A world apart, p.1
A World Apart, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Praise
Prologue
PART ONE - BEGINNINGS
FLOSS
WITCHES
MIRRORS
SEX
ELIZA FARNHAM
STEPS
PART TWO - LOSSES
MANDATORIES
JAIL BABES
ELLEN CHENEY JOHNSON
TRAILER TIME
APPETITES
DESPAIR
PART THREE - ESCAPES
SNOWSTORMS
CIRCUS
MIRIAM VAN WATERS
ESCAPES
CONTACT
Acknowledgments
EPILOGUE
About the Author
Also by Cristina Rathbone
Copyright Page
For Jack and Lucas
(the greatest boys in the world)
(Oh heart, I would not dangle you down into the sorry places, but there are things there as well to see, to imagine.)
—Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud
PRAISE FOR A World Apart
“Beautifully written . . . It took years and a fierce legal battle for Cristina Rathbone to gain access to MCI-Framingham, a Massachusetts women’s prison. But her struggle turned out to be well worth it.”
—O: The Oprah Magazine
“By turns illuminating and enraging, A World Apart is a book of hard-won stories about hard-luck lives. Cristina Rathbone’s dogged insistence on letting some light into Framingham prison, despite stone-walling by fearful officials, filled me with admiration. It also taught me things. Women in prison are different from men, and this unsentimental account shows how.”
—TED CONOVER, author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
“This is an important, hard-won book throughout which the deepest meanings of commitment come to bear: the unjust commitment of women to our nation’s prisons, the women’s commitment to their families and the risks of hope, and, as strikingly, Cristina Rathbone’s commitment to her profession and her craft.”
—ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC, author of Random Family
“A World Apart should be required reading for all Americans and especially those concerned about gender and justice. Through compelling narratives of inmate lives, interspersed with historical background, Rathbone exposes the high personal and social costs of poverty, violence, and sexual coercion.”
—ESTELLE B. FREEDMAN, Stanford University, author of Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 and Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition
Prologue
It’s important that you know this: except for the visiting room, which I still go to occasionally, I have seen little of the prison I write about in this book. Despite nearly five years of research, two successful lawsuits, and countless trips to court, the Massachusetts Department of Correction continues to deny me access.
My long fight for access to MCI-Framingham began in January 2000. I felt hopeful about my chances back then. The department’s book of regulations acknowledged that “conditions in a state correctional institution are a matter of interest to the general public.” It further stated that “the department has a proactive posture when communicating with the news media” and listed only five conditions under which media access to its facilities could be denied—none of which applied to my case.
In the end, however, the DOC came up with a reason entirely unrelated to those published in its book of regulations. After months of consideration, it concluded that my work might upset the victims of the women I write about, and it was on these grounds that they finally denied access. Perhaps because the state had long been under a court order for failing to take care of even the most basic of crime victims’ rights, the sudden concern was hard to take seriously. Nonetheless, its position stood. This project had effectively been killed.
Almost every major periodical in the country has had to shelve prison stories because access was denied. Despite attempts by press organizations to rally against such restrictions, the trend to exclude media from prisons continues to grow apace with the system itself. In 1998, for example, California, which has the nation’s third-largest prison system, banned all face-to-face interviews with, as well as confidential correspondence to, every inmate in its system. Arizona followed suit. Pennsylvania maintains a blanket ban on all news-media contact with inmates, as does South Carolina, whose regulations state that “news media interviews with any inmate . . . will be strictly prohibited.” Alaska insists on officials monitoring interviews. Connecticut instructs journalists to include in their requests “a statement of any perceived benefit to law enforcement agencies,” and Mississippi states that consideration will be given only to media requests to develop stories “portraying rehabilitative efforts.”
Most states are less severe in their restrictions, at least on paper. Alabama, North Carolina, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nevada, and Massachusetts all officially allow media access to their prisons as long as interviews pose no threat to security. But this often means little in practice. Idaho’s written policy, for example, allows interviews in all of its facilities, but the state’s corrections director did not approve a single interview request for five years. As he told a reporter: “We look for compelling reasons why the interview should take place. How will the interview benefit the department?”
The same is true for Massachusetts. Despite an annual budget of close to $860 million, its Department of Correction operates with an almost complete lack of oversight and a level of fiscal opacity that would be unacceptable in any other government agency. On matters of policy, the commissioner of corrections (herself a political appointee) answers only to the governor. There are currently no legislative checks to discourage the abuses of power that such a closed system can so readily promote.
Even the Department of Correction has to operate within the law, however, and when the American Civil Liberties Union concluded that its grounds for denying me access were unconstitutional, another avenue of approach opened up. With their help, and that of an energetic young partner at one of Boston’s leading corporate law firms who did the work pro bono, I brought suit. Ten minutes before the case was due to be heard, and a full nine months after I had first requested access, the Department of Correction finally reversed its decision. On paper at least, it gave me the access I had been asking for: the ability to meet with any woman at MCI-Framingham who agreed to meet with me.
Another month passed, however, before I was actually able to enter the visiting room at MCI-Framingham. To begin with, the DOC insisted I sign a gag order surrendering my rights to write or even speak about the case. When it lost that legal skirmish, it used administrative procedure to delay my entry. For the first couple of months, correctional officers routinely kept me waiting for hours before allowing me into the visiting room. Sometimes they wouldn’t let me in at all, citing failure on my part to provide this or that piece of previously unnecessary paperwork. The first few times I went in, they selected me for a “random” full-body pat-down. And though for the most part they seemed finally to come to terms with my being around, a year later I found myself back in court suing for access to a mother-child program at the prison.
I had understood, by then, that people at the DOC were determined to do all they could to keep me from discovering the worst of their practices. I was surprised, however, by the vehemence with which they tried to keep me from seeing even this most shining example of success. The Girl Scouts Beyond Bars program was small, tiny if you looked at it statistically, but it was uniquely successful at maintaining relationships between incarcerated mothers and their daughters. Such relationships have been proven not only to help the child but to reduce the risk of the mother returning to prison after being released. Yet the DOC seemed determined to keep me away. This time it didn’t back down from the lawsuit. Before the case was finally resolved, it had wound its way through the courtrooms of three consecutive superior court judges.
The book that follows could not have been written without the legal victories that ensued. But the DOC didn’t lose out entirely either. The constraints of the prison system, as well as those placed on a journalist attempting to write about what she herself has never seen, have taken their toll. Even after four and a half years, my view of prison life remains circumscribed. There can be no omniscient view.
Most journalists respond to these restrictions by forcing their way in only when confronted with extreme examples of abuse. Scandalous revelation, however, though necessary and morally just, tends to reduce those involved to their roles in the particular scandal revealed. I have tried here to do the reverse: to render the lives of women in prison as fully and humanly as possible—with all their varied, often maddening complexities intact. There is horror in prison for sure, but there is also humor and vigor and downright bloody-mindedness—just as there is every place human beings gather. Ironically, this life stuff is, in the end, precisely what the DOC’s posture toward the media prevents you from seeing.
PART ONE
BEGINNINGS
FLOSS
FLUFFY WAS A surprise. An aging seventies throwback with piles of teased blond hair and too much makeup, she was older than Denise Russell, past her prime perhaps, and sad, but not frightening, not threatening at all. Denise had never been in prison before. Thirty-two years old, with long dark hair, high cheekbones, and the kind of body that only rigorous exercise can maintain, she d expected to be confronted by the kind of crazed and violent criminals she had always seen portrayed on TV. But Fluffy had been helpful when Denise first moved into her cell. Motherly almost. She had explained, if in a sometimes showy, desperate way, how Denise should store her papers and valuable canteen snacks in the lockable one-foot cubby, and how to climb up onto the top bunk by straddling the pull-out chair and then leaping onto the corner of their shared metal desk. Originally designed for one, the ninety-square-foot cells had long served as doubles. There wasn’t enough room for a ladder.
Every once in a while Fluffy did manage to startle Denise with a sudden burst of frantic exuberance. She sang hippie love tunes off-key and belly-danced around their cell and out onto the unit itself, down the corridor to the officer’s glass-walled office, or “bubble” as it was known, and around the airless dayroom. Most of Fluffy’s time, though, was spent lying around on her bunk, watching soap operas and dreaming of her triumphant return to Han Lan’s, the divey Chinese restaurant where she’d ruled the roost before being sent away on a three-year mandatory for drugs. Her stories about the place were long and often dull, but as long as Denise indulged them the two managed to share their cell with relative ease. Fluffy was kind, that was the thing. Open-hearted. Denise had known women like her all her life.
LIFE IN A women’s prison was full of surprises like this. Not that MCI-Framingham was a pleasant place to be. The housing units were crowded, dark, and noisy, and the aimless vacuum of daily life there often made you want to curl into yourself on your thin little bunk up close to the ceiling and cry. But it was nothing, nothing like Denise thought it would be. There were the locks, of course—including, most impressively, the one to her own cell—to which she would never hold a key. And there were the guards and continually blaring intercoms, which controlled the smallest minutiae of her everyday life. There were full, bend-over-and-cough strip searches both before and after a visit, and random urine checks, and cell searches, called raids, which left her prison-approved personal items (mostly letters and drawings from her son, Patrick) scattered all over the floor. She’d heard there were punishment cells too. Dismal, solitary cages with nothing but a concrete bed and a seatless toilet, to which women sometimes disappeared for months.
Despite all this, Framingham seemed more like a high school than a prison. Some of the guards were rougher than teachers would ever be, of course. Dressed in quasi-military uniforms and calf-length black leather boots, a few also flaunted their power, making irrational demands simply because they could. For the most part, though, Denise found it easy to keep out of their way. No, it was the inmates, not the guards, who reminded her of her days at Wecausset High—as did the unfamiliar experience of being with so many women. Framingham girls were older, and so lacked the freshness that graced even the plainest girls back at Wecausset. They were tougher too. Some had scars stretching across cheeks, jagging up from lips, or curved around their necks. Others, when they smiled, revealed the telltale toothlessness of crack addiction. But the overwhelming majority were mothers, as well, their walls decorated not, as she’d imagined, with images of muscle-bound men but with photos of their kids and sheets of construction paper scrawled over with crayon—valentines and birthday and Christmas cards saved year after year.
There were some unsavory types, and a smattering of women who seemed plausibly threatening. But even the handful in for murder looked more defeated than frightening. Most were long-term victims of domestic abuse who had killed their spouses, and though one or two of them did have an unnerving deadness to their eyes, they pretty much kept to themselves. Lifers, like everyone else at Framingham, were a cliquey lot, by turns supportive and undermining in the manner of, well, high school girls. As a group, they sat firmly at the top of the hierarchy—no matter how meek they appeared, they were, after all, in for murder—while the real social maneuvering took place in an ever-shifting universe of less powerful cliques beneath them.
There were the popular girls, who tended to be prettier than the rest and confidently rule-abiding at Framingham; the repeat offenders; the “intellectual” college crowd; the rabble-rousers; the hard workers; the butches; the femmes; and the group of untouchables—baby beaters mostly—whom nobody wanted anything much to do with. Most of these groups were self-segregated along racial lines, but those in parallel ranks often intermingled. Popular black women like Charlene Williams, a mother serving fifteen years for her first (nonviolent) drug offense, spent a lot of time with Marsha Pigett, a striking redhead and longtime victim of domestic abuse who was also in for drugs and who pretty much ran, for a time, the popular white set. The language barrier often made things more difficult for what everyone called “the Spanish women,” but they too were measured and graded and sorted into type, and a handful of Dominicans, Central Americans, and, separately, Puerto Ricans shared the ability to break free from stereotype and mix it up with the in crowd.
At first, none of this was clear to Denise. For months she could not tell the difference between a potential ally and a troublemaker when they stood next to her in line for meals, or for count, or for what they called “movement,” which were the only times in the day inmates were allowed to walk from one area of the prison to another. Besides, she wasn’t that interested. She didn’t belong there, she still believed. It was just as good to subsist quietly in the small shadow cast by Fluffy and to cradle there as much of her old life as possible.
But roommates are just one of the myriad things over which inmates have no control. While violence is the main concern in a male prison, at Framingham it is the creation of intimacy that most worries the authorities. For this reason, the population is kept fluid. Women are not allowed, officially, to hold the same job for more than six months, and roommates are routinely moved around.
So it was that one day Fluffy was gone, replaced by an elderly, drug-addled woman, the kind who steals extra chicken from the dining hall by hiding it in her bra, and who then pulls it out sometime later in the day to eat in her cell. Her name was Sonia, and like so many women in Framingham, she was a heroin addict serving time for drugs. Sonia’s age made her seem more damaged than most—she was old and worn both inside and out. Denise tried hard to be nice at first, leaping to her feet to help like the obedient grandchild she had, in fact, always been. But after a couple of weeks Sonia’s fragility began to wear her down and the reality of her own powerlessness in prison began, at last, to congeal.
IT HAD TAKEN a surprisingly long time for this to happen. The first few weeks had been terrible, of course, frightening and degrading and completely unnerving. “Just try to imagine it,” she told me. “Everything was gone. My son, my home, my family, my car, my friends, my cigarettes, my alcohol, my drugs, my clothes, my makeup, my dishes, my paintings, my socks, my glasses, my bills, my life—not to mention my dignity and my self-esteem (which wasn’t much anyways) . . . everything.”
She could see, however, that in a way the shock and anxiety of it all had protected her back then too. One minute she’d been at home, packing her son Pat’s brand-new Nintendo and his smart new clothes into the case he’d bring with him to her mother-in-law’s house, the next she was inmate number F24447, being stripped naked, checked for STDs, and asked if she felt depressed by someone in a uniform on the other side of a desk. This last question seemed the cruelest of all because it wasn’t as if she cared, the nurse or whoever she was. She didn’t even look up from the checklist in front of her when she asked. And how was Denise supposed to feel anyway, facing five years and a day in this place?
She cried all night, every night, that first week. She didn’t know, yet, how expensive collect-call rates were from prison, so she spent hours on the phone with her mother and her son, and endlessly marched around the yard, the headphones of her prison-bought Walkman tuned to heavy metal because she knew enough, even then, to stay away from anything in the least bit emotional. It only made her cry.
Then, two weeks after she’d arrived in August, just as her fixed daily routine had begun to numb her, three correctional officers unlocked the door to her room in the middle of the night. “Denise Russell? Denise Russell?” they asked, shining their flashlights in her face, so that even before she was fully awake, she knew something terrible had happened.
