The years between ages fifteen and twenty-six are structured with recognizable milestones: high school, driver’s license, college, first love, first job, first serious relationship, perhaps marriage, possibly a child.
For those who pass adolescence in prison, none of these rites of passage go away; it’s just that they take on a massively distorted shape. It’s sort of like a fun-house mirror. These life events don’t get ticked off on some sort of regular schedule of progression but get racked up, unpredictably so, over the course of a hard-fought existential struggle. And extra rites of passage, unknown, say, to the high school senior, get added in. First long-term separation from family. First racial melee. First administrative segregation, also known as first solitary confinement. First sodomization.
From the time of his arrest to the time of his sentencing, so for roughly nine months, Michael was mainly, except for a brief transfer to San Fernando, in Central, the juvenile prison. At Central only parents and legal guardians could visit. This meant that after his arrest, for nine months, he saw his siblings only in court. And visits were brief, thirty minutes after a three-hour wait for admission, in a bare room with nothing but old, gray, stackable office chairs. Parents and children were allowed to hug when the parents arrived and again when they left, but there couldn’t be physical contact in between; nor was there a chance to eat together. In these early days, Michael was very emotional, very teary, and very apologetic.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Mama,” Karen remembers him frequently saying.
L.A.’s historic juvenile prison was also like school. The staff sponsored parent meetings that bizarrely had the feel of a PTA. Staff led parents through conversations about why their kids had ended up in Central and about how to support them. They even, PTA-like, gave the parents certificates for their participation. The educational element of Central was serious. Between his arrest in September, at the start of his junior year in high school, and his sentencing in June, Michael earned his GED. By sixteen, in other words, he was a high school graduate. To those who knew him, this was hardly surprising. He was bright and curious. After the sentencing, Michael then transferred to Los Prietos Boys Camp in Los Robles near Santa Barbara. Karen remembers the three-hour drive and taking picnics to Michael. “We had lunch together,” she recalls with the trace of a smile. The food, the physical contact, made this camp a high point.
When Michael turned seventeen, he was immediately transferred to a “distribution center” in Kern County, near Fresno. This distribution center in North Kern State Prison takes ninety days to compile inmates’ criminal records, life histories, medical and psychological histories, and social relationships, in order to recommend their appropriate institutional placement. They sent seventeen-year-old Michael to the High Desert State Prison in Susanville, near the Oregon state line, one of the toughest prisons in the system.
At this distance, it was impossible for Karen to visit. This was family separation to the max. “That’s where,” Karen says, “he had his worst experience. He was so new to the prison system.” “I could sense it. In my spirit,” she continued. “His voice was sad, it was hard to talk sometimes, there was an increase of loneliness, he sounded out of touch, he really needed his family, needed some common ground, something familiar. And I never saw him up there.”
Michael would spend his first six months in adult prison without a single family visit. Who knows why the authorities made whatever diagnosis they did that led to Michael’s being sent to Susanville. These files remain utterly unavailable.
Devoted mother that she was, and now finally coming out of her own emotional paralysis, Karen started working the phones to get Michael moved closer to home. After those six months, Michael was transferred to dry-as-dust Centinela, across from Mexicali on the Mexican border. For someone driving from Los Angeles, this felt like driving nearly all the way to Yuma, Arizona, where Shawshank Redemption happened to be filmed. Karen remembers the exhaustion of the drive and how grateful she was that, having to make an early morning drive on the weekend after a hard week of work, she never ran off the road and into the mountains. Here family sleep-overs were possible, and Karen was able to take her daughter Roslyn, and Roslyn’s newborn, Joshua, sick with asthma but nonetheless also playful and happy, to spend time with Michael, who was beginning to adjust to his new life. Numerous scholarly studies agree: family contact is the single most important thing in helping inmates through prison time and back into the world as people less likely to become repeat offenders.
Karen could see Michael starting to change in Centinela, not in his physical appearance but in his demeanor. He was gaining in confidence and settling down. He did vocational courses, gaining certifications in plumbing and electrical work. He joined a Toastmasters club and for the first time in his life overcame his stammer. He converted to Islam.
MICHAEL IN CENTINELA, ON PRAYER RUG
Karen says that they didn’t talk about prison life in any great detail. She would ask if he was okay, and he would tell her that he was hanging out with older men who were lifers and that they were taking care of him. She met one of these men once, during a visiting day, and then happened to bump into him years later on the outside. He told her then, “Your son is a good son, he just got caught up.” These older black inmates kept Michael focused. He did a lot of reading with them and spent time in the library.
The other change that Karen noticed while Michael was in Centinela (the Spanish word for “sentinel”) was the arrival of tattoos. Not many. To the very end, Michael had nowhere nearly as many tattoos as the other inmates around him. Some had inked every visible inch of skin and, probably, the rest as well, using pieces and parts from ball point pens and portable CD players to set up ad hoc tattoo parlors. But when Michael left for adult prison, Karen had asked for only one thing—that he not get a tattoo. He knew, though, how to forestall her wrath. For his first tattoo, around his wrist, he chose her name, “Karen.”
“I never asked for anything else,” she recalled. “When I saw my name, I was just furious.”
But then, she says, she had a realization. “The one thing I realized was that it was his world now. I couldn’t control what was going on. He had to do whatever he had to do to take care of himself.”
From Centinela, Michael transferred after three years first to Chino’s California Institution for Men and then to the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco. By the time he reached Norco just before 2000, Karen realized that she had seen her boy change from child to man. When he entered Centinela, she remembers, his conversation was full of phrases like “I need” and “Can you send me?” By the turn of the millennium, though, this had shifted.
Now he asked, “Mommy, how are you doing; are you taking care of yourself?”
MAP OF PLACES WHERE MICHAEL WAS INCARCERATED
Although I was eight years older than Michael, by the dawn of the millennium it appeared that he had grown up faster than I. Graduate school prolongs a state of dependence, and I started my first full-time job only in 1998 at the age of twenty-six. By then, Michael had been in prison, surviving even in an adult facility, for several years. When in 1999 Michael and I picked up a relationship that had lapsed when I left for graduate school in England, we found ourselves closer to being peers than we had been as children. The eight years between us had seemingly diminished to only a few. This gave us the chance to become friends on an equal footing and to confide in each other. He was as shaken as I by my parents’ 1999 divorce. The seeming stability of their marriage had been as much of an orienting point for him as it had for me.
“NORCO, CA STATE PRISON” 2015, PHOTO BY STEPHEN TOURLENTES
When Michael and I reconnected in the late nineties, he was transitioning through Chino—a notoriously tough prison—and landing in Norco, the final stop on his journey. Sometime after I moved to Chicago in January of 1998 to start teaching at the University of Chicago, Michael and I began talking regularly on the phone. Once he moved to Norco, I began to visit him regularly, every other week in the summer, and once or twice during the Christmas holidays, depending on the visiting schedule. The only seasonal differences I remember in those prison visits had to do with the weather: warm or chilly. I don’t recall any holiday decorations inside the prison, probably for good reason. Christmas ornaments would surely have made excellent weapons. Over my seven or eight years of visiting Michael, the environment in the visiting area was utterly unchanging.