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.
8
On a brisk morning in late November, Millie Gittens and a bundled-up Calvin were saying their good-byes. The details for Millie’s drug program had been abruptly finalized, and Camille Baxter and the mothers were gathered around, waiting for officers to escort Millie and Calvin to the receiving room. Everyone was wishing her well, although I could also hear the murmurs: “It’s not fair—how come she gets to go to a program?”
I still had mixed feelings about Millie, but as the officers arrived, I just hoped things would somehow work out for her in rehab.
And on the Mental Observation Unit, Annie Tilden was pacing the floor, awaiting the release that would send her home for Christmas. “Every day I’m in here feels like a year,” she said in our final session.
“It’s almost over now,” I said. “You’re coming down the homestretch. Soon, this place will be a memory.”
“Hey,” she said, “how will you and I be able to meet when I’m home?”
“Well—we won’t, Annie,” I responded honestly to the question that had been cropping up of late. “But we’ll always have nice memories, and as long as I know you’re taking your meds and staying away from drugs, then I’ll know you’re fine.”
“Like I told you a thousand times over,” she sighed. “I’m done with drugs. And the medicine—you know I’ll take it. You think I want to start talking to Dan Rather again? I mean, he’s nice and all. But, no thank you!”
The Monday after Thanksgiving, Annie Tilden’s name was gone from the Rose Singer census, and I smiled. She was home now.
In early December, green plastic wreaths popped up on the clinic windows, and in the nursery the mothers put up a small silver tree. Even the dour Overton surprised everyone by bringing in a strand of colored lights that he hung over the inmate waiting area.
Although the festivities were less joyous and more restrained than on the outside, the holiday spirit still permeated the cold concrete walls, and modest party plans were under way. The students were asked to prepare a Christmas party for the mentally ill, and after work one evening, the three of us drove to a convenience store and bought bulk holiday candy, careful to avoid gum and anything in aluminum wrapping. Gum can be used to jam locks, and convincing badges can be fashioned out of aluminum, so both are prohibited.
We filled goody bags with chocolates, peppermints, and hard candy. One of the permanent staff members belonged to a church that donated toothpaste and other toiletries to the mentally ill, and we added these to the bags. The final step was permission for music. Since nothing—even something as innocuous as a tape deck and assorted Christmas tapes—could be brought into the jail without DOC approval, I assumed the job of getting the okay from the clinic captain. As the next level up from the CO in the correctional hierarchy, captains are easily recognizable by their white shirts.
The captain who oversaw the clinic was a hefty woman with thin brown hair pulled back into a tight little bun. With a cigarette usually dangling from an unsmiling mouth, Captain Murphy had a reputation for doing things “by the book!” But I wasn’t worried. I expected my request to be nothing more than a formality, as small parties for the mentally ill were considered part of their therapy. There was always a line outside the captain’s office, and when it was my turn, I laid out the party plans. She dragged hard on her cigarette, mulling it over. “Come back tomorrow! I’ll let you know then.”
I was a little surprised. But I didn’t protest—after all, we were “guests in their house,” something that, I noticed, DOC never passed up an opportunity to remind us of.
The following day, I reported to her office, and she was ready with her decision. “You’re cleared to bring in the tapes.”
“Oh, thank you, Captain!”
“But you may not bring in the tape recorder.”
“What?”
“Department regulations!”
“But what good are the tapes without the recorder?”
Ignoring me, she motioned to the person behind me in line. “Next!”
I stormed back to the conference room, fuming to my comrades, “These people are crazy!” Overhearing my ranting, Overton popped his head in. “You want to know why you can’t bring in a tape deck? You see the signs around the island? No cameras, no recording devices allowed. It’s because of that. A tape deck plays tapes—but it also records.”
“Aahh!” I ran back to Murphy’s office, jumping the line. “Captain, if I can find a tape deck without a recording feature, would that be okay?”
“Yes, but I’d have to see it first,” she snapped.
I was now on a mission, checking tape players at home and enlisting the aid of friends and family. Everyone was on the hunt. But no luck.
A week before the festivities, it looked like our MO party would be a quiet affair.
In the meantime, we suspended the last nursery session before our winter break for a party. When Allison and I arrived, the silver tree was lit up and Bing Crosby was crooning “White Christmas.” Curious about the music, I traced it to a boom box that I inspected closely. Sure enough, the word record was right on it. Ha! According to DOC’s own rules, this device should never have been in the jail—but I wasn’t going to point it out. Instead, I would walk it down the hall for the MO party later in the week, and return it afterward.
With my problem solved, I returned to the festivities, joining Allison in setting out plates of donuts with red and green sprinkles. In the living room, Marisol and baby Teresita were enjoying the tree. On the couch, Lucy held little Michael, giggling with him, playing peekaboo, smothering the laughing baby with kisses. It was nice to see Lucy laughing, as she ordinarily had an intensity about her, a determination that was exhausting.
Yet despite the tree and the music, the party was a bittersweet affair, as only a few of the mothers came. The others tended to chores or retreated to their cells. When I noticed tear-stained faces, I pulled Addie aside and asked her why she wasn’t joining us. Choking back tears, she said, “There’s no Christmas in here—when I get out, then it’ll be Christmas again.” Separated from family, cut off from the world, incarceration during the holidays is especially painful for detainees, and many simply wanted to get it over with.
A few days later, there was an entirely different mood on the MO. The Mental Health staff set aside their paperwork and walked over to the protective unit where the mentally ill inmates were already gathered, eager for their party and relishing the unusual show of attention. Staff members dragged chairs into a widening circle, and Rose Singer’s Mental Health chief stood up and said a few words of goodwill, and, as always, pushed the women to take their medication. “Make that your New Year’s resolution!”
Wendy and Allison passed out the goody bags while I popped a tape into the borrowed nursery boom box. With the festive tunes playing, these fragile people, whose lives knew far too little joy, delighted in their treats, laughing and popping chocolates into their mouths. A good-natured psychiatrist, best known to them for looking over the brim of his glasses as he queried them about medication, donned a Santa Claus cap, which drew howls of laughter. When “Jingle Bells” began to play, everyone joined in on the familiar tune—“o’er the fields we go, laughing all the way, HEY!” Even the officers tapped their feet and sang along, and in the bubble, Officer Timlinson was peering through the big picture window and smiling. As the women laughed and the singing continued, for a few blessed moments it felt like we were all transported out of the cheerless Mental Observation Unit, far away from courts, handcuffs, medication, and jail. When the singing slowly wound down, patients and staff sat for a moment in satisfied silence. The silence was broken by the little woman with the mismatched eyes who’d told me she’d seen the Easter Rabbit. “This is the best party I’ve ever been to—in my whole life.”
A few days later, the rosy hue of the party still lingered as I worked on my charts. I was humming Christmas carols when agonizing cries suddenly pierced the clinic. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Overton was yelling. Staff members rushed out of their offices toward Overton, who was pulling a sobbing inmate down from one of the seats. Above her was the string of lights he’d brought in, and stuck in her wrists and forearms were bits of broken colored glass. “Kill me—just kill me!” I recognized her as one of the women who frequented Sister Marion’s office and had been on Rikers for a good year before we’d arrived. Always demure and polite, she was familiar to us as one of the women from South America who’d been arrested at a city airport for carrying drugs. I’d often noticed her in the nun’s office, deep in prayer—praying for mercy, praying for compassion, praying for a miracle. But earlier in the week, her case had finally resolved. There had been no miracle, no last-minute reprieve, no dream team to swoop in and save the day. Her sentence for the nonviolent first offense of smuggling a small amount of drugs: twenty-five years in prison.
As she was rushed over to the medical side of the clinic, propped up by the unit chief on one side and a psychiatrist on the other, her shrieks grew louder—“Mis niños, mis niños! My children, my children!” The rest of us stood by, dazed, save for Overton, who was sweeping up the glass, muttering, “You try to do something nice, brighten things up for the holidays . . .”
I retreated to the conference room and clamped my hands over my ears, trying to block out the heart-wrenching cries. So, this was the War on Drugs—up close and personal, the side that no one ever sees: a newly sentenced human life coming apart. How could these cruel sentences be the answer to the drug problem? Why was the solution to complicated social and psychological problems always a bigger hammer? Brutally punishing this woman meant nothing to the powerful drug trade. But for children waiting for their mother, it was everything. The thought of little children in some far corner of the world waiting for a mother who would never come home was one that would haunt me long after my internship was over.
* * *
As the semester wound down to the last few days, we kept up the vigil in our “anti-TB room,” quietly finishing term papers and wrapping up chart work, toiling away in a room that was now ice cold. To keep my hands warm but still manage a pen, I’d cut the tips off a pair of old gloves. Every time we considered shutting the windows, a new rumor would surface that someone else on the island had tested positive for TB. And with each new report, our supervisors told us to “think positive, work hard, get good rest, and you’ll be fine.”
And with that, the first semester ended.
9
The winter recess brought a two-week hiatus from school, and I enjoyed the break from classes and the weary trek out to Rikers. I got to see a lot more of my family over the break, and by now I had much more to tell them about the women at Rose Singer and life “on the inside.” Mostly, I was struck by the unevenness of life, how these women had had to survive fragmented, impoverished families when so many of us are blessed with comfortable, intact ones. One of my brothers, Charlie, a New York City firefighter, was stationed in a busy firehouse in a rough section of Brooklyn, and he well understood. He told us about the neighborhood children who showed up at the firehouse doors, dragging in old bicycles with flat tires. “We fill them up with the pumps we use on the rigs, and we pull out tools and just try to get their bikes working. I feel so bad for them. They’re just trying to have little-kid fun—not easy because they’re growing up in a hellhole. When I’m doing my overnights, the neighborhood turns into a war zone—all night long, pop-pop, pop-pop! Guns! Unbelievable! I lay there and think, My God! Where the hell am I?”
My brother’s report of gunfire came as a jolt. Oddly enough, despite working in a jail, I was far removed from the violence he described. Life at Rose Singer was orderly and controlled, although I was well aware that it was only one of the ten jails on Rikers, and that the other nine housed men. I also knew that, for the most part, the men were charged with more serious crimes.
I tucked away my brother’s comments, and by early January I was back at school with fresh
enthusiasm for the second semester. At the end of December, Wendy and I had been asked to start a support group for adolescent inmates between sixteen and nineteen years old. The “girls” were notorious for fighting, often sporting black eyes. Our challenge was to see if a therapeutic group might defuse some of the violence.
Since the girls attended school during the day, the plan was that Wendy and I would each run an evening group in their house, which was divided into two sides. For our first session, we walked through unfamiliar corridors until we reached the house, located in a remote section of the jail. We explained our mission to an amused housing officer. “Good luck! These girls, they’re just gonna play you.” Nonetheless, we signed in to the logbook and split up, with Wendy going to work on the A side while I took the B side.
Inside the cellblock, twenty-five cell doors bordered a common space where a bunch of girls—one of them hugging a blanket and sucking her thumb—was crowded in front of a TV that was blasting a bawdy sitcom. Everyone else was running around, shrieking and laughing with youthful energy. No one seemed to notice me as I plunked down my papers on a round plastic table. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do next, so a little self-consciously, I stepped to the center of the room and said in as loud a voice as I could muster, “I’m Miss Buser from the Mental Health Department, and I’m starting a support group in this house.”
There was no reaction. Either they didn’t hear me or they chose to ignore me. I opened the box of donuts I’d brought along and placed it on the table. I’d learned the value of bait.
Lockdown on Rikers Page 8