Locked Down, Locked Out (4 page)

As my dad noted back at Cook County Jail, after a half-hour of shouting to my sister through the plexiglass, “What’s left to scream?” Lingering between the words of these “water-cooler” conversations is a sinking reality: Even for the most dutiful visitors and most appreciative visitees, prison feels like abandonment.

What does the feeling of abandonment do to people? What does the act of “abandoning” do to those who must walk away at the end of a visit? And if relationships are what make life matter—and, therefore, what spark people to change their lives—then what kind of change is generated by reducing prisoners’ relationships to half-hour-long chats about eyebrow-threading ... for them, and for us, and for the progress of our communities, our country, and our world?

“It’s So Weird—She Just Stays Here”

When my parents and my partner, Ryan, and I visit Kayla at Decatur Correctional Center (a central Illinois prison) in early summer
of 2012—she’s in for retail theft, stealing over-the-counter medications to sell in order to pay for under-the-counter heroin—the four-hour drive there is, oddly, tinged with an upbeat air. It’s a day trip with a mission. We ride into town: small, nondescript, somewhat decrepit houses wearing front-stoop flags, a cat sauntering here and there, a sign plastered with Decatur’s town motto, “We like it here.” The city’s main claim to fame is that Abraham Lincoln lived there briefly circa 1830, and we glimpse a couple of standard-looking presidential monuments, boring ghosts perched atop flat green park lawns.

We stop in at a diner whose storefront sign proclaims it “best in town!” for midday omelets and piles of hash browns. On our way out, my dad pauses at the counter and asks a waitress for directions to the prison. The customer seated at the counter across from the waitress looks stricken, then looks down, swerving his chair a bit.

“I’m not
sure,”
says the waitress, and goes silent. She moves away and begins slicing intently into a pie, as if Dad has burst out with a huge official secret, à la the emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps he has. As is the case in most prison towns, the prisoners aren’t local, and the prison, though it employs many of the town’s residents, is still viewed as an imported incongruity.

The section of the prison siphoned off for visitors vaguely resembles the diner—bland outside, disinterested service staff inside—minus the omelets and kitschy posters. Decatur is a minimum-security women’s prison. Unlike Cook County Jail, there are no long, cramped lines punctuated by guards barking orders. The waiting room is quiet and barely populated; family visits are much less frequent here. The four of us are privileged to be able to take the day off and spend the money to travel to this far-off spot.

A correctional officer (CO) leads us silently through a heavy door into a hallway, and my mother and I are intercepted by a female CO and pulled into a narrow, dusty room that smells like Lysol. Ryan and my dad are pulled into another. We’re patted down firmly, and I flinch as the CO’s hands pass over my breasts and between my legs. This is a mild ordeal compared to the strip search that prisoners themselves must undergo prior to each visit.

Inside the visiting room, the incarcerated women, all garbed in baggy, pale blue uniforms, are nevertheless dressed for the occasion: fingernails freshly lacquered in bright pinks and greens, just-applied layers of lip gloss and eyeliner. Later in an interview, activist and former prisoner Kathy Kelly tells me of how women hand over their meager dollars to the commissary (the prison store, which sells a rotating stock of overpriced items) for makeup and hair supplies, prepping compulsively for the visits of their partners, family, or friends. When Kathy first went to prison in 1988, the commissary sold only things like “oatmeal and Cracker Jacks,” but the selection has ballooned along with the size of the prison-industrial complex, feeding off prisoners’ desperation. Unable to control any other circumstances, many long to know that when family and friends catch a glimpse of them, they’ll think, “At least she’s looking good!”

Unlike Cook County’s heavy-aired, crowded cavern with its shouting-through-the-glass misery, Decatur’s visiting area is a real room, in which one can move one’s arms and legs and even walk around. We hug Kayla, sit down with her at a small, round table, and watch babies play with their incarcerated moms, although, of course, that scene is not uniformly cheery. When conversation stagnates, we can stroll over (without my sister, who must stay seated) to the vending machine and purchase aged treats: Kayla has come to favor a stale-tasting peanut butter and marshmal
low lump, the offspring of a Moon Pie and a hardened Twinkie.

“You would love it here, My,” Kayla jokes, catching hold of my hand, swinging it back and forth. “No real meat. Soy sausage, soy bacon, soy hot dogs. It’s like a really gross vegetarian restaurant.” (I’ve been a vegetarian since the age of seventeen, a choice with which Kayla has never quite sympathized.) Decatur’s nickname is the “Soybean Capital of the World”—though I feel like there must be other cities that claim that title—and the prison makes expedient use of the cheap and bountiful local crop.

I’m happy to be able spend an hour with Kayla face-to-face. But the relative “comforts” of visiting the prison bring to mind the fact that, unlike jail, this place is—for many of its inhabitants—a very long-term residence, very far from home. And despite her soy dog jokes and vending machine enthusiasm, Kayla’s face is damp, stained with the residue of tears and sweat. She’s shaking like crazy and explains that she’s been sedated on large doses of prescription meds dubiously assigned for “anxiety,” then abruptly pulled off of them. Our chatter is peppered with “um’s.” We revolve around safe topics, reaching for hypothetical fun activities we can do after she’s out, which mostly just involve hanging out in public. Ryan and I share plans for our upcoming wedding, for which Kayla has a slew of ideas—purple candles, a rhinestone headband, a cheesy love song we both adored as kids. We nod and laugh and emit meaningless witticisms that skirt the fact that Kayla won’t be there for the wedding, that she’ll be here, crossing off the wedding day’s box on her countdown calendar, probably crying.

Undergirding our visit is a sense of quiet desperation. We know Kayla has practically nothing to do all day besides paint her nails with polish purchased off the commissary. We know she encounters regular violence and degradation from guards.
We know that the drug treatment program in which she was enrolled upon entering prison has since been eliminated due to state budget woes, and Kayla, by her own admission, spends a fair amount of her ample free time yearning for crack and heroin. We also know this: Though Kayla will be released in six months, she has absolutely no postrelease plans.
How could she have plans?
I wonder. In prison, “outside” exists as a diaphanous dream; untouchable, it’s sometimes tough to comprehend that it really still exists.

As we slip out, walking backward and waving to Kayla until the door shuts, Mom says, “It’s so weird that now she just stays here.” I look at her, then around to the other tables, where other prisoners’ families are hugging and sobbing and leaving. “It’s just a room, like any other room,” Mom says. “It’s almost as if she could just walk out with us!”

But of course she can’t. We spun plenty of vague dream-plans for our future life together as we sat around that table. (Traveling to New York to see Grandpa! Playing basketball with Ryan! Finally meeting each other’s friends! Writing together! Thinking together! Being “real sisters”!) But later that year, a couple of days after Kayla’s release, the two of us are “visiting”—joylessly munching cookies at a coffee shop and talking about nothing. She looks up at me and shakes her head languidly. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I don’t know what to say to people here. The only thing I know how to do is be in prison.”

Chapter 2
The 100-Year Communication Rewind

It’s been awhile. We’ve missed you!

—
Securus, Illinois’ prison phone company, in an email I received three months after Kayla’s release from prison

From time to time, Kayla asks me to send one of her incarcerated friends a card or a letter for a birthday, or a death in the family, or simply “so she can hear her name” called out when the mail comes around, to provide a brief interruption in the insular monotony of the daily routine. “Mail call” can be the pinnacle of the day in prison—or the low point, for those prisoners who don’t receive anything.

When Kayla’s locked up again in the fall of 2011, I don’t pay her any visits: I’m living across the country in California, where Ryan is finishing his master’s degree. I’m bored there—it’s a small university town with little to do outside of academia—and spend most of my nonworking time pacing through the public library and wandering up and down the same streets. Maybe it is my loneliness, or maybe it’s Kayla’s desperation—but for whatever reason, over these months, we grow closer than we’ve been in years. We’re linked almost solely by letters. We share our weirdest
hopes for the future (I’m briefly obsessed with moving to the North Pole), our tiniest short-term goals (she is working hard to befriend a squirrel she has met in the yard), and her day-to-day activities (memorizing all the muscles in the human body, painting and repainting her nails).

Kayla apologizes for letting me down in the past. I apologize for passive-aggressively slipping off the face of her planet when I’m mad at her. In our letters, we tell each other the truth. (She says she’s scared she’ll never get clean.) My first words aren’t “Where are you now?” and my last words aren’t “Where are you going?” like they were when she contacted me on the outside. She reassures me about my (undoubtedly smaller) worries and woes. She calls me her best friend, saying, “You’re the only friend who I’ve kept—or who has kept me.” And at the end of that stint in jail, a small, selfish corner of me is sad to see her released—thrown back into a universe without moorings, where the promises, ponderings, hopes, and truths that livened the pages of our letters will likely be crumpled up and tossed in the free-world trash.

This, however, is not the usual story of mail call. Most prisoners’ siblings aren’t wandering around Davis, California, with an abundance of free time, a love of letter-writing, and lots of spare change for stamps. Abraham Macías—who’s on year eighteen of a twenty-five-year sentence at Pelican Bay, in California—tells me that, like visits, his mail quantity dropped off fairly rapidly after a short time in prison. Most people don’t understand how much it means to prisoners to receive a letter, he says, because in the “real” world it’s not a valued commodity. Even his mom writes only sporadically.

“She’ll send a book of stamps or a package of writing materials, with an apology for not writing. The way most people do,” he writes to me. “Instead of writing, people send money, offer things
on a postcard shout-out. They don’t know what a simple note does for us in prison.”

The absence of mail can also have direct bodily consequences. Rev. Jason Lydon, who runs the queer anti-prison group and pen pal project Black and Pink, tells me that for more vulnerable prisoners (these usually include queer and gender-nonconforming people), a lack of mail can mark a prisoner as alone, abandoned by folks on the outside—and therefore an easier target for harm, especially from guards. “Mail call happens in a public space, and so folks are hearing the names of people who are getting letters, day after day,” Jason, who’s been incarcerated himself—in a segregated unit for LGBTQ prisoners where guard-perpetrated sexual violence was rampant—tells me. “If you’re not receiving mail for years, you’re more likely to experience harm or violence, because they know that it’s less likely there will be consequences, that there’s no one looking out for you.”

The ABCs of Mail Call

Mail is scarce for almost everyone in prison. One reason is quite basic: Many prisoners and their families struggle to—or flat-out can’t—read or write. Among prisoners themselves, only 3 percent were classified as “proficient” in reading and writing in a National Center for Education Statistics literacy assessment in 2003.
¹

Lacino Hamilton, who’s incarcerated in New Haven, Michigan, staring down a life sentence, points out that in Detroit, where he’s from, nearly half of adults are considered “functionally illiterate.”
²
“Not only are prisoners overrepresented in those horrific numbers, but so are the family and friends of prisoners,” he says, explaining that many of his own kin fall into this group. “I often go months without family and friend contact.” Black and Latino family members living in poor communities with fewer
literacy resources and more barriers to literacy are disproportionately affected by the problem.
³

The literacy barrier poses problems for another giant group: Many of the 1.7 million children with parents in prison simply haven’t learned to write yet.
⁴
Pennsylvania prisoner Sable Sade Kolstee’s three kids were all under the age of five when she was incarcerated, and for much of her three-year stretch of prison time, her only contact was a smattering of brief phone calls with her oldest daughter. Letters being impossible, she missed out on the nuances of her kids’ development, their emerging personalities, their daily passages of thoughts and feelings. (First words don’t translate very well to thirdhand letters penned by adult relatives.) As Sable prepares for a much-anticipated visit with her children, she writes letters to me, sharing her worries that her two younger kids “wouldn’t know me and would be scared.”

“Anything Can Happen to Prison Mail”

Even for prisoners who write up a storm, including the many with whom I’ve corresponded, the prison mail system can prove a formidable opponent to sustained, meaningful correspondence.

In early 2008, I was writing to Eugene Fischer, who was serving a life sentence for marijuana smuggling. (Since he was a federal prisoner, Eugene was ineligible for parole—though years later, in 2012, he was granted a rare resentencing and released.) At one point, I expressed frustration about the fact that one of Eugene’s letters, which he’d referenced repeatedly in a later note, never made it to my box. Eugene, having had twenty years of prison experience to cushion the blow, took the loss in stride. “Anything can happen to prison mail, both incoming and outgoing,” he wrote to me. Other prisoners and ex-prisoners have described this phenomenon—how there’s virtually no account
ability for their letters. Given that for many, it’s their main form of communication, this unpredictability can contribute to their sense of helplessness, isolation, and bitterness toward the system.