A Mother’s Promise

by Lee Barnett

  After hanging up I asked one sober-looking woman if she knew what the procedure was, but she had been waiting five hours and still didn’t know what was going on. The hours crawled by and people came and went. I hugged myself to keep warm and didn’t move, even when a guy clearly high on crack tried to attack a women close by. Within seconds, huge guards in protective gear ran in, brandishing sticks and stun guns.

  ‘Turtles!’ everyone shouted. And they did look like turtles as they dragged the crack head away. Circus, I thought to myself, this was a bloody circus and someone was going to get terribly hurt.

  ‘Barnett!’

  I jumped up and looked around to hear my name being called from the mug shot-cum-fingerprint room. I almost skipped over to it. ‘Does this mean I’ll be heading to my cell soon?’ The lady’s answer was no. I shrank back into a ball to preserve my body heat and calculated how long it had been since I was able to sleep: I had been awake for around fifty hours. There was another long lag before a nurse took down my medical history and noted my need for blood pressure medicine. By that stage I was just about the only person left in the once full room. Almost in complete despair by now, I asked how much longer things would take.

  ‘Oh,’ said the officer sweetly, ‘any minute now you’ll be called for court.’

  ‘Court? But I’ve spoken to my lawyer and I’m not going to court until Monday.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘everyone goes in front of a magistrate first thing in the morning. That’s why you haven’t been assigned a cell.’

  Deep breaths. Deep long breaths.

  ‘Ma’am, I told you about twelve hours ago that I’m a federal prisoner.’

  ‘You’re federal? Oh my, you should have been sent to your cell straight away. These morning courts have nothing to do with you.’

  Had all of that been a mistake by the officers or had the delay been a deliberate act, just to make things more uncomfortable for me? At any rate, twelve and a half hours after arriving at Al Cannon I joined a line of girls to be given a uniform, the last step before heading to the cells. The uniform was grey and white, and we were given a pair of underpants, a bra, a pair of socks and extra large plastic shower shoes. We dressed and when we handed over our personal clothes and shoes I asked about the extra clothing.

  ‘Extra clothing?’ snorted the officer. ‘You think this is Neiman Marcus? That’s all you get.’ That and a plastic cup, plastic spork (spoon and fork), tiny toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo and bar of soap.

  Four of us piled into the elevator and headed to our floor. Everything seemed clean (a plus), and fairly new (another plus). We were told to wait against a wall while the guard looked up at a camera. After a few minutes there was a click and noise of a thick automatic metal door opening. We stepped into this small area, called a sally port, and the door closed behind us. Once that door closed the next automatically opened and we entered an artificially bright, huge room with many women in grey and white, who turned towards us chanting, ‘Fresh meat, fresh meat.’ Great, a room full of comics. The unit officer asked us to turn around against the wall for a pat down. With my hands on the wall waiting, I watched the gloved unit officer doing a full search, even inspecting our toes one by one. I was the last to be searched. The girls who had come up with me went to collect a cover for their mattress and a small blanket.

  The officer started with the back of my neck. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘we’ve been waiting for you.’ I did a double-take and checked to make sure she was speaking to me. She was. ‘Welcome. I want you to know that we don’t watch Channel 4 News in this unit.’

  ‘Channel 4?’ I asked, wondering if I was delirious from lack of sleep and had missed something.

  ‘Yes, Channel 4. We don’t watch the nightly news because Dean Stephens, the anchorman, hates your guts.’

  And those same girls who had shouted ‘fresh meat’ now wanted to be my best friend. They’d all seen me on TV.

  I put my stuff on my bed and looked at it longingly. There were four beds per pod or cubicle, and around fifty or sixty beds in the unit. By now it was chow time and everyone started to queue. The girl in front of me turned to ask if she could have anything I didn’t want. I said yes, thinking fat chance, but then I was handed a tray. On it was a slab of pseudo meat, maybe bologna, a ‘meat’ I had stayed clear of even as a child, a dollop of mustard, two slices of bread, slightly hard to the touch, and some mystery beans that tasted of … nothing. I remembered it was only a few days before back at BWCC that a couple of eastern European ladies had made our unit crepes with caramel sauce. Boy, what a contrast.

  All the tables were in the middle of the unit, with the guard’s desk to one side, allowing full view of everything. There was one guard per unit. Behind the guard’s desk and through a glass door was a rec area, but aside from tiny windows several metres high it appeared to be just a cement room. That was our ‘outside’. Very little fresh air and no clear view of sky.

  Jesus, I’m going to die in here, I thought.

  On either side of the tables was a large TV, and both blared at all times.

  As for our toilets, there were five or six toilets with sinks opposite the toilets. There were no doors so you were exposed to everyone wandering by or anyone using the sinks. There were also about five showers. These at least had flimsy shower curtains and were relatively clean. In fact the entire place was pretty clean.

  In the open room on the way to the toilets were two stands which housed two phones apiece. ‘That’s for you to call your friends,’ my pod mate explained, ‘and back behind the partition over in the corner there,’ she indicated, ‘is where you have your visits.’

  ‘People come up here for visits?’ I said excitedly.

  She looked at me like I was crazy. I was used to that look as a response to my naive questions about prison life.

  ‘No, we don’t have those kinds of visits, up here we only have visits through monitors. The people who come to see you are downstairs.’

  By the time the inedible lunch was done, I was beyond exhausted, yet the racket in the cavernous room was terrible. The two TVs competed against each other and the decibel level from the women’s chatter was nightmarish. Added to that, no matter how tightly I scrunched my eyes I couldn’t block out the light from the fifty fluorescent lights above. Yes, fifty! I counted them instead of sheep.

  I woke from a nightmare featuring Jania. Her face was close to mine as she said, ‘Lee, no one is saying you’re crazy; diabetics take medicine to be well. All you need is your medicine!’ I suppose it was understandable after all that travelling and sleep deprivation I was feeling vulnerable. I soothed myself and try to acclimatise to my new environment.

  Breakfast, naturally, was at the crack of dawn and then it was in line for medication. An activity, unsurprisingly, of particular interest to the girls, although my blood pressure medicine hadn’t yet arrived.

  My greatest excitement about this new day was that, after months of talking regularly on the phone, I was finally going to meet Russell.

  ‘Barnett.’

  I rushed to the officer’s desk to be told I had a visitor – it wasn’t my lawyer, though, but a visitor over on the monitors. In the corner of the room where the monitors were I sat and waited. And then Patty’s much-loved and familiar face appeared. Awkwardly we both picked up the phone receiver and started to giggle, smiling like loons. We told each other how great it was to see one another again and we both reckoned we looked pretty good given the intervening years.

  Once again, Patty had done so much for me. Over the past months she had collected and sent all the documents to Bruce as well as liaising with Samantha to connect my old friends with my new friends. It was wonderful to hear her sharing stories about how everyone was getting to know each other, like a long-lost family.

  Later that morning I was called again and taken to a small room on the first floor. There was a chair, a narrow shelf and a large glass window that showed an identical room, though that one had the door
to freedom. My friend Keri had googled Russell and said he was just about the most handsome man she had ever seen, but all I knew was that he had a kind voice, a great sense of humour and that I trusted him. After a very long wait the door finally opened and I caught a glimpse: yep, Russell is the most handsome man I had ever seen.

  He was fortyish and tall with thick black hair speckled lightly with grey. He wore a light blue, close-fitted shirt and jeans and a warm, almost shy smile. It felt a little as if I was on a first date after having chatted on the phone for months.

  We both said hi and Russell sat opposite me, the thick glass between us – we leaned in as close to the glass as we could. He has lovely kind eyes. Immediately we got down to business. He asked how I was doing and promised to move me as soon as he could to a jail in a town called Georgetown which was located between Charleston and his hometown of Myrtle Beach, saying it would be much more comfortable for me. Next, he reminded me yet again not to speak to anyone about the trial or evidence. The following day I would be sent to the federal courthouse for a preliminary plea hearing, where I was to stand and plead not guilty.

  The next morning, four of us female federal prisoners, one other white girl and two black girls, were placed in full restraints. An enormous belly chain was wrapped around my waist (digging into my already bruised ribs from my extradiction flight), my hands were secured to the chain via the cuffs while the rest of the chain was wrapped around again and secured. Then we came to the leg cuffs. My left leg was clamped so tight I wanted to scream, any lingering pain in my ribs long gone. Then it was the right leg. There was about a foot of chain between my ankles, from which another chain was secured to my cuffed wrists. By the time it was all done I was in considerable pain and the mere thought of walking scared the hell out of me. And then all four of us were chained together. Once inside the truck, the girls chatted to the male prisoners in the other half of the truck. It was perfectly clear that the large group of men was facing the same drug conspiracy charges as the girls. After a bit I motioned to the girls that they should be quiet, but they were excited. I suspected that it was the first time they had been all been together since their arrest. After a while longer I pointed theatrically to the speakers in the van, and only then did they start to watch what they were saying.

  In the courtroom I glanced around to see if Harris was there. No one resembled him. Whew. I rattled all the way over to Russell who helped me into a chair next to him. Out of the cornor of my eye I spotted the familiar albeit older face of Graham Sturgis. He was glaring daggers at me.

  I did what I had to do, which was to say ‘not guilty’ and was escorted back out of the room to wait for Russell. He came in carrying an envelope which contained the evidence the prosecution had on me. I asked him how bad it looked. ‘They’ve given me six CDs’ worth.’ That didn’t sound so bad until Russell explained that it was about 6000 pages of evidence. And yet somehow I still felt confident there weren’t going to be any surprises.

  ‘Ah, one other thing I have here is this email from your father-in-law in South Africa. I thought it might cheer you up.’ He handed me the printout of the email. I thanked God my father-in-law couldn’t see me in this situation, and I was so touched he had made the effort to write, especially after having had such a terrible year himself. It was a beautiful letter, full of his love for me and the children, and wonderfully supportive.

  I was the first out of the truck back at Al Cannon, with my chained cohorts behind. At the other end of the underground car park I saw a giant long-range camera trained on me.

  ‘Quick,’ urged an officer, ‘cover your face.’

  I used Dad’s letter as my shield as we shuffled in chain-gang style towards reception.

  Later I would learn that that footage circumnavigated the world, and was seen by my fellow prisoners at Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre, and by friends in Australia and New Zealand. And of course it filtered into my children’s lives too. The irony was that I had shielded my face so I wouldn’t embarrass my children, and yet Reece’s first thought was that I was hiding the fact that something bad had happened to my face.

  24

  Georgetown, South Carolina, US

  October 2014

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I WAS WOKEN AND TAKEN DOWN TO THE transport area. Russell had promised me that I would be moved to a much better place but I was now familiar with the routines at Al Cannon. I was put in the small holding cell that stank of faeces, across from a larger cell that held several of the men I had travelled to court with, those same men allegedly part of the same drug ring as the girls chained to me. After waiting an hour, the cell door opened and those same two black girls from the van, New Jersey and Mary, joined me.

  Our departure was further delayed because New Jersey refused to allow the officers to test her for tuberculosis. She literally freaked out when they tried. I thought it was odd, sure that she had used many needles in the past, so why would she baulk at this? And at the same time I wondered why we needed a TB test. I had never had one before when leaving or arriving at a jail. Finally, once they threatened to strap her to a gurney, the sweary New Jersey agreed.

  Georgetown jail was small and old and housed around 200 prisoners. It was also filthy, but I kept Russell’s words in my head: ‘I’ll have you moved to a much better place.’ I kept reassuring the girls with that news too. On the way to our cell we were told to grab a mattress from a filthy, haphazard pile of them outside one of the security doors. I chose the cleanest, a thin, ripped, plastic mattress and tucked it high under my arm away from the grimy, damp floor.

  The three of us entered the unit, which had a few tables and a couple of phones. Downstairs there were five cells and metal stairs led to another five cells above. We were ushered to a bottom cell. The door clicked open as if by magic. Sitting on the bottom bunk was a smiling small blonde women. The cell was tiny. There was a toilet, a small sink near the door and bunk beds. My memories of this cell, however, are completely coloured by my uncontrollable shivering. It was freezing! I stood by the open door expecting to be taken to another less populated cell, but without another word the door was closed, leaving the four of us in this tiny room where the walls and floor were wet.

  ‘Holy shit,’ I said.

  ‘What the fuck?’ shouted New Jersey, and began beating on the door.

  Mary was shivering, too, and not only from the cold but also from fear.

  I asked if I could sit on the blonde’s bunk and began asking questions. Was it always this cold in here? Yes, she said, and then explained it was kept so cold to try and reduce the mould. I followed her pointed finger indicating all the black on the walls that I had mistakenly thought was dirt. Ah, so that’s why we had been tested for TB.

  I learned that we were allowed out of the cells for an hour a day. New Jersey started banging on the cell door again swearing up a storm saying that she and Mary hadn’t got their medication. Shit, I thought to myself, I needed to tread very carefully.

  Mary was shaking uncontrollably. I went to her and wrapped my arms around her and said it was going to be okay. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’ve done two tours in Iraq and spent time in hellholes but they were nothing like this. It’s not going to be okay! I have TBI and PTSD.’ TBI means Traumatic Brain Injury, which Mary got from an explosion while on duty. Clearly she and New Jersey needed their medication.

  I pushed the emergency button for help. Nothing. The blonde told me that the buttons hadn’t worked in years. What were we going to do?

  I knew that we all needed to calm down. One way to do that was to try and get comfortable and to tell stories – any stories, but best if they were unrelated to prison and our crimes. At first the girls looked at me as if I was mad but, huddled on our thin mattresses next to the toilet on the freezing floor with our arms wrapped around each other for warmth, that’s just what we did. New Jersey was actually one of the funniest people I’d ever met. I suspected that poor broken Mary was a shell of her previous
self.

  When our breakfast tray slid through the slot in the door in the morning I told the officer that they had better get these ladies their medication at once or something bad might happen.

  Later that day I was called out for a lawyer’s meeting. Russell walked in grinning from ear to ear and gave me a huge hug before I launched into a diatribe about Georgetown and demanded that he get me out as soon as he could. He looked apologetic and said he’d try. Then we got to work discussing the 6000 pages of evidence. He asked me if I once had a ride-on lawn mower, because he’d spent half an hour watching a video – one of the prosecution’s ‘pieces of evidence’ – of a man riding a lawn mower. My brow wrinkled in confusion while Russell explained that it seemed like an instructional DVD but he needed to make sure it wasn’t some hidden piece of information.

  ‘Why in the world would they have included that?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably to waste my time and your money,’ said Russell. ‘It’s that what the feds do, add multiple copies of the same thing as well as useless material to increase the costs for legal representation for the inmates.’

  The bond hearing date was set for 24 November. I told Russell that most of my friends were upset they weren’t at the preliminary hearing and wanted to know if we could ask all the people who were going to come and support me this next time to stand up so the judge got to see my local support base. He agreed it was a good idea.