Locked Down, Locked Out (13 page)

Steven was twenty-six, two years older than me. (He was arrested at twenty-one.) He worshipped ’90s underground rock and had played bass and guitar for “beer party punk bands” in past days. His politics were passionate—and, incredibly, more hopeful than mine: He wrote of his belief in the power of nonviolent resistance to “help our fellows rise above their chains,” even in the direst of circumstances. To top it off, he’d been an avid
Punk Planet
reader before he was locked up—he could name cover stories from 2001. He claimed he was innocent: His co-defendant, whose fingerprints were found on the weapons, had confessed to being the sole shooter in the murder. No physical evidence against Steven was ever discovered, although he did acknowledge being at the scene of the crime. (I neither questioned nor affirmed Steven’s innocence throughout our correspondence, but I did go online and read, over and over, flooded with grief, anger, and confusion, the gory details of the murder he was said to have committed.) Now, he woke each morning sweating uncontrollably, hit with the stark inevitability of his impending death.

In his first letter to me, Steven shared that he was working on a zine—a handwritten, self-produced magazine filled with rants and comics—entitled “The Continuing Struggle of a Nail in My Coffin.” The point? “To educate and entertain!” Steven wrote me. “Sitting idle while the world wallows in ignorance and apathy just isn’t for me.”

In my letters to Steven, I didn’t talk much about my own life (though I answered his questions about the music scene here in Chicago, where he’d once lived). It felt absurd to blather on about my bland day job, lunchtime trips to Noodles and Company, and watching television marathons on DVD. So I asked what life was like in Polunsky, what protest actions he had planned for the future, and whether he had any appeals left to fight his sentence. “One more,” he wrote.

My string of questions began wearing itself ragged. I was repeating myself, struggling to avoid the one topic that burned at the forefront of my mind and the tip of my pen. Our letters grew further apart. I tried to send him copies of
Punk Planet;
they didn’t get through inspection. We “chatted” about protest behind bars. He wrote, “The biggest part of being an activist is reaching out and instilling the spirit of revolution and resistance in our fellows, to break the herd mentality ... you place us into a situation where all the fuel is already there, and all it needs is a spark.” I wrote, “I am so impressed with all you are doing!” I thought: “What good will any of it do? You’re dying.” We traversed light, safe, death-free discussion terrain: Chicago bookstores, my work at
Punk Planet
, the merits of Mountain Dew (which he loved and I hated). He wrote about the time of enlightenment that would come “after we win better conditions back here.”

I avoided the mailbox, falling toward a selfish, gutless conclusion: I didn’t want to watch Steven die. I stopped writing first.

For four years, I quit thinking about Steven, or tried. But in the summer of 2012, as I began this book, I combed through my letters from pen pal interviews past. There was Steven. And so I took a deep breath and googled “Steven Woods” and “Texas death row.” The Internet delivered the news: My friend had been executed in 2011. His last meal had included French toast, bacontopped
pizza, chicken-fried steak, and, of course, Mountain Dew, though he hadn’t eaten a bite. His last words: “Warden, if you’re going to murder someone, go ahead and pull that trigger.... I love you Mom.... Goodbye, everyone. I love you.”

Meeting the “Monster”

The poet Richard Shelton spent several decades leading writing workshops in Arizona prisons. His inspiration for the classes was an extended correspondence with a death row prisoner convicted of three murders. Shelton writes in his book
Crossing the Yard
of the first letter he received from Charles Schmid, who sought his advice about writing poetry. “Here was my chance, I thought, to read the poetry of a monster,” recalls Shelton, “an exotic subspecies of human I had never encountered.”
¹

But Shelton saw promise in Schmid’s work, and they mailed poetry back and forth, sifting emotions and motivations and tangled histories as they sifted words. “I was beginning to realize, dimly, that I was dealing with a human being and that I could no longer think of my involvement as casual, as a form of literary slumming,” Shelton writes.
²
Eventually he visited Schmid and began to extend his services and his friendship to other men in the maximum-security prison where Schmid was incarcerated.

Shelton’s relationship with the “monster” yielded transformations in ways beyond the poetic. After four years of writing together, Schmid told Shelton, “I’m not the same person.... I’m only now beginning to realize, to understand, what I’ve done. Something’s happened to me. Something wonderful and frightening. I can’t explain it, but I feel like somebody else. And you are what made it happen.”
³
Thirty years after he met Schmid, Shelton feels like somebody else, too—his prison workshops and friendships have “enriched and enlarged my life. It has led me through
bloody tragedies and terrible disappointments to a better understanding of what it means to be human and even, sometimes, to triumph.”
⁴

It wasn’t all fuzzy wuzzy, Shelton assures us: He wrestled with the fact that many of his new buddies had committed acts of extreme violence—acts that had deeply harmed people (real humans, too!) and families—and that these actions could not simply be ignored. So although his link to the prison revolved around poetry, and his role was that of an educator, Shelton nevertheless became heavily immersed in his students’ struggles, and troubled by some of their crimes.

He writes of a note he sent prisoner Jimmy Baca, after receiving an ongoing litany of rants from Baca about his treatment in prison. Shelton, fed up, wrote: “I don’t see how anybody as smart as you could be so stupid as to do something that would get you sent to prison, where you knew you would be completely under the control of those less intelligent than you are.”
⁵
Though Shelton worried about how this would be received, the starkness of those words on paper struck Baca hard, in the best way. He kept the letter in his wallet for years and years thereafter, a reminder that the system wasn’t a one-way game: His actions played a part in his predicament. (As Mauricio Rueben would say, he was a bit “Stuck on Stupid.”) Baca went on to become an award-winning poet in his own right, and to be released from prison.

Shelton knows that his mentorship of Baca, Schmid, and others profoundly impacted their lives—but he also acknowledges that poetry and friendship aren’t “solutions” to incarceration. A back-cover endorsement calls the poet’s memoir “a moving plea for the arts in prison.” But
Crossing the Yard
actually calls for a much more radical and real transformation: abolition of the prison system. Shelton did not start out as an activist; he was a poet
and teacher offering his services. His firsthand experience of getting to know prisoners as people awakened for him the power of those bonds to change worlds. It has transformed Shelton just as it transformed his pen pals, students, friends. And, he writes, it has caused him—rather, it has
forced
him—to imagine his way beyond a system that isolates people in a manner that, ordinarily, permits folks in Shelton’s position to simply forget about them, unless they should chance to receive a letter from a “monster.”

Their “Side of the Story”

In early 2013, Beth Derenne from the Women’s Prison Book Project (WPBP) sends me a packet of thank-you letters from women who’ve participated in her book exchange. I flip through the pages, pausing on a letter from Sable Sade Kolstee, who describes herself as a book lover with a “thirsty brain.” I drop her a note to see if she’ll answer some questions for my book on prison and disconnection. She responds promptly in round, clear print: “I am 26 years old and a mother to 3 beautiful children. When you talk about disconnected—I was shut off from my children from April 4, 2010 until just this month, March 2013. My crime put restrictions on my contact with minors.”

Sable writes achingly of how she’s been severed from her three young kids, all under the age of eight. Over the course of her incarceration, Sable has missed a long list of early milestones: “first steps, concerts, growth, birthdays, holidays, and many more.” Letters, calls
and
visits from her children have been banned until recently, she writes: “My greatest challenge was fighting for the children. So many times counselors would say ‘I understand.’ I would look at them and tell them not to lie to me because none of you have ever gone 1 year, 18 months, 2 years without your children.”

The battle for her children won’t end upon release, Sable says. The terms of her parole will also mandate a separation from her children. And, she writes, her “separation” extends beyond contact with her kids, and even beyond the limits of the law. She’s worried about how people will perceive her. “It’s not that I think I won’t be able to make a positive contribution to society when I get out,” she writes, “but the stigma I will live with for the next 22 years will possibly make me shy or frightened of judgment. Although I want to help others and show my children that a mistake does not define you.”

At this point, I’m absorbed and pained; I feel for my new pen pal. And I’m rooting for her! But the gigantic thought bubble hanging over my brain is shouting,
“What was the mistake?”
What act would bar her from receiving visits from her kids—or leave her with a twenty-two-year postrelease “stigma”?

I google her, of course. One cruel irony prisoners face is that while they’re behind bars, unable to speak for themselves, the Internet offers up a host of third-party information about them: mugshots, court documents, personal data (age, height, weight, tattoo verbiage), past records, and often-sensational press coverage of their convictions. A couple of newspaper snippets disclose that at twenty-three she was convicted of “statutory assault”—having a “sexual relationship” with a “known minor male” over the course of a couple of months, as evidenced by text messages exchanged between the two. I write Sable for her perspective on what happened.

Asking prisoners for their “side of the story” can be an awkward affair, something it doesn’t even make sense to do unless the incarcerated person initiates the conversation; after all, the
story
is just one of each prisoner’s stories—the act for which they’re incarcerated doesn’t define them—and the last thing a pen pal should
be doing is implying that. Perhaps I shouldn’t have broached the topic in the first place. But Sable’s very straightforward: She “did it,” she says. In her early twenties, she was attending college and caring for her three young children (including a newborn). The kids’ father, Derrick, was in prison, and Sable, overwhelmed (she says she’d been “codependent” on Derrick), began to drink, use drugs heavily, and “sleep around with whoever.” From there, she says, her judgment slid downhill. She began dating a guy who, a month and a half in, told her he was fifteen. They fought, he left—but he continued coming around at night for a couple of weeks, and Sable, drunk and lonely, suppressed her major qualms. “I thought, hell I did this at that age,” she writes. The relationship soon ended, but Sable subsequently discussed it with a friend—who turned her in to the cops. She was charged with five counts of statutory sexual assault.

In the grand hierarchy of public perceptions of crime, ranging from I-don’t-know-why-this-person-is-in-prison to this-person-is-despicable-scum, people incarcerated for sex offenses are categorically deposited into the “scum” pile. I’d never corresponded with someone in this position before, except for brief interview-style exchanges for articles. Honestly, if I hadn’t impulsively written Sable based on her WPBP letter, I probably would’ve looked up her conviction and, glimpsing “sexual assault,” ruled her out.

But I didn’t, and now we were friends, and—though I didn’t and still don’t pretend to fully comprehend the ins and outs of her case—when she wrote of her hunch that if she’d had money for a decent lawyer, she’d “never have seen a day in prison,” I thought, “She’s probably right.” I google “age of consent.” In Spain, it’s thirteen. In Austria and Bulgaria, it’s fourteen. In Turkey, it’s eighteen. In Costa Rica, it’s fifteen. And in Pennsylvania, where Sable was convicted, it is sixteen; the boy with whom she had sex was
fifteen years old. I wonder: What defines a sex crime, what makes someone a sex “criminal,” and why am I so hesitant about writing to someone who’s been branded with that label? I’ve had pen pals who have pled guilty to murder. Why am I even more insecure about corresponding with a woman who admits to a statutory sex offense? How do our definitions of “human” match up with our categories of “crime”? Questioning the labeling of a “sex criminal” is not to diminish the tragedy and trauma of rape, or the pain of survivors, who are often underrecognized, ignored, or even punished in our culture. Rather, it’s about questioning the logic of a system in which a person becomes defined by one of their acts—defined
as
that act instead of as a person. The questions knock at my brain. Sable and I continue to write.

For most of her prison sentence, Sable was barred from seeing or speaking with her children, but just before she’s released she is granted one visit. When the day comes, her oldest kid remembers her right away, and she’s “loving, excited and quite the chatterbox,” Sable writes me. Her three-year-old boy is understandably shy; for most of his life, his mother has been invisible. Meanwhile, her middle child stays quiet, rarely smiles, and looks down a lot. Eventually, though, she gazes up at Sable and asks whether she can “live with [her] forever.”

The answer is no. After Sable is released, she’ll still be held tightly in the prison nation’s grip. She will spend three years on parole, held to an 8 p.m. curfew each night. She writes that she can’t have a driver’s license, and must avoid the Internet, cell phones, “excessive amounts of candy,” and “contact with minors”—including her own children. Her conflicted feelings squeeze through the lines of her letters—her desperation for freedom, her fear of long-term separation from her kids, her longing for fresh air, her anxieties around the millions of unknown people
who will share that fresh air with her. But a few days before departure, she says she’s ready. She writes to me: “I have a long list of things I have to do. The first thing I’m doing is eating a pizza. After that, my steps towards my new life can begin.”