Authors: Cleary Wolters
When we landed in Oklahoma, Hester and I looked at each other and laughed nervously. We waited patiently for our turn to exit the plane and once again enter the transfer center’s gauntlet of lines. The long and boring procession from one line to another was the last obstacle to having a cigarette. We had made it back to Oklahoma. We would once again breathe fresh air and be able to smoke.
These were the two things we had missed most the five or six weeks we had been cooped up in the cuckoo’s nest in Chicago.
When the marshals got to our section and were about to unload us, they called out a list of names of who was to remain seated; these were the poor bastards who had arbitrarily been chosen to do their layover in Oklahoma at a county jail. This happened whenever the FTC was overbooked. The marshals paid local jails to handle their overflow.
I was on the list. Hester reluctantly got out of her seat and left me behind. She turned around before exiting the plane in her shackles. She looked like she was about to burst into tears, but she managed to mouth the words “Shackle Shuffle.”
Piper, Hester, and I had choreographed a little dance we would all do when we got to Oklahoma, or as our victory dance one day when we met again in the free world. It would be like our little secret handshake, since no one else would know what the hell we were doing or what we had been through together. My little sister was saying goodbye to me and I knew it would be years before I saw her face again. Rumor had it that getting farmed out from the FTC like this was bad luck, or in my case, a payment on the karmic debt for testifying against Henry.
A handful of women, including myself, were loaded into a white van and driven somewhere about an hour from the Oklahoma City FTC. I knew I was in trouble when one of the escorts, the older of the two guys, gave us all three cigarettes to share among the nine of us. This was payment for a titty show the teenage girl in the front row of the van had negotiated. The girl had apparently done this before. The fact that he knew he would get away with this, in spite of the grumpy and offended nonsmokers on board, did not speak well of what lay ahead.
When we pulled into the gravel parking lot and I saw the sign out front, my hopes died. We had ended up at the Grady County Jail. This place was well known among federal prisoners at the FTC. I had heard of it there. But I had heard Shady Grady had lost its contract with the feds for too many violations.
I spent two weeks in the Grady County Jail annex for women, without a change of underwear, without a shower, and without heat or air-conditioning, both of which would have been nice on different occasions. This place was deplorable. The tap water stank to high heaven and was the color of mud. They barely fed us—a biscuit and some gravy for breakfast, a baloney sandwich with one slice of baloney for lunch, and a rotation of absolutely inedible goulash for dinner. The women who had been there for a while subsisted on food that family members were allowed to drop off once a month.
The women who would have otherwise been on psychiatric medication were regularly denied their meds if they were unfortunate enough to run out of the supply the marshals brought along with them, and the women who should have been on heart and seizure medication didn’t get that either. The place was contracted by the U.S. Marshals Service, and they had just gotten their lucrative, but canceled, contract back. Apparently, the refusal to provide humane conditions or comply with federal policies was considered a breach of said contract. How they had gotten the contract reinstated was beyond my imagination.
I got back to Dublin on March 10th. I wanted to kiss the ground when I arrived. It was absolutely surreal returning to the place I had once thought of as a prison. The flowers were all blooming, the grass was green, and the birds were singing. After my first shower in two weeks, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Home sweet home.
Federal Prison Camp, Dublin, California
August 2005
M
Y TRANSFER OUT OF
the FCI to the FPC came as a huge surprise to me. The FCI is a higher security facility with more officers lording over inmates all the time. It is behind razor wire, with armed perimeter trucks circling it. There are fourteen hundred women there, compared to fewer than three hundred women across the street in the FPC. In the FCI, we were locked down most of the day in either the housing units or facilities buildings and permitted a few minutes to move from one building to another only once an hour. The prison in Dublin also housed a much broader spectrum of criminal than the camp in Dublin.
There were cold-blooded murderers in this prison, famous felons, terrorists, rival gangs from the streets, the insane, and a huge immigrant population from all over the world. We had more Hispanic or Latina women than any other ethnicity, from an array of Latin American countries. I think the disproportionately large immigrant population there were primarily women who had been caught one too many times crossing the U.S. border from Mexico. I
never took a poll to figure out exactly why the Latinas were so overrepresented in Dublin. I had no desire to know exactly how many Griselda Blancos were among us. Griselda Blanco was the Godmother of the Medellín cartel. She had ordered hundreds of executions in her reign over the Miami cocaine industry.
Griselda, the Godmother of Cocaine, was no longer a resident in Dublin when I arrived. I did not want to know how many of her contemporaries were still among us in Dublin, so I never asked any of the Latina ladies why they were there. Surely, you have seen how brutally the drug wars have played out in the countries to our south. It was better to focus on being very careful not to piss off anyone I didn’t know well. The weapon and attack of choice in Dublin was a padlock in the end of a tube sock, swung at your sleepy head on a pillow.
Whatever the cause for so many Latinas, the bright side was the fantastic food the Mexican mommies could create in a microwave, and our Cinco de Mayo celebrations were as big as the Fourth of July, sans the fireworks. I also learned to salsa, assuming you would even categorize my attempt at this as a dance.
The prison was not always as overcrowded as it was during my stay. Some of the old-timers who had been serving life sentences now shared rooms with three other women, rooms that they had, twenty years ago, had to themselves. Overcrowding and familiarity breed contempt, so violence, even among the gentler gender of our species, was common, brutal, and sometimes lethal. I managed to make it out of there without incident. I stayed out of people’s business, for the most part, except for teaching in the computer lab. That was a difficult adjustment. I am naturally curious about everyone, perhaps nosy, but in the prison, if I saw something interesting brewing, I didn’t want to know about it, not even with my close friends.
The guards and staff at the prison had also been harder to deal with than at the camp. I had gotten used to the lack of human decency there, like guards refusing to be bothered to call the nurse for a woman dying from a heart attack and threatening her bunkie
with the SHU—the “special housing unit”—if she didn’t calm down and go back to her room. The SHU is where bad girls are sent for solitary confinement. One officer had given a woman a shot—an incident report—for refusing to work instead of sending her to Medical as she had requested. I guess the officer had thought she was faking her headache and throwing up. She died from an aneurism that night. Ironically, she died before the incident report had been picked up by her counselor.
That was how incident reports worked. If we were given a shot, it was sent to our counselor and to the lieutenant on duty. If it was serious in nature, like a fight or women having sex, the lieutenant would come get us, put handcuffs on us, and take us to the SHU. The irony I mentioned was if the woman had just hauled off and punched the CO who wouldn’t let her see the nurse, she might have lived. That is a big maybe, but who knows? At first, I was aghast by incidents like this when they occurred; they ate at me and quietly filled me with rage.
Most of the lack of human decency was subtler than these horrific examples; it was in the way they always just stood over this one girl, who was severely epileptic, and watched her bang her head on the floor over and over again while they chatted. My brother is epileptic and this drove me out of my mind. I wanted to leap from the balcony and lunge at one of those officers. The first time it happened, it was at count time, and the girl lived in my unit’s wing. So we all got to watch this occur, quietly, or go to the SHU. Interrupting count time is a big no-no, an SHU offense, so is leaping from balconies and lunging at officers, so none of the 150 women watching said a peep, and I stayed in my room.
Then, of course, the daily dose of smaller indecencies add up, things like the male guards who overtly squeezed our breasts on the way out of the kitchen when they pat us down. They were in search of chicken wings. Seriously, on chicken-wing day they would pat us down and molest anyone with boobs. You might be thinking,
Cleary, could chicken bones be used as a weapon?
The plastic sporks we used every day would surely work better if that was what we
were after. No, it was the delicious chicken wings they were worried about. Those could be packed in ice, hidden in the back of a toilet, and sold on non-chicken-wing days. Even certain members of the staff, normally nice people, sometimes failed the test of being a decent human. One teacher wouldn’t let an old lady go to the bathroom ten feet away from his classroom. She peed her pants. Was that necessary?
The one thing it took me a long time to adapt to was my utter invisibility to most of the staff. I was an inmate, that’s all, subhuman, and some staff would literally watch me die in front of them rather than get up off a chair and help me. I am a friendly person. I used to always smile when I passed by people on the street. But if I smiled at a staff member who did not know me, they looked straight through me like I wasn’t even there. If every employee of the BOP were like this, it would be intolerable and our prison system would make China’s record for human rights look like a good report card in comparison. Fortunately, for every one monster there, there were several perfectly wonderful human beings, like my bosses in the computer lab. But it would be the monsters that made a more lasting impression on me.
I very recently saw a YouTube video of a bunch of American fishermen on a fancy yacht using five-week-old kittens as live bait. These men were drinking beer and laughing at the pathetic mews from the precious creatures they tortured. One kitten shook and squirmed, trying to get away from the hook in its back. It was lowered on a fishing line into the ocean, where it desperately swam in circles, crying out. It was gobbled up by something big in the water, then the video showed the guy pulling a huge fish into the boat, falling over on it, and humping it.
These men in the video made me think of some of the correctional officers in the FCI, who used to jokingly kick at the stray cats that lived on the grounds, chase the geese and their goslings, stomping while they ran to scare them, and otherwise harass every smaller and defenseless creature that crossed their paths. These are people completely stripped of any normal impulses and lacking
even the most miniscule ounce of empathy for any creature, let alone a human being. The video triggered me; it upset me in the same way watching the correctional officers in the FCI did once. By the time I was transferred to the camp, though, I was blind to these people in my world. These monsters were invisible to me. I didn’t smile as I passed by them anymore. I just pretended they did not exist. The only people I focused on were the nice ones, and that includes both inmates and staff.
I had to survive though. I didn’t want to go mad, and dwelling on all that was wrong with my little world would have no other result. After dinner, we had open movement on the compound until around nine o’clock at night. On Saturdays and Sundays we had open movement all day except for a couple of hours around the ten
A
.
M
. count, when we all returned to our units and rooms to be counted, then again at four
P
.
M
. I found a niche, a routine, a way to avoid most of what was ugly or unbearable in the FCI and see only what was good: I stayed at work during weekdays, while there was no open movement, and out of the living unit at all other times, when I could be out of the units and roam around the yard freely. I spent this time at the tennis courts; in the rec field, lying out in the sun; at the weight pile, working out; at movie nights in the gymnasium; taking paper-making classes, legal-research classes, pottery classes, and crochet classes; looking for places to hide with my lover to try to steal a kiss without getting caught; having picnics in the rec field with my friends; or with my friends on picture days, when we were allowed to get our pictures taken together.
At night, when we were once again locked in the units and my lover was back in her unit, I had mail call to look forward to: letters from Mom and Dad, aka Catherine and Eugene Wolters. Just like in the free world, there were shows I watched regularly with my friends:
Nip/Tuck
and
Rescue Me
nights, etc. My routine kept me in motion, and being in motion made time fly. Then it all came to an abrupt halt, and there was not a thing I could do about it.
The timing of my transfer to camp sucked. I had been in the FCI for two and a half years, and it felt like my sentence was going
by so quickly. I had earned the right to be pretty much left alone by the staff. Some of them even liked me and spoke freely about their disdain for the same staff that inmates hated, so I knew there were humans among them; just like anyplace else, there were normal people, nice people, and complete assholes. I was in the last days of my second prison love affair and at the beginning of a big computer lab project for the regional director of education for the Bureau of Prisons. Tatiana, my beautiful friend, worked with me in the computer lab. We were both tutors for all the computer classes offered to other inmates and we worked on special assignments not normally entrusted to inmates, like creating a movie incorporating pictures and footage from the prison’s history with cheesy special effects for a thirtieth anniversary party for the BOP staff. It featured personal photos of old wardens and pictures of the staff outside of their roles in the pokey, in street clothes, mixed in with some of the more notorious residents and happenings in Dublin. People like Griselda Blanco, the Godmother; Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madame; Marilyn Buck, the white Black Panther; and Stella, the Tylenol Killer (actually a copycat who used Excedrin, but they still called her the Tylenol lady).
Of all the work assignments I could have gotten, the computer lab was the best. My knowledge of programming and networking should have been cause to ban me from even visiting the computer lab. The Bureau of Prisons (BOP for short) is very nervous about inmate access to technology. But “institutional need,” the trump card invoked to bypass BOP policies, was used because I could provide a needed service. I had been put there to replace an inmate who had just been released after nine years. She had been a systems administrator in the real world and had kept the computer lab hardware and software functioning. The lab’s equipment was about as outdated as her knowledge of information technology.
I was first introduced to Tatiana at a Hacky Sack game in front of my unit. I had seen her floating across the commons on many occasions, but she didn’t land within my social reach prior to a certain Sunday afternoon’s game. Prior to this introduction, I was also still
with Sissy, my first love in prison. Sissy had recently been released and so I had been nursing a broken heart when my friends started dragging me out of the unit to participate in life again as a remedy for my blues.
Watching Tatiana play Hacky Sack was like watching a Cirque du Soleil act. Tatiana is an extraordinarily graceful being; she played Hacky Sack as if it were an elegant dance. I think the sack even slowed itself in midair to keep her from having to jerk awkwardly like we humans do when playing the silly game. Of course, I know that can’t happen, but as someone who plays Hacky Sack like she’s being stung by red ants, I needed to believe in magic in order to keep playing in the presence of such magnificence.
At first glance, Tatiana consisted almost entirely of legs—long, slender, creamy white, athletic legs. She didn’t have a hint of cellulite. She wasn’t bony though, more like a classic Roman statue. Imagine the graceful, winged, and headless statue Victory of Samothrace hopping up and playing a little Hacky. No, scratch that, that’s just plain weird. Tatiana was slightly above average height. She had long straight black hair, green eyes, red lips, and flawless pale white skin. She was exotic and had learned to speak English in London, so she had a scrumptious accent. I was mesmerized and she was straight.
Tatiana enrolled in one of the classes I taught and I discovered she was also intelligent, really intelligent, and that was it for me. For a while, I turned beet red and stammered whenever she simply asked a question in the class. The other students thought it was funny, except one. Sara Jane Moore, the failed assassin of Gerald Ford, didn’t think my distraction was funny at all. She lodged a formal complaint against me for being a lousy tutor and paying too much attention to Tatiana. I had to defend my behavior to the computer lab boss, with Tatiana present. He was only following the required protocol for the complaint. It was his intention to resolve the problem informally, not to embarrass me or sanction me for my crush on Tatiana.
His informal resolution was that I convincingly apologize to Sara
Jane Moore and give her more focused attention for a little while. In my defense, I told my boss how smart Tatiana was and that she would be a great tutor in the lab. That was why I was so invested in her success. When Tatiana and Sara Jane Moore left his office, he sarcastically agreed with my assessment of her potential as a tutor in the computer lab.