“Okay,” I said, feeling slightly overwhelmed. “Okay, now. I know this is all a terrible shock, but we’re going to help you get through this, okay?”
He bit his lip and nodded.
Given his reference to suicide, I wanted to transfer him to the MO. But when I proposed it, he gripped the edge of the desk. “No! Please! I can’t take any more changes. Don’t move me! I’m not gonna do anything—I wouldn’t do anything to hurt my kids! I swear!”
As desperate as he was, I believed him. I set the MO aside for the moment. But I did want him to meet with a psychiatrist for medication. Although a pill couldn’t undo the damage, at least it would help calm him down, and to this he agreed. “But can I talk to you again?” he asked. “You’ve been very nice to me. You can’t trust anyone in here, and I really need someone to talk to.”
I pulled out my calendar, and we scheduled our next appointment.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
When Miss Edwards announced that the morning session was over, Antwan Williams, my first case, got up and returned to the cement cell that was part of his new and horrible world.
After he was gone, my thoughts were racing. Antwan Williams seemed like a decent person who’d made a terrible error in judgment, yet the price for it could be twenty years—a huge number in a human lifespan. My mind flashed back to Sister Marion and the mules at Rose Singer who faced fifteen- and twenty-five-year sentences for similar transgressions. Once again, I didn’t understand how a nonviolent drug sale could be placed on par with murder. If Williams got the maximum, this father of three would leave prison in his early fifties. His children would be grown and the prime of his life over.
17
As the days progressed, I grew accustomed to the rhythm of the men’s jail—the quieter halls, the long silent lines headed to chow. At mealtimes, white-shirted captains stood at the mess hall entryway and scrutinized the arriving lines, watching as the inmates removed their belts and passed through metal detectors. After refastening them, the men were hustled in to eat—and just as quickly hustled back out. With an allotted “feeding” time of five to seven minutes, there wasn’t a moment to spare.
I began each day with a stack of referrals and a morning of assessment interviews. Through these interviews, I found that the male inmates shared the same sad profile as the women: poor, minority, drug-addicted, products of foster care or group homes. Most were high school dropouts, with tenth grade seemingly the universal dropout grade. Many were illiterate; many more had spent their early school years in “special ed.” Whenever I asked what took place in special ed, the answer was always “Nothing.”
But when it came to criminal charges, men and women differed radically. No longer was I sitting across from people charged with drug possession, prostitution, and shoplifting—now it was drug sales, rape, assault, arson, and murder. Although these men were detainees and innocent until proven guilty, I knew very well that many were guilty as charged. But just as I had done all along, I resolved to leave judgments to the courts and keep my focus on their mental status.
Despite the more serious charges, the work itself, as Janet had promised, was the same. I settled into a comfortable groove, transferring the mentally ill onto a Mental Observation Unit and scheduling clinic-based follow-ups for everyone else. I was just starting to feel confident in my ability to work with male inmates when I began making mistakes. The first occurred during the evaluation of a forty-year-old referred for possible mental retardation. When I questioned him, he was mute and appeared lost and disoriented. I decided it best to transfer him to the MO for his own protection and further evaluation. My next referral was a twenty-three-year-old brought to the clinic by two officers who’d spotted him fashioning a noose out of bedsheets. I wasn’t going to take any chances here and immediately transferred him to the MO.
On the face of it, these two situations seemed straightforward and my response to them appropriate. In both cases I’d been duped. The “suicidal” inmate began extorting the mentally ill, and within days of his arrival on the unit, the “mentally retarded” inmate was hailed as the house chess champ! Both were promptly discharged back to population, and I landed in Pat’s office, feeling a little chagrined.
“Don’t worry,” said the chief. “It happens to all the rookies.”
“Happens to the veterans too!” Charley piped in. “These guys are good, Mary—they know exactly how to play us. Welcome to the wonderful world of malingerers!”
Malingerer, I learned, is the psychiatric word for a faker, and a big buzzword behind bars.
Charley and Pat explained that, for a variety of reasons, the island’s Mental Observation Units are coveted houses. Terrified first-timers in jail often fudged mental illness because they figured that with the Mental Health staff’s regular presence on the unit, the MO was a safer haven. Others thought it might help their legal case. Unfortunately, others viewed the mentally ill as perfect prey for extortion. But the biggest motivation for feigning mental illness and exacting a transfer to the MO was a key policy clause: “Any inmate housed on a Mental Observation Unit is considered too fragile for solitary confinement.” What this meant was that someone who’d been issued a “ticket” was apt to appear at our door prior to his transport to the Bing. If he could convince us that he was suicidal or mentally ill, he’d be transferred to the protected house, safe from harsh punishment.
“The two guys you put on the MO, Mary, they’d both been issued Bing tickets the night before,” Charley said.
Now it all made sense.
“You can’t blame them for trying,” Pat said. “They’re scared to death of solitary—but on the other hand, we can’t allow our units to become havens for Bing beaters.”
Armed with this new information, I conducted my evaluations with a little more savvy. As a gatekeeper for our Mental Observation Units, I needed to protect the mentally ill. If someone told me he felt like killing himself, I didn’t automatically believe it. I assessed his energy level and body language. Did it add up? Or was he joking around in the waiting area just prior to telling me about his death plan? When I asked myself these questions, many claims did not pan out. If I still had doubts, I checked with DOC to see if there was an outstanding Bing ticket at play. In many cases, the answer was yes.
With a little more experience, I began recognizing ruses and staged maladies. Some were quite sophisticated and convincing, while others were so obvious they were almost comical. One young man, outfitted in designer jeans and gold chains, who’d been holding court in the waiting area, claimed to be hearing voices. “When did you start hearing these voices?” I asked.
“The other day—just like that!”
“And how often do you hear them?”
“All the time!” he insisted. “All the time . . . you better transfer me to the MO.”
“And what do these voices talk to you about?”
He thought about it for a moment before making his fatal mistake—“Sports!”
I tried not to burst out laughing, but I did smile, and when he realized it wasn’t going to work, so did he.
While frustrating, situations like these actually provided a little levity, and in some ways they were a welcome diversion from the more complicated decisions that I was starting to face. Although many would take a broad brush to malingerers, attributing their chicanery to the “criminal mentality,” I was finding that most jailhouse malingering was driven by sheer terror.
It was through Curtis Bellows, one of my earliest cases, that I came face-to-face with the dire straits the detainee is up against. A thoughtful thirty-three-year-old, Bellows was battling drug addiction and depression. In and out of jail most of his adult life, he’d endured a horrific childhood at the hands of a sadistic foster mother. Belt-buckle beatings and near drownings at bath time made for a man who functioned with great difficulty. But he and
I were forming a solid therapeutic alliance, and I wanted to help him find some peace in his life. Although he’d be going upstate for a few years, we were working on a postprison game plan. But one afternoon he arrived for his session with eyes downcast and lower lip quivering. He told me he was in grave danger. Apparently, he’d borrowed a pack of cigarettes from a housemate through the jailhouse practice of “juggling.” The repayment terms were steep: twice the amount loaned is due back on an agreed-upon date. For each day it isn’t repaid, the owed quantity doubles. Curtis had juggled the cigarettes with the promise of payback later in the week when he received money from his sister. But things took a bad turn when his sister, usually faithful about sending him ten bucks a month, was unable to do so. With the owed cigarettes rapidly multiplying, he’d never be able to pay off his “creditors.”
Janet told me that DOC would not make housing transfers based on these everyday squabbles, and that an inmate who owes money to a housemate is a sitting duck for violent retribution.
In one case that occurred before I arrived, a young man’s desperation led to ultimate tragedy. My cube mate, Ellie, told me how he’d juggled cigarettes and candy, knowing his grandmother would be visiting and bringing the money he’d use for payback. But when she wasn’t up to making the trip out to Rikers that week, he panicked. Instead of pretending to be suicidal or psychotic, and possibly being pegged by us as a malingerer, he devised a risky plan for getting out of his house. The idea was to step into a bedsheet noose while a pal of his, who “happened to be walking by,” would then yell out for a CO. With such a dramatic act, he’d be a shoo-in for the MO. However, the plan went awry when the timing of the rescue was off. By the time the COs arrived, he’d already hanged for too long. Although an ambulance was quickly summoned, this twenty-one-year-old was dead on arrival at the hospital.
Curtis Bellows’s situation was similar, and I tried to help him figure some way out of it. “Maybe you could call your sister again—explain things to her.”
“No,” he said. “She has her own health issues and barely has enough money for herself. If she had it, she’d have sent it.”
We were quiet for a moment before he shook his head, tears rolling down his cheeks. “I hate fighting, but I’m gonna to have to. I don’t know when I’m going to get jumped . . . at night . . . in the showers . . . I just don’t know. But they’re coming for me.”
I was half-tempted to give him the money, to put it in his commissary account and end the whole thing. But to do so was taboo, both from a therapy standpoint and because giving anything to an inmate was strictly prohibited. Theoretically, I wasn’t supposed to get pulled into these situations. As a therapist, it was my job to stick to mental health concerns. But I had to do something. And what I had in mind was a transfer out of his house and onto one of our Mental Observation Units. The only problem was that he wasn’t mentally ill. A move like this would require Pat’s approval. “Wait here,” I told Curtis.
I went back to the office where I hashed it over with the chief. Her response was exactly what I’d hoped for. “Get him out of that house. Go ahead and put him on the MO. We’re always trying to make sure we don’t get played that sometimes we lose our hearts. He’s in emotional distress—I think that qualifies him for the MO, don’t you? You don’t ever want to lose your heart, Mary,” she winked.
In that moment I felt a stab of love for Pat. While it would have been much easier for her to default to a bureaucratic template, Pat hadn’t lost her own heart, and even if I were duped by a malingerer here or there, I wasn’t going to lose mine either!
I practically skipped back to the clinic to deliver the good news. Bellows was ecstatic. “Thank God! Oh, thank God! Thank you, Miss B, thank you!”
I filled out the transfer form and within hours, Curtis Bellows was packed up, escorted out, and spared the trauma of certain violence.
18
By summer’s end, I’d been back at Rikers for three months. My plate was full, with a caseload that had swelled to thirty people as well as handling the accompanying paperwork demands. The inmates I met with suffered primarily from depression, anxiety, and often a combination of both. There was little time for the in-depth work I’d enjoyed as a student, but with each person I met, I listened wholeheartedly, tried to nurture maturation, and instill reasonable hope. When I packed up to go home at night, it was with the quiet sense that I was doing something important.
And in my outside life, there was cause for celebration. Alex had passed his exams and was now a full-fledged American doctor. With his long struggle over, a world of opportunities was opening up for him. And as he began exploring new possibilities, I became more deeply immersed in my work with the men at GMDC, a population of little concern to the outside world.
But if the public was disinterested in the Rikers detainees, one accused criminal had captivated the entire nation—O. J. Simpson. By the fall of 1995, his trial was under way and the case was discussed endlessly in newspapers, on TV, in the home and workplace. The fervor was felt no less on Rikers, where officers, civilians, and inmates alike offered passionate opinions as to whether Simpson was guilty of the grisly double murder. By early October, the trial was finally wrapping up, and on a bright autumn morning, word spread that the jury had reached a decision. Officers and civilians crammed into a clinic lounge while inmates gathered around their house TVs for the verdict. When the words “not guilty” were uttered, a massive roar rose up over Rikers Island. The inmates were ecstatic—dancing in their houses, cheering in the clinic. The dour faces on the mess hall lines were replaced with broad smiles and pumped fists. None of my sessions was complete without a quick sidebar on the verdict. “Finally,” they said, “White justice for a Black man!”
But as the O. J. euphoria died down, and the inmates realized that his victory meant nothing for their own cases, the jail returned to its usual somber state.
At GMDC, I found a profound sense of sadness that I had not felt at Rose Singer. Not that Rose Singer was “Mickey Mouse land” by any means, but the difference, it seemed to me, was hope—hope for a better life after jail. Numerous programs prepared the women for better things after release. But at GMDC, programs were scarce, and the idea of something like the meditation group that Lucy Lopez had attended seemed laughable. And perhaps my biggest shock: for all of the Mental Health Department’s efforts in denying women sleep medication, no such policy existed here. In fact, it was the opposite. Here, sleep meds were doled out freely—even encouraged—as though there was an unspoken understanding of the men as a lost cause and a desire to anesthetize their pain as best we could. I suppose with more serious charges, and the heavier sentences that waited, there was little point in focusing on life afterward.
As part of my evaluations, I asked about physical injuries, and the men whipped up T-shirts to display scars from gunshots and stabbings, the result of gang warfare and stray bullets. Before GMDC I’d never even seen a bullet wound, but now the sight of scarred and puckered abdomens was routine. Many had also suffered blows to the head, usually through accidents or fights. In one grief counseling situation, I worked with twenty-four-year-old Alex Mora, who’d just learned that his younger brother had been killed by a stray bullet. He sobbed uncontrollably, grieving for the “good one” in the family, wishing it had been him. And it could just as easily have been. Alex had already survived seven gunshots to his back and now walked with a limp. Post-traumatic stress disorder was almost as common a diagnosis as drug addiction, but here, the walking wounded weren’t soldiers returning from any war, they were victims of the violence that comes with being part of New York City’s rough-and-tumble underclass.
Not surprisingly, drugs were at the heart of most men’s charges. Whether it was sales, working as a lookout, “steering” customers to dealers, robbing to get money to buy drugs, or committing a violent crime while under the influence, all roads led back to drugs.
> But as I got to know these men, I discovered that they viewed drug dealing as their salvation. It was not only lucrative, but within their impoverished subculture it carried prestige. As Alonzo Gomez, a soft-spoken twenty-year-old referred for attempted suicide, put it, “I had real money in my pockets, and for the first time in my life, I was a somebody!” In their insular world, drug dealers command respect. Many are viewed as neighborhood “godfathers,” doling out cash for groceries, Pampers, and other necessities. In the larger society, these men are uneducated, unskilled nobodies, but through drug dealing, they’ve found a shortcut to the American dream of big money, power, and respect.
But the dream is short-lived, and the downside—violence, death, prison—is horrific, as Antwan Williams was discovering. Since our initial session, I’d been meeting with Antwan regularly, and as the shock of his arrest wore off, he knew his life would never be the same—nor would the lives of his family. By the fall, his three boys, aged ten, eight, and five, were returning to school and becoming more upset that Daddy wasn’t home. “I used to walk them to school every morning,” said Antwan. “That’s where I should be now—taking my kids to school.”
Initially, Antwan’s wife tried to shield the children from the truth, but when it became apparent that he wasn’t coming home any time soon, she started bringing them on visits. “It’s terrible for them to see me in here like this. My youngest, he just hugs me and cries, ‘Papi, come home!’ I can’t take it, Miss B! The whole reason I did this was to help my family. I wasn’t looking to buy fancy cars. It was to take care of them—and now look at the pain I’ve caused!”
Lockdown on Rikers Page 14