Locked Down, Locked Out (24 page)

Meanwhile, Akkeem leads actions to call out lawmakers for the way they’ve abandoned communities of color. He’s spoken out against Chicago’s school closings (most of which took place on the West and South Sides) and continues to condemn the state’s prison budget. He heads up rallies and press conferences, pointing to issues like the lack of jobs available to black men on Chicago’s West Side. “Every day, we need to invest in the community we live in,” he says.

For a long time, “investing in our community” has served as a justification for policing, surveillance, arrests, monitoring, incarceration, and discrimination, in the name of “safety.” And so
building the kinds of communities that break free of those institutions requires not only concrete action, but also a continual remaking of the perceptions and motivations that guide our interactions—with the people across the street, the people we work with, the people we pass in the grocery store, the people we live with, the people we love. Chanelle and Lisa from Everyday Abolition explain, “It is about pulling the cops out of our hearts and minds and radically rethinking safety and justice.”

Health Without Cages

One of the many priorities that Chanelle and Lisa point to as an abolitionist goal is free treatment for those who suffer from substance dependency, an issue that’s frequently bound up with incarceration, as my family well knows. Mandatory “rehabilitation” (akin to the “mental health jails” of which CURB warns) is sometimes proffered as an alternative to incarceration. But really effective treatment means bringing people
out
of isolation—not imposing more of it.

Comprehensive, widely accessible, family- and community-oriented, optional treatment should be cost-free and available for all those who want to commit to addiction recovery. For those who don’t choose to make that commitment, accessible and condition-sensitive medical care must still be provided: You can’t force a person to recover, but that doesn’t mean abandoning them to a “futureless future.” Precedents for this kind of medical care exist elsewhere in the world. For example, in Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Germany, Spain, and Norway, legal safe injection centers provide heroin users with a place to administer their drugs safely, with medics looking on to assist with overdose prevention, administer emergency care, and deliver information about safer usage practices. Clean needles are provided, and the
medical team offers other services for folks who typically avoid official health institutions (and other institutions) whenever possible. Plus, there’s plenty of info and guidance on treatment for those who are interested.

Results—those you can document, since life satisfaction, ability to participate in one’s family and community, and personal fulfillment can’t really be measured—are reliably good. In the Swiss program, the on-the-spot medical treatment has ensured that no one has died from an overdose. And upon discharge, about half of participants ended up enrolling in recovery-oriented treatment programs. A British study demonstrated that participants, who were provided with counseling and social services in addition to heroin administration, got healthier and happier, and many were able to find housing and jobs. As a bonus, “the number of crimes committed by those in the group dropped from 1,700 in the 30 days before the program began to 547 in the first six months of the trial.” And another plus: By the end of the trial, three-quarters of the study group had stopped using street heroin.
⁷
These programs aren’t perfect, but in an imperfect world they’re crucial public health measures that save lives. And survival is a key component of freeing ourselves from the logic of prison. If no one is disposable, then everyone must be granted the necessities and the tools that enable them to live.

Liberation

The monumental shift toward a system structured by connection instead of isolation will be a shift so deep that it will leave this country unrecognizable. Just as much as it is a transformation of systems, it is a transformation of priorities, of how we define a good society and a good life. Angela Davis argues that prison abolition is necessarily a movement for a wholly different world,
“a world that doesn’t
need
to depend on prisons,” because people’s needs are met in other—life-giving, life-affirming—ways.
⁸

As I’m wrapping up my conversation with Jazz Hayden from Campaign to End the New Jim Crow, he adds one last crucial point. We’ve got to work toward specific changes every single day, he says, but we also have to start telling ourselves different stories. “As long as we continue using the narrative of the few when we talk about the many, we’re walking through the poppy fields, falling asleep, like in
The Wizard of Oz,”
he says. “We have to tell the truth, and act on the truth. This is our planet, and as far as we know, this is the only planet in the cosmos we can live on. It’s for all of us. We have to wake up.”

The struggle to end the prison nation is not an isolated fight. It’s a culture-wide leap toward liberation from all manifestations of imprisonment—a liberation that can only arise through coming together.

“Human lives are what weighs in the balance,” Lacino Hamilton writes to me, as fall begins to turn to winter. “What are we waiting for?”

Epilogue
Not an Ending

“Two days and a wakeup!” Kayla howls ecstatically into my ear during a November phone call from prison. “My babyyy! I’m gonna see my baby in
two days!
”

“You did it!” I say.

“Yeah,” Kayla sighs. She pauses for so long I think she has hung up, and a sudden nausea descends—I’m worried she’s about to announce that she’ll miss prison.

Instead, she says, “Don’t worry, My. This time I
know
it’s going to be hard.”

The sequence of these two thoughts—the reunion with Angelica, the recognition that release doesn’t erase the reality of incarceration—reminds me that mixed with most released prisoners’ joy is the knowledge that they’re actually transitioning to a different facet of the prison-industrial complex. Parole is a subtler but still very present confinement. Kayla must not only stay clean but also conform to other conditions (curfew, treatment sessions,
location restrictions) if she is to steer clear of reincarceration. And although the Department of Child and Family Services has thankfully granted Kayla custody of her own child (at first, they had threatened to deny her that), they will be conducting ongoing surveillance of her parenting.

Still, this time, upon release, some things are different. Kayla is taking a big step of her own accord,
not
dictated by mandates or monitoring. She has opted to enter the recovery home at Women’s Treatment Center (WTC), a publicly and donation-funded program that offers previously incarcerated mothers a chance to recover from drug problems in a safe, supportive environment,
with
their babies. It’s one of the only centers of its kind in the state.

The program is controversial: It doesn’t fit too comfortably into the prison-nation mindset. In a newsletter, WTC’s director writes, “I’ve had a prospective funder tell me, ‘We don’t fund drug addicts and criminals.’”
¹
Though some women are able to opt for the center as an alternative to incarceration, others choose to enter it completely of their own accord, and can do so cost-free. The “home” area, where Kayla is staying, is a place where, instead of being “caught” and disciplined through treatment, women can turn voluntarily because they want to break with their dependencies and nurture new lives. WTC also provides the basics: food and reasonably comfortable shelter.

These women are not punished with isolation and separation from their kids for things like addiction, poverty, and single motherhood. Instead, they are given the support to nurture bonds, develop friendships, and care for their children, and are provided with assistance for procuring subsidized housing in the future. Although the women completing “alternative sentences” are confined in their movement (unfortunately, the treatment
center can’t simply negate the criminal punishment system), many others have the freedom to leave, get a job, attend meetings, see family, go to the gym, go to a movie—to connect.

After a couple of months with her baby at the recovery home, Kayla tells me over the phone, “I’m just watching her sleep, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.” While she was in prison, she began compiling a journal for Angie (as she now calls Angelica), filled with pictures, letters, and poems. She shows me a poem she’s written about her gratitude for the reunion. A fragment of it:

She won’t grow up w/o a mother
Or call another person mom
Such a fragile existence seems destined to fail but
That little girl is my world
It’s up to me to shelter her from the one I brought her into
The same one I’ve been trying to escape instead of taking
The time to embrace...
It’s time to learn

As my phone conversation with Kayla draws to a close, I’m unspeakably grateful that it’s ending on our own terms, not because our allotted time is over, or because my prepaid account has run out, or because an officer has ordered a lockdown. I’m grateful that next time I want to hear Kayla’s voice, I can pick up the phone and call her myself—and hey, we can even hug each other without a barked order to stay within a foot of a visiting room table! More than all that, I’m thankful that she and Angie are together—that they’re not split by handcuffs, shackles, or the watchful eyes of a guard, and not counting down the minutes until they’ll be severed from each other’s arms.

The poem is also a sobering reminder of all the mothers still wholly engulfed in the system. For so many women, the first line of Kayla’s poem will never ring true. Kayla is incredibly fortunate that, with the support of both a family with whom she’s still connected and the new community she’s building at the recovery home, she has a lot of accompaniment in meeting those benchmarks. She says that, for the first time in as long as she can remember, she’s “free.”

I don’t know where things will stand a month from now, so I can’t call this a happy ending. It’s simply not an
ending
, and it never will be. But for Kayla, the “sun has come” for the first time in many years. What’s sustaining her now, she tells me, is love—a force that’s antithetical to imprisonment, a force that regenerates connective tissue and breathes life into dead links, when it’s free to flourish.

Permitted to be with her child and supported in that endeavor, permitted to reunite with her family, she tells me that she is alive again. She is able to think about the future with a sense of hope—one of the greatest freedoms of all.

“I’m going to make wasted nights, sick mornings, a trapped mind and locked away body all things of the past,” Kayla writes, in another poem. “Life is amazing. I want to be part of it.”

Notes

Introduction: Into the Hole

1
Angela Y. Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison-Industrial Complex,”
ColorLines
(Fall 1998). Retrieved from
www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Prison_System/Masked_Racism_ADavis.html
.

2
Lucy McKeon, “When Violence Backfires,”
Salon
, June 2, 2012. Retrieved from
www.salon.com/2012/06/02/when_anti_violence_backfires/
.

3
Pew Center on the States,
State of Recidivism: The Revolving Door of America’s Prisons
(Washington, D.C.: Pew Center on the States, 2011. Retrieved from
www.michigan.gov/documents/corrections/Pew_Report_State_of_Recidivism_350337_7.pdf
.

Chapter 1 The Visiting Room

1
John Tierney, “Mandatory Prison Sentences Face Growing Skepticism,”
New York Times
, December 11, 2012.

2
Lauren E. Glaze and Laura M. Maruschak, “Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Department of Justice, 2008. Retrieved from
http://bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=823
.

3
Jeremy Travis, “Summoning the Superheroes: Harnessing Science and Passion to Create a More Effective and Humane Response to Crime,” in
To Build a Better Criminal Justice System: 25 Experts Envision the Next 25 Years of Reform
, edited by Marc Mauer and Kate Epstein (Washington, D.C.: Sentencing Project, 2012), 12.

4
Bruce Drake, “Incarceration Gap Between Whites and Blacks Widens.” Pew Research Center, 2013;
www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/06/incarceration-gap-between-whites-and-blacks-widens/
.

5
Sarah Schirmer, Ashley Nellis, and Marc Mauer,
Incarcerated Parents and Their Children: Trends 1991–2007
(Washington, D.C.: Sentencing Project, 2009). Retrieved from
www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/publications/inc_incarceratedparents.pdf
.

6
Randall G. Sheldon and Selena Teji, “Collateral Consequences of Interstate Transfers of Prisoners,” Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 2012. Retrieved from
http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/Out_of_state_transfers.pdf
.

7
Ram A. Cnaan, Jeffrey Draine, Beverly Frazier, and Jill W. Sinha, “Ex-Prisoners’ Re-Entry: An Emerging Frontier and a Social Work Challenge,”
Journal of Policy Practice
7, nos. 2–3 (2008): 178–98.

8
“Prisoners and Families Connect with Video Visitation, for a Price,”
Prison Legal News
, September 9, 2012.

9
Sadhbh Walshe, “Prison Video Visits Threaten to Put Profit Before Public Safety,”
Guardian
, October 25, 2012.