Locked Down, Locked Out (3 page)

The “chasms” and “distances” are more than metaphors. Jeremy Travis, a leading prisoner-reentry scholar, calls the prison-industrial
complex “a modern version of the slave auction block.”
³
Upon the strike of a gavel, people who’ve been convicted may be bussed to far-off prisons, hundreds or even thousands of miles from their families—most of whom are poor and can’t afford to travel far or often to visit them. The metaphor is all the more apt because a large proportion of those families are black. As chronicled in Michelle Alexander’s
The New Jim Crow
, national incarceration rates are a product of the prison nation’s groundings in slavery and ongoing anti-blackness. African Americans are currently about six times as likely to be incarcerated as whites, and therefore six times as likely to be uprooted from their families and communities.
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Abraham A. Macías Jr., who cracks me up on first contact by referring to his lockup at the notorious California supermax prison Pelican Bay as a “vacation” at “Pelican Bay Resort and Spa,” describes how his incarceration 750 miles from his hometown has unraveled his familial ties. “Stuck way up at the California/Oregon border, in the middle of nowhere, seems to erase you from the world,” says Abraham, who’s originally from East Los Angeles. He says he can’t blame his family for not visiting more frequently. “It’s the cost of gas, taking days off from work, the 36-hour round trip, 18 hours to and from ... and for what?” he says. “Three hours behind a glass window talking over a phone?”

For some prisoners’ families with whom I’ve spoken, their loved one’s transfer to a far-off prison has meant, flat-out, the end of visits: The money just isn’t there. In 2004 (the most recent data at this writing), more than half of state prisoners and a little less than half of federal prisoners said their minor children had never visited them.
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More and more families are finding themselves in this position: In the past couple of decades, out-of-state transfers of prisoners have soared. As prison populations have ballooned, many
states have dealt with overcrowding by shipping people off to prisons across state lines.
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Even prisons within state lines tend to be plopped down in the middle of abandoned fields or former factories (generally, in depressed rural areas where land is cheap).
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Prisoner placement “procedures” run something like, “You go here, you go there”: Primary considerations include security level (minimum, medium, maximum) and the availability of open beds, not prisoners’ proximity to home.

Some weak rumblings toward addressing the problem of distance have surfaced recently: Select prisons in at least twenty states have implemented “virtual visits,” using video conferencing. It’s a hopeful prospect for some families who can’t make the trip, but for many it manifests as a less-than-wonderful reality. Some jurisdictions charge bloated fees for each “visit”—in Virginia, folks on the outside pay $15 for a half-hour video chat, $30 for an hour
⁸
—and some prisons are actually cutting out contact visits in favor of video chats.
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Abraham points out that distance and cost aren’t the only reasons family members don’t make the trek. His dad, who died suddenly of a heart attack last year, once told him that he never visited because he didn’t want to see his son “caged like an animal.” Even if your loved one is incarcerated right across the street, “visiting” serves as a weak substitute for existing in the world as humans together.

“Visitor-Friendly”

For April Anderson, who was fourteen years old when her dad, Joe, was sentenced to life on methamphetamine conspiracy charges, much of life has centered around the visiting room for the past eighteen years. She’s traveled to see him in prisons in five different states. It’s carved into her family’s existence, she says, as much a
fixture as mealtimes and laundry: the four-hour (or more) drive to the prison, the humiliating security checks, the unfinished emotional business that trails behind them as they walk away. “For us, a family vacation basically means traveling to prison to see Dad,” April writes to me in an email. “Conversations are not private but shared with the next inmate who is sitting within a few feet of you on either side. Armed guards and cameras are watching and capturing every word and movement. That’s where all of our family photos have been taken for the past 18 years, with Dad wearing a hideous jumpsuit and all of us doing our best to smile.”

Even after seventeen years, April and her family never know what to expect upon arrival at prison. “Rules” change rapidly, depending on the guard on duty. April’s grandmother, Sue, tells me of an instance in which the two of them were kicked out after April hugged her dad and was accused of being “too affectionate with her father.” Harsh, denigrating words are to be expected. This is common: When I ask prisoners’ family members about the physical experience of visiting, they often use the word “punishment.” Inside the walls, they’re treated like prisoners themselves, particularly if they’re people of color and therefore already classified as “dangerous.” They’re subject to invasive body frisks, rude or abusive treatment, and sometimes sexual harassment.
¹⁰

Waiting rooms and visiting rooms are often dirty. Many don’t offer seats or bathrooms, regardless of how long the wait may be. Sometimes the wait is many hours long. Plus, visitors can be turned away for anything from wearing the wrong clothes to popping up positive on an inaccurate drug hand-scan.
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In at least one state—privatization-happy Arizona—visits are growing even more prohibitive for poor families: A mandatory $25 “background-check fee” must be forked over before visiting a state prisoner.

Though visitation is a frail substitute for a solid presence in community and family life, recent studies have shown that even these brief moments of contact contribute to reducing recidivism. (Reducing recidivism isn’t the only way—or even the best way—to measure “success” in the system, but it is practically the only indicator that’s measured.) A study out of the Minnesota Department of Corrections concludes that making visitation policies more “visitor-friendly” could result in “public safety benefits”: More human contact, the logic goes, strengthens bonds that discourage reoffense and encourage positive behaviors upon release, which means a better life for former prisoners and safer lives for everyone else, too.
¹²
Even the federal Bureau of Prisons agrees, stating that visits, phone privileges, and mail service are provided because “research has shown that prisoners who maintain ties with their families have reduced recidivism rates.”
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This correlation illustrates the necessity of more “friendly” visitation policies—but the fact that more human contact means less recidivism begs some larger questions: What are the collective consequences of pulling people away from the people they care about in the first place? How does it keep us safe?

A Side Note: Wait, What About Conjugal Visits?

Questions about the purpose of physical separation take on a particular significance when it comes to romantic relationships. In the movie
Office Space
, unhappy cubicle-ite Peter Gibbons reassures a friend with whom he’s planning an elaborate quick-money scam that even if they land in jail, it won’t be so bad—in fact, it could be awesome. “The worst they would ever do is put you, for a couple of months, into a white-collar, minimum-security resort,” he scoffs. “Shit, we should be so lucky! Do you know they have conjugal visits there?”

“Conjugal visits” are in fact banned almost everywhere and for almost all prisoners. Four states (California, New York, New Mexico, and Washington) allow a limited number of “extended family visits”: time that can be spent in a more private setting, with either a legal spouse or other family members. (A few prisons in an additional four states allow overnight visits with children or grandchildren.) Though restrictions vary among different states and prisons, these choice visits are most often available to minimum- to medium-security prisoners who are STD-free and HIV-free, with no disciplinary markups while in prison. So where did Peter from
Office Space
get the idea that anonymous women might be magically carted in to satisfy prisoners’ “conjugal” needs?

The concept of the conjugal visit was constructed explicitly on the foundation of controlling black sexuality. It originated in early-twentieth-century Mississippi, at Parchman Farm, a slave-plantation-turned-prison. The visits were introduced as a management tool intended to promote docility,
¹⁴
and were allowed mostly for black male prisoners, who were said to have an “insatiable sexual appetite” that might morph into violence if left unfed—plus, the thinking went, it would motivate them to work harder in the cotton fields.
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The women involved were often sex workers brought in specifically for the purpose of quelling potential inmate “aggression.” Conjugal visits began to spread across the country—they were considered an incentive to work and a means to “reduce homosexual behavior.”
¹⁶
(The practice of bringing in sex workers was phased out in favor of spousal visits.) But in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that these types of visits were
not
a constitutional right,
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and amid widespread overcrowding and budget-tightening, programs allowing “conjugal” contact with spouses or partners have since fizzled to barely existent status.

Conjugal visits are, then, a pop culture-hyped yet near-mythical prison “perk.” More common is the visiting room, a heavily regulated space, with the distance between participants measured and monitored. Joe Jackson, April Anderson’s dad, describes the visits he received early on in his sentence from his then-wife, to whom he’d been married for seventeen years upon entering prison: “When she came to visit I could kiss her ‘briefly’ upon exiting. We couldn’t sit by each other or even hold hands.” Like much of the visiting life, the brief arrival of a partner is—on both sides—often simply a wrenching reminder of absence and loss.

“Water-Cooler Talk”

“Absence makes the heart grow colder, not fonder,” Marcos Gray, an Illinois prisoner, tells me. He, like many of my pen pals, says he understands why his loved ones have stopped visiting. With every year that slips away, friends and family members become more “accustomed” to the fact that he’s not there. They settle into their own ever-evolving lives that don’t include him.

Incarcerated at sixteen on a sentence of life without parole, Marcos (who’s thirty-six at the time of this writing) has spent more birthdays in prison than out. Nowadays, when the date swings around, he often doesn’t receive a card, let alone an in-person greeting. He seems to have resigned himself to this lonely reality.

“We all would like to believe that we’re irreplaceable to our loved ones,” Marcos writes, leaving the second half of that thought
(but maybe we’re not
?) glaringly unspoken. There’s a difference, he says, between family members “wishing” that their incarcerated relatives would come home, and actually working to hold together the bond—a bond that, ultimately, can’t help being strained, worn down, fractured. Many loved ones simply opt for the dreamier and more distant route: the “wishing.”

Marcos’s family ties didn’t vanish all at once, he writes: “The strain came gradually and was so subtle that to this day, I still wonder what has happened.” Weekly visits turned to monthly visits, monthly to quarterly. These days, only a few family members—his mother and two of his nine siblings—make an appearance. He says he’s grateful for how long his connections lasted: Older prisoners had warned him that loved ones might slip away more quickly. “I’m lucky to have received at least a good 11- or 12-year demonstration of support from my family,” he writes.

Abraham has a similar attitude: “outside” people’s lives move forward, and in some ways they can’t help leaving their incarcerated family members behind. Like Marcos, Abraham was incarcerated as a teenager. Neither feels as if his own life ever really “started” before it was stopped.

“As time steadily marches on into eternity, they have all marched on with their own lives: growing up, having babies, maturing,” Abraham writes of his relatives and friends. “All the while, I’m here, stagnant in life experience, only knowing adulthood from within a prison cell.” He’s happy to have a “few die-hards” who drop by once in a while, but he says that the visits tend to disintegrate into awkward “water-cooler talk.” Conversation topics run dry fast when one participant’s life feels so stuck and so estranged.

Lawson Strickland, who has spent the past twenty years incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—a notorious prison built on a former slave plantation, where the primarily black prisoners still pick cotton—describes the state of incarceration as being “held outside of time itself ... a sort of stasis, akin to being trapped in amber.” Lawson served seven years on death row and has since remained in semi-solitary confinement. He describes his isolation as not only a geographical
separation but a temporal one: He resides, he tells me, “outside the flow of history.”

Reading Lawson’s letter, I think to myself: What do
I
talk about with people here on the outside, when we’re getting together just to talk—that is, when we’re “visiting”? Usually, we’re telling each other our ongoing histories, the events and the choices, the slippery path forks that we navigate to pave the timelines of our lives. Nonprison “visits” with people we haven’t seen for awhile—say, a family reunion, or a week’s stay with an out-of-town friend—are usually occasions for updates: relationships, births, deaths, bankruptcies, graduations, moves, trips, breakups, new homes, new careers, new adventures, lost jobs, adventures cut short. But most of those milestones, even the horrid ones, are out of reach for prisoners, “trapped” in space and time.