Ayelet Waldman

WOMEN IN PRISON
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EXCERPT: IRMA RODRIGUEZ

The first time I was sent to juvenile hall when I was twelve was for school truancy, being a runaway and an incorrigible delinquent, and for using phencyclidine, angel dust. My grandparents were devastated. They just couldn’t understand how it had gone wrong. But they were loyal. My grandmother would not miss a visit. That lady was the first one there and the last one to leave. I remember the counselors at Juvenile Hall would give her lists of things I was allowed to have—half of which I didn’t even need—and she would bring every single thing on the list. My grandma even started bringing things for the other girls, too. It was like she was the grandma of the whole unit. All the girls knew when she was coming that everybody was getting something. They weren’t rich; my grandma was a cafeteria dietician and my grandfather was a janitor. He did floors, she cooked, and they supported us to the best of their ability. But even so she was like the grandma of the unit. When she was coming they just knew that everybody was going to get a gift.

I was in for three months and then they let me out. But I was only out for a couple months and then it began all over again. It was like a cycle. I would be out for a little while, and the probation would come and pick me up again, out of nowhere. Sometimes I would be just at my grandma’s and they’d come.
The probation officer would say, “We got a call from your school, you’re not showing up, you ain’t been there in a month, what’s going on here?”

My grandmother would say, “Well, we just can’t control her.”

That would make my grandfather so upset. He would say, “Why are you telling them that? Why are you telling them that we can’t control her? They’re going to lock her up!”

They would argue. I caused a lot a lot of heartache in that home because my grandfather always defended me. I could go kill somebody and he’d find a reason to say, “Nope, she didn’t do it.” My grandma, on the other hand, was the more responsible, honest one, “This is how it has to be. I know they’re gonna lock her up but I have to do this. I have to say the truth.” And you know what, now I’m grateful for this. She tried, at least.

Once, instead of Juvenile Hall, I was sent to boot camp. When I got to the point that they began letting me go out on passes for the weekend home, I just left. And that’s when I got pregnant. I was fifteen, and I was smoking PCP on a daily basis by then. I was drinking alcohol and smoking PCP all day. When my baby daughter was born they took her into custody and sent me back to Juvenile Hall. By now, though, my mom had gotten off the Methadone and was able to get custody of her.

I was so glad my little daughter didn’t end up in foster care. By then I’d been around so many women in prison. I’d see them crying on the phone and stuff because they had just heard that somebody had touched their little girl in the wrong areas -- private areas. I don’t think I could endure hearing that somebody touched my baby in her private area. I hear a lot of stories about sexual abuse here in prison. It breaks my heart to hear these girls talking about having sex with their fathers, being abused. I might have had a harsh childhood but not like the stories that I heard of the women in here. There are some really hurt individuals in here, and I’m not talking hurt just mentally. I’m talking hurt physically—scarred and damaged so they can’t have kids. It makes me so grateful that my mom was able to rebound and care for my daughter. At least she avoided being abused in foster care. But of course, in the end, my daughter had a baby at fifteen. It’s like the cycle was never broken. My mom wasn’t married and had me young. I wasn’t married, had her young. And now my daughter, unmarried, had a baby young. I only hope my granddaughter will be able to break the cycle.

The first time I was sent to prison rather than Juvenile Hall I was 18 and convicted of possession, transportation, and sales of PCP. I had large quantities, apple juice bottles of that stuff. My first trip to prison was six years, and I’ve pretty much been in and out since then. In the first institution I was taken under the wing of lifers who knew I was a baby and couldn’t take care of myself. A lot of them played mom and a lot of them played sister, and they taught me the moral and principle of how to carry yourself and the dos and the don’ts of surviving in prison. I learned that you have to carry yourself right, carry yourself with respect.

It’s hard to explain how degrading prison is to someone who’s never experienced it. You are told when to wake up, when you can bathe, when you can brush your teeth. You stand for 20 minutes waiting for a door to open just so you can walk in a line and go eat. You’re given three minutes to shovel down your food and then you’re right back in that line, waiting for them to open up the door again so you can go put your stuff way. Through all this you have constant yelling over an intercom. There’s a lot of heartache, a lot of crime, and a lot of violence and chaos. Crammed into a building with 200 women you’ve got 200 different kind of cultural backgrounds, ethics, beliefs, attitudes, emotions. You got 200 different ways of processing emotions. There are some women who can’t read, some that weren’t even taught how to shower. They come in here and they are stripped of more of their dignity. They can’t even go to the bathroom without male staff watching. You get so accustomed to the loss of dignity that your standards just disappear.

But some women come in who have never even taken off their clothes in front of their own husbands. They get so upset and so embarrassed, they cry. What makes me the saddest is that I find myself hardening up, saying things like, “What are you crying about?” I have to remind myself to have compassion. Just ’cause I’m used to it, doesn’t mean she’s used to it. It’s so sad to see women coming here who really don’t know how to deal with prison. They’ve never been out of their homes. They’re in here for ridiculous stuff: making bad decisions, helping someone out. They were just so naïve and gullible that another person was able to reel them in. And they’re incarcerated with other people who’ve committed murder. It’s like one pit. Everyone’s thrown in one pit.

I first went to prison back in the early ‘80s and at that time there were a lot of corrections officers, COs, who were getting away with a lot of terrible things. It was kind of scary because you didn’t know which CO was the good one or which one was the crooked one. You learn to keep yourself as safe as possible. The COs were bringing drugs into the prison. They would swap sex for drugs. Girls were always getting pregnant there. A couple of times COs allowed certain doors to be propped open at night for other inmates to get into different cells and beat someone up or steal her property. I really to this day don’t know exactly what happened in there because I was locked in my room. You really don’t know what’s going on but you hear muffled screaming and the sound of someone being thrown around. And you’re wondering, “It’s two o’clock in the morning, how did this door get open?” The COs would do it, in return for money or sex. Or maybe just because. Who knows why they do these things.

Even now, when things are supposed to be better, COs routinely come into our rooms and take our things. A lot of us have arts and crafts supplies—cardstock and markers to make cards. We might have books or other small things. Routinely the COs will come with their gloves and bags. And they take everying. You’ve got three blankets, trust me, they will take them away. You have a homemade pillow sewn up, they take your pillow. You’re constantly living on edge. Sometimes I feel like they set women up. They know who’s going to blow her stack about having her things taken, and they purposely target her, just so that she will lose it and they can bust her.

There is an abundance of drugs in prison, more than the streets. It’s the currency of the place. You buy it, get it for free, do whatever. You become a runner, do a favor for an inmate, she’ll give you half of the drugs. Even your tray of food - hamburger night, pork chop night - take the pork chop back, you get dope in return. I went in for angel dust, but I came out actively using heroin. I had tried heroin in the free world but I wasn’t an active heroin addict, because of my mother. I knew I didn’t want to follow her example and be a heroin addict, so instead I used PCP. But when I got to prison I started using heroin, and by the time I got out I was hooked.

After that I was just in and out of jail and prison. In and out. Out for sixty days, back in again. In for four years, out again, violate parole, back in again. The same thing over and over again, for years. The only thing that changed was that in the early nineties I switched from heroin to crack cocaine. Every time I went into prison, I came out with a worse addiction. Crack cocaine is just overpowering. I can’t even express what it’s like. I’m clean and sober now, and I look back and say, “God! What the hell was I thinking?” I look at my arms at the scars and tattoos and I see how girls without them can wear pretty shirts and stuff and it just makes me so sad. I just had no sense of worth. It just didn’t matter.

It took me a long time to get clean. I’ve been in and out of programs. I’ve worked with sponsors, I’ve gotten therapy, I’ve done outpatient, I’ve had intensive family therapy counseling. It seems that when I did the intense family therapy, that’s what caused me to reuse drugs even more. A lot of the help I got was court ordered. It was nothing that I ever chose to go get. I wasn’t ready for it, and I was scared. Fear turns into anger and anger turns into resentment and resentment causes you to use because if you don’t know how to deal with the resentment in a healthy way, you have to numb it. So I’d use more, because of all therapy. It was only when I was really ready to face all that stuff, when I came to it on my own, that I got clean.

Voice of Witness is a nonprofit book series that empowers those most closely affected by contemporary social injustice. Using oral history as a foundation, the series depicts human rights crises around the world through the stories of the men and women who experience them. Voice of Witness was founded by author Dave Eggers and physician/human rights scholar Lola Vollen, and is the nonprofit division of McSweeney's Books.

EXCERPT: IRMA RODRIGUEZ

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