are. We scream because we can’t be heard otherwise, due to the thickness of the plexiglass divide and the compressed cacophony of the fellow visitor-screamers competing with us on either side.

Eventually, I just go for it and press my mouth up against the bars of the hole so Kayla can hear me. I taste sweat and sour steel.

“How’s it going?” I scream.

“It sucks, what do you think?” Kayla shouts back. “I feel like my life is over. But, at least, I’m working out.” She twirls, her dismal blue smock flaring wearily.

Kayla’s arms have grown quite muscley (push-ups are a favorite pastime in jail), and her eyebrows are meticulously groomed, if a little greasy.

“Your eyebrows look awesome!” I yell.

“Thanks—we did them with thread that we pulled out of our jumpsuits!” she yells. “They don’t let us have tweezers! I learned it in Audy Home.” The “Audy Home” is the old name of Chicago’s juvenile detention center, where Kayla spent some time in 2005 and 2006. Now she pauses, then knocks her head lightly against the plexiglass, her eyes closed. “But no one gives a shit about my eyebrows, if you think about it. I just don’t know what else to do.”

Mom and Dad take turns. Then I’m back on the stool. We
quickly run out of things to talk about: Kayla doesn’t want to belabor how hopeless and miserable she’s feeling, and I don’t want to carry on about the happy things in my life—or the frustrating things in my life, most of which seem ridiculously trivial given the circumstances. Later, my dad observes, “What’s left to scream?”

Soon, a jarringly loud buzzer sounds, silencing all conversation. A guard calls time: Our thirty minutes are up. Kayla and her companions rise to march out. “I miss you I miss you I miss you I love you...” Kayla calls, the ends of her words quivering. She touches her fingertips to the plexiglass before she’s led away. Then, “TIME!” a guard barks on our side of the glass, and we fall in line, too.

They Make Life Matter

The visits my parents and I pay to Kayla in jail are accompanied by a constant mantra that pulses through all of our minds:
This is temporary
. We’re white, we’re middle class; my sister and I grew up in a neighborhood where few people had ever been in prison. Kayla’s sentence is not long. Our privilege affords us the opportunity to frame imprisonment—the first time around—as a bad dream. Regardless of how relieved we are that Kayla has been incarcerated, that she’s off the street and probably sober, implicit in the relief is always the notion that this saga will come to a close, that “real life” will return, even if it doesn’t last.

For a whole lot of other visitors, trips to prison are infused with a more painful pulse. This act of visiting is the real life of their relationship. It lives this way over the course of many years and, sometimes, forever. And so my visits to Kayla are laced with thoughts of the families I’ve come to know through my interviews, families whose bonds are maintained—and often lost—through bars.

One prisoner’s familial situation has permanently set up residence in my mind by the time Kayla is incarcerated. She is Danielle Metz, a California prisoner and mother of two who’s been separated from her children for most of their lives. I first wrote to Danielle in 2007. I was plugging away on a couple of long feature articles about federal prisoners serving life sentences, and was knee-deep in bland, evasive statements from members of Congress, most of whom didn’t intend to lift a pinky to contest the harsh policies in place. Danielle’s lucid honesty shone through the murk. She was serving three life sentences plus twenty years for a cocaine “conspiracy” conviction. (Her husband was a high-trafficking dealer.) Danielle was locked up in Dublin, California, more than two thousand miles from New Orleans—her home, and the home of her parents and two kids. Citing racism (she’s black), poverty, negligent public defenders, and unjust sentencing practices, Danielle expressed little hope for a commutation of her sentence, barring a pardon from the president.

“My story is like a lot of stories you see, but can’t really put a face on,” she wrote me. “In communities where I’m from, this type of thing happens all the time.” It’s true: One in 40 American kids has a parent in prison, and for black kids, it’s 1 in 15.
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Increasingly, those parents are mothers; women are the fastest-growing group in prison.

No matter what problem we were discussing—federal parole, the pardon system, prison conditions, useless lawyers, useless laws—Danielle’s letters wandered back to the topic of her children. She was grappling with a stark, practically unanswerable question: How do you parent from prison? It’s a question most prisoners are asking themselves, since a considerable majority of them have kids who are minors.
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Danielle responded to it with a quiet verb: “watching.”

“It hurts to watch your children grow up from 3 years old and 7 years old to 22 and 19,” she wrote. “Years ago my children used to be so hopeful that things would change. Then [I was] seeing them evolve into adults right before my eyes. Seeing them eager to come visit, then not wanting to see me because they say it hurts too much for them to come year after year and see me in prison.”

After reading her letter, I sent myself a short, scrambled email:

The Point:
Family, loved ones, community!
—love, support (hopefully)
—They make life matter

“They make life matter” has stuck with me. Prisoners frequently tell me there’s “no point anymore,” that incarceration has extinguished much of their will to live. Most say that—more than the cramped and dirty quarters, the harsh treatment, the lack of sunlight, the baloney sandwiches—this sense of pointlessness stems from their frustration and sadness about the people they’ve lost, the ties that have dissolved over time and distance. Many prisoners also mourn ties that were broken already, and they now see an even slimmer chance of healing. Others mourn the bonds that never existed in the first place; prison has laminated and preserved their isolation. Where is life in its “mattering,” for prisoners watching their outside relationships erode and their possibilities for new bonds wane, watching the months drift forward and the chasms grow wider?

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