Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (21 page)

Part III

Angels

Chapter 8

State of Shame

By the summer of 2012, I had been working on this book for a year, and I felt like I was trapped in a strange recurring dream in which I caught a glimpse of Harry Anslinger and Arnold Rothstein fleeing out the door every time I arrived at a drug war battlefield.

I watched as Chino and Leigh tried to be Anslinger and Rothstein, and failed—but I kept hearing about people across the world who had in fact succeeded in becoming these founding fathers, and then went further than they ever dreamed. They had, I realized, taken the darkest impulses I found and feared within myself and our culture—to repress addictive urges with violence; to crush, in the belief you will conquer—and followed them literally. I needed, I knew, to go looking for those men. I wanted to understand them. They might hold the key.

So I booked a ticket to Arizona, and within a few days, I was marching with a chain gang of meth addicts in the desert—all arranged by Harry Anslinger’s personal disciple. Then I booked a flight to Texas and found myself in a bare prison cell, talking through reinforced glass to a young man who has sawed off heads for the great-grandchildren of Arnold Rothstein. Then I headed into the deadliest city in the world, to track a dead woman’s dream.

The female chain gang
¹
meets at five o’clock every weekday morning, just as the sun is starting to rise over the Arizona desert. The women emerge unfed from the tents, surrounded by barbed wire, as they are ordered to put on T-shirts that display to the world why they are here.
I
WAS A DRUG ADDICT
²
, it says in bold black letters you can read from a distance. I watch as they clamber into their striped uniforms, their limbs flailing with hunger and exhaustion. Then they put on leg-irons. Then the guards order them to begin their chant.

Everywhere we go

People want to know

Who we are

So we tell them

We are the chain gang

The only female chain gang.

They have to stamp their boots and jangle their chains in rhythm to the song, as though they are the chorus line in some dystopian Broadway musical. And so their march out into the desert heat begins.

Some days they are made to bury dead bodies. Today, they clamber into a bus. They are being taken, they are told, to a parched, trash-strewn traffic island in the 110-degree heat and ordered to collect trash, in front of signs urging people to vote for the politician who has pioneered this particular form of punishment.

The women try to get out of the bus but keep tumbling into each other as the chains catch their feet. They always apologize, in small voices, as the other women hold them up. When they step out into the sun, the women are shoved a bottle of sunscreen. The expiration date on the bottle, I notice, is 2009—three years earlier. It comes out as a thick paste.

One girl is free
³
of the chains. It is her job to nail into place a sign that says
CAUTION
!
SHERIFF’S CHAIN GANG AT WORK
!
and to fetch water for women when they are on the brink of collapse. Gabba is a pale, bony nineteen-year-old Italian American. As I follow her around, she tells me that she was thrown out by her parents as a teenager and started using heroin. “It was my escape,” she says, looking down.

I can see Candice staggering around, looking fazed. She is a blond woman in her twenties with an inflamed red face that looks as if it is being slowly eaten by something. It is bleeding where she has scratched it too hard. The doctors have told her it is an allergic reaction to the bleach they use in the tents, she says, but there is no alternative for her. Her story comes out, like the other women’s, in a matter-of-fact monotone—it’s nothing special here. She ran away from her family when she was fourteen and joined the carnival, and she started using meth there. “It was the best thing I ever had in my life—it made the bad feelings go away,” she told me, scratching. “I’m afraid to get released because I don’t know what I’m going to do. It numbs all the bad feelings. It makes me not feel anything.” Like everyone else, Candice is sweating constantly in this heat, and the salt in her sweat is making the rash burn.

The other T-shirts the women are forced to wear say
I
AM BREAKING THE NEED FOR WEED
,
CLEAN
(
ING
)
AND SOBER
, and
METH USER
. Michelle, an older former meth user, says to me as she collects rubbish awkwardly: “A lot of people didn’t have a lot of dignity to begin with, to come here, and what they did have is taken away. Everything . . . [is] about humiliating us until there’s nothing left.” A few hours after she tells me this, when she has been in the desert sun all this time covered only with out-of-date paste, Michelle starts vomiting
⁴
and shaking, and has to be held up by the rest of the chain.

The day before, when I mentioned Harry Anslinger’s name to the man who invented this chain gang—along with a slew of other ways to punish addicts—his face beamed big and wide.

“Oh, wow! You’re amazing!” he exclaimed. “It’s amazing that you remember that man!” He had Harry’s signature on his wall, staring down at him as he worked. To him, Anslinger was a hero, a role model, the man who started it all. He kept repeating Anslinger’s name in our conversation as though stroking a purring cat: “When you go back to Anslinger—you got a good guy here!”
⁵

Harry Anslinger employed Joe Arpaio in 1957 to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and he rose through the bureau over decades. Since 1993, he has been the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He was eighty when I met him, and about to be elected to his sixth consecutive term. His Stetson, his shining yellow lawmaker’s badge, and his sneer have become national symbols of a particular kind of funhouse-mirror Americana, and his hefty chunk of Arizona, home to nearly four million people, is now Harry Anslinger’s last great laboratory. Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,”
⁶
and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony
⁷
for them in the desert.

I watch Gabba and Candice and Michelle and their fellow addicts march back into it in lockstep. Again, they have to chant:

We’re in a state of shame

Couldn’t get our lives straight

We’re headed back to intake

We’re here without our kids

We lost our hope

We gave up dope.

The women look at me while they chant, then look away quickly. They have been ordered to look only at the back of the head of the person in front of them on the chain.

It takes a moment for me to register what they are singing now. The guards have also ordered them to chant warnings that they will be given electric shocks if they dare to talk back:

We’re in stripes

They’re in brown
[meaning the guards]

We walk in chains with them close by

We dare not run, we dare not hide

Don’t you dare give them no lip

’Cause they got tasers on their hip.

This isn’t an idle chant: in the jails and prisons of Arizona, several inmates have been tasered to death. As we stumble back into the bus and then back into the prison, the women are unshackled and strip-searched to see if they have any drugs in their vaginas or anuses.

They live in tents that Arpaio got the military to donate for nothing. Many of the tents are from the Korean War. At night, you can hear the low scuttle of scorpions and the squeak of mice venturing out from the nearby trash dump. In the winter, it is freezing. In the summer, the heat hits you like an unimaginably vast hairdryer pointed at your face. Inside the tents, the temperature hits 140 degrees. The women go into the shower fully dressed to get soaked and then go lie on their beds. It takes an hour and then you are bone-dry again, but that, at least, is an hour in which you feel some relief.

The first time I enter Tent City, the prisoners crowd around me, trying desperately to explain what is happening.

“This is hell!” one of them shrieks. They are given two meals a day, costing fifteen cents
⁸
each. It is referred to by guards and inmates as “slop”—a brownish gloop of unspecified meat
⁹
that Arpaio boasted to a reporter contained “rotten” lumps, and costs at most 40 cents a meal. People from the outside can give you money to buy small items from the commissary, like potato chips, but there are plenty of inmates who have nobody willing or able to give them money, so they live in a state of constant hunger. The prisoners are never allowed to touch their visitors: it all has to be done by video. Your children can be brought into a visiting room, but you will be handcuffed to the table and not allowed to touch them in any way, no matter what age they are. Even when the child cries “Momma, Momma” and asks for a hug, the prisoner cannot reach out, and has to watch her child crying, helpless. The guards, the women say, openly mock and abuse them: “They think it’s funny,” one woman says, “to see us down. To see us without our children.” Another tells me: “It’s like they’re trained to be brutal.”

As I walk through the tents a cacophony hits me from all around—a diabetic twenty-year-old, imprisoned for drinking alcohol, saying he’s not being given his insulin; frightened cries from everywhere about being dispatched to some place called the Hole.
¹⁰

The next day, I return to take down more details—but something has changed. The prisoners who hurried to me yesterday, full of pain, face away from me now. When I approach them in the tents, they are mute, and simply shake their heads. I walk from one to another: they all refuse to talk, and when I keep asking, they try to shoo me away. The cacophony has been replaced by a perfect silence. One woman grabs at me as I pass and says that she’s sorry she can’t talk to me but she’d like to shake my hand. As she does, I realize she is passing me a tiny folded note.
¹¹

I open it later. “If I speak the truth to you I will go to the Hole and it’s awful, you have nothing. Please understand, I’d like to talk to you but I can’t. They are watching us,” it says. “We all got in trouble yesterday after you left. Please don’t let no-one see this note.”
¹²

I assume I will get no more information from Tent City. But—to my surprise—when I ask to see the Hole, the officers agree to show me. Everybody gives it this name, including the guards, although technically it is called an Isolation Unit. As I walk through the tents into the concrete heart of the prison itself, I see the Hole consists of a series of tiny concrete solitary cells laid out in rows, on two different levels. The cell doors have a tiny slit in them, and as the guards unlock them, eyes peer out. When they see an outsider, they immediately start yelling for help, and their voices have a cracked quality, as though their throats are too narrow to let out their words. They are not allowed to communicate with the guards: they have to put anything they have to say in writing and slide it under the door. They are trying to talk to me.

The first thing that hits me as I approach these eyes is the stink, literally, of shit: it is so overwhelming it makes me retch.

The inmates let me peer past them into the cells. There is a steel bunk bed that would fit a ten-year-old child, and that’s it. No radio; no life. The prisoners inside cannot see the sun or the sky or another human face. Some inmates are given a cellmate, and even though they can barely move with another person in there and have to shit in front of each other, they consider themselves lucky.
¹³

As an inhabitant of the Hole, you get one hour out of your cell to take a shower and stretch your legs; you can’t communicate during that hour, and no phone calls are permitted. This is where you go if you break one of the rules Sheriff Joe has laid down, or if one of the guards takes a dislike to you. For example, he has banned cigarettes, so a woman is here, for a month, for being found with one.