Lockdown on Rikers (8 page)

During my weekly hour of formal supervision with Janet, my “Millie struggle” dominated every conversation. Janet suggested various strategies for engaging her, and though I tried them all, nothing worked. Millie's disinterest in therapy flew in the face of my belief that with a little patience, everyone would come around. Yet no matter how hard I tried to forge some kind of therapeutic alliance with her, I was unable to do so. Even worse, I often wound up as her adversary. In one of our infrequent sessions, she revealed how she'd lost her two youngest children to the Bureau of Child Welfare. She told me she'd been living in a hotel in downtown Manhattan. “I did a lot partying down there,” she giggled. “Anyway, middle of the night, my three-year-old gets up, leaves the room, and gets down to the street. The police found him on the sidewalk, so they called BCW and they just took both of them away from me. You believe that?”

“It must have been hard for you to lose your children like that,” I said, trying to meet her “where she was.”

“It was! It really was. And it was all BCW's fault!”

“Well . . . now . . . do you see a problem with a toddler being alone on the streets at two in the morning?”

“'Course I do! But what are they blaming me for? Huh?”

“You're the baby's mother, Millie. You're responsible for him.”

“Now
you
sound just like BCW, and like I told them, don't you think I would have done something—
if I was awake?
Ah, duh!”

“Do you think that maybe the partying might have something to—?”

“No, no, no! I was just asleep—that's all. How'm I supposed to know the baby's goin' out the door if I'm asleep? Duh!”

“But, Millie—”

“Ah,
DUH
! Ah,
DUH
!”

With that session, I saw the light. My belief that everyone could be helped was naive. Even the ever-optimistic Janet agreed. “It looks like Millie's just not receptive to help, at least not at this point in her life. The simple truth is that you can't help someone without their participation—no one can.”

As soon as Janet deemed the situation hopeless, the floodgates of relief opened up. No more maddening trips to the nursery, no more struggling for magical words that would turn this disinterested person around. Best of all, Janet didn't view it as my fault—something I'd worried about. “You can't help someone without their participation—
no one can.
” A great burden was lifted. The Millie struggle was over.

But not quite. Janet also noted that Millie hadn't been in any trouble since I'd been meeting with her and wanted me to continue doing so. “At the very least, she knows she's being watched—and let's not forget she's going to a program soon. Let's just give her the added support till she leaves.”

It was with mixed feelings that I kept Millie on my caseload, still finding it hard to accept that we can't help someone who just doesn't want help.

* * *

But this defeat was offset by a growing sense of competence. As I handled the daily referrals, Janet was looking over my shoulder less as I was making accurate assessments, transferring only those in true need to the more protected Mental Observation Unit.

My mornings were spent with referrals, with afternoons devoted to follow-up sessions. The faces on my caseload came and went—usually to Bedford Hills Prison. But Lucy Lopez, Tiffany Glover, and Annie Tilden had developed into my long-term cases, and as they took wobbly steps forward, I delighted in their progress.

Once Lucy Lopez asked for help, she never looked back. Once a week, she could be heard running down the hall for her session, her jail-issued red plastic slippers slapping hard on the linoleum
floor. Lucy always managed to find another mother to babysit her son, underscoring her level of motivation. The challenges she faced were formidable: Lucy's father had been shot and killed when she was two, and her mother had been in and out of jail while she was growing up. She was raised by her grandmother, a solid caregiver. Tragically, her loving grandmother passed away when Lucy was nine, and then it was on to foster care. But the memory of her grandmother's love was Lucy's life preserver, pulling her back from the brink of destruction. “Sometimes,” said Lucy, “I feel like I can hear my grandma talking to me—
You can do better than this, Lucy—you can do better!
”

And Lucy was doing better. She pushed herself. Therapy was just the beginning of her personal improvement campaign. She was the first to show up for jailhouse Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and she took full advantage of the Mental Health Department's weekly meditation group. “It really helps! When I get out of jail, and find myself getting uptight and wanting to get high, I'm going to meditate instead. It's just another tool I'm learning,” she smiled. When Lucy wasn't immersed in various therapies, she was busy with the Social Services Department regarding another child, her four-year-old son, Junior, who'd been in foster care during Lucy's years of drug use. Despite Lucy's valiant efforts behind bars, her older child was being readied for adoption. The prospect of permanently losing Junior terrified Lucy, and she was making every effort to prove herself a responsible mother. Social Services was assisting her in negotiating the vast Bureau of Child Welfare, helping her to file petitions and gather letters of recommendation. She was also trying to arrange for a visit with Junior in the Rose Singer visiting room. It was an uphill battle, and with fingernails bitten to the quick, she told me how she lay awake at night, agonizing about how all of this would play out. “I worry about how long I'll be sentenced, whether or not I'll get my children back after I'm released, and if I do—hope of hope—then I worry about where we'll live, what I'll do for money. I dropped out of high school and don't have any skills. It's all so scary. But what scares
me most is that it's all too late, and that in the end I'll lose my children anyway. And then I get so depressed I don't even want to get out of bed. So I try not to go there. I can't look too far ahead—it's too scary. So what I do is, I just do the best I can every single day, and leave everything else in God's hands. That's all I can do, Miss B, that's all I can do.”

Lucy's steely determination was admirable, and I just hoped something good would come her way. Though I kept my thoughts to myself, I had to agree that her future was daunting. Despite Lucy's progress, it was not with open arms that the world would greet an ex-con and recovering crack addict. Still, some things have to be taken on faith, and sometimes the only thing to be done, as Lucy said, was to leave it in God's hands.

Tiffany Glover was more fortunate in that she didn't have to worry about losing her son, who lived with her mother, a woman who prayed for her daughter's recovery. After the drug program fiasco, it was as though a dam broke, and everything bottled up inside Tiffany began to flow. “I cannot believe I was a down-and-out addict—
me!
You just don't realize what's happening to you when you're in the middle of it,” she said, shaking her head. With Tiffany's acknowledgment of her addiction, her mood lightened, so much so that being on the Mental Observation Unit was no longer warranted. Janet noted Tiffany's improvement. “She's doing a lot better, Mary—time for her to go to GP.”

Except for severe psychiatric impairment, the MO is temporary, just long enough for sustained emotional stability, followed by a discharge to general population. “It's healthier for them to function in GP,” Janet explained. “Not to mention the need to free up beds for the newcomers.”

While this policy only made sense, the MO was viewed as a safer, softer haven in jail, and transfers from the protective unit to general population were met with fierce resistance, and in this regard Tiffany Glover was no exception. Although I tried to frame the move as a milestone in her improvement, she didn't buy it. “But I'm afraid of GP!”

“I think you'll do fine,” I said. “You and I will continue to meet, but it will just be in the clinic, that's all. You can do it!”

Her eyes welled up with tears and she stared at the floor, her demeanor reverting to that first day in the receiving room. For a moment, I wondered if this really was the right move. But then she bit her lip and nodded.

A day later, her meager belongings packed up in a clear plastic Hefty bag, Tiffany Glover dragged the bag through the corridors as she was led to a GP dorm.

Although the transition to GP was initially difficult, Tiffany began to thrive in her new environment, another plus for her. She made friends with the girl in the next cot, a girl nicknamed Lanky who'd given birth just prior to her arrest. Tiffany told me that Lanky had been so desperate to get high that as soon as her baby was born, she'd jumped out of the hospital bed and run down a side stairwell. Tiffany said Lanky was just now wondering what had happened to her daughter. “At least I never did that!” Tiffany declared.

With wide brown eyes and a full pretty smile, Tiffany Glover stood out as a beauty in the Rose Singer halls. She'd had numerous boyfriends on the outside, many of whom were drug dealers. “That's how I got my fix,” she explained.

Reading between the lines, I surmised the arrangement with these men was sex for drugs, an all too common bartering arrangement among the female inmates.

One afternoon, Tiffany arrived for our session with a big announcement: “I want to join STEP.”

STEP, an acronym for “Self-Taught-Empowerment-Pride,” was a jailhouse drug rehab program. The STEP participants lived in the same dorm and were often seen marching through the halls in military style. Upon completion of the program, certificates were awarded. “Some of the girls told me they have a graduation where your family comes,” said Tiffany, “and I was thinking that could be really nice. If I can get through this program, I think it will help me when I go upstate, and I know my mother would be proud of
me. They have a new class starting and I'm going to check it out. What do you think?”

I told her it was a wonderful idea, that it was a big step in her recovery. I also told her it was smart to take advantage of any programs jail had to offer. “Time is going to fly by, and when you're released, you want to be ready.”

Shortly afterward, Tiffany Glover was transferred to the STEP dorm. She immediately shared the news with her mother, who was thrilled.

Annie Tilden differed from Tiffany and Lucy because of her schizophrenia, but within the constraints of her mental illness, she, too, was progressing. By now, she was fully compliant with her meds and feeling quite proud of herself. The next challenge I gave her was to come out of her cell and socialize a little. She rolled her eyes at the suggestion. “There's too many troublemakers around the TV,” she said. Still, I prodded, and I noticed that she began coming out, chatting with a good-natured CO whose brother just happened to be a mailman. With a realistic grasp on both her illness and addiction, Annie was on track for her December release, and for sustained recovery.

For Tiffany, Lucy, and Annie, it seemed to me that arrest had been their salvation, a forced time-out from self-destructive paths. Without the radical intervention of arrest and incarceration, they would never have made such progress. In this regard, I viewed jail as having a valuable purpose, as a window of opportunity for lives that were dangerously out of control.

But not every jailhouse situation was positive. Next door to the clinic was the office of the jail chaplain, Sister Marion Defeis. She was a Josephite, an order of Catholic nuns committed to social justice. Sister Marion had converted her small office into a chapel of sorts. With a cloth-covered table and a simple homespun rug that hung on the cinder-block wall, the room served as a refuge for inmates seeking spiritual solace. A tall woman in her fifties—reserved, refined, and with a deep sense of commitment—Sister Marion worked closely with “mules,” women charged with the
serious crime of trafficking drugs through city airports. Most who sought out Sister Marion were Spanish-speaking women from South America. Although mules transport drugs—sometimes packed inside condom-like containers and then swallowed—they're not drug dealers per se, but rather tools of the violent drug trade. Living in impoverished third world countries without any type of public assistance made available to them, most were simply trying to survive. Recognizing their desperation, the powerful cartels offered them big money for performing a “small job.” In many cases, Sister Marion told me, they weren't “offered” the job but were tricked or forced by calculating husbands and boyfriends.

Although the rewards are high, the stakes are higher—if caught, they would bump up against the harsh Rockefeller laws. In 1973, New York's governor, Nelson Rockefeller, took the nation's newly declared War on Drugs to a new level, signing tough legislation aimed at stamping out the illicit drug trade. The penalty for drug trafficking was a minimum prison term of fifteen years to life, and a maximum of twenty-five years to life. At the time, these laws were hailed as progressive. However, in the ensuing decades, it has become clear that they've failed to stem the flow of drugs, and what was once viewed as progressive was now considered by many as draconian. With her personal relationships with these women, Sister Marion was at the forefront of a growing movement to repeal the laws, traveling to the state capital in Albany to argue that they weren't only cruel, but ineffective.

Although reform would come, it would not be in time for the women who gathered in Sister Marion's chapel in utter despair. Sister Marion's first priority was to help them with basic needs: a pair of socks, new underwear, a long-distance phone call. After their practical needs were met, she would ask them if they wished to pray. When an inner door was propped open, the prayers could be heard, followed by tears and cries for their children:
“Ay dios mio! Mis niños! Mis niños!”
The cries of the women were heartbreaking, and someone usually got up and shut the door.