Lockdown on Rikers

by Ms. Mary E. Buser

  “I’m gonna get released in December,” she continued. “I’ll be home for Christmas. The others downstairs—I’m different from them.”

  “How are you different?”

  “I wasn’t always like this,” she asserted. “This is my first time in jail. I didn’t always have schizophrenia, you know. I used to be a mail carrier.”

  “A mail carrier?”

  “Bet you’re surprised.”

  I sure was. “Really?”

  “That’s right. I worked for the Post Office for seven years. Hey, miss—do you know all the words to that saying, “Neither wind nor rain . . . ?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I didn’t think so,” she said, and a crooked little smile emerged. “Well, I do.”

  As she proceeded to recite the iconic postal slogan, I completely forgot I was sitting in a jail cell on Rikers Island. Like two old friends overdue for a reunion, Annie Tilden told me everything, how she had gone from gainfully employed postal worker to Rikers Island inmate. While working for the Post Office, her income was limited, and as a single mother with a mentally handicapped daughter, she hit on the idea of opening her home to a couple of boarders for a little extra money. “They weren’t the down-and-out types, you know, so when they started smoking pot, I didn’t think it was any big deal, and I started getting high with them. And then they started using harder drugs, and one thing just led to another.”

  At thirty-seven, Annie Tilden, the hardworking employee and mother of a special needs child, was lulled into the world of drugs. Tragically, these drugs were highly toxic to her brain, causing a drug-induced psychosis. She had no mental illness prior to her drug foray, but the residual effect was paranoid schizophrenia. She’d paid a terrible price for her drug use—her career, her freedom, her sanity. As I absorbed her story, I was struck by the utter devastation that drugs can cause. She was lucky to have come away from this with her life.

  “A lot of bad things happened, miss,” she acknowledged. “Very bad. But you know something—I gotta look at the positive. My daughter’s with my sister, and that’s where I’m going when I get out, and I’ll never go through this again. I’ll never wind up on the streets in rags, talking to myself. I’ll always have to take the medication, but I’m going to get my life back—at least as best I can. And while I’m in here I’m not gonna take any chances on anything going wrong. I can watch TV when I get home—and it won’t be Bugs Bunny.”

  Her odd, emotionless delivery never changed, but it didn’t matter. I heard her, heard every word she said. I never expected such a connection with a paranoid schizophrenic, but there it was. When the session ended and I made my way back to the clinic, I sailed through the gates with a smile, ignoring the bewildered looks of the COs who opened them and locked them up again.

  5

  My workday pace was picking up, as Wendy, Allison, and I were now pitching in with the daily referrals. Inmates in emotional distress came to the Mental Health Department’s attention primarily through medical screenings and alert officers who generated referral slips that were dropped off to us and placed in a wire basket. Whether the emotional crisis was the shock of arrest, an AIDS diagnosis, a family death, or the trauma of a heavy sentence, the basket was always overflowing, our waiting room a daily mob scene.

  Our highest priority was to identify the suicidal and mentally ill, who were to be transferred out of general population and onto the Mental Observation Unit; less critical situations called for supportive therapy, an appointment with a psychiatrist for medication, or some combination of the two. But the appropriate action wasn’t necessarily obvious. Mental dysfunction is not an exact science; there’s nothing like a blood test to pinpoint bipolar disorder, types of schizophrenia, or degrees of depression. A psychological assessment is largely a judgment call, and in the beginning our supervisors followed our assessments closely, especially after the three of us started putting almost every person we met onto the MO as a precaution, creating a mini-crisis. The permanent staff swiftly descended on our conference room. “Ladies! You can’t put the whole jail on the MO. Not everyone who’s depressed is suicidal, and not everyone with messy hair is psychotic!” We were learning.

  When I sat down to interview these women, I almost forgot they’d been accused of crimes. In a place where they were treated as nothing more than a number and a body, they seemed grateful for a little personal attention and were generally polite and well mannered. Although I needed to complete a lengthy intake questionnaire, I made a point of shaking hands and chatting a little, which helped to establish a rapport that eased the sting of the prying questionnaire a bit. One of the first questions dealt with the reason for arrest. The general responses painted a picture of drug possession, petty theft, prostitution, and shoplifting, or “boosting,” as they called it. While I surmised that many were guilty as charged, I had resolved that if I was going to work with the incarcerated, then I needed to leave judgments to the courts and keep my focus on mental status.

  As we moved into the “Family Background” section, the stories were painfully similar: growing up in the care of a drug-addicted mother, extension-cord lashings, empty refrigerators, abuse, fear, and neglect. As I took in the sad details, I wondered how I—or anyone, for that matter—would have turned out under similar circumstances. And what of their own children? When we reached this sensitive question, their eyes welled with tears as they confided that their kids were in foster care or, in luckier cases, with family members, often their own mothers—the very same mothers who’d once been addicts themselves. Instances of a formerly drug-addicted mother now raising grandkids would become a familiar theme. Many an inmate would recover from addiction too late to raise her own children, but would eventually straighten out and take over for her children’s children, with her adult kids lost to the streets. Among the jail population, this is a tragic but common family scenario as the misery of drug addiction passes from one generation to the next.

  I was often surprised by the twists and turns an assessment interview could take, and I was learning the utter importance of refraining from judgment. In one situation, the Social Services Department informed us that the husband of an inmate had been killed in a car accident, and it was up to us to break the news to her. “It’s a tough one,” Janet said, handing me the referral. “But it’s important experience.” Armed with a box of tissues, I went out to the waiting area where Daphne Cruz was perched on the edge of her seat, anxious to find out why she’d been summoned to the clinic.

  I led her to a session booth and gently told her. But as I passed her the tissues, I was shocked to see that she was suppressing a smile. Her husband had just died in a terrible accident! But I caught myself and pulled back from judgment, resolving to let her tell her story, and I was glad I did.

  Putting the tissues aside, I said, “I get the feeling that this isn’t really such bad news.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, it is! It’s just . . . terrible,” she replied, trying to conceal her obvious joy.

  “Look,” I said, “it’s okay to say how you really feel. It really is.”

  She probed my face for a moment to see if I meant it. Then she took a deep breath and the smile vanished. “Well, maybe I don’t feel bad about it,” she whispered. “Maybe I don’t feel bad about it at all. Look, miss, I know that sounds terrible, but see, he was terrible—he used to beat me up, bad. He even burned me once with boiling water. Look!” she said, rolling up her sleeves to reveal ugly scars along her upper arms. “I wanted to take out a restraining order, but he said if I did it, he’d kill me—and he would have. I was like a walking dead person. And then a funny thing happened. I got arrested for selling drugs, little nickel and dime bags of reefer. At first, I thought going to jail was the end of the world. But when I got in here, I was safe! This is the one place in the world where he couldn’t get me. After I was released I made sure I got arrested ag
ain, and as long as my son was with my sister, I was fine with it. You know, miss,” she whispered, “There’s worse things in life than coming to jail. Much worse.”

  This was not at all what I’d expected, but I understood. “It’s over,” I said softly. “It’s over now.”

  “I’m free! I’m free!” she said, holding prayerful hands up to the heavens. “Thank you, God—thank you!”

  I never saw Daphne Cruz again, and as she walked out of the clinic, I had the feeling that her jail days would soon be over for good.

  * * *

  Whenever I made a good connection with someone I’d met through the referral process, Janet would assign the case to me, and my caseload was building. Of my original three cases, I was meeting with Annie Tilden regularly, but I was discouraged that Tiffany Glover continued to hold me at arm’s length. And I was thoroughly challenged by Millie Gittens, who never showed up. But as soon as Camille Baxter got wind of this, Millie was promptly delivered to the clinic.

  “What happened?” I asked her. “Did you get my messages?”

  “Yeah, sure I did—and I wanted to come, but Calvin was crying and I couldn’t leave him. We can’t just walk away, you know!”

  There! Her explanation made perfect sense. There was a good reason she hadn’t been coming.

  As I spread out my intake forms, though, it bothered me that Millie was twisted around in her seat, straining to see who was in the waiting area. But she settled in, readily answering the intake questionnaire. Millie was twenty-seven years old and confided that she’d been arrested for possession of a small amount of “cocaine.” As I probed about her drug addiction, her cocaine use seemed more akin to smoking crack, a cheap derivative of cocaine, but even more addictive. Like many of the inmates I’d work with who’d been hooked on crack, I noticed that she was careful to avoid the undignified word itself.

  Millie’s background was a sad one. Her sisters and brothers, as well as half-sisters and half-brothers, were raised by an overwhelmed grandmother. She had no memories of her father and said her mother wasn’t around much while she was growing up. “She used drugs back then,” Millie said softly. “But she doesn’t anymore. Now she’s taking care of two of my kids and some of my nieces and nephews.” When Millie’s grandmother became ill, she and her siblings were farmed out to foster care. “That happened when I was nine, and I didn’t see two of my sisters again till I was twenty.” As she described her foster family experiences, it was apparent that these makeshift arrangements were anything but nurturing, loving, or secure. At fifteen, it was off to group homes until she was on her own at eighteen. Somewhere along the way, she’d dropped out of high school. As she recounted a painful childhood, I felt a deep sadness for Millie, once again wondering how I would have turned out under similar circumstances. I thought of my own mother, the family rock, and then I tried to picture her holding a crack pipe or a heroin needle. It was a preposterous thought, an image impossible to even conjure. Yet this had been Millie’s reality.

  With the paperwork completed, we sat back to talk. “Have you thought about what happened during that group session?” I asked.

  “I sure have!” she retorted. “I shouldn’t have gotten blamed for everything when it was those two who started it!” With that, she thrust out her long legs, crossed her arms, and pouted.

  Her childish answer was disappointing, indicating a starting point well below what I’d hoped for. “Well, what they did was mean,” I agreed.

  “That’s right.”

  “But . . . maybe we need to work on your reaction to it. People aren’t always going to be nice to us, Millie. Sometimes they’re going to get nasty, but we just can’t let it get to us that badly. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Hey,” she said, pulling up straight. “Here’s what you could do for me—how about getting me some sleeping pills. Now that would really help!”

  Suddenly I had an image of Overton’s smirk.

  “I don’t think so, Millie. Not every problem in life can be solved with a pill.”

  She slumped back again, but I wasn’t ready to give up. “Let’s back up. Before everything went haywire, you said Calvin was your sixth child, that you wanted to be a good mother to him. That’s a good goal—an important one—something we can work on together. Now, being a good mom means keeping your baby safe, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the thing is, when you got so upset, you could have dropped—”

  “Yeah, well,” she interrupted, “maybe I wouldn’t get upset if I wasn’t so tired all the time. Other girls in here get sleeping pills—I know they do—so how come I can’t?”

  “I don’t know about them, Millie, but I don’t think sleeping pills are the answer here.”

  She stared at the floor. I tried a different angle, looking for something positive where we might make a connection. I praised her for meeting with me, for trying to improve her troubled life. But once pills were ruled out, I was grabbing at air. Still, it was only our first meeting, too soon to become discouraged. As the session ended, I finished up with a cheery, “See you next week!”

  But as Millie skulked out of the clinic, I wasn’t hopeful.

  In contrast to Millie, one of my first promising cases was a woman named Jeanine Bowers. Jeanine had been referred by an officer who noted that she spent her days lying on her cot, weeping and staring at the ceiling. During our initial interview, the neatly kempt twenty-six-year-old tearfully told me she’d been arrested numerous times in the past, and it seemed that this pattern of coming in and out of jail was the source of her despair. “I’ve been getting locked up since I was fifteen,” she whispered. “Going to jail didn’t used to bother me. I was always fooling around in the halls—it was all a big joke. But now, when I see older women in here—women in their thirties and forties—looking all beaten up, I say to myself, That could be me! The thing is, I’m scared, miss—I’m really scared. I thought I could turn this around any time I wanted, but I haven’t been able to do it.”

  Jeanine Bowers and I made an instant connection. In our first few sessions, time flew by as she told me how she’d attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings and enrolled in GED classes each time she’d been released, hoping to break the jail pattern. “But it always winds up the same—I fall back into drugs and wind up right back in here.”

  As she and I looked more closely at her backslides, and at how she might line up outside support prior to release, I was delighted with this budding relationship. My work with the motivated Jeanine was exactly what I’d hoped for in coming to Rikers. But I was about to learn one of the cold realities of providing therapy in a jail setting. When I asked Overton to summon her one afternoon, he said, “She’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah—she went upstate yesterday morning—prison. She got sentenced. Once they get sentenced, they’re not city property anymore, they’re state property, and the city’s not paying for state property—and you better believe it!”

  “Thank you for that!”

  I immediately sought out Janet, who explained that once the detainees were sentenced, DOC wasn’t going to tell them—or us—their departure date. The date was kept vague as a precaution, to thwart any plan of springing someone from a bus while en route to prison.

  From a security standpoint, this policy made perfect sense, but from a therapeutic perspective, it was a disaster. Although deeply disappointed that she was gone, I only hoped that Jeanine would continue therapy in prison. After that, I learned to become attuned to my clients’ legal proceedings, now understanding that they could simply disappear.

  6

  One bright fall weekend, I went out to Long Island for a family visit, where there was often a crowd gathered around the Sunday dinner table. My mother was enjoying the first wave of grandchildren, and as the tots arrived in state-of-the-art strollers with
the latest in child-safety gadgets, I had a flashback to the woman with the flimsy stroller whom I’d encountered on my first day at Rikers, and I felt a pang of sadness. Nonetheless, I was excited to tell everyone all about my unique internship, and it was a rapt audience that listened as I explained what I had learned: that Rikers Island is not a prison and that it is not one building, but rather a complex of ten jails, and just how jails differ from prisons. “Prisons are for those who’ve been convicted and sentenced, whereas jails are for pretrial detainees,” I explained.

  “I had no idea,” my mother said. “Jails, prisons—I thought it was all the same thing.”

  For my family, like most, Rikers Island was an occasional blurb on the evening news, its true function just as fuzzy as its exact location.

  But my mother mulled it over a little more, and then looked puzzled. “But if the detainees haven’t been convicted, then why are they in jail?”

  “Because they can’t afford bail while they wait for their cases to resolve.”

  “Well, that doesn’t seem right,” she said.

  “It doesn’t seem right to me either,” I agreed. But I didn’t really understand the legal system, and so I told them more about what I did know, about the women I’d met, of their sad backgrounds, and of how we were helping them to find their way.

  Everyone was interested and supportive, and outside the family, my friends were also enthused. The only sour note came from my father. My parents were separated, and although my father lived in another state, we maintained a close relationship. His blunt take on all this was that it was okay to work in jail for the school year, but after that, “Get the hell out of there.” I didn’t understand his negativity, but I didn’t let it bother me.

  * * *

  The following Monday morning, Janet announced that she was stepping aside as nursery group leader and assigned Allison and me to take over as co-leaders. “I think I’ll take a break,” Janet said, with a little smile that made me suspicious.