Here I Stand

by Amnesty International UK

  I sat there for a long while, unable to even think about what I should do next. Eventually a car pulled up beside me. I leapt to my feet, ready to run. Then I saw the blue light on top of it. A woman was getting out. She was wearing a blue uniform.

  “You all right, love?” she said. I’d only learned a few words of English by then and did not understand her.

  “Please,” was all I could say. “Please.”

  She came closer. I backed away from her, pressing myself against the glass wall of the bus shelter.

  “How old are you?”

  I knew what those words meant. I’d been taught the question, and that I was always supposed to answer: Eighteen.

  “Fourteen,” I said.

  She had a radio clipped to her shoulder. She bent her head and spoke into it. Then she opened the back door of the police car. I stared at her. I’d trusted Maria. I’d trusted Andrei. I’d thought I’d never trust anyone again. But what choice did I have?

  “Come on, love,” she said. “Get into the car.”

  So I did.

  “Some years ago, in Pakistan, I met a group of young boys, some as young as five, who had been trafficked to the Gulf States to be camel jockeys in the rich camel racing industry. I was deeply shocked and moved by their experiences, and wrote a novel about them, called Lost Riders. Slowly, over the years, I have come to realize that there is a widespread and vicious trade in trafficked girls, some very young, into our own country. It’s time we stood up and shouted about it.” Elizabeth Laird

  CONSTANT

  Jackie Kay

  It is following you and you can’t escape.

  You cannot hold your head up or be happy.

  You lose your confidence. You turn a corner: it is there.

  You cannot step on it; make it disappear.

  You are feeling many complicated things.

  Dawn raids strike and you are terrified.

  You are imprisoned in your own life.

  Every time you go to the Home Office, there it is.

  They make you feel inhuman. Every word you speak

  A complete lie. An untruth. You cannot begin

  To imagine. It is always there. Constant.

  It is your only companion. There is no freedom.

  There is just this fear. You can’t really describe it.

  It gets everywhere. It gets in your hair.

  Under your arms; between your legs.

  It gives you a bad taste in your mouth.

  You can see it in your eyes; hear it in your voice.

  It is hard to describe. It never takes a break.

  When you walk away, it follows you. When you

  Stay inside, it stays by your side, so quiet.

  It is under your skin. It is your heartbeat.

  Never leaves you be. It is you. It is me.

  It will stroke your hand when you die.

  “This poem, together with ‘Glasgow Snow’ and ‘Push the Week’, was written in response to stories told to me by three different women, who I was put in touch with by the Scottish Refugee Council. Their stories were so very different that I wrote three separate poems, which were read out at an event in the Scottish parliament with many of the refugees present.” Jackie Kay

  REDEMPTION

  Ryan Gattis

  On the drive into San Quentin State Prison, the contrast stays strong and strange no matter how many times I see it. I always feel like I’m entering a dystopian novel: on the peninsular tip of Marin County – one of the richest areas on the entire planet, dotted with multimillion-dollar, San Francisco Bay-view homes stacked on hills – stands one of the worst prisons there ever was, chock-full of poor people of every stripe, those who had the worst possible legal representation the first time around, all of them housed inside the thickest of walls, walls that stand between them and a gorgeous view that most will never actually see.

  The irony of it all is a rock in my stomach. It’s something I didn’t want to swallow but it’s there, and I can’t digest it. A first-rate science-fiction writer could probably come up with plenty of metaphors and allegories for this, but I get stuck in emotion. To me, it just feels wrong, unfair on so many levels, and – more than anything – sad. Stomach-ache sad. “Don’t think about it too much or you’ll go crazy” sad.

  So I don’t.

  I focus on pulling up, turning left into the visiting lot – except I can’t. The guard at the gate puts his hand up at me because some first-time visitor didn’t know any better and missed the turn, so I have to sit and wait while he turns his car around and cuts into the lot ahead of me.

  This is a courtesy visit, an “I’m your lawyer and I need to check up on you and see how you’re being treated” visit. The paperwork’s already filed. The federal courts found difficulties with my client’s appeal that they had to kick back to the state level for resolution.

  Dawn’s done, but it’s still early: 7.20 a.m. for an 8 a.m. appointment. There are spaces closer to visitor processing, but I park facing the water because I always park facing the water. Even this early, the parking lot is already half full. I can’t see the Golden Gate Bridge, but it’s out there on my right, south of Belvedere. The bridge to Richmond is on my left. Gulls on the rocky beach fight over something that looks like a dried banana skin but probably isn’t. Seabirds cut loops in the sky in front of me as I check emails on my phone. I leave a message for Janine at the office, reminding her to file the motions we finished last night, and then I get out of the car, empty my pockets, take extra keys off my ring so I only have the car key left and lock the rest in the trunk with my phone.

  Inside the processing building that looms over the parking lot is what Janine calls the Sad Corridor. She’s not wrong, but it doesn’t feel that way to me when I walk in today. Sure, the near side is heavy with quiet gloom. These are the walk-ups: mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers and kids sit pressed together on a long bench, but the far side – the appointments, the jail wives and kids – is alive with chatter, with hugs and hellos, and questions. None of them fake. Nobody talking for talking’s sake. All as real as church, because every single person here knows the deepest consequences of the law as the lived experience of ripple effect, as a life changer. The only other people who fully understand it are the families of their husbands’ and daddies’ victims. Once that web gets you, it never lets you go, no matter which side of the crime you’re on.

  This is the domain of women, and they know it. Sure, there might be a brother in there on any given visiting day, but this side of the corridor is all the high voices and appraisals of women obeying the dress code. Nothing too tight. Nothing too short. Nothing too sexual. Nothing that matches what inmates or guards wear at this California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation institution: no jeans, no chambray shirts, no dark green, no khaki, no brown – which basically means there’s a lot of black and white here. It being December, a coat is allowed. Beyond that, they’ve all got plastic baggies or clear little purses holding dollar bills and quarter rolls for the food machines, and their government ID. Nothing else.

  I’m standing in the middle of the corridor, waiting to be buzzed through, watching. You can learn more about the human race from ten minutes in this hallway than a whole lifetime anywhere else if you know how and where to look. For me, it’s at the little boy sitting up as straight as he can, fiddling the top collar button of his shirt open with one hand, and then back closed, and then open again. It’s a button with stakes. Done up is to be formal, strait-laced, armoured. Undone is to be loose enough to let the world in, to be open to undue influence.

  His mother sits beside him, holding his other hand in a grip so firm that even from here I can see it’s part help and part hurt; I know this because it’s how my momma used to hold mine in a hallway just like this, before I knew what it meant. It’s a complicated grip. It says: I will not keep you from your father; you will learn from his mistakes and absolutely not make the same ones; you must understand this shadowed corner
of the world most people never see so you can be damn sure you don’t end up on the wrong side here. I show you the dark, it says, even though we’re both afraid, because the stakes are high and this is the most important lesson you’ll learn in your life: be good, don’t stray, don’t ever fuck up like your father fucked up. It’s a Shakespearean moment about fathers and sons, about burdens, and paths, and costs, crammed into two seconds. All of that in a fussed-with button and a hand squeeze that doesn’t let up, even as I get buzzed through to visiting and can’t see it any more.

  My ID is scrutinized, and they bring my visiting file up, then the list gets checked. My name is on it. I have to open my briefcase, but only so they can see it just has papers, pens and file folders, then I close it. They print out my visiting form. It still has my client’s mugshot on it from eighteen years ago: smiling crazily.

  Every time I see it, I think, That’s not him any more.

  I have to duck under a string of tinsel to get into the screening room, where I remove my blazer and put it in the tray to go through the X-ray machine. I’m cursing myself for wearing new shoes I haven’t broken in yet as I lean down to untie them. It’s like I’m at the airport, going on vacation, except on the other side of that exit – after a long walk in the wind – it’s pretty much the opposite of that.

  “Designer,” the guard working the X-ray says as she taps the toecaps of my shoes with her fingernails before resettling them in the tray. “These are real nice.”

  “Thanks,” I say as I shrug my blazer back on.

  She watches the monitor as my shoes go through, then slides them out the other side and says, “You’re good.”

  I thank her again when my shoes are back on, and I’m through the door.

  Back out on the bay, walking the yellow line and feeling my heels rub with every step, I pass an older couple helping each other. On the water, far off to my left, a crew boat glides by with a coxswain shouting orders to rowers by bullhorn: “Get your butts up!” and “Watch your balance!”

  I wonder what these athletes think about the prison, or if they’ve ever visited, as I cross another parking lot and turn left at the central building that looks like a castle. I hug the red brick wall next to it, my footsteps bouncing off concrete as two men unload a snack food pallet from a nearby truck. There’s a big door just past a metal staircase, and next to it a tiny sign: Visitors Entrance. No punctuation mark.

  I wait to be buzzed in, and then leave my driver’s licence with the guard behind the double-plexied window. When a gate behind me shuts, one opens in front of me. Also black. Also heavy. There are two correction officers joking together on the other side.

  I’m about to brush past them and turn left to the room used for legal visits, beyond the partitioned visiting area, when the taller one stops me.

  “Mr Hill?”

  My heart drops in my chest. Bad news is on its way, I know it. I’ve come all the way out here only for them to deny me, to tell me he’s lost privileges, or he’s in the infirmary. I’m making my face a mask and getting ready to hear a sorry explanation when the shorter, fatter CO points behind me.

  I follow his finger to the cages for contact visits on my right, the ones that have white bars stretching from floor to ceiling and plexiglass behind them, and there he is – sitting the closest to freedom he’s been in eighteen years.

  My jaw actually drops.

  My eyes hit his and we have a fast, wordless conversation. My high eyebrows ask, When the hell did this happen? He shrugs and his hands come up, telling me that it’s so new he’s still trying to figure it out himself.

  “Your inmate’s up,” the CO says behind me, like it isn’t obvious.

  I’m already walking towards the cell, speaking to him through the vertical crack between panels of plexiglass.

  I say, “How long?”

  Meaning: How long have you been out of the hole?

  For eighteen years he was in the solitary housing unit – or SHU – two doors between him and anybody else, even guards. Torture is what it was.

  “Last Tuesday,” he says. His head is bowed as if his words are heavy, and they are. You can hear it in his voice.

  I do the math: a little over a week and a half. Eleven days.

  I’m smiling a smile I can’t control. I say, “You hungry?”

  He nods.

  At the humming machines, I get us two burritos and heat them up while I press the buttons for two orange juices, the full cans thumping to the chute bottom. California must make a fortune on these things.

  When I’m back and locked in with him, he knows his boundaries. He shakes my hand and lets go first, but I’m aware that this respectful, positive touch is no small thing.

  I study his wrists, the hard red lines on them: double parallel lines, one for each side of the shackle. I know how they work. I’ll be here two hours. In that time, they won’t fade.

  Around bites of burrito, he tells me his mother has already visited, that he got to hug her for the first time in way too long.

  I’m caught by the thought of that. My mom’s been dead three years herself – three years and two months, actually – and the idea of being able to hug her again overwhelms me, so I just nod and say, “How did it feel?”

  He’s right there with me, half frowning. His nostrils flare a little. He’s riding a wave inside, but hiding how complicated it is.

  “Pretty good,” he finally says, and it’s the kind of understatement you hear a lot here. Of course it was better than pretty good, but it’s tempered because it happened while locked in a box like this one, and it was only for a few hours, that connection, and then it was gone; she left, and he had to be led away, and he couldn’t watch her go. He would’ve had to leave first, to be strip-searched behind the main door before they even let her out, but having that warmth, even for a moment, and losing it again, would’ve been about the worst feeling he’d felt in years.

  He was a teenager when he did what he did, undeveloped brain and all. Making bad choices. Doing “gang shit” as it’s known around my office. Got sentenced as an adult. Grew up behind bars. His story is the same as a few thousand others. Poor kids. Doesn’t matter if they’re black, brown or white. They have an overworked public defender, and in shocking numbers, they don’t pass go, they go directly to jail.

  Still, he’s alive in here. Still human. Against all odds, really.

  Eighteen years in the hole.

  No contact twenty-three hours a day until eleven days ago.

  Still waiting to die.

  Here’s the thing, though: the state of California hasn’t executed anyone since 2006. It’s got hundreds of condemned prisoners, and more than a few with exhausted appeals, real no-hopers forming an awful long line. The state knows it needs to resume executions. New proposed regulations for doing just that have been released. The public hearing date is already set. We talk about the proposal: the absurdity of it, the insane bureaucracy of how to kill “humanely” and how many people get paid to actually do it.

  “What hit me,” he says, “is that it’s going to cost taxpayers one hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars to kill me.”

  I give a slow, sad nod. I highlighted that number in my copy too: $186,886.

  I also highlighted its breakdown – CDCR Training Staff and Ancillary Costs: $85,200; Cost of Lethal Injection Chemical (based on previous purchase of thiopental – the drug the state of Arizona has been buying, against federal law): $4,193; Contracts with other law enforcement agencies to provide crowd control outside the prison: $97,492. I added it up and was off by a dollar. They rounded somewhere.

  He says, “All that for a couple hours?”

  It’s my turn to shrug. Like no place on earth, prison in America is a business.

  “You’re a job creator,” I say, and he smiles, trying to hide the sour edges of it.

  I can see he’s got deep smile lines on his face. He’s also got listening eyes and brows that tent and react genuinely when I’m talking: sign
s of empathy and sympathy written all over his body language.

  He’s still human, I think. But even more amazing is this: he’s a better human than when he got locked up. It’s remarkable that he could grow up so much in a place built to dehumanize. It’s what you’d hope prison does, but which it rarely ever achieves.

  We talk about how he’s doing.

  “Fine,” he says. Meaning: Not fine, but surviving.

  He’s SHU-sick, he says, like homesick. He misses the quietness of being shut up alone behind a door, of having the space to disappear into a book. He’s been relocated to a tier, and given a cell with only bars on it. You hear everything happening on all five tiers, fifty-seven cells per floor, the snorings and the fights. All night. As a result, he’s not sleeping much. He’s wrapping one of his bedsheets tight around itself, tying it to his desk, and using the other end to anchor the cell door so it’s difficult to open.

  “People here just call that security,” he says.

  I change the subject.

  We talk about case specifics, because after that it’s easier to talk about what we know. We talk simple stuff. Stuff we’ve covered in the past, but once more now, mostly to build a buffer between the last topic and the next one.

  After a little while, we relax again.

  We talk books, long books – the longer, and the more epic, the better. He’s a Robert Jordan fan. He’s starting on Diana Gabaldon soon. He lights up talking about premises and plots. Stories are the only way he can escape. I feel that, and I listen, impressed by his passion.

  He ends with a question: “Have you ever wanted to write fiction?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” I say. “I think most lawyers do.”

  His brow wrinkles. “Since they moved me, I got this self-help book that says I should write fiction to turn bad feelings into art. I tried writing fantasy, but halfway through, it just turned into a story about a guy dreaming it from prison.” He’s looking at me, not hard, but intently. “If you had to write about a prison, how would you make it better? Like, what would you change from this one?”