THIRTEEN

LOVE IN THE TIME OF REENTRY

I want to find someone to love me. I do. But who’s got the time? I gotta think about getting a roof over my kids’ heads; I gotta think about getting food on the table. I gotta think about getting a job, meeting my PO. When can I find the time to do a relationship?

—NITA JANNSSON

I’m trying to talk my husband into going to Watts to sit down with a former gang member who wants to “pick his brain” about the LAPD. Although he’s been retired from the force for fourteen years—in recovery, as I love to say—he works alongside many residents of South LA who have come to trust him and talk to him about the police. But it’s a quiet Sunday afternoon and he wants to watch the Dodgers game. I’m getting ready to drive down to Watts, alone, when my cell phone chimes and my anxiety kicks in. Over the years, I’ve developed my own version of the national warning system. Late-night calls are never good. Weekend calls are also not good, especially Sundays. A Sunday afternoon call is the red alert of warnings. There’s no number on the readout, just the name: Carmen. “Oh dear God! What’s happened now?” I wondered.

Carmen had survived childhood sexual abuse, gang involvement, and the revolving door of Los Angeles County probation camps and jails to finally land in downtown Los Angeles, working in a tourist kiosk. She had long been part of my chosen family, and I was the godmother, co-madre, to her third child. I knew very few women who possessed her kind of resilience. Carmen had succeeded in surviving—undocumented—in Los Angeles while racking up a series of encounters with government institutions from which she always managed to emerge unbroken. About two years before, after a particularly gruesome incarceration that included delivering her fifth child while she was locked up in the LA County jail, she told me she was going straight, promising, “I’m never dealing drugs again, and I’m never getting locked up again.” Making good on that promise, she was hired by a local entrepreneur to sell T-shirts, souvenirs, and memorabilia. She went to work six days a week, wearing her thick ebony hair in a braid coiled on top of her head and colorful eye makeup; thin and dressed dramatically all in black, she looked like Frida Kahlo’s twin sister. At her Olvera Street souvenir stall, Carmen hawked “I [Heart] Olvera Street” T-shirts and mariachi puppets, while selling jewelry and accessories on the side.

The gift stall thrived as a combination monument to Los Angeles and a swap meet all in one, with Carmen capably managing the business with the same entrepreneurial skills that had contributed to her past success as a drug dealer. If you bought something from the gift stall and Carmen knew you, she’d open up her tote bag to show off new earrings or baubles she had for sale. She once enthusiastically tried to sell me a “beautiful purse—it’s pure leather,” and I barely managed to resist her sales pitch.

Carmen succeeded with the world view of a professional gambler—calculating the risks then making her move, which almost always turned out all right. Now, despite some of her sketchier business ventures and her alignment with active gang members, she’d won her latest bet: she hadn’t been arrested in over two years. Her juvenile record was sealed and her adult record had been expunged, primarily because none of her crimes were violent. There was only one place her luck didn’t hold: when it came to men, her choices invariably led to heartbreak, failure, and worse. Carmen was drawn to Black men who’d been involved with gangs and criminal activity. She was often told, even by her friends, “Stay with your own kind!”

Yet, ultimately, the problems with the men she chose had nothing to do with their color or their dangerous behaviors—instead, it always came down to their miserable treatment of her. All of them cheated assiduously, one beat her bloody, one had a child with another woman, then tried to enlist Carmen’s help taking care of the newborn, and one failed to show up at the baby shower that a group of women—myself included—threw for her when she was eight months pregnant with their second child together. But that didn’t stop her. Carmen kept searching for love—and by the time she was forty years old, she had a series of wrecked relationships and five children, along with the son of her former boyfriend, all dependent on her. Things had ended badly with her last boyfriend, Kevin. Despite some initial misgivings, Carmen managed to press charges, and he was found guilty of domestic abuse and attempted murder after he pushed her out of their car onto the San Diego Freeway.

Still, Carmen kept going. After Kevin was locked up, she moved right into her next relationship, with Brian, a gang-connected drug dealer. “He’s the one, Jorgee, he loves me!” Carmen confided. Then, a month after professing his love for her, he was arrested for racketeering and drug distribution, eventually taking a plea bargain for five years in state prison. And it was there that Carmen finally accomplished what she’d longed for her entire life: in a beige dress, with the assistance of a prison chaplain and her five children present, she got married. She was officially a wife and delighted in using the words “My husband, Brian.” In some ways it was an ideal situation: she had all the legitimacy and status of marriage without any of the responsibilities. She could live her life freely, no longer worried about finding or keeping a man.

Carmen’s work commitments attested to how well this new arrangement suited her. She moved on from Olvera Street and was now a case manager at a nonprofit program for homeless mothers and their children. Her coworkers adored her and the families she worked with all lined up to see her, even spending time with her after hours, drinking coffee and eating cookies at her Section 8 housing. Carmen wanted to become a credentialed social worker, and together we investigated community colleges where she might take classes.

The one obstacle to her career advancement—and her personal safety—was her undocumented status. But Carmen, ever resourceful, had connected with an immigration attorney who’d figured out a way to help her obtain a green card legally. She wasn’t paying $5,000 to acquire a fake ID! This was legitimate. She’d be able to stop looking over her shoulder and focus on the future. The executive director she worked for at the nonprofit was already mentoring her and we’d shared our ideas about Carmen’s pathway into college and when she could enroll in classes. The stars were aligned.

I learned early on working with men who’d been gang members that just when their lives started to stabilize and they encountered some degree of success, they would actually commit a crime or relapse back into substance abuse or suddenly, inexplicably, stop showing up for work—as if to wreck their good fortune. Homeboy Industries used to bestow an “Employee of the Month” award until it became apparent that every time someone won the award, they would recidivate, relapse, or just disappear. “It’s just too much pressure,” one gang member told me when I went to visit him in jail. I was confused. Didn’t doing well, winning an award, motivate him to keep going? “I couldn’t take it, miss. The award, everything. It was just too good. I didn’t deserve it.”

I don’t know if Carmen thought she didn’t deserve the upward turn her life was taking—she was calling on this Sunday afternoon to tell me she’d been arrested. She’d managed to be released within a few hours after reaching out to my unofficially adopted daughter, Joanna Carillo, who, just as she’d done for so many others, had raised the bail money for her. Now, her opening line was a lulu. “You are family, Jorgee, and I trust you. And I am going to tell you the truth.”

I knew exactly what this meant. Whenever someone who was caught up in criminal activity says they are going to tell me the truth, it was a signal to brace myself for a series of lies, usually revolving around their innocence and their total ignorance of any crime that was committed. This kind of lying certainly wasn’t the norm. So many of the women and men who reached out to me had not committed the crimes of which they were accused. But when they had and they lied, I truly understood why—there was shame along with the belief that someone like me couldn’t really understand the obstacles they faced. Carmen was no exception, and her narrative involved some supersized deceit.

“You know, I went to see Brian with the kids. I was sitting with him at a table, and someone had left their drugs there. I would never bring drugs into the prison. I’m not that stupid. You know me, Jorgee. I would never do anything like that.” She waited for me to agree, but I was silent.

“The deputies found the drugs on the table, and then they accused me of trying to smuggle drugs in to Brian, into the prison. They said they were gonna call DCFS to take my kids away if I didn’t sign a confession. So, I signed it. I swear, Jorgee, I didn’t do it. And I need a lawyer. And not some public defender—a real lawyer. I need you to help me, Jorgee. I need you to write a letter saying I am of good character. Please!”

Once I regained the power of speech, I told her I’d call her after I talked to Elie. Elie would know. Elie would help her. Again, the mantra, “Wait for Elie.”

I already knew certain things without any doubt. Carmen most certainly had tried to smuggle drugs into a state prison during visiting hours. There were no drugs “left behind” on the table—no one in their right mind did such a thing. The California state prison system is riddled with drugs supplied by two major sources: prison guards and families of the incarcerated. Sometimes, the two worked together: Nita Jannsson had a longtime drug-smuggling business that involved guards at a state prison—she was on the outside, her husband was on the inside, and one guard was their connection. Compared to Nita, Carmen was an amateur. None of this would stop my helping her, but before I did anything, I needed to find out just what the charges against Carmen were.

I also knew that there was no way she could afford a private attorney, even if she didn’t trust the public defender. This was an attitude shared by lots of people, including my partner in Project Fatherhood, Elder Michael “Big Mike” Cummings, a former gang member turned community activist who often referred to the public defender as the “public pretender.” These widely held, highly unfair attitudes were based on the belief that PDs never defended their clients, that they pushed clients to accept plea bargains rather than go to court. This was far from true and reflected a confusing range of factors, all of them leading to the reality that prosecutorial culture and practice reigned supreme with the scales hopelessly tipped in favor of the district attorney’s office.

I also knew that the sheriff’s deputies hadn’t threatened Carmen with children’s protective services so much as they’d used the law coercively, in their favor. They’d probably “educated” Carmen about what was about to occur. If she was in custody and said she had no family to take the kids—and for Carmen, there was no one—they’d be placed in foster care pending the outcome of her criminal case. As a teenager, Carmen had lived in a foster home; she didn’t want history to repeat itself. This could all be avoided if she simply agreed to the charges, said she was guilty, and promised to be in court on a date to be determined. That’s the document she signed. Which brought her to me.

I called Elie.

“Well, you know she’s lying to you.” I sighed in acknowledgment.

“And you know she’s going to ask you for something—to testify or to write her a letter of recommendation. That’s risky—you’re going to stake your reputation on someone who tried to bring contraband into a state prison.” I wasn’t worried about this—I would testify if it came to that. I was more worried Carmen wouldn’t go to court but instead would deal her rights away as part of a plea bargain.

“So, what can we do for her? She’s desperate not to have a public defender.”

“That’s exactly the lawyer she should have,” Elie was adamant. “She can’t afford an attorney. Anyone she finds will probably try to cheat her. I need to look up her charges. Why’d she do this?”

That was the one thing I did know: Carmen wanted her new husband to love her. More than anything, she wanted to make sure he wouldn’t abandon her—even while he was in prison. Weeks later she admitted to me that he’d asked her to bring the drugs into prison. By that time, Elie had found out exactly what Carmen had been charged with, and the news wasn’t good. She’d been caught trying to transfer marijuana and heroin to Brian for distribution inside the prison. Brian wasn’t going to let being incarcerated put a dent in his business activities. According to Elie, Carmen could serve time for this offense, and she’d be unable to visit a state prison again. Ever. Elie had recently filed an appeal for a woman who’d attempted to smuggle drugs into a prison ten years earlier. Since that time, the woman had lived an exemplary life. Her son was now locked up and she’d been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer; she wanted to see her son one more time before she died. The court denied her appeal. But there was additional bad news in store for Carmen: she would most certainly be fired from her job at the nonprofit and stood to lose her Section 8 housing—jobless, homeless, with five kids. Her efforts to get a green card would be totally derailed. We were living in Donald Trump’s America at the time, and she might even be deported.

Once again, Carmen would not be broken. She called, furious, after her arraignment and told me the public defender was “horrible, a monster; he wanted me to plead guilty.” She then pleaded with me to send her money for a private attorney. I called Elie and asked if she could find someone honest to take the case pro bono. But Elie was unflappable.

“It wasn’t her attorney representing her at the trial; it was just the supervisor from the PD. She has to calm down and wait. She’ll get a good PD to help her. Don’t give her any money.”

Elie was too late. I’d already told Carmen that I was going to send her $200. I also broke the news to her that I couldn’t find her a private attorney.

“That’s okay, Jorgee. Thank you for the money. I’ll find an attorney.” “Why don’t you call Elie?”

“Oh, I think she’s gonna yell at me. I don’t want her to yell at me. I can’t take it.”

And she’s going to call you out for lying, I thought.

A day later Elie called to tell me she’d heard from Carmen.

“I told her to stick with the public defender. It will be okay.”

“What do you think is going to happen to her?” This was always my refrain.

“I don’t know. She was just a few weeks away from getting her green card. She really blew it.”

I knew Elie was right. I also knew Carmen had done all of this for love.

I kept thinking about how I could help. Elie counseled caution. My daughter, Shannon, in her first year of law school, loved Carmen and, while still a legal novice, predicted, “She’ll probably be okay; it’s a nonviolent offense. They’ll make her wear an ankle monitor.” Surprisingly, Elie echoed her evaluation. Carmen called to tell me the housing agency had placed her on administrative leave. She knew they were getting ready to fire her. “I’m gonna run out of money, and my kids and I are going to be homeless. I was only trying to help Brian.”

Carmen was only “trying to help” her husband. But over the years, I’d never seen any evidence of men “trying to help” their incarcerated wives or girlfriends. The men who these women believed would protect them all too frequently abandoned them once they faced jail or prison. “We wanna believe men are gonna wait for us,” Nita told me, “and we’re havin’ a fantasy.” Men don’t have any problem finding women who will wait for them.

There are even formerly incarcerated women who deliberately marry “lifers.”

When I ask one woman why she married a lifer, she was quick to explain: “We have conjugal visits, and I know where he is every night—I don’t know a lot of girls who can say that.” I would say that sets the bar pretty low in terms of marital commitment, but many of these women express satisfaction with their lives.

I had heard stories of women who took the bus from Los Angeles to Corcoran Prison, 220 miles and four hours away, just so they could see their man. Yet when I put together all the material on the women I’d interviewed, laughed with, spent time with—all eighty of them—not a single woman told me she was visited by a spouse, partner, or boyfriend while she was locked up. There were also no accounts of men who brought children to visit their mothers. Instead, these women saw their children when grandmothers or other family members or social workers brought them to visit. Once they were released from prison, the vast majority of women were alone. A small number of them—six in all—started up again with the men they’d been involved with in the past. But for most of the women, there was no one waiting and no future possibilities. “Who’s gonna want me?” Nita asked me. “I’m old, I’m tired, I’ve been locked up, I’ve got three mouths to feed, and I don’t have a job. I don’t even want me. We’re ‘after prison women,’ and with men, we got a big problem.”

The big problem was love. Most of these women, even after incarceration and despite their uncertainties, still wanted an intimate relationship; they wanted someone to take care of them. These were the same desires that often had led them into the criminal justice system in the first place. And even on their journey out, many admitted they still longed to find someone to live with and love. This longing and the search for its fulfillment was what guided them and often conflicted with their commitment to change. “I want a relationship,” one woman told me, “but it can’t interfere with my recovery. There’s nothing more important than that.” Her words not only described her challenges; they reflected the experiences many women face after incarceration. They wanted relationships, yet after being locked up, they were also determined to change. The majority of the women I’d gotten to know didn’t want to repeat their past mistakes. “I don’t want the same kind of man, I don’t want an abuser, I don’t want a hustler,” an older woman who’d finished serving seventeen years at Chowchilla, explained. “I’ve been married twice—they were both no good. I want a good man now. I’m just not sure I can find one.”

Over the past decade, I’ve discovered only one thing for certain: there is no single pattern to post-release relationships. This is yet another example of how, after being locked up, women differ profoundly from men. There’s no sugarcoating it—it’s much easier for men who have been incarcerated to find women and build relationships after they’ve been in jail or prison than it is for women. They’re able to maintain relationships even while they’re in jail or prison. This is absolutely not to deny the intense barriers men face after incarceration. Their stories and struggles are real in terms of psychological, sociocultural, and economic obstacles. But the one area where men don’t contend with post-incarceration challenges is personal relationships.

For five years, I listened to the men in Project Fatherhood describe in detail their relationships with their wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, and casual hookups; they talked about their women almost as much as they talked about their children. The men complained about the women who wanted to possess them, the women who wanted to control them, the women who wanted them to be faithful, the women who cheated on them. And then I realized, no one complained about not having a woman (or, in several cases, women). What the men uniformly encountered and even expected was women wanting them and waiting for them. Very few of the women I spent time with experienced that. Despite the fragmentation of families of color and Black families, within marginalized communities, men appear to have a better chance than women of maintaining personal relationships when they are incarcerated.

Social stigma against women who are incarcerated and the negative consequences surrounding their relationships and family life appear to be much more profound for women than for men. Yet, despite all of these issues and others, the search for love and intimacy is part of women’s lives. No matter what they’ve experienced, none of the women I know wanted to be alone. The question is, just who did they choose as partners once their lives were changing after incarceration? And how far were they willing to go for love?

I was thinking about this when Adela called, asking if we could meet up at Alma Backyard Farms, in Compton. She’d been volunteering for this worthwhile program, which helps formerly incarcerated men and women learn about urban agriculture, carpentry, and landscaping through working in an enormous community garden. By connecting with the land and plantings, Alma fosters healing and creates a relationship between nature and community.¹ It was the perfect place to meet and talk during the Covid-19 pandemic. A week later, Adela and I were in the open air, wearing masks, sitting some feet apart from each other. Still, despite our social distance, this was one of the most intimate moments in all our years of talking. She began, “I wanna tell you about my relationships. It’s time.”

Adela had insisted, more than once, that she didn’t want to be involved with men anymore. Despite what she said, that declaration still surprised me—a reaction that was clearly idiotic on my part. When I’d known her at Homegirl, men were falling all over her. All the homies, no matter what age, would hit on her, ask her out, bring her presents, try to win her favor. She’d smile softly and turn them away. “I’d been married twice. Both of my husbands, first Sleepy and then Lefty, were gang members. They both ended up in prison. So, I had a rule: I was never dating a gang member again. I didn’t want to get involved with anyone who was caught up.” She stuck to her rule for years. But all that changed when her second husband, Lefty, was released from prison.

At first, she only saw Lefty when they were making custody arrangements for sixteen-year-old Julia, co-parenting with suspicion on both sides. But they soon began to spend time together, hiding it from their daughter. Then Adela discovered she was pregnant. She hadn’t planned on another child and wasn’t sure what to do. She’d had an abortion in the past and she wasn’t against having one again. She and Lefty were fighting, and she felt unsettled, uncertain. One day, she started bleeding and doubled over in pain. She had to ask Julia to drive her to the hospital. At the ER, Julia stayed by her side while the doctor examined her and said, “I’m sorry, you’re having a miscarriage. You’ve lost the baby.” The minute Julia heard this, she got upset. She couldn’t believe her parents had been together—and they hadn’t told her! That night she told Lefty, “You’ve done enough to hurt my family, leave us alone.” Still, even after their breakup, Adela acknowledged how good it felt to be wanted, good to be desired.

Lefty started calling her again. He still wanted her back, but along with wanting to control Adela, he was angry at her. He’d threatened her, although he hadn’t done anything physical. Yet. “I was afraid of him, even though he said he’d never hurt me. I wasn’t gonna wait and see,” Adela told me. “I told Julia we needed to go to a shelter because I was afraid of what he would do. I realized that either I stayed with Lefty in that lifestyle or I got out.” Adela thought about Ivy and how she’d warned her about Pedro, telling her to leave him, that he was abusing her emotionally and physically. She remembered another homegirl she’d helped leave an abusive marriage and, in desperation, called her for advice. The woman told Adela how much she’d helped her. This made Adela’s request for help with an abusive relationship even more difficult. “I remember I said, ‘I’m ashamed. I’m going through something, and I don’t know what to do.’” The woman immediately called the shelter she’d lived at, and the next day Adela was contacted by a counselor from Interval House, a nearby shelter for women and their children. “She asked me ‘Are you ready?’ I said, ‘I don’t know—but I feel like I am.’”

The next morning, Adela and Julia moved into Interval House. Adela followed their program, which included counseling and classes about domestic violence. “I started learning what abuse was. This was in 2017. I believed I wasn’t there because I was adjusting to life after prison. I was there because I needed to learn.”

At first, Adela had a hard time adjusting to her newfound knowledge—she felt a sense of shame and uncertainty. “I kept thinking, they’re not going to understand me, they’re going to judge me. But they welcomed me with open arms and helped me get through it. I started to understand that, with Lefty, I was emotionally abused. I also understood that in the past I’d been physically abused. I can’t tell you what I felt like when I realized that. I’m still learning what happened to me. I guess I was ready to understand—I hadn’t been ready before.”

This was beautiful Adela, the woman who’d always been in control, finally learning that she too had been hurt, she too had suffered. So much of the trauma she endured had been stuffed deep down inside of her. She’d pushed all of this away so she could go on—working, caring for her children, taking risks, running her business, getting through prison. She thought she’d settled her losses, but until she went to the shelter and spent this time healing herself, she never even understood what those losses were.

Adela is now a counselor at Interval House. She works closely with the women there, talking to them about what she experienced, accompanying them to court when they are filing temporary restraining orders or dealing with child custody issues. None of this is surprising to me. Adela and Interval House are a perfect fit, just as the Homegirl Café had been earlier in her life. Both share a similar philosophy about women helping women, although in many ways, this shelter also resembles ANWOL, but without the focus on incarcerated women. From the time it was founded in 1979, Interval House established its unique identity as the first “survivor-led” program in the US, staffed entirely with individuals who have dealt with and overcome trauma, violence, and homelessness. Its mission, “to ensure health, safety and self-sufficiency for victims of domestic violence and individuals at risk for abuse and homelessness,” is reinforced by its practice of “training from within.”² Its approach is culturally sensitive and diverse—services are available in over seventy languages. Embodying the mission, its executive director, Carol Williams, wisely recognized that Adela could help so many others if she joined the Interval staff.

Today, Adela is at peace. Along with a woman who was incarcerated with her in federal prison, she now plans to open a domestic violence shelter that specifically helps women who’ve been incarcerated. Because of what she experienced, Adela believes women who’ve been locked up may not realize what traumas they endured until years after they get out of jail or prison.

“I think about these women,” she tells me. “I was one of them. I could have been Ivy or Janeth. I wonder what would have happened if someone really knew what the two of them had gone through. Ivy and Janeth didn’t want to get in trouble; they were lost. They both were abused. And it was all because they wanted someone to love them.”