Locked Down, Locked Out (9 page)

The idea of the “deterrent” potential of isolation has long been subject to skepticism. In 1898, following two years of incarceration for “gross indecency” (that is, sleeping with other men), the playwright Oscar Wilde endeavored to distill the ethos of imprisonment in his poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” On its surface, the poem chronicles the story of a murderer being hauled off to his execution, but it is haunted by a larger message:

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong.

Wilde is saying that, for himself and his fellow prisoners, the desperation and anger sparked by confinement rise above all other responses to their environment.
The wall is strong
. An overwhelming reality dominates the world of prisoners: They can’t get out.

But what about those tough-to-sort issues of “right” and “wrong”? What about prisoners coming to “know” the harm that they’ve inflicted on others (if they have indeed inflicted harm), coming to the realizations that’ll help them avoid those actions in the future? It’s a tough prospect in prison, says Lacino Hamilton, incarcerated in Michigan. He explains his thinking: “Those committing crimes over and over again … have not dealt with the void in their lives that leads to the act itself.” In order to do harm, he notes, you usually have to be able to disregard the effects your actions have on other people. And imprisonment—a life in which isolation is constant—provides an atmosphere in which those effects on others can simply continue to be ignored or repressed.

Prison guards, who function as the human embodiments of Wilde’s strong walls, are trained to constrain and suppress, to enforce zoo-like isolation. Guard-on-prisoner violence is routine, and, true to the undergirdings of the institution itself, is infused with racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and transphobia.
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This explicit violence often goes unrecorded—even unacknowledged. It is cleanly isolated and therefore easily suppressed; often, guards need merely close a cell door and walk away. Although the US Supreme Court held in 1993 that “an inmate has a constitutional right to be secure in her bodily integrity and free from attack by prison guards,” the very structure of prisons—in which guards are explicitly handed the mission of controlling prisoners’ bodies—belies that ideal.
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Rev. Jason Lydon, who founded the queer, antiracist prison abolitionist group Black and Pink after his own incarceration, describes how the act of sexual violence is built into the institution of prison, which cuts off from the rest of society not only your mind and words and thoughts, but also the solid fact of your body. “It’s about restricting the body, controlling the body, so that other people have access to your skin anytime they choose,” he tells me over the phone. “You have no right to say no.” When Jason was incarcerated in Georgia, he was placed in a segregated block confined to gender-nonconforming and queer people. The experience played out as, in Jason’s words, “torture”:

Preachers would come into our cellblock on Sunday morning and tell us what abominations we were, and we were forced to stay in the room to listen to them. Prison guards would force us to strip naked in the dayroom in order to get our clothes, while all the other prisoners around in the other tiers would humiliate us. Strip searches are a form of sexual violence no
matter what happens—but when I was further assaulted by a prison guard during a strip search, that really solidified in my deep self that this system causes so much harm.

One in five men experiences sexual abuse in prison; the estimates for women vary quite a bit, but reach one in four in maximum-security institutions.
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(Such “abuse” doesn’t include the lack of privacy prisoners experience while showering, changing, and on the toilet.) Lesbian, gay, bisexual, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans prisoners experience overwhelmingly higher rates of assault, often by authority figures.
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Jake Donaghy, a friend and fellow prisoner of Kayla’s at Logan Correctional Center, writes to me about the ways that guards manipulate bodies into deeper isolation. Jake is transgender and describes how trans people are “kept safe” in the women’s prison where he’s incarcerated: “Say someone is trans, [and] fears for their life in any sort of way. They are placed in Segregation—‘The Hole’—where one is confined to their cage for 24 hours a day and fed through a tiny window that is built into the steel door that can only be opened with a key.” In a study of trans and intersex people in New York men’s prisons, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project noted, “Interviewees report being subjected to disproportionate isolation and solitary confinement where they experience regular physical and sexual assault, harassment, and the denial of food and urgent medical care by correctional officers.”
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Confinement in the Hole is also prison personnel’s go-to response to those who break explicit rules (not just implicit ones like “don’t be queer or trans”). Jake writes of the psychological and physical violence inflicted on prisoners: “What does that do but create more anger and resentment in an individual? In most cases, let’s use mine for example—I know for a fact that I will walk out
of these barbed wire gates more traumatized than I was when I entered them.”

About a month after my sister’s 2013 return to prison, I receive a letter from her that hits similar notes: “This place, this time down is turning me into someone I didn’t ever want to be ... mean and very hateful with a bitchy exterior,” she writes. “You know that’s never been me, Maya.”

Christian peace activist Lee Griffith, who writes on the spiritual significance of this force-driven cager/caged relationship, notes, “The problem is that prisons are
identical in spirit
to the violence and murder they pretend to combat.... Whenever we cage people, we are in reality fueling and participating in the same spirit we claim to renounce.”
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“Why Get Out?”

For people who are caged, the lighthouse twinkling in the distance may almost always be freedom—but “freedom” doesn’t look the same for everyone. For those who anticipate a homecoming of homelessness and hunger, for example, the lighthouse twinkles less brightly. It also depends how deeply feelings of worthlessness and criminality have set in. It’s possible to get used to anything, Oklahoma prisoner Gabrielle Stout writes, and for some, the anticipation of release mixes with a contradictory wish. After all, for many, going home resembles a different kind of incarceration—another arena of the prison nation, characterized by surveillance, racialized police targeting, and the crushing force of poverty.

Gabrielle has drifted between jail, prison, and the streets since the late 1990s, arrested on drug possession and theft charges. As both Native and transgender, she’s a prime target for profiling, as well as for discrimination and abuse while incarcerated.
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She writes to me of the harsh scrutiny to which she’s subject as a trans
prisoner—how she, like Jake, is prone to ending up in especially restrictive circumstances for relatively minor infractions: an unmade bed, talking across the unit, walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk in the yard. Over a year ago, she was placed in an intensive supervision unit, on twenty-three-hour lockdown. She is permitted one hour of recreation per day and three showers per week. Her mind has slipped into such a stupor, Gabrielle says—a state so different from that required to function in society—that often she’s on autopilot. “I’m used to being in here,” she says, “so why get out?” She’s watched this shift play out in other prisoners as well. “You become so comfortable with the prison setting and lifestyle, that it’s all you know,” she says, noting that after a while, lost connections with people on the outside also begin to feel almost normal. “You don’t feel like you would be able to make it if you were released.”

Not long after Gabrielle’s letter, I receive one from Kayla, in which she talks about her “comfort” in prison and fear of her out date several months down the line. At that point, not only will she be flung back into a world that doesn’t want her, but she’ll also be subject to a whole other round of severed connections; her closest friendships, at this point, are with people on the inside, many of whom won’t be leaving for a long time. “Some of my best memories stem from inside these walls,” she writes. “Although disturbing, it’s my reality.”

So I go to prisoners with a question that feels bizarre: Do they
want
to get out?

Most say they do, but they’re scared. When I ask Sable Sade Kolstee, a former community college student from Pennsylvania and twenty-six-year-old mother of three young children, what frightens her about her impending release, she answers without hesitation, “My biggest fear is anxiety.” This might seem tau
tological: Isn’t fear anxiety? But, prisoners tell me, when you’re relegated to an intensely dehumanizing state of confinement, unexposed to the daily interactions that outside life brings, it can be terrifying to imagine yourself immersed in a constantly flowing world of other human beings. Sable, who’s kept to herself in prison, puts it like this: “Sometimes I think it will be over-stimulating when I can actually have contact again. We desensitize so much.... I know I will be nervous when I’m touched.”

Pulled away from the people she loves, she says, she has become an expert at retreating into herself, faking invisibility. No one is demanding her presence; after all, severed personal connections also mean severed personal obligations. There are no kids tugging at her hands, no parental caretaking responsibilities to face. “Now, when confronted with an uncomfortable situation at times I look for the quickest way out, instead of working it out,” she says. Later, after her release, Sable writes to me: “When I am in public, large crowds, I shake and nearly shut down.... It’s like sensory overload and I have to have a timeout for three hours. It’s frustrating because I want to be normal.”

For prisoners incarcerated at a young age, the prospect of release looms especially intimidatingly. Abraham Macías, imprisoned since he was eighteen, is confined in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) at California’s Pelican Bay Prison. He lives alone in a cramped cell with no windows, a few pictures from magazines affixed to the wall, and a corner piled with manila envelopes stuffed with papers and photos, his only other possessions. To picture his living space, he says, “Get a TV, take it into the restroom, and lock yourself in. But you can’t use the tub or shower. That’s our existence.” He and the seven others in his “pod” spend their limited yard time in a “23 x 5-foot concrete box,” with a scant view of the sky that affords no sunlight for months at a time. It has
been years, Abraham says, since he has seen the sun or the moon.

Abraham talks about life on the outside as a stack of faded memories, thin as dreams. And though he wishes fervently he were free, his before-prison life played out as a battle waged daily: His main concern, he says, was survival. With “friends getting gunned down” and “no food in the fridge (literally none),” he turned to “self-medicating” with drugs and alcohol, obtained through “illegal activities.” He knows that upon release, most of his human interactions will probably revolve around the same make-ends-meet struggles. And he’ll still confront racism-fueled police scrutiny. (Abraham is Latino.) “Brown and black men /women are mostly targeted in inner cities as suspicious characters, has-beens and any other name you can think of,” he writes. He’s seen fellow prisoners of color released, only to be rearrested almost immediately for small infractions. The idea of release is instinctively joyful, Abraham says, but in real terms, what—and who—will he be released
to
? As Gabrielle puts it, the question that pulses through her when she thinks of getting out isn’t simply what she’ll do—it’s whether she’ll be able to “make it.”

And so, in this prison nation, release is a weighted “freedom.” During the rise of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement, poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote the poem “truth,” about the complicated heaviness that may descend on someone emerging from the “night-years”:

And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?

When the door is flung open, and access to the “sun” seems within reach, the path forward is not simple: A million barriers and cliffs lie beyond the doorstep. And for many prisoners, once the sun comes, it can feel blinding, with the instant pressure to “make it” in an oppressive world overwhelming the warmth of its rays.

“But He Had a Record...”

What does it mean to navigate the daylight—to “make it”? Is it to “rehabilitate”? To find or reignite companionship and love? To attain a joyful and fulfilling life? To avoid a return to prison? Or, simply, to survive?

I visit the Chicago office of US congressman Danny K. Davis for an interview in the spring, as Kayla’s latest sentencing date draws close. Though many of his colleagues have only recently come around to the idea of scrutinizing criminal justice policy, Davis represents a district that houses some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods—mostly black communities that have been torn and scattered by incarceration—and he has long advocated legislation addressing the rights of currently and formerly incarcerated people. I first met him in 2008 while writing a story about federal parole; parole has been abolished on the federal level since 1984, and the congressman had introduced a bill to reinstate it.

When I visit his office in 2013, he speaks of how, upon release, former prisoners remain isolated by labels. He speaks of a man who works for him, who was arrested as a juvenile for laughing at a police officer, “disturbing the peace.” Later, as an adult, he attempted to become a police officer himself. He took the exam, passed, but was denied by the police board. Why? “He was a good person, an intelligent person, but he had a record,” says Davis. Criminal records become former prisoners’ badges of identification, the defining characteristic that tells the world what
kind of human they are. One glance at the badge can mean being refused food stamps, or Pell Grants, or public housing, keeping lots of former prisoners separated from their families even upon release.
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Many formerly incarcerated people already lack crucial job skills, since technology has evolved so rapidly over the past few years—some have never held a cell phone, others have seen the Internet only on TV. Prison also teaches patterns that are contrary to those needed for many jobs. Tack on the “convict” badge, and their chances are toast.