Locked Down, Locked Out (8 page)

We talk soon after, though. Her calls come at dawn or late at night, wrenching me from sleep, and they’re always the same: Each conversation balances itself on a thread of watery banter, sometimes toppling into hopelessness before one of us slams down the phone. At home with my parents, the fights are constant. Kayla’s days are containers of empty hours; her job searches crumple on the spot. There’s no way to cover up the three-year gap in her résumé where jail and prison have carved a gulf in her work life, and background checks ensure that she doesn’t have a decent shot at even the jobs for which she’s qualified.

On Christmas Eve, two and a half months into her parole, Kayla’s hauled off to jail for retail theft. She calls my mom, then me, with the news. Number one: She’s been arrested, and once she’s sentenced, she’ll more than likely end up back in the penitentiary. Number two: Her post-arrest urine sample has revealed some unexpected information—she’s pregnant. Number three: Can one of us please post bail?

I talk to my mom, then my dad, then Ryan. Bailing Kayla out seems like a $500-steep exercise in pointlessness. She may get rearrested, and soon. (Her bond is $5,000, which means $500 must be paid to get her out on bail. Bail keeps you out of county
jail while you’re awaiting sentencing—but, of course, that’s moot if you get picked up again.) Besides, we have reached the end of our collective ropes. We don’t
want
her out. We don’t want to pace our kitchens agonizing over her whereabouts, wondering if she’s dead or dying; anticipating another near-overdose, another offense, another strike on her record, another trip to the joint. We sigh into the phone, reciting the events of the past two and a half months to each other, again and again, as if, this time around, we’ll “solve” them. We don’t post bail.

Chapter 4
“Only Her First Bid”

I’ve got the prison thing down pat. I can get by in here. I’m not ready to die out there.

—
Kayla, spring of 2013

Eventually, some friends of Kayla’s do put up the $500 to get her out, and we return to a stasis of daily unpredictability. I check my phone compulsively, always anticipating word of a new arrest. The winter wears on, and I offer Kayla limp, token gestures of concern. I ask around about jobs at local restaurants, pick up some papers for her at the methadone clinic, say, “You can do it!” As I say this, I’m not exactly sure what “it” means.

We meet for lunch in late March, three months since she was last in jail, five months until the birth of her baby. Kayla moves and speaks—when she speaks—with an undercurrent of hopeless nausea. When I ask how things are going, she says “horrible.” I toss out a feeble comment about how the pizza place down the street has tacked up a “We’re Hiring” sign. Kayla nods and makes a note on her hand. She’s probably indulging me. A couple of weeks ago, she applied for a job at a home supply store, and they loved her and told her she had it, and then they did a background
check. Bam. Of course, the odds were not in her favor. Recent Illinois statistics aren’t available, but in New York, 70 percent of parolees are not employed.
¹

All of a sudden, Kayla looks straight at me. “The day before I got out, when we got our ‘reentry orientation,’ they brought in these old inmates to tell us how they succeeded after prison,” she says. “They were saying things like ‘Now I make $90k a year and have five acres,’ and ‘Now I’ve got three kids and run my own business.’ They should’ve brought people in who said, ‘I got out and couldn’t find any work, ever,’ or ‘I work three jobs but they pay so bad that I can’t support myself let alone my kids.’” She glances down at her lap and says to her chewed-to-blood fingernails, “I miss prison.”

The next day, she calls me, half-crying, half-screaming, so loudly I must hold the phone at arm’s length: “What do I do? What do I do? ANY SUGGESTIONS?” The words scrape jaggedly in my ear, echoing themselves sickly.
Do about what? The baby? The joblessness? The future, as an ex-felon?

“What do I do?” As the days pass, Kayla begins to quietly answer her own question. She disappears for long stretches, fading out through my parents’ door in the early afternoons, resurfacing days later, flopping into bed and slamming the door. “I got things to do,” she mumbles at the floor, when asked. Amid the disappearances and the mysterious “things,” the fights and the midnight phone calls, we find out that her baby is due September 3. Her name, Kayla announces in a brief moment of utter, serene sobriety, will be Angelica.

In late May 2013, when Kayla’s sentenced to a year in the penitentiary—during which time she’ll give birth to her baby—I barely remember which “thing” she is being sentenced for.

“No One Would Buy Those Cars”

Kayla once told me that, during the beginning weeks of her first prison sentence, when she slipped up on an obscure rule in her kitchen job, guards would comment, “She’ll learn—it’s only her first bid!” The assumption that there’d probably be a second bid (prison slang for “sentence”) always hung in the air. Disheartening as their comments may have been, those guards knew the drill: Many of Kayla’s fellow prisoners at the time were in on a second, third, or fourth bid. Each bid, it seemed, had ushered in the next, making prison a little more “normal” each time.

The magnetic pull that reels Kayla back to incarceration, again and again, is hardly unique: More than 4 out of 10 ex-prisoners return to prison within three years.
²
Many more come close: A recent Bureau of Justice Statistics study showed that within that three-year timeframe, 67.8 percent of released prisoners were rearrested.
³
While some recently released prisoners are arrested for new offenses, others are reincarcerated for violating the conditions of parole, which may impose curfews, restrict whom the parolee can associate with, or confine where they can live or work. A failed drug test is a sure-bet violation.

At one point, I ask Kayla whether her parole officer provides any support in her job search or her quest to get sober. She laughs a little and says that, when it comes down to it, there’s one main point to his job: to “violate” her if she messes up. Soon after, my mother, attempting a last-ditch effort to engage the court system in getting Kayla on track, asks Kayla’s parole officer whether the state might be able to help find her a rehab placement. “Nope,” he says. “But what I can do is violate her. Do you want me to do that?”

Decisions about whether to “violate” a parolee are largely up to the discretion of the officer, which leaves a wide, unchecked
field open for racist determinations. A 2009 Colorado study showed that black parolees were eight times more likely to have their parole revoked by the parole board than their white peers.
⁴
The study’s author, Professor Sarah Steen, noted, “We feel confident in saying that race seems to be an important factor in parole revocation decision making.” And so, for a huge number of prisoners, the door out of prison is a revolving one.

Looking at the rate at which released prisoners are sent back to prison isn’t an ideal way to gauge the “success” of the system. It would be better determined by whether those being released are able to build fulfilling, happy, well-fed, healthy, well-housed lives that contribute to the good of humanity, liberated from both official and unofficial forms of oppression—including targeting by police. But recidivism rates are really the only widespread quantitative data we have on the topic, and they do tell us something about whether people released from prison have shifted out of the circumstances that got them locked up. Alex Friedmann, my pal at
Prison Legal News
, points out that looking at recidivism is important because it measures whether the “justice” system is accomplishing its own stated goals. The main stated goal: preventing people from doing the things that led to their incarceration.

Alex’s verdict on how the system is faring at its own game? “If a company produced cars and 43 percent of them were defective, the company would go out of business,” he tells me, alluding to one of the most conservative reincarceration estimates, from the Pew Center on the States.
⁵
“No one would buy those cars. But that’s how we operate our criminal justice system.”

What does that mean for those of us on the outside? Let’s consider another number: Ninety-five percent of prisoners will, at some point, be released. If prison makes us feel more secure because it disappears the “troublemakers” from our midst, what
does it do for us if those of them who’ve committed harmful acts in the first place are likely to continue doing so once they reappear? If my sister’s ex-boyfriend, incarcerated for residential burglary, is breaking through my parents’ window upon his release, what does that say about that feeling of security? Upon checking her ex-boyfriend’s record in June 2013, I discover he’s now in the county jail, awaiting sentencing on a theft charge ... and he’s been incarcerated for robbery, burglary, and battery at various times throughout the past sixteen years. Once he’s sentenced and spends yet another two or three or four years isolated from society, what are the chances this man will emerge “reformed”—less prone to heroin use and more employable?

Mainstream social scientists are now hypothesizing that, at a certain point, incarceration actually promotes crime.
⁶
Large-scale studies from the Justice Department have linked high rates of incarceration with high rates of reoffending, and recent data shows a correlation between reduced crime and reduced prison populations.
⁷

As early as the 1970s, officials were decrying the failures of mass incarceration to improve “public safety.” The US government-sponsored National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals reported that prisons were, essentially, useful only for confining people who were serially prone to extreme physical violence. In fact, just a few years before the war on drugs began to blow the prison population up to five times its size, the commission recommended that no new prisons for adults be built and that juvenile facilities be swiftly shut down. “The prison, the reformatory, and the jail have achieved only a shocking level of failure,” it concluded.
⁸

After one has passed through this rite of failure, what comes next—or what’s supposed to come next? “Reentry” is the most
common term for the process of a prisoner returning to society. I’m not crazy about it. What are prisoners “reentering” into? What were the circumstances they left behind when they went to prison—and when they leave prison, who’s to say those circumstances have changed? For many, the reality becomes a circular rotation through the innards of an omnipresent system, from which an exit—let alone a “reentry”—feels nearly impossible.

“It’s Healthier to Disconnect”

Mauricio Rueben has
“only
two more years!” on his thirty-year marijuana-trafficking sentence in federal prison. In a letter to Eric Holder (a copy of which he sends me), he writes, “I am a black male, born in Cuba, raised in Texas, been in the US my entire life. I paid my taxes, received my voters card, registered with the US military, and was summoned for the occasional jury duty.” After twenty-eight years in prison, he strains to continue to feel a part of the society to which he pledged loyalty, the society he left behind half a lifetime ago.

He tells me: “The truth is that anyone sentenced to over five years will have to undergo some degree of disconnect in order to mentally survive on the inside. Not hearing from friends and loved ones, not being able to do anything about anything that happens to sons, daughters, mothers, brothers etc. is emotionally, mentally, and physically stressful. If one dwells on the outside events, it can wreak havoc on one’s health. Thus, it is healthier to disconnect to some degree.”

This psychological switch is hard to flick off upon release, he says, and he points to it as an important factor that functions alongside more visible oppressions, helping to explain why the same faces keep popping up in prison as the years pass. “I’ve seen many men come, go, and come back again. Most of them on a
violation, but a fair share on a new case with double-digit sentences,” Mauricio writes to me. Lots of them, he says, emerge to find that the mental “disconnect” that served them well in prison deals a blow to their ability to survive outside.

Inside prison, one’s most evident identity becomes “inmate,” as opposed to partner or parent or child or grandchild or friend. By the time of release, that “inmate” identity—the person distanced from family, whose contribution is “unnecessary,” who does things wrong, whose abandonment is preordained—can cling to a person. According to a study headed by Todd Clear and Dina Rose, the researchers who described imprisonment in terms of “social disorganization,” prisoners tend to self-isolate once released: “We saw evidence of isolation when we asked returning offenders about their neighbors; frequently they said they were careful to stay away from people, and claimed not to know the neighbors.”
⁹

After incarceration, many of the mechanisms that help keep people accountable for their actions—ties with family, ties with community—are frazzled and misplaced. Former prisoners often return to homes that are either gone or no longer theirs, families that have either dispersed or grown to tolerate their absence, neighbors who may fear or stigmatize them, and a society that marks them as “offenders” and doesn’t let them forget it. On top of that, they’re usually heading back to hard-hit neighborhoods, mostly poor communities of color, where many, many people’s lives and homes are regularly interrupted by incarceration, making it even more difficult to establish lasting networks that foster accountability.

The “Strong Walls” and the Cagers