Locked Down, Locked Out (7 page)

When a loved one is locked up, those left behind are often less able to participate actively in community life and in the economy, strained by severe shortages of money and time. There are sometimes more subjective forces tugging them away from their communities, too: shame (on their end) and fear or suspicion (on their neighbors’ side of the fence).
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Families’ self-isolation is compounded by the fact that some of their neighbors—such as Yvonne’s fellow basketball parents inching away from her on the bleachers—aren’t crazy about seeing them, anyway.

Often, family members relocate out of their communities either upon incarceration (in search of more affordable housing,
since they’ve lost an income-earner) or afterward (in hopes of a less stigma-tainted transition).
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And as they walk away, they leave behind friends, schools, religious groups, and support networks—those ties that link families to the world.

In communities where incarceration is common, these ongoing removals, isolations, and relocations can prove a formidable barrier to building a stable, close community in which people know each other and look out for their neighbors. Researchers Todd Clear and Dina Rose, who have studied incarceration within the context of families and communities, write that the way in which imprisonment disrupts connections can actually make harm and conflict more likely. The researchers frame the effects of incarceration as a type of “social disorganization,” a process that interrupts lives, shaking and scattering the collective life of a community. An important part of preventing violence, according to Clear and Rose, is maintaining “informal social controls”: structures
besides
laws and law enforcement.
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These are things like neighbor interaction, community groups, close friend networks, and peer pressure (the good kind!) from loved ones.

So, when lots of people are moving in and out of a neighborhood—or isolating themselves to the point that they may as well have moved out of the neighborhood—the effectiveness of those informal controls plummets. It’s hard to maintain strong community networks if you’re not even sure who’s in your community. Add to that the fact that those who are incarcerated have themselves “moved out,” abruptly and with no choice in the matter (Clear and Rose call this process “coercive mobility”), punching holes in the networks they left behind.
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This phenomenon is deepest felt in poor communities of color, where high proportions of people are incarcerated.

Barbara Fair, the New Haven mother whose seven sons have all been incarcerated, hails from one such neighborhood. Unlike April Jackson’s small-town “friends,” many of Barbara’s neighbors have provided empathy and support: “Going to prison ... was so common in my community that there wasn’t much of a raised brow about that,” she says. This commonality lends families in neighborhoods with high concentrations of former prisoners a unique base of communal support. If almost everyone has a relative or friend who’s been incarcerated, they’re less likely to judge.
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But residents are so supportive, in part, because they know all too well the venomous power of the stigma that runs thick outside the bounds of their neighborhoods—a stigma that captures prisoners, their families, and their communities in its widening net, isolating them in a sort of external jail of their own, in which actual imprisonment seems devastatingly predestined. As legal scholar Dorothy Roberts puts it, “Because all of the children in these communities have some experience with prison and may expect to be behind bars at some point in their lives, prisons are part of the socialization process.... Incarceration is a ‘rite of passage’ imposed upon African American teenagers.”
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A Landslide of Consequences

The criminal justice system has coursed through Barbara Fair’s life for decades, starting when she was a teen and her brother was sentenced to prison. Soon after, Barbara herself was incarcerated for a couple of weeks—delivering a sharp premonition, she says, of emotions to come. She tells me, “I can still feel the pain and humiliation that cut through me.” Barbara’s kids grew up in the thick of the drug-war years and could serve as poster children for the strangling effects of that “war” on poor, black families. Each has been locked up for a drug-related conviction. “The greatest
factor influencing my sons ending up in prison is the fact that they are young African American males, and thus the targeted commodity for the prison industry,” she says.

Barbara explains that not only are black males a targeted commodity, they’re an
assumed
commodity; they’re viewed as suspicious from youth on up. Her words mirror an interview I did with Mariame Kaba, the founder of Chicago’s Project NIA, an advocacy and education organization aimed at ending youth incarceration. Mariame spoke of how kids of color begin their lives weighed down by an obligation to prove their “innocence.” Unlike their white counterparts, their “guilt” is presumed from the start. “Black and brown youth are born with criminality inscribed on them,” Mariame said. “When they commit crimes, that’s just confirmation. Their job is to prove they’re
not
criminal.” On top of this assumption of criminality, family members of prisoners are often handed a whopping serving of guilt-by-association. Siblings often have it the worst, according to Todd Clear, who interviewed a group of families in an impoverished, mostly black neighborhood in Miami. In
Imprisoning Communities
, he writes, “Siblings often bear the brunt because there is the idea that if your sibling could be a criminal, then you could too.”
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As her sons were carted off, Barbara’s life quickly molded itself around prison and its immediate effects: the weekly visits to various facilities—each at least forty-five minutes from home—the expensive phone calls, the panic attacks, the money troubles, the time constraints, the sadness.

Even after her sons came home, she wrestled with the lingering reverberations of their imprisonment. By the time Barbara and I get to know each other in 2013, all of her sons have been released, but her youngest—deeply traumatized by his time behind bars, some of which was spent in isolation—currently lives in a
psych ward and still depends on his mother for constant support.

Barbara’s ordeal is just one example of how the incarceration of large numbers of men (especially black men) generates a landslide of consequences for women. In an interview, gender and criminology scholar Beth Richie tells me, “Clearly one of the ‘untold stories’ of mass incarceration is the way that women are disadvantaged. The most obvious part is their own incarceration. But... there is also the problem of women supporting men who are incarcerated and when they are released. It is visiting, housing, feeding, protecting, hiding, taking the rap for them. All kinds of things have women ‘working’ to create or maintain stability when men are incarcerated, or when [their] kids are incarcerated.”

Barbara Fair carried on this support work routine, sevenfold. But amid the sleepless chaos, she gleaned a panoramic view of the system in which she was entangled—and became convinced that the best way to cope was to dig in and fight it. In the years since, Barbara has jumped into the struggle full-force, traveling the country to speak out about bail, plea bargains, sentencing, juvenile justice, and the war on drugs. She’s reached out to Yale students to collaborate on projects like “The Worst of the Worst,” a video aimed at exposing the harmful effects of solitary confinement. She led a fight to oust a corrupt New Haven judge, she held a “Biking While Black” protest to speak out about the anti-black profiling of bikers on the street, and nowadays she’s working to set up dialogues throughout Connecticut between victims and people who’ve caused harm.

Yet after thirty years, the challenges are still just beginning, says Barbara. She’s thinking long-term—and big: “I have worked so hard at reform, and saw so little change, that I have come to the conclusion that revolution might be the only response to what
is occurring in America relative to criminal justice and the prison industry it feeds.”

The Incarceration Wish

At this point, I need to acknowledge an uncomfortable but prevalent conundrum: Occasionally, a family member’s incarceration has its perks. For some families, the prisoner in question has posed a real threat in their lives. Most victims of domestic violence don’t call the cops—often because they know that police involvement would make their situations worse, especially if they’re people of color.
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Still, one-half of stalking instances, one-fifth of intimate partner rapes, and one-quarter of intimate partner physical assaults
are
reported to police, according to the US Department of Justice’s most recent survey.
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Police intervention and incarceration may seem, for the folks who’ve been harmed, a chance to cut ties and build a safer life.

It’s not a lasting “solution,” of course; the person is almost always eventually released from prison. And the incarceration of the family member (and the loss of their income) often creates fresh problems. In fact, many victims become direct targets of state violence upon reporting harm by their partners, especially if they’ve attempted to defend themselves physically, and particularly if they are black or brown.

Beth Richie notes, “Black women who report male violence to state officials are more likely to encounter uninformed service providers, unsympathetic community members, and rigid representatives of the state who blame them for their experiences and ignore the structural preconditions that surround them and their families.”
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Still, in the prison nation, incarceration is presented as the official go-to means to separate people from those who have harmed them.

Likewise, families of people with addictions have been taught by decades of drug war policy to see incarceration as one of the few surefire means of separating their loved ones from their substance of choice. Even those family members who recognize that continued drug use in prison is sometimes possible tend to feel reassured. For the chunk of time in which an addict is locked up, loved ones may breathe a little freer. They may let go of a bit of that clinging terror that their daughter or son or sister or aunt or brother or uncle or father or mother might be sprawled on a street somewhere, unconscious, ticking away the lonely minutes until death.

Kayla’s friend Jake, incarcerated at the time he writes to me, acknowledges that his mother has mixed feelings about his incarceration. “One thing I know for sure,” he writes, “is that she can sleep at night now while I’m in here because she knows where I am. She knows I am ‘safe,’ or safer than I was while I was out in my madness where there was no telling if I was dead or alive for weeks at a time.”

What
exactly
are we wishing for when we want someone close to us incarcerated? Maybe this question can only be answered with further questions, in this system mired in confusion and propelled by fear. Here are a few: Do we want them to stop hurting us? Do we feel prison would keep them safer? Do we want to freeze their spiraling criminal record, before they get in even
worse
trouble? Are we so angry at them that we just want them to go away for a while, reassuringly immobilized on the corner of the Monopoly board? Or do we feel that, when it comes down to it, clamped down under the force of the prison nation, there is just no other way?

Come October 2012, my family is tossing around these questions on an hourly basis. There’s absolutely no danger that Kayla
will physically harm us. But we can answer a weak and weary “yes” to at least a couple of the other questions. Four days after Kayla gets out of prison—two days after telling me that all she knows how to do is be incarcerated, one day after I proudly presented her with her brand-new Facebook profile—my mother finds her passed out on the bathroom floor, a needle stuck in her arm. A chilling and tear-ridden trip to the hospital follows.

Two days later, an old boyfriend of Kayla’s, newly released from prison himself after doing time for residential burglary, has crept into my parents’ house during the night to bring her heroin. My dad, jolted from sleep, slides open Kayla’s closet door to discover this man standing there, silent but barely shaken. “Hi, Mr. Schenwar,” Kayla’s ex-boyfriend says.

My dad can’t coax his body back to sleep that night, or the next, or the next. Dad is prone to cyclical, major depression, but at the time of Kayla’s release, he’s staved it off for twelve years, climbing to a rare point of joy and calm. The rest of us remark that he’s “enlightened.” But now he’s scared—for Kayla and for the family—and he paces the house, shaky and sleepless, sinking back into depression.

Kayla is scared, too. In a wild, honest instant, she thrusts a bag of heroin into my mom’s hands and says, “Take it. I don’t want it in the house.” My parents, flustered, discard Kayla’s advice to flush it, since they don’t want it traveling into the water supply; instead, my dad, gingerly clutching the bag, walks it over to the police station. The amount of heroin is minuscule—it’s about a fifth of what a typical addict might use in a day—and after my dad conveys his circumstances, the police say nothing. Dad may have been the first person ever to appear in their station, unsummoned, to surrender a bag of heroin. Still, I wonder how their response would have differed had Dad been black.

A week later, my parents, Kayla, and I meet at a café for a disastrously executed half-intervention. It ends with me screaming maniacally, “Fucking asshole! You’re ruining everything! Do you want to go back to prison? FINE! I never want to see you again!” Her limp, teary reply floods out before my rant is through: “Fine, bitch. I never want to see you, either!” We exit before we’re banished, the other café-goers’ eyes escorting us out the door. Leaning against my car in the café parking lot, Kayla and I half-hug and concede grumblingly that we love each other. Neither of us indicates that we actually do want to see each other again.