It’s lunchtime. Out in the yards, dozens of inmates suddenly emerge from the dorms and walk carefully along a prescribed path—no stepping on the grass—to the yard cafeteria, where they can pick up box lunches to take back to their rooms. Mostly in their twenties and thirties, the women’s faces are strikingly unhealthy, wan and pockmarked, their hair frizzed, sheenless and limp. They walk in twos and threes, dragging silently on cigarettes. Here and there a pair hold hands, until Wong discourages them with the mimed gesture of a slit throat: “Cut it out,” to which they respond with a shrug. Most of the women are dressed in bland, long-sleeved baseball shirts and jeans; others wear the prison-issue muumuu, a shapeless floral-patterned Hawaiian tunic, which resembles a large swath of drapery. One woman so dressed is tall, about five feet, eleven inches, with beefy arms and a hardened face. She walks flat-footed and lan-gorous, like a man made foolish in drag. The youngest women—who are, by all accounts, the toughest and craziest, the quickest to brandish a weapon—flash gang colors, red or blue around their neck or at their hip.
The inmates of Chowchilla reflect the full array of human temperament and desire. They have committed crimes of passion, greed, necessity, and want, because they’re unemployed, high, bummed out and fighting back, or because crime is a culture for them—it’s what they know. It’s estimated that about 20 percent of female inmates in most prison populations are psychopaths, like Dorothea Puente. The rest somehow just got lost along their way. Four in ten have a prior record for violent crime. A third are in prison for drugs. They dealt drugs, or stole for drugs, or committed assault, armed robbery, or homicide while high on drugs. Nationally, one in three women in American state prisons were serving time for drug offenses in 1991. One in four had committed a crime to get money to buy drugs. More women than men had used drugs in the month prior to their arrest, and more women were high at the time of their crime, including a quarter of the violent offenders.
To an inmate—gay or straight, stud or feminine, high or sober—the women of Chowchilla reveal nothing of themselves to the awkward gawker with a visitor’s pass. Their expressions are muted, concealed. Lunchtime is no time to reveal the complex relationships that women form within their prison world. “They’re not gonna be smiling,” says ex-inmate Marti Salas-Tarin. “They don’t got time for you. They stick to the schedule. Get up, go to work, go back to the dorm, do drugs.” Do a lot of other things, too. Fight, make love, run a thriving illicit economy, launch lawsuits, gather in groups to compare notes on abuse, and arrange themselves into an all-female hierarchy of power that combines masculine and feminine strategies of aggression in a virtually unprecedented way.
Thirty miles from Chowchilla, amid arid miles of ranch land, vineyards, and almond groves, lies the city of Merced, a port of call for the women who are released from CCWF equipped with a bus ticket and a pat on the back. There are no state-run halfway houses for women in Merced, but on a quiet street lined with dogwood and apple trees, a handful of ex-cons live together in a white wooden house with a wide front veranda. The place is called Miracle House, named by its founder, Marti Salas-Tarin, a charismatic and vivacious fifty-year-old who spent twenty years addicted to heroin. Salas-Tarin served one sentence in “the click,” as she calls prison, for dealing, which she had an immense talent for—she dealt in prison, too—and three more sentences for “dirty tests,” or violating parole on her first conviction. Eventually, she got sick of walking out of prison gates and plunging back into the gutter, so she went back to her Hispanic-Catholic roots, rediscovered church, and dusted herself off.
Now Salas-Tarin zips around Merced in her white Chevy pick-up with a bumper sticker that puns, “My hire power is Jesus Christ,” fenagling donations of furniture and food from neighborhood businesses, and persuading the Merced County District Attorney’s Office to steer women into her one-year halfway house program. She has a glossy tumble of jet-black hair and gorgeously large dark eyes, and when she’s on a business run, she dolls herself up in high heels, cherry-colored skirts, and gold hoop earrings. But her preferred form of dress is a turtleneck, jeans, and her own bare feet—a habit she formed when she was shoeless and adrift as a junkie, sleeping in the backs of wrecked cars. What Marti likes to say about her feet, and her drugs, and the noise of brawls and sex in prison, and the fact that she never quite managed to raise her two children, as well as every other detail in two decades of disastrous dishevelment, is this: “You can get used to anything.”
Salas-Tarin owns her own home right next door to Miracle House, so she can supervise her “girls” by padding back and forth across the grass. She lives with her electrician husband, Domingo, a soft-spoken sweetheart who stuck by her through her last stints in prison, and their bouncy black lab, Ishaia. In her living room, she sprawls on the sofa, like a down-home Cleopatra, regal and comfortable, one leg trailing the other on the floor, one arm slung over the back, waving her hand in the air. She keeps her big color television set on mute, tuned to a channel that displays the FBI’s most-wanted list. Marti’s life, her work, her friends, her politics, are dominated by the subject of prison. She hangs out with women who’ve been in the click, women who should probably have been there except that they never got caught, and women whose boyfriends and fathers and brothers are down at San Quentin or upstate in Pelican Bay.
Her friend Pauline calls collect from jail when Marti’s in the kitchen making a soup of tomatoes and tripe called menuto. Pauline’s bawling, she’s been hauled in with her daughter on a theft-for-drugs charge, and they’re both up against their third felony conviction, which, under California’s 1994 three strikes law, means that they face a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life. “Man,” Marti says, when she hangs up the phone, “you gotta pay more attention!” She’s equal parts mad at Pauline and at the system. Users don’t pay much mind to headlines. As a result, a lot of them are getting caught in the dragnet of the three strikes law and being thrown into prison for twice as long as someone like Karla Homolka.
While Marti frets about the fate of Pauline, she’s joined by Cat, a quiet woman with a slow, sweet smile who is round and plump, doubtless once voluptuous, now gray and bespectacled on the edge of sixty. Cat was Marti’s partner in crime for nearly two decades, both of them totally devoted to their drugs, ripping off whomever they could for a dime bag. Crime, for Cat, is a family business. Her husband is in prison. She hasn’t seen her only son in eighteen years, since he got sent to San Quentin, then up to Pelican Bay on a robbery-kidnap charge. She’s come to tell Marti that the parole board has turned her son down, again. “I’m glad he’s strong,” she says, and shows her only photograph of him, taken when he was a boy. “He’s a real tough character.” Cat’s life has been constant chaos, full of mundane deprivation and injustice, but she has her own apartment at the back of Miracle House now, and it’s a cozy nest of flowers and family pictures, like any other mother’s parlor.
The newest addition to Miracle House is Geita, an energetic platinum blonde with a wrinkled tan and candy-bright jewelry who usually lives in Las Vegas. Geita did time in Nevada for possession of crank, a mixture of crack and speed. Like Marti, she’s in her late forties. She has five kids, none of whom has been in touch with her since she went to jail. While her kids were still home with her, Geita’s preferred vice was pot smoking. But later, after she got divorced, someone introduced her to crank, and she got herself a steady, four-year shooting addiction, in the midst of which she swung a post-hole digger at her boyfriend, breaking his leg. Now she’s doing Marti’s program as a court-ordered alternative to a second jail sentence, this time for getting caught with crank paraphernalia in her trailer.
At first, Geita resented being in Marti’s program, because Geita hates rules and didn’t have much time for straight people, let alone church. But now, after a few months, she’s pretty keen on the arrangement. “Church is my new drug,” she says with a wide, white-toothed grin, her voice gravelly from cigarettes, “my new high.” People for whom addict
ion is a religion often turn to religion to give up their addiction. If Geita hadn’t stayed in Marti’s program and gotten clean, she’d have been sent to CCWF or Valley State, in and out again through the revolving door. Women’s prisons are no more likely to be filled with new faces than men’s prisons. Seventy-two percent of America’s female inmates have had prior incarcerations. The American media have a pronounced tendency to depict women in prison as melancholy daughters of virtue who are unjustly sentenced. They don’t need rehabilitation because as soon as they get out, they’ll rush back to their kids and start saving money for Christmas. The reality is that many of the female inmates are stoned when they’re arrested, stoned in the mix, and stoned all over again as soon as they hit the streets. Thanks to Marti, and no credit to the press or the state of California, Geita and Cat are now thinking of starting a beauty parlor. That, for both of them, would be a nice change.
Cat first went to prison in 1963 and has watched with some interest as the landscape around her unalterably shifted. “Back then,” she says, “it wasn’t but five hundred women. It was empty. The halls echoed. We didn’t have radios and TVs. White sheets was contraband. Had to be green. Our rooms was just regular. One woman to a room. It got better and better.” She smiles, amused. “I had rugs, curtains, fish. You could have pets. When I went in in ‘seventy-nine, the dress code had changed. Women was wearin’ mink coats, hats, leather. I mean everything! I thought: ‘I gotta dress and get down with ’em,’ because I wanted to be like everybody else, dress nice. My mother sent me what I wanted. We ended up havin’ a wardrobe there.” Now the dorms that echoed when one woman called to another to show off a fancy coat are crowded and increasingly tense, with eight women jammed into cells built for four, sharing one toilet with a chest-high window. Hundreds of other women at CCWF sleep in gray-blanketed bunkbeds in the prison gymnasium, as restless and displaced as evacuees.
No classification system exists for female offenders. Unlike men’s prisons, which are divided into different levels of security, most women’s prisons are indiscriminately filled with any female who happens to have committed a crime. Multiple murderesses mingle with check forgers, psychopaths share bunks with petty thieves. “I been in a room with a lifer, murderers,” says Cat. She crosses her arms. “They very serious.” Geita was in prison “with a woman who shot her old man up with Dràno. Another one went on a rampage in Reno and ran a bunch of people down with a car.” Imagine the junk bond trader Michael Milken sleeping three feet away from Charles Manson, or J. Gordon Liddy bunk to bunk with Ted Bundy.
Nor do prison officials honor the hierarchy of female transgression. Among inmates, killing children or infants is the least forgivable crime. “They’re so many [baby killers] here they could have their own fan club,” Lieutenant Wong says. “We have a lot of predatory women, too, a lot of sex offenders.” Indeed, one quarter of the women at CCWF are considered “maximum risks.” “Baby killers used to be in protective custody away from the population ’cause they caused a lot of violence,” says Marti on her sofa in Merced. But overcrowding jettisoned the luxury of separation. At present, only one unit at CCWF holds what Wong calls “disturbed characters,” which is to say those who are mentally ill. Otherwise, everyone’s shoulder to shoulder, creating an admixture of harmless and highly dangerous women that generates deep unease.
To quell chaos and achieve some semblance of security in a threatening environment, male prisoners create hierarchies of power, inventing a rigid code of conduct that they themselves police. They mete out their own justice, they run their own economy, they fight their own wars. Their laws have nothing to do with the guards’ laws or with the values of the world outside. A murderer whom we might revile in society might have very high status in Pelican Bay, while an essentially decent, mild-mannered man may be treated with utter contempt. “It’s all the way you carry yourself,” says Cat, reflecting on her son’s journey through California’s toughest lock-downs. “My baby, he went in fightin’. That’s how he gained his respect.” It’s also why he now gets turned down for parole. “My husband, they call him the Professor. They respected him a lot in there. They left him alone.”
What men import from the outside is a basic idea of how to build their power structures. Prison gangs, for instance, are no different than the gangs on the streets of L.A. The members know how to follow laws of respect—how to gain it, how to use it as deterrence against unprovoked assaults. Men bring military, corporate, or street experience with them into prison. They know how to vie for status in a strictly impersonal way.
Women, on the other hand, tend to have little or no familiarity with combat in a public arena. They possess no repertoire of in-your-face aggressive postures. Karla Homolka and Myra Hindley and Marybeth Tinning hadn’t been socialized to order themselves into an impersonal hierarchy with explicitly enforced rules, based on formal expressions of status rather than relational alliances. Yet when they entered prison, heterosexual femininity was suddenly the least valuable currency. For the first time in many of their lives, women must find a way to build a system of power and privilege that has nothing to do with men.
Although some feminists would argue that no such hierarchy need exist, that women can fall into a healing harmony side by side, the reality is more complex. Female prisoners are not peace activists or nuns who were kidnapped off the street and stuck in jail. They are miscreants, intemperate, willful, and rough. Conflicts flare, and because there is no stable hierarchy, they flare with the frequency of brush fires, with no mechanism for containment. Infraction rates against prison rules are extremely high in women’s prisons. Nationally, in 1986, female inmates racked up an average of two infractions per year versus 1.4 for males. In England, “the incidence of violence in women’s [prisons] is two and a half times higher than in men’s.” A study of the two female prisons in Texas, Gatesville and Mountain View, found that women committed 3,698 infractions against prison discipline in one year, nearly five times the rate at which male inmates were cited. Among the women’s ten most common infractions were striking an officer, fighting without a weapon, damaging or destroying property, and creating a disturbance. More offenses “of a threatening, violent or sexual nature” were cited against women than men.
“You can get into a fight every ten seconds in here if you want to,” an inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State told Psychology Today. “I figured that I was going to spend the rest of my life locked up … so what the hell? A lot of the women here feel the same way. Just look at them the wrong way and they’ll go right for your eyes.” Says Marti: “Sometimes the fights are out of the blue, especially when you gonna eat, you don’t mess with that. You better not be crowding—a fight will start.”
Flare-ups also ignite over trade in the illicit prison economy, in particular the buying and selling of dope. “I seen a woman that’s got AIDS shootin’ AIDS blood at a woman who can’t pay,” recalls Cat. “I seen a girl’s head put down in one of those industrial kitchen mixers, tore off the top of her head. You can’t pay, they’re serious.” They’re serious, but in a much less systematic or decisive way than men are. “My old man was in Folsom,” says Geita. “Some of the stories he told me … cold-blooded. He’s seen men die for a cigarette. Men have an image to live up to. If you’re weak, you’re through. Women are more into trying to heal each other. Still,” she adds, “a deal’s a deal. If you say you’re gonna do something, do it. Don’t play games.”
Men in American prisons are far more likely to commit homicide. As their hierarchies are more strict, so, too, are their penalties. “Men stab each other,” says Wong, “but here they use weapons to disfigure each other, curling irons, razor blades, locks in a sock. Throwing hot liquids at each other. Their issues are drug-related or lovers’ quarrels or sexual misconduct.” Both women’s weaponry and their “issues” are fashioned from what is at hand, in a world where gender roles and power strategies are suddenly up for grabs.
The sense of urg
ency women feel when they first enter prison—to locate themselves, connect, find a safe point of reference when the codes are scarily cryptic—leads them to adopt a variety of tactics that are, in effect, wild guesses about how to survive. One tactic is to emulate masculine violence. Josie O’Dwyer entered the British penal system at the age of fourteen, convicted of a relatively harmless robbery. O’Dwyer had never shown a predilection for physical aggression, but when she entered the Borstal prison, she quickly decided that force was her best option for feeling secure. The way she saw it, if she didn’t fight the guards, they wouldn’t respect her. They’d abuse her privileges. If she didn’t fight the other girls, she wouldn’t gain any “credit,” the ultimate objective being to be left alone. So she fought like hell and achieved a traditionally masculine attitude toward violence. “When I came out of Borstal my ambition in life was to be the top dog, the most hardened criminal, the most vicious,” she wrote in her memoir.
According to research in both Britain and the United States, young women are by far the most physically aggressive inmates in their prisons. Maybe they’re more insecure, or more impulsive and defiant, but certainly O’Dwyer’s tactic was one she was more apt to adopt than older, more seasoned inmates like Marti and Cat. At nineteen, when O’Dwyer was in London’s Holloway prison, she took on Myra Hindley. She didn’t know how high up Hindley was in the prison hierarchy, only that the famous serial murderess had killed children. She attacked Hindley in a dimly lit hallway. “Her nose was crossed to the left side of her face, I’d split her lip, her knee and her ear, and she had two black eyes.” O’Dwyer had, in fact, been set up: Holloway’s guards had deliberately exposed her to news clippings about Hindley, then waited for her to explode. Apparently, Myra Hindley was subjected to this kind of set-up every few years. Unlike the prisoners, who could engage in overt aggression, the female guards were still beholden to conventional gender rules. Their aggression was indirect.
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