TWO

PARTY BUS

It is the mission of the Custody Division to serve the best interest of Los Angeles County by providing a secure, safe, and constitutionally managed jail environment for both staff and inmates.

—LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF‘S DEPARTMENT¹

It is January 2013, and Janeth is still locked up; Ivy and Pedro are in Mexico, according to the latest rumors. Although Janeth has been formerly charged, a trial won’t be scheduled until all three are apprehended. After spending the morning with Elie, monitoring the progress of the case, I leave for a professional commitment bordering on the surreal. I’ve been enlisted to accompany a group of philanthropists as they tour the Los Angeles County Women’s Jail. “Maybe I’ll see Janeth,” I grimly joke to Elie, knowing she’s in a high-security lockup, cloistered away from any VIP tour.

The tour organizers had invited me along so that I could speak to twenty funders traveling to the Century Regional Detention Facility, the euphemistically named women’s jail. The group was made up of representatives from private and family foundations from northern and southern California. Each day, these individuals oversee the awarding of millions of dollars of philanthropic funding dedicated to criminal justice reform. Their current interest stems from their dawning realization that so far, criminal justice reform has been almost entirely focused on men.

By the second decade of the new century, philanthropy was slowly catching on to this lopsided situation—and the reality that justice was gendered didn’t fit with most foundations’ emphasis on equity and access. Funders were recognizing that things needed to change. As a consequence, this group wanted to see a women’s facility “up close.” The sheriff, ever in search of funding and political connections, had responded to their interest by granting unusual unlimited access to the women’s jail. The philanthropists were scheduled to tour the facility and talk to guards and incarcerated women, directly observing how detention operates. I’d been asked to offer what is called “context”: information about women, gangs, and crime. I was also supposed to reinforce the fact that the jail was originally designed to “detain” individuals while they awaited trial. Detention wasn’t incarceration, which occurred in the state and federal prison systems after trial. I knew that today’s visitors often mixed up the two, an honest confusion they shared with most of the public. This confusion was further complicated by the current instability of California’s overcrowded carceral system. With the exception of federal crimes, which are subject to an entirely different system, jails operated by city or county entities are supposed to serve as pre-trial facilities. Prisons, in turn, are post-trial facilities and are administered at the state level. But in California, many jails, including the one we’re scheduled to visit, house individuals who are post-conviction and serving time. This is only the first of many complicated issues that will have to be explained during the tour.

We travel to the women’s jail in South Los Angeles on a luxury bus, with the group scheduled to eat lunch while I talk. The tour organizer passes out boxed lunches, and everyone spreads themselves comfortably around the upholstered seating. We look like we could be traveling to the Napa Valley for a wine tasting instead of going to a detention facility.

As the participants eat, I offer an overview of the specific dilemmas that women face. I talk about the types of crime women are most frequently charged with (drug-related), their changing roles in gangs (more active), and the dramatically increasing numbers of women being incarcerated. The funders listen as the bus rolls along, moving south on the 110 freeway, bypassing the marginalized Los Angeles neighborhoods many of the women we’re going to see call home. I pause to take questions while I wonder, Wouldn’t it be better if the funders could at least see the areas these women came from? To understand how their individual lives are intertwined with their communities? Is this group really going to grasp the inequities that lead to mass incarceration? Is anyone thinking about the voyeurism—going on a “field trip”—of privilege? As my internal monologue runs on, the funders ask questions, mainly about the role girls and women play in gangs. This has captured their attention—I’m not sure why. It’s probably easier to deal with women in the outside world, in the streets, rather than face the narrative that surrounds their incarceration and its aftermath.

Still, I can’t let this go. I ask the group, “What do you think happens to women after incarceration? What’s their place in the criminal justice landscape?” No one responds. Finally, one woman asks what programs exist for women caught up in the criminal justice system. We’re nearing our destination as I briefly explain that for so long both girls and women have been “included” in or pasted on to male-focused community-based programs, without a thought for their own experience of criminal activity and gang membership, their own struggles, their specific needs. Instead, they continue to be the object of an all-purpose strategy, with programming that has been developed for men frequently reconfigured for women. And this lack of insight into the issues that women face begins with their detention—in an overcrowded, understaffed, and antiquated facility that everyone on the bus is about to see.

In the beginning, jails were designed to hold people briefly until they could secure bail or until they were tried and sentenced. Today, because of prison overcrowding, they have turned more or less into ad hoc prison facilities where a stay in jail might last “two days or two years.” There’s a reason for these two extremes. Up to the present moment, individuals were usually kicked out immediately for lower-level crimes or due to what was termed a “DA reject”—based on a lack of enough evidence to hold them. However, if they were formally charged with a crime, bail would then be set. This was where the problems began.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department currently operates the largest jail system in America—it is the twenty-fifth largest correctional institution in the world, consisting of seven separate facilities. Out of the more than twenty thousand individuals LA locks up on any given day, a little over two thousand are women, and the numbers are rising as part of a national trend. But what’s more stunning is that almost half, 46 percent, of these women are in jail simply because they can’t afford to post bail. They’re locked up on what’s categorized as “pretrial status,” and the vast majority of these women, unlike Janeth, have not been accused of violent crimes. If they’re mothers, their children can be taken away from them at this point and forced to enter the child welfare system and foster care, just because they can’t make bail.

The remaining 54 percent—women no longer awaiting trial, who have cut a deal, or who have had their day in court—are still incarcerated in the Los Angeles County jail system because of a shift in public policy. In 2011, to address overcrowding in the state prison system, California voters passed Assembly Bill 109 (AB 109), which approved a practice known as “realignment.” The bill didn’t affect individuals who’d been convicted of serious offenses such as violent crimes—they stayed in prison. But individuals convicted of less serious felonies were diverted from state prison to county jails. The trouble with realignment was that jails were designed for detention, not incarceration, and these pretrial holding facilities assumed responsibilities they were never intended to fulfill. Now, with the women’s jail hopelessly overcrowded, the Los Angeles County supervisors had to consider building more jails in outlying areas far from where families lived, instead of funding community-based alternatives to incarceration. As a result, women who couldn’t afford bail or due to AB 109 were literally withering away in overcrowded, often violent settings for weeks on end, either awaiting trial in an equally overcrowded and understaffed court system or counting the days until their release.

But the problems didn’t end there. At least one in ten of these women—this is a low estimate—didn’t belong in jail or any kind of detention facility. These were women classified as suffering from a severe mental health condition. There were other unintended consequences of overcrowding: contagious illnesses and racialized violence. Additionally, in any given year there were at least 175,000 children who required county services because they had a parent who was incarcerated or on probation. This posed an additional strain on the Department of Children and Family Services as well as on the Probation Department and made absolutely no sense. This was why, as we embarked on our jail tour, one question circled round and round in my head: Where was a pretrial release program? How much better would things turn out for these women, their children, and their families if some sort of mental health diversion, some sort of family-strengthening effort, was funded instead of the county’s gearing up to spend two to three billion dollars on a jail in the middle of nowhere?

It all felt so counterintuitive. In ever-expanding ways, the jails made women’s problems worse. The majority of women in jail had encountered and been victims of violence throughout their lives. They didn’t suffer the effects of an isolated incident—which was traumatic enough. Instead, most women who were locked up experienced an ongoing “relationship” with violence resulting from childhood abuse or domestic violence. Or both. And then they were confronted with more violence in jail.

I’m thinking about how to convey all of this to the group when we arrive at our destination, a standard-issue government building—nondescript, gray, and timeless. In reality, the jail was built in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until 2006 that it was designated as a detention center exclusively for females. From the outside it doesn’t look so much like a prison facility as a post office, its courtyard surrounding a centerpiece: an American flag whipping in the wind. Then, once inside the door everything changes. The group passes through the metal detector—sans purses, bags, tablets, cell phones, and laptop computers. All the accoutrements of our wired age are turned over. Once through the metal detector we navigate increasingly smaller, darker hallways—the finished walls give way to cinder blocks, the lighting becomes dimmer, the ceilings lower.

Today’s visit is rigidly structured. Everyone is silent while we’re divided into two groups. Already I feel trapped. It’s not going to be possible for me to separate myself, to step outside, to leave early, to answer emails while I pretend to take notes on my laptop. Prison is the ultimate existentialist exercise. You’re forced into the here and now with no escape. I keep thinking about one former gang member I’ve gotten to know well while working in the community, Donald “Twin” James. It’s no coincidence that during his thirty-two-year stretch in San Quentin, Twin learned all the speaking parts in Waiting for Godot and read everything he could about Samuel Beckett.

I’m assigned to the first of two groups, led by Susan Burton. Because she operates one of the few reentry programs in California exclusively for women and is formerly incarcerated herself, Susan is more than a guide—she’s the expert our group desperately needs. She promises to talk with us when the tour is over. In the meantime, a deputy sheriff appears to instruct us that we’re supposed to move together as a group and follow the directions of the deputies within each area. Finally, we’re admitted to the first cellblock area. It’s small and strangely intimate. This isn’t the grid layout of a maximum-security prison. Instead, there’s a central desk and observation site on a raised platform in the middle of the room. The guards sit there, almost royal, perched on their Aeron chairs, watching the women. All around the observation desk, the women’s individual cells rise up in tiers, almost like the seats in a concert hall. They are stacked in three vertical rows and form a semicircle facing the desk. The cells are behind thick doors with a window set at eye level in each door. We’re on the unit where women who represent behavioral problems are isolated in single cells. “Is this solitary confinement?” one of the tour members asks and I nod while we’re shushed by a guard who wants to talk to the group. She gives us a brief orientation—jail cell etiquette 101. We are not to touch anyone. We are not to reach through the bars. There is a subtext the guards are communicating to the group: Remember, no matter what they look like, these women are dangerous, they are criminals, they can attack at any minute.

As I approach the first woman I want to talk with, I look beyond the door. There are bars and behind them, the tiniest of all possible spaces, just enough for a small cloth cot and, six inches away from the cot, a metal toilet with sink on top of it. There is no floor space. It is beyond claustrophobic, beyond containment, beyond description. And it is dark. There are no signs of the sky. It could be eight in the morning or midnight—there is no sense of time. The dim light, somehow worse than darkness, feels oppressive. There is sweat everywhere—on the walls, on the women, on my body.

The women talk through the bars as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. And their concerns are elemental. They need “sanis”—they don’t have enough sanitary napkins. One woman is recovering from having given birth two days earlier and can’t stop bleeding. They are sick. They haven’t seen their children. They talk about things women everywhere on earth talk about. Their kids. Their men. Their women. Their longing to return home. Their periods, their aches and pains, their bodies, their feelings that they aren’t attractive, that they are ugly. And they are hungry.

I’m an inveterate talker, but here words fail. The women keep talking to anyone who will listen. Again, and again, they talk of hunger. Withholding food is the most potent form of punishment the guards employ indiscriminately. We’ve already heard that when women misbehave or break the rules, their meals are stopped. Instead, they’re fed two “jute” balls a day. One guard helpfully supplies a photo of what the jute balls look like—supersized non-meatballs that our group is assured possess all the daily calories and nutrients required for good nutrition.

I ask one of the women about this system of punishment.

“They get you for anything they want. Even if you talk back—they cite you. It can add days to your stay. You lose your visiting privileges. And you have to eat those balls. They’re all the scraps left from the food they make. Like if you peel a carrot, the peel goes in a pile they use for the balls; you take the skin offa something, the skin goes in. Then they pack those balls together and freeze them. You gotta gnaw on the ball until it gets warm. I’d rather starve than eat that shit.”

I’m thinking about a friend who feeds her cats broiled lamb chops for dinner. I feel like I’m going to throw up. The guards repeat their warning that this is the high-security area for the most difficult prisoners, even though all I see are deeply depressed women. Then, before we can have any more meaningful conversations, our group is moved to lower security, where the women actually walk around in the area outside of their cells, interacting with one another. Some of them work at jobs in other parts of the facility—in the laundry, in the kitchen. It is not lost on me that they’re engaged in what is traditionally categorized as “women’s work” inside as well as outside the jail walls.

Susan Burton moves through each of the low-security spaces and disobeys the rules, hugging women and talking to them in a low voice. The deputies ignore her while warning our group not to touch anyone. As we are looking—not touching—proof of overcrowding is unapologetically on display. Instead of a single cot, there’s a three-level bunk in one tiny cell. Susan explains what she learned from being locked up multiple times: the top bunk is the most desirable; the bottom bunk is referred to as “the coffin.” And even with three women to a tiny cell, there are additional three-level bunks set up outside the cells—all highly desirable because they’re “out in the open.”

Our tour group is led into a small area next to the low-security cells and organized into six smaller discussion groups with two detained women assigned to each. It’s announced that this arrangement will allow us to talk more personally. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so oppressive. There’s no privacy—guards are stationed a few feet from us. As the women begin to share their experiences, everyone is aware that we’re being carefully monitored. So much for the “unusual, unlimited access.” In each group, the incarcerated women are talking, answering questions. But despite their carefully scripted accounts, their problems sound so complex, interrelated, and unsolvable. And they appear in multiples. There is a collective feeling of being overwhelmed.

I’m sitting next to a small, thin woman who looks straight ahead and pretends she’s listening to another woman who’s talking. Then she starts speaking to me, barely moving her mouth, and for a minute I feel like she’s Edgar Bergen and I’m Charlie McCarthy. Her voice is so quiet that I strain to hear her.

“I’m not supposed to tell you stuff. They warned us about what we should say. We’re not supposed to say anything bad about what’s going on in here. We’re supposed to talk about our crimes and how they’re helping us to get ready for when we get out. But it’s all bullshit. And the worst part is not knowin’ what’s gonna happen when we get out. I’ve been locked up three times. I got nothin’ waitin’ for me on the outside. I don’t know where I’m gonna live. It’s bad in here and it’s even worse out there.”

I quietly tell the woman that when she gets out, she should call UCLA information and ask for Jorja Leap.

“Can you remember that? ‘Leap’?”

“Like leap year. I’ll remember you. Don’t forget me.”

I reach out to hug her.

“I’ve gotta pretend I don’t want you to hug me,” she whispers, making a show of her rejection.

We’re leaving and I’m the one with nothing to lose. She tries to push me away, but I hold her close.

The lead deputy barks that the tour is over, then adds, “Wait! There’s one more part of your visit!” In an exercise that seems half public relations and half madness, our group is now guided into the deputies’ roll call room to debrief us on the visit. And we’re still not alone. Several sheriff’s deputies sit in on the discussion.

After we find our seats, Susan Burton stands up in front of the shell-shocked group.

“I always cry when I leave here,” she begins. “We need to do something for these women, for their children. Did you see any children’s visiting areas in the jail?”

The group all shake their heads, “No,” comes the answer, in unison.

“This is one of the worst things—it’s not the only bad thing—but it’s one of the worst. Do you know that none of these women get to see their children? And they haven’t even been found guilty. The only thing they’re guilty of is not having enough money for bail. We see poor women, Black women, women of color, women who can’t afford to pay the rent, let alone bail out. And if they do get out—there’s nothing waiting for them. Most of the time, by the time they get out, their children are gonna be gone—either staying with family or in the system. We have to stop this. Now. We gotta think about taking care of these women—while they’re locked up and once they’re out.”

The group is listening, nodding and murmuring to one another about their next steps.

As she winds down, Susan is joined at the front of the room by a late arrival, the man invariably introduced as “the producer of the Hangover movies, Scott Budnick.” Despite being in his early forties, he has the infectious energy of someone much younger. Scott appears everywhere—even at formal affairs—in dark-colored tennis shoes, his personal interactions often marked by the preoccupied attitude of an overactive child. But this lack of attention isn’t in evidence when he’s concentrating on the nonprofit organization he founded, the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), and when he is trying to help the young men who gather around him for support and guidance. After just a handful of years running ARC, Scott is now appearing in prisons alongside public figures like Richard Branson, who trumpeted via social media and at national convenings that Scott was one of his seven heroes (along with his mother and the Dalai Lama). Still, there’s no denying Scott’s passion. He is the Hangover franchise crossed with criminal justice reform. He can twist arms, schmooze, connect, raise money, and change social policy, sometimes all at the same time.

Scott is in rare form. Alongside Susan, he criticizes the deplorable conditions at the jail, announcing, “We’re gonna do something about this.” While Scott talks, one of the ARC members accompanying him, James Anderson, pops up next to me and grabs my elbow.

“Did you see those jute balls?”

“I’m still trying to figure out how they get away with calling that nutrition—”

James interrupts me.

“Scott and I are on it. We’re getting rid of them.”

Scott yields the floor to Susan, but I can’t take my eyes off him. Despite the edict banning all electronic devices, Scott is tapping madly away on what appears to be an iPhone while James whispers in my ear, “He’s texting the governor.” It appears that Scott Budnick probably has a direct line to Jerry Brown, Barack Obama, and God himself. I am certain, in that moment, that if I walk into the jail kitchen I will see the jute balls magically disappearing into the trash can.

Susan tells the group that everything they’ve just observed today is a microcosm of what is occurring with women in jails and prisons throughout the country. Judging from their rapt attention and the expressions on their faces, every funder in the room has been affected by the women’s stories and their needs. Yet, there’s still no discussion of a path forward. And the issue of funding for women’s programming remains unresolved. There is a great deal of work left to be done. And no one knows more about the deficit in action and the unaddressed needs of formerly and currently incarcerated women than Susan—Ms. Burton.

Susan Burton was born in Los Angeles, living first in an East LA housing project, Aliso Village. Alongside poverty, her childhood was punctuated by trauma, beginning with sexual abuse by her aunt’s boyfriend when she was four years old, and a family life that was beyond dysfunctional. As she moved into adulthood, she swung between criminal behavior, mainly drug dealing, and conventional family life. But tragedy stopped the clock. In 1981, her five-year-old son was killed after being hit by a car, driven by an off-duty LAPD police officer. In the aftermath of the accident there was no prosecution, no public apology, no response to the trauma she’d endured. She didn’t remember seeing LAPD chief Daryl Gates at the funeral, although her daughter Toni later told her he’d attended. After that, there was never any official response to ease her pain or address the tragedy that had occurred. Instead of therapy or religion, Susan turned to crack cocaine, smoking it and developing an addiction that landed her in jail and in prison. Worse yet, this kicked off a cycle of substance abuse and incarceration that endured for fifteen years.

In Burton’s beautifully written memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, she likens those years to moving through a “turnstile” she was powerless to escape. Finally, in 1997, Burton entered rehab at the CLARE Foundation in Santa Monica, a facility that largely served residents of the coastal communities that were predominantly white and affluent. Her friend Joe had recommended she try this program, and her brother Melvin had paid for her treatment. While in the process of ending her dependence on drugs, she experienced an awakening about the purpose of her life. Having struggled with the revolving door of incarceration, she became committed to helping other women reenter mainstream society once they left jail or prison. She also knew that women leaving incarceration needed more than a place to sleep—they needed the level of services she’d seen provided to the more privileged women on the west side of Los Angeles.

To fund her dream of providing such a haven, she worked as a live-in caregiver, saving the money necessary to buy a house in Watts. She maximized sleeping arrangements and turned her dining room into an office-bedroom, a layout that lent new meaning to the term “multi-use structure.” She opened A New Way of Life in 1998 and never looked back. The house has always been full, and the waiting list is long.

By the time of the jail tour, Susan had already begun collecting the awards that accompanied this kind of commitment: she was named a Top 10 CNN Hero, received a Soros Fellowship, and accepted a Citizen Activist award from the Harvard Kennedy School. Two California governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, appointed her to serve on state commissions on sentencing reform and gender-responsive strategies. She was, in short, a person with gravitas, whose impact on the treatment of women paralleled what Father Greg Boyle had accomplished for male gang members all over the world.

But right now, she wasn’t interested in accolades. She was, as always, interested in change.

“Everyone ignores these women,” she told the group. “Today that has to stop.”

At that moment, I knew I wanted to understand what women caught up in the criminal justice system experienced. I knew their stories needed to be told, framed in terms of the issues they faced. I also knew there had to be a way to address their plight, to change their fate. I just wasn’t sure what that might be.