Vicki texts me from a new number. It’s been three months since I last heard from her. In the interim, as I’ve tried not to worry too much about what is going on in her life, I have reacquainted myself with the disturbing research about female incarceration and reentry—which, not surprisingly, has caused me to worry more. Since the 1980s, when Vicki first became a returning guest in her local jail, the number of women behind bars has increased more than 750 percent. That’s a staggering statistic. The incarceration rate of women is now at an historic and global high with 133 out of 100,000 U.S. women behind bars, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Vicki has been part of another twenty-first-century trend: the skyrocketing incarceration rate of white women. The Sentencing Project found that in the first two decades of this century, the incarceration of white women increased 41 percent, while the incarceration of Black women actually declined 60 percent. (Despite these trends, African American women continue to be incarcerated at a higher rate: 1.7 times that of white women.)
The research reminds me that when women emerge from prison, they face different—and often tougher—challenges than do men. Most, like Vicki, have children, which can mean anything from engaging in the lengthy and stressful process of reclaiming custody to working the labyrinthine social services system to get benefits to finding family-wage work to, as Vicki has had to do for the entire lives of her two children, facing the guilt over and the damage done by the life you have been leading. Women encounter worse job prospects and make lower wages than men. And because their pathways to prison too often include violence, abuse, and addiction, they are, upon reentry, a “high needs” population that “consistently fares worse than men…for all measures of mental and physical health.” That was the conclusion reached by a federally funded study, Prisoner Reentry Experiences of Adult Females, that tracked women’s post-incarcerated lives at three, six, and fifteen months after release. The home-prison-home cycle had been a part of Vicki’s life for pretty much all of her adult life.
Vicki’s surprise text—actually a long string of messages—chronicles her problems renting a place to live. As with so many of our interactions in the past, this one feels like I’ve walked into the middle of an ongoing conversation for which I have no context. She obviously landed somewhere and is trying to settle in. Where is that? I have no idea. How long has she been there, and what is she doing? I have no idea. Are the police after her? I have no idea. But I read the texts. She apparently found a house to rent, and a woman she met said she would share the rent. Vicki must have gotten a job because she had $350 to put toward the deal. Then the woman never came up with her share. Vicki lost her deposit. In the next text she tells me that Steve wired her some money, and she is now renting a trailer.
After that flood of texts, there is silence. I wait fifteen minutes. “Do you want to talk?” I text her at the new number. She calls immediately.
The first thing she tells me, with no preamble, is that she was in jail a few weeks ago. She was pulled over by a local cop. Her car had a cracked windshield and looked “a little sketchy,” she says. But she thinks the cop was just looking for an excuse. She thinks he profiled her when he saw her inside a convenience store a few minutes before the traffic stop. “I was a little high-strung,” she says. “I bet he thought I was on drugs.” I am trying to imagine this scene: Vicki, all five-foot-ten of her, probably carrying her little yappy dog in her arms, jittery, maybe talking too much or too loudly to whoever was behind the counter, fumbling for change. She figures the cop pulled her over expecting to find drugs in the car. Of course the first thing he did was run her plates and her license, both of which were from out of state, through the system.
She sat in the car waiting for him to come back, slap handcuffs on her wrists and take her in. She was sure there was a warrant out for her arrest. That’s why she had lied to her family (and me) about finding a “traveling” job with the census, why she had secretly packed up her belongings, stuffed them in the trunk of her car, and driven off to who knew where months before.
The cop came back to inform her that she was driving with a suspended license, which was a criminal offense. Apparently, no arrest warrant had shown up in his search, which confused Vicki. After all, the cops in her hometown had found a large quantity of drugs in her house; she had promised to name her supplier in exchange for the charges being dropped; and she had fled. But she also knew, from long personal experience and acquired street smarts, how unpredictable and idiosyncratic the criminal justice system was. She didn’t have time to feel relief, however, because the cop arrested her anyway. Driving with a suspended license was only a misdemeanor, but it carried a fine (which she couldn’t afford) and a jail sentence. She spent the next five nights locked up in the county jail sleeping on a tick-infested mattress on the floor. “I ought to sue them,” she tells me. Then I hear a bang that sounds like her phone dropping on a hard surface and a yelp. Ziggy, her eleven-year-old dog, is having seizures. She’ll call me back. A week goes by.
During the next phone call, and the one after that, supplemented by our on-again, off-again texting, I find out what life has been like since she disappeared—and it is as chaotic as it always has been. First there was that falling out with the woman who was going to pay half the rent on a place Vicki found. The woman agreed, reneged, then changed her mind again and told Vicki to sign the rental agreement, that she was good for the money. She never showed up with a check. She stopped answering Vicki’s phone calls. Vicki thinks the women she knew in prison were far more trustworthy than those she meets in the free world. And then there’s the job Vicki found at a fast-food franchise. She hates it. She hates her boss. She tells me that she works her ass off but is not appreciated. But in the next breath, she tells me that Steve came to visit, and she missed a week of work. That was followed by a two-week period during which she was late for her shift every day. That’s because, she says, she ran out of her meds. She had no renewals left on her prescription, and she didn’t have a local doctor. She was pretending to be living in her hometown and trying to work the health-care and social services systems via her phone. Then her phone stopped working. She doesn’t have and has never owned—or even sat down in front of—a computer. Her phone is her one and only device.
She tells me with extraordinary pride that her new phone, the new number she called me from, is on her son’s plan. It’s the only way she could afford it. “This means he trusts me,” she says, “He really trusts me.” There’s a catch in her voice. She knows she has repeatedly disappointed her children. She has not been reliable, responsible, or for that matter, even present for most of their lives. They have learned the hard way, and repeatedly, that they cannot count on her. So this arrangement with her son—she sends him a check to cover her part of the bill—has great significance. It also means (doesn’t it?) that her son knows she is not living in her hometown and traveling for this fabricated job. Yes, she says, “both the kids know I live in Oklahoma.” And now, with that offhand remark, I know too. I ask her where, and she names a town I’ve never heard of. I look it up later. It’s maybe an hour from the Texas border, population 1,700, median income $22,000, and 90 percent white—a lot smaller, somewhat poorer, and just a little bit whiter than her hometown. She’s living in a trailer park with her dog that gets seizures (she can’t afford a trip to the vet) and another dog she adopted that has “issues.”
She tells me more about the job she hates. She tells me that every week her hours change. One week she worked thirty hours, the next only eleven. The boss is just messing with her. She has been trying to supplement her income by baking and selling cheesecakes. Last week there was money missing in the cash register at work, and she thinks the boss suspects her. She wants to quit. She wants to look for a new job. But it seems like every job requires an online application. “I don’t know how to do any of this,” she tells me. “And I get frustrated, and then my ADD kicks in.” I ask about her daughter. They are apparently texting again. She says her daughter and the boyfriend—the guy with whom she committed the crime that got her sentenced to the same prison as her mother—are saving money to fix up a van to live in. She thinks her daughter is clean. Maybe. She thinks she’s maintaining on Suboxone, the same prescription med Vicki takes, which treats opioid addiction. I wonder what “moving forward” even looks like for Vicki, whether her life outside prison walls will always be like this: tenuous, unsettled, one step, or misstep, from disassembling altogether.
The next I hear from Vicki, maybe three weeks later, is that she is back in her hometown. She was fired from the fast-food job. She put a few changes of clothes and her two dogs in her car, the “sketchy” one with the cracked windshield, and drove almost two thousand miles west. She has a plan, sort of. She is keeping a low profile, not seeing friends, not checking in with her street family, still mystified that the cops are not after her for the drug bust. “It seems like no one is concerned about my whereabouts,” she says. She sounds slightly disappointed. Meanwhile she is trying to get reconnected with the health-care system so she can find a new doctor and get valid prescriptions for her medications. She is waiting for an appointment at the DMV so she can get her license reinstated. Her cousin borrowed money from her mother so she could pay Vicki for two weeks of work sorting vintage clothes at the warehouse. She has also picked up a part-time job as a weed trimmer, a legitimate gig in those states that have legalized marijuana. For several hours a day she sits at a table pruning away leaves, snipping off stems, and manicuring cannabis flowers without damaging them. The potency of the plant is in the flower, not the leaf. Trimming also gives the product the “bag appeal” needed to compete for customers in the now-booming cannabis industry. Trimmers have to be able to focus on monotonous tasks for long periods of time. I wonder whether Vicki can do this unmedicated, either by legal or illegal means. She says she needs to make $400 so she can buy a new battery for her car and afford the gas back to Oklahoma, where she will, she says, clear out the trailer, pack everything in the car and move somewhere else. “I’m done here,” she says about her hometown, the place she has come back to after every stint in prison. “All my negative stuff is here. I am surrounded by it. When I wasn’t here, I could breathe differently.” Maybe that’s true. But two thousand miles away she still found drama in the workplace and in her personal relationships. Two thousand miles away she landed in jail. She got fired from her job.
She is thinking maybe she’ll move to Flagstaff. Steve drove through there on his way to see her, and he liked it. He could rent out the house, move there too. Or maybe she could move to Reno. She heard it was easy to find a job there. She is confident she can find one. She is a woman with no special training and a long history of incarceration who was fired from her last three jobs. She is on two medications to treat long-term addiction. She does not know, nor does she have any interest in learning, how to navigate the online world that is job searching. Confidence may be the best, strongest—only—thing she has going for her.
While she tries to earn enough money for gas to make it back to Oklahoma, she has started work on a vision board. This is a collage of images, pictures, and affirmations designed to serve as a source of inspiration and motivation. She learned about vision boards in rehab. One image she knows she’ll put on the board is a wedding picture. She and Steve are still planning to get married. She’s selected a date based on a numerological calculation she tries to explain to me, but I fail to understand. What I do understand is that she wants to find meaning in her life and the decisions she makes. She wants to start this marriage, now almost thirty years in the making, with some divine help, some mystical support from the world of numbers. Whatever it takes.