Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better
241
Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better
241eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
An analysis of the U.S. prison system through real-life stories, and a look at the complex work of community-based social justice projects.
Through the stories of prisoners and their families, including her own family’s experiences, Maya Schenwar shows how the institution that locks up 2.3 million Americans and decimates poor communities of color is shredding the ties that, if nurtured, could foster real collective safety. As she vividly depicts here, incarceration takes away the very things that might enable people to build better lives. But looking toward a future beyond imprisonment, Schenwar profiles community-based initiatives that successfully deal with problems—both individual harm and larger social wrongs—through connection rather than isolation, moving toward a safer, freer future for all of us.
“Maya Schenwar’s stories about prisoners, their families (including her own), and the thoroughly broken punishment system are rescued from any pessimism such narratives might inspire by the author’s brilliant juxtaposition of abolitionist imaginaries and radical political practices.” —Angela Y. Davis, author of Are Prisons Obsolete?
“Locked Down, Locked Out paints a searing portrait of the real-life human toll of mass incarceration, both on prisoners and on their families, and—equally compellingly—provides hope that collectively we can create a more humane world freed of prisons. Read this deeply personal and political call to end the shameful inhumanity of our prison nation.” —Dorothy Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds and Killing the Black Body
“This book has the power to transform hearts and minds, opening us to new ways of imagining what justice can mean for individuals, families, communities, and our nation as a whole. Maya Schenwar’s personal, openhearted sharing of her own family’s story, together with many other stories and real-world experiments with transformative justice, makes this book compelling, highly persuasive, and difficult to put down. I turned the last page feeling nothing less than inspired.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626562714 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 241 |
| Sales rank: | 995,769 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Locked Down, Locked Out
Why Prison Doesn't Workâ?"and How We Can Do Better
By Maya Schenwar
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Maya SchenwarAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62656-271-4
CHAPTER 1
The Visiting Room
Loneliness gnaws at the essence of who we were. The hunger for connection with the outside world is what, in the end, turns us callous, creating delusions that we are better off lonely. —Abraham Macias, Pelican Bay Prison
When my parents and I visit Cook County Jail for the first time in February 2009, it is a Saturday and the place is jam-packed. We squeeze into the slow-snaking security line, which curves around several ropes and bumps up against the doorway. Some visitors stare at their feet, hands stuffed in their pockets, trudging forward every few minutes when the line loosens. Others shout to their children to stay within the roped boundaries, fearing that they'll be booted out for causing a disturbance. A thin, shivering woman standing in front of us is shaking her head over and over, rocking a blanket-covered baby in her arms.
As we inch closer to the metal detector, a guard pulls a tall young woman off to the side, gesturing to her short skirt and scoffing, "You think you can come in here like that? Huh?" After a few hesitant protests—"Sorry, sorry, I didn't know"—she walks away slowly, toward the exit, face in her hands. We follow commands, removing our shoes and socks, stepping through the metal detector, raising our arms for the pat-down, following the officer who escorts us across the yard.
After a three-hour wait, we're called into the visiting room, and we file through the narrow door. It's a short, dim corridor lined with wobbly stools facing a thick wall of plexiglass with several barred holes. On the other side of the plexiglass, Kayla shuffles in with a few other women. They scrunch down in a row, each opposite their visitors, and lean toward the holes. We start talking—well, screaming—back and forth. We don't scream because we're fraught with emotion, though we are. We scream because we can't be heard otherwise, due to the thickness of the plexiglass divide and the compressed cacophony of the fellow visitor-screamers competing with us on either side.
Eventually, I just go for it and press my mouth up against the bars of the hole so Kayla can hear me. I taste sweat and sour steel.
"How's it going?" I scream.
"It sucks, what do you think?" Kayla shouts back. "I feel like my life is over. But, at least, I'm working out." She twirls, her dismal blue smock flaring wearily.
Kayla's arms have grown quite muscley (push-ups are a favorite pastime in jail), and her eyebrows are meticulously groomed, if a little greasy.
"Your eyebrows look awesome!" I yell.
"Thanks—we did them with thread that we pulled out of our jumpsuits!" she yells. "They don't let us have tweezers! I learned it in Audy Home." The "Audy Home" is the old name of Chicago's juvenile detention center, where Kayla spent some time in 2005 and 2006. Now she pauses, then knocks her head lightly against the plexiglass, her eyes closed. "But no one gives a shit about my eyebrows, if you think about it. I just don't know what else to do."
Mom and Dad take turns. Then I'm back on the stool. We quickly run out of things to talk about: Kayla doesn't want to belabor how hopeless and miserable she's feeling, and I don't want to carry on about the happy things in my life—or the frustrating things in my life, most of which seem ridiculously trivial given the circumstances. Later, my dad observes, "What's left to scream?"
Soon, a jarringly loud buzzer sounds, silencing all conversation. A guard calls time: Our thirty minutes are up. Kayla and her companions rise to march out. "I miss you I miss you I miss you I love you ..." Kayla calls, the ends of her words quivering. She touches her fingertips to the plexiglass before she's led away. Then, "TIME!" a guard barks on our side of the glass, and we fall in line, too.
They Make Life Matter
The visits my parents and I pay to Kayla in jail are accompanied by a constant mantra that pulses through all of our minds: This is temporary. We're white, we're middle class; my sister and I grew up in a neighborhood where few people had ever been in prison. Kayla's sentence is not long. Our privilege affords us the opportunity to frame imprisonment—the first time around—as a bad dream. Regardless of how relieved we are that Kayla has been incarcerated, that she's off the street and probably sober, implicit in the relief is always the notion that this saga will come to a close, that "real life" will return, even if it doesn't last.
For a whole lot of other visitors, trips to prison are infused with a more painful pulse. This act of visiting is the real life of their relationship. It lives this way over the course of many years and, sometimes, forever. And so my visits to Kayla are laced with thoughts of the families I've come to know through my interviews, families whose bonds are maintained—and often lost—through bars.
One prisoner's familial situation has permanently set up residence in my mind by the time Kayla is incarcerated. She is Danielle Metz, a California prisoner and mother of two who's been separated from her children for most of their lives. I first wrote to Danielle in 2007. I was plugging away on a couple of long feature articles about federal prisoners serving life sentences, and was knee-deep in bland, evasive statements from members of Congress, most of whom didn't intend to lift a pinky to contest the harsh policies in place. Danielle's lucid honesty shone through the murk. She was serving three life sentences plus twenty years for a cocaine "conspiracy" conviction. (Her husband was a high-trafficking dealer.) Danielle was locked up in Dublin, California, more than two thousand miles from New Orleans—her home, and the home of her parents and two kids. Citing racism (she's black), poverty, negligent public defenders, and unjust sentencing practices, Danielle expressed little hope for a commutation of her sentence, barring a pardon from the president.
"My story is like a lot of stories you see, but can't really put a face on," she wrote me. "In communities where I'm from, this type of thing happens all the time." It's true: One in 40 American kids has a parent in prison, and for black kids, it's 1 in 15. Increasingly, those parents are mothers; women are the fastest-growing group in prison.
No matter what problem we were discussing—federal parole, the pardon system, prison conditions, useless lawyers, useless laws—Danielle's letters wandered back to the topic of her children. She was grappling with a stark, practically unanswerable question: How do you parent from prison? It's a question most prisoners are asking themselves, since a considerable majority of them have kids who are minors. Danielle responded to it with a quiet verb: "watching."
"It hurts to watch your children grow up from 3 years old and 7 years old to 22 and 19," she wrote. "Years ago my children used to be so hopeful that things would change. Then [I was] seeing them evolve into adults right before my eyes. Seeing them eager to come visit, then not wanting to see me because they say it hurts too much for them to come year after year and see me in prison."
After reading her letter, I sent myself a short, scrambled email:
The Point:
Family, loved ones, community!
—love, support (hopefully)
—They make life matter
"They make life matter" has stuck with me. Prisoners frequently tell me there's "no point anymore," that incarceration has extinguished much of their will to live. Most say that—more than the cramped and dirty quarters, the harsh treatment, the lack of sunlight, the baloney sandwiches—this sense of pointlessness stems from their frustration and sadness about the people they've lost, the ties that have dissolved over time and distance. Many prisoners also mourn ties that were broken already, and they now see an even slimmer chance of healing. Others mourn the bonds that never existed in the first place; prison has laminated and preserved their isolation. Where is life in its "mattering," for prisoners watching their outside relationships erode and their possibilities for new bonds wane, watching the months drift forward and the chasms grow wider?
The Modern Slave Auction Block
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." 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.
Abraham A. Macias 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.
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. 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). 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—and some prisons are actually cutting out contact visits in favor of video chats.
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.
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. 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. 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." 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?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Locked Down, Locked Out by Maya Schenwar. Copyright © 2014 Maya Schenwar. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Into the HolePart I: Coming Apart
Chapter 1: The Visiting Room
Chapter 2: The 100-Year Communication Rewind
Chapter 3: On the Homefront
Chapter 4: "Only Her First Bid"
Chapter 5: Disposable Babies
Part II: Coming Together
Chapter 6: The Case for a Pen Pal
Chapter 7: Working From the Inside Out: Decarcerate!
Chapter 8: Telling Stories
Chapter 9: The Peace Room
Chapter 10: A Wake-Up
Epilogue: Not an Ending
Resources
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author