35, formerly imprisoned
Sheri was interviewed in a small, empty park in Inglewood, California. As she shared the details of her story, she frequently looked over her shoulder to scan the other benches, ever vigilant from her years in prison. Sheri was seventeen when she met her husband, and their marriage quickly deteriorated into mental and physical violence. A year into the marriage, Sheri shot and killed her husband, and was sentenced to fifteen years in a California state prison. During her time inside, she was diagnosed with ovarian cysts, and agreed to have them removed via a cystectomy. Then, for the following five years, Sheri found herself unable to menstruate, and experienced menopause-like symptoms. An investigation led by the legal nonprofit Justice Now revealed that the surgeon who had performed Sheri’s cystectomy had also given her an oophorectomy without her knowledge or consent. Sheri has been home for a year, and is working to rebuild her life and help other survivors of domestic violence.
SCHOOL WAS NEVER HARD FOR ME. IT WAS AFTER SCHOOL WHERE I GOT INTO MOST OF MY TROUBLE
I grew up in Watts, South LA. My parents cared for me, but we weren’t an affectionate, interactive type of family. My dad was always working, and he wasn’t around the way me and my mom both needed him to be. My momma, because of the strain that was going on between her and my dad, she isolated herself. I felt very unloved, unprotected, and very lonely.
School was never hard for me; I was always in some kind of gifted program. It was after school where I got into most of my trouble. I was angry, for a lot of different reasons. My home life was very strained, very hurtful, there was a lot of pain, a lot of loneliness. At school I would always be sent to the principal’s office for one thing or another, get written up or have some kind of detention, yet still I aced every test. The teachers wanted to kick me out, but my test scores and my academics were high enough that they kept me in. I was one of those kids who were really smart but tough, they’ve got that attitude.
Fortunately I never got into the heavy stuff, but I smoked weed. I smoked it from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed. The weed just balanced me out; it calmed the anger inside of me. I don’t think my mom knew the difference.
I first became pregnant at fourteen, and by the time I was in eleventh grade I had two kids already. After eleventh grade I dropped out of school because my oldest son was constantly sick. He was born with a respiratory illness and was always running a high fever or congested, so once a month I was in the emergency room to bring his temperature down.
My mom helped me with my sons. But I felt that, because I was still a child and we were all under the same roof, they were like another two of her children. So when I said no, she said yes, and her yes went. That sparked a lot of heated arguments, which led to power struggles.
MY HUSBAND BECAME CONTROLLING OVER ME AND MY SONS
I was living with my mom up until I was seventeen, and then I moved out on my own. I met my husband at that time. One of my friends from high school was married to his relative, and so we exchanged numbers and began communicating over the phone for several months. Eventually, we arranged a formal date, and the rest is history. We were together for two years, married for one, before I shot him. I shot him twice in the upper torso and he died. I did fourteen years for that.
My husband was abusive almost from the start. At first I took it as him being protective, loving, and caring, but he became controlling, dominant, and possessive over me and my sons. At first he was physical, but he didn’t hurt me. He basically would stop me if I tried to walk in the door, he’d block it. If I tried to take off, he’d grab my arm, not too hard, just enough to stop me, and he’d say, “Come here, don’t go nowhere, I’m not done talking to you.” But it didn’t become painful, physical, until after we got married.
It started at a family event. I didn’t get up and do something he asked me to do, and so he began to talk down to me and bad-mouth me in front of his family. His family tried to interject. They were saying things like, “Hey, leave her alone, man, we’re all watching the game. It’s cool, get up and do it yourself.” And then he immediately challenged them. He said, “Anybody has a problem, I’m gonna whoop your ass! Leave my wife alone!”
So I got embarrassed and I left. I hadn’t taken more than a few steps away from the house when he charged me to the ground. We began wrestling and tugging and fighting. His family didn’t stop it; a stranger off the street came and broke it up. It was the first of many, many fights that came very rapidly after that.
Thirteen months it lasted, with him abusing me. It just got worse and worse. I’ve been raped and sodomized by him, I’ve been tied up and held hostage, I’ve been choked to the point where I passed out numerous times. He’d strip the clothes off my back, sometimes leaving me half-naked in the street. He’d take all my clothes and destroy them or hide them, and then I would walk around for a week with just the clothes on my back. He would take all the money out of my bank account so that I couldn’t move. He would take the battery and disconnect the stuff out of my car so I would be stuck.
It was a very degrading, humbling, shameful, embarrassing time in my life. I was not easy in my own home; I would wake up feeling like my breath was being cut off. It was very stressful, very painful. But nothing was as painful as looking in my sons’ faces after I got beaten up. One day, in the fall of 2005, something happened that woke me up to the reality of the danger me and my children were in. I’d told my sons to go put their toys away, but they were just jumping up and down on the bed. My husband snatched them off the bed, and when he did that, panic just struck in me, like this protective nature, and I jumped all over him. I knew at that point that, by any means necessary, I was going to get myself and my children out of that situation. I saw that it would only get worse. My sons were so precious to me, and they were just so beautiful, so loving, and it wasn’t fair for them to endure what was going on.
I HAD GIVEN UP ON THE LAPD TO PROTECT ME
By that point, I had given up on the LAPD to protect me. I’d already had numerous police reports from previous fights. I’d had emergency room reports, reports from my doctor about the wounds from the abuse. I had given up on God because I felt God was allowing this thing to happen to me. What had I done to deserve this when I had turned my life around and was going to church and living a spiritual life? And my mother and father, with them I always felt unprotected, unloved, so it was not my first instinct to run to them for protection. So I went to the streets.
The streets are always there waiting for you. The streets always have what you need, and I needed a gun. And just like that, I had a .38. My sons and I had started staying with parents, but I got the gun just in case my husband came and caught me off-guard. I was also going to use what little money I had to get away from him. I had some friends that had moved to Nevada, so I was thinking of going there.
At this point my husband was doing all kinds of stuff—constantly calling my mom’s house, threatening me, telling me that we were going to die together. So one day—it was November 15, 1995—I went to move my stuff out of the house. My husband was there, packing all of our stuff; he had the kids’ stuff all packed up in this U-Haul truck. I knew there was a reason he was packing up all that stuff, and not because we were moving. I was afraid he was taking my sons’ things so he could manipulate them later, like, “Hey little man, here’s your toy, come get it.” I just knew him and I knew some of his tactics. I knew he was treacherous, he was very calculating.
When I looked in the house, it was all messed up. Everything I’d worked hard for, my husband had destroyed. I was trying to get our things, and he was steady threatening me under his breath. After a while, I just lost it. Everything in my identity, my integrity, everything was lying on the floor, shattered and cut up and destroyed. It triggered something inside of me and I pulled out my gun.
But then my husband, he got that smirk on his face, like he knew he was going to win. He kept looking at the gun, looking at me, and in my heart I felt that if he’d got a hold of the gun it would have been me dead. I was crying, just hysterical.
He said, “So, you gonna shoot me?”
I said, “I’m tired, I can’t do this any more.”
Then he said, “All right,” but it wasn’t like, “All right then, I’ll back down,” it was “All right, well, let’s do this.” When he charged toward me I fired. And it felt out of body, it felt unreal. But when I came to, he was lying there on the floor. Somehow I got back to my parents’ house because I just felt like I was never going to see my children again. I held my children until the police came.
I had a neighbor who’d heard the hollering and the screaming between me and my husband. She’d just had that gut feeling that something was not right and she called the police. I thank God for every time she’s ever called the police, whether it was for me or against me. I thank God for her, because we need people like that, because it is life and death. It was my life or his death.
When the cops picked me up at my parents’ house I was numb. The detective began to try and build a case, not even understanding me or what I had come out of. Every time I would begin to tell him about what had happened or what I was thinking, he’d shut me down. He only wanted something that could give him evidence to stand upon.
THE JUDGE DIDN’T BELIEVE I WAS A BATTERED WOMAN
After just coming out of a relationship where I’d fought for my life, I began fighting for my life again in the judicial system. I don’t believe the system handled my case fairly. I had neighbors testifying for me, I had family members testifying for me, I had police reports, I had medical records, but none of that meant anything to the prosecutor. Their job was just to convict me, it was like a show. The prosecutor was trying for a sentence of thirty years to life. I had to fight to not go into a prison for life.
I believe that domestic violence representation now is a little better than fifteen years ago, but fifteen years ago, let’s keep it real—they didn’t give a damn. I was a young African American woman, I was from the ghetto, I didn’t have money or anything else like that, so of course my chances of going to prison and nobody giving a fuck about what happened to me was high.
At the first trial I got a hung jury. Before the second trial, that’s when I was given a deal—fifteen years. The judge said if I lost in trial she was going to give me the max because she didn’t believe that I was a battered woman.1 It didn’t matter to her that I had iron marks on my chest, iron marks to this day on my arms, bruises and scars all up and down my body. Back then, the battered woman syndrome was just becoming a factor. There was no consideration, no compassion for the fact that people like me were fighting for their lives in their own homes. There was no consideration of the fact that I was just like a prisoner coming out of war.
I was in county jail for two years while I was fighting my case. It was like living with a bunch of college girls, but bad girls. The Bad Girls Club. I got a chance to meet a lot of high-profile cases, a lot of the cases that you’ve seen on TV. I’ve actually had the privilege of meeting some of these beautiful, talented, mentally disturbed women who just snapped—they were a lot like myself. Some are women who killed their own children, women who killed their husbands, women who were greedy for money. You get to hear the stories behind what started the greed. Some of them were locked in a closet with no food for days, some had been pimped out by their mothers, and it created a sense of hard, cold callousness. You just really get to hear the brokenness behind the people you look at in the news. Something in their heart, something in their mind, something in their spirit just snapped that day. And once they heal from that day, usually they go back to being decent, beautiful, intelligent, creative beings. It was just that day they lost it all.
Even though I was in jail, I somehow felt safe because I didn’t have to worry about a man hurting me any more. But prison still is a violent, hostile place.
YOU HAVE A BAND OF SISTERS
I got to Chowchilla in 1997, when I was twenty-one years old. Up in prison, I learned a lot. If you don’t have any street smarts, you learn some. You learn to read body language a mile away. I can tell by the shift in the atmosphere if something ain’t right. Like, sometimes we’ll sit here talking and all of a sudden it gets quiet, and you’ll start looking around, because you know there’s a fight about to break out.
There are certain things you pick up in prison, like sometimes when the male guards were mad at certain inmates, especially the ones that are homosexuals and look like little boys, they had a tendency to be rougher with them. They’d go up under your breasts a couple more times than necessary. They’d take the back of their hand and swipe your crotch. That was very inappropriate and it was very hard, especially for women like me. At the time I didn’t want to have anything to do with any men, and so for a male guard to touch me—instantly anger and fright rose up in me. And so a lot of times I got slammed up against a wall when I said to a guard, “Get up off me!”
You’ve also got a lot of dope fiends in prison, so when people come to you with a sad story, you have to go by your instincts. You think, is this person really in a bad situation and she needs a little help, or is this person one of those crackheads and she’s running this crackhead drama drag on you, trying to get a few noodles and a couple of candy bars up out of you? You have people who are constantly scheming to try to live off of you, or get something from you, or take something from you. It is a place where only the strong survive. They will eat you alive in there.
There were four thousand women there. Eight women to a room, thirty-two rooms in each building, four buildings on each yard. I knew a lot of people there, from school and from fighting their cases with me in county. That’s where the bond is built. Nowadays I watch a lot of war movies and I can see a lot of what I went through in prison; it’s the same thing. You have a band of brothers, a band of sisters. It was more settled than in county jail. Jail is more like, Please God, help me get out of this situation. I don’t wanna be here. But once you get to prison you’ve already gone through that process and you have a settling in. Then it’s like, Please God, give me the strength to go through this situation. I don’t wanna die here.
I had a crew that was between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, and they all came in facing thirty-five to life, fifty-five to life, life without the possibility of parole. They became my sisters. We were fighting for our lives together. Nowadays, when I see some of those girls out on the street, I get so excited. I don’t even get that excited when I see family members I haven’t seen in years. But when we see each other, it’s like, “What do you need?” We’d do anything for each other. The shirt come off your back, the shoes come off your feet, the money comes out of the purse. You say, “Come on girl, I got $5, let’s go to McDonald’s! At least we can get two hamburgers, two fries, and share some cookies.”
MY BODY WAS SHUTTING DOWN, AND I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY
I think it was in 1999, when I was twenty-two years old, that I started having a lot of abdominal pain and heavy menstrual cycles. I knew that something was wrong. The cramping that I was having was just, oh my god. Not only was I in a lot of pain, but I was also having periods in between periods. I went to the gynecologist to see if something was going on, and he began to run a series of tests, a lot of different pap smears. One of the pap smears came back showing that I had abnormal cells. I went through more tests to figure out what was causing the abnormal cells, then more pap smears, ultrasounds, pelvic exams. All this testing took about a year and a half. During that whole time I was having pain, abnormal menstrual cycles, and heavy bleeding.
One ultrasound came back, and it said that I had two ovarian cysts, one on each ovary. The diagnosis was that it was probably caused from endometriosis. I didn’t know what that was, but the gynecologist told me it was blood that had been circulated back out from the uterus to the fallopian tubes to the outer walls, and had collected itself. He said there would just be a simple procedure, that I would simply have the cysts removed and also have a cone biopsy because of the abnormal cells. With the cone biopsy, they would see if I had cancer or not. He said that, according to the cell readings, I was basically in the very early stages of cervical cancer.
That gynecologist was the only one we had at the prison. With all four thousand women, if there was anything wrong, you’d go and see him. Usually you form some type of relationship with your doctor, but that’s not how it was there. It’s more like, “Number X, lay down here, put your legs up in the stirrups.” There is no getting to know you or your needs and wants.
The gynecologist referred me to a surgeon at the local hospital outside the prison. I had to wait a few more months for the pre-op so we could discuss what the treatments were going to be. The surgeon explained to me that he was going to be doing a surgery to remove the cysts, and that he was going to be doing a cone biopsy on me to find out whether or not I had cervical cancer. Based on the findings, if any forms of cancer were found within my cervix or in my uterine wall, then I would be looking at a hysterectomy or a partial hysterectomy. So I was basically consenting to the fact that if they had found cancer, they had the permission to remove part or all of my uterus.
The doctors said that the cystectomy was a simple procedure. They would cut, remove, and deflate the cysts. I was pretty comfortable and confident about the ovarian part of it, but I was very concerned and a little scared concerning the uterus part of it because the cancer was my main focus.
There is a lot of debate as to what happened to me when I woke up out of surgery, but I do remember bits and pieces. I do remember asking what happened to me, and they told me I’d just had a cone biopsy and a removal of the cysts. There was another girl in the hospital room recovering with me. She’d overheard some things that were going on, and she was a little bit more alert than I was. She said, “I believe that you had the same surgery as me, a full hysterectomy.” But that wasn’t what the doctors told me.
After the surgery, I started having pain in my back and going through these hot flash symptoms. I would be sweating, my heart would be beating fast, I couldn’t sleep. Mentally I had started tripping. Then I hit depression, and I sunk into it real quick. I didn’t know these were symptoms of menopause. At the time the doctors told me it was all in my head. They said, “There is nothing wrong with you, go back to your cell.” But those doctors were going by my hospital discharge papers, so it’s really not their fault. They’re not pushed to go a little deeper. They’ve got four thousand other women to see. Prison is overpopulated, overcrowded, and they don’t want to pay the money for enough medical staff. So during a medical visit it’s like, “Okay, well, you don’t have anything, I don’t see anything, I’ll order a blood test and see where your hormones are at, if they’re high or low. See you in two months.”
I never got my period again after that surgery. For the next few years, I was still asking at the prison why I didn’t have my menstrual cycle. I was told that sometimes these things just happen, that maybe my body shut down or went through shock, or that maybe the trauma of the surgery caused surgical menopause. All the discharge papers from the hospital said was that I’d had a cystectomy, one on one ovary this size, one on the other ovary that size, and that a cone biopsy had been done. I was waiting and hoping for my cycle to start back again, waiting for my body to kickstart. But my body was really shutting down, and I couldn’t understand why.
I didn’t learn what happened until four or five years later, when an organization called Justice Now2 started looking into my case. Through their investigation, I finally found out that, during the surgery, the surgeon had cut off the blood supply to my ovaries, killing them instantly. Instead of trying other techniques, or offering me alternative measures to go about this procedure, he’d just gone in and just snap, left me with no ovaries. Then after the cone biopsy, he’d sewed me up and never talked to me about it at all. He never sat on the side of my bed and actually took the time to tell me what procedure had been performed on me and why. Before the surgery he’d even asked me if I wanted to have more children. I’d said, “Yeah, I’m hoping to find somebody one day who loves me. I didn’t get a chance to raise my other sons, so I want the chance for a family again.” He didn’t listen to me.
THEY TAKE FOR GRANTED OUR IGNORANCE, THAT WE DON’T HAVE A VOICE FOR OURSELVES
What rights did I have for real? I was just an inmate. No one came in, no one consulted, no one asked if my mother or father knew, no one cared about any of those things. After the surgery I was just handcuffed back on to my recovery bed, and after two days I was released back into general population. If something were to happen, if a fight were to break out and I were attacked, I would have been in no condition to defend myself. I could barely walk then.
That’s CDC3 for you. When a woman comes back from an oophorectomy in prison, she goes to the infirmary for a week. No one comes to see her, they just come to check her vitals, make sure she has her medication, check her bandages, remove her staples, then send her back into general population. Even though she has been through a life-changing experience, she goes through it alone. There is no counseling, there is no mental health, there is nothing to help her try to deal with the fact that she has lost her ability to have children.
They take for granted our ignorance, they take for granted the fact that we really don’t have a voice for ourselves. We have to fight an organization that’s bigger than us, stronger than us, and that’s been there longer than us, and we have to push past all of that just to gain an answer to a question like, “Do I have my ovaries?”
I was so sad when I found out about my ovaries. I’d fought for my life in my marriage, I’d fought for my life in prison—and here life was taken from me. It made me feel broken, empty, used up. That surgery took the last bit of what I thought made me beautiful as a woman. I asked myself, “Why do I keep losing when it’s not my fault? Why is it that I went in trusting my life in someone else’s hands, and once again someone mistreated me and just took advantage?”
I remember when I used to go out to a medical appointment, having those chains and that uniform on when the guards transported me to a community facility. I remember the fact that even though I was a human being, just that uniform itself made me feel different. It made me feel less than other people who were out there in society looking at me. It just made me feel less than a human being. That right there, it really messes with your mind.
A LOT HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM ME. I REFUSE TO GIVE ANYTHING ELSE UP
My case was picked up by a law firm. So I began to 6024 for documents, I began to 602 for answers and to speak with the Chief Medical Officer. We eventually put in for a lawsuit against the surgeon. When I got that lawsuit started, the prison threatened me that they’d stop treating my medical problems. And I was telling them, “Then so be it. You’re not taking care of me anyway. That’s why we’re here.”
My lawyers, they got it going on. They fought for me when I couldn’t fight for myself, they gave me a voice when I did not have a voice for myself, and I appreciate that.
The surgeon’s lawyers tried to prove that I knew what had happened to me the day after the surgery. They said that I’d asked the nurse whether I still had my ovaries, and that this meant that I’d had an inkling that my ovaries were gone.
In the end, we lost. We walked away with nothing, mostly because of the statute of limitations.5 That was the time from when I found out what had happened to when I actually filed a lawsuit. I had a specific time limit to file the lawsuit, and they said I waited too long. It really did something to me, it sent me into a little depression. It hurt me. After the case was over I just wanted to be done with everything, let everything go. I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to go over it and figure out what went wrong. I thought, I fought the good fight, it happened that way, it’s over and done with. I’m ready for my life to go on.
But still I walked away from the case hoping that maybe that surgeon would think twice next time. Because he’s still working in the same place, he’s still cutting on CDC women. He never said he was sorry afterward. There was no, “I’m sorry you felt that way, that wasn’t my intention.” He just smirked when the verdict was read, as if to say, That’s what you get for going up against me. Maybe he won then, but it will all come back around later.
I found out later there are different alternatives for preserving the reproductive organs during a cystectomy that were never offered to me. My right to reproduce was never an issue anyone cared about. Cut, snip, you ain’t doing nothing, you’re just a prisoner anyway. I felt mutilated. And I noticed that a lot of African American women were going into prison in their fertile child-producing years, and coming back with these partial hysterectomies, complete hysterectomies, abnormal cells. I noticed that it was a pattern.
The hot flashes, nervousness, heart palpitations, lack of a sex drive, that all lasted about five years after the surgery. It took me about that long to get used to what was going on, and then my body started leveling off. Every now and then, though, I’ll be sitting in church and I’ll get a hot flash, but everybody is waving their fans so I blend right on in.
A lot has been taken from me from when I was seventeen up to thirty-four—half my life, really. My husband, the court system, the correctional facility, the surgeon—they all took a lot from me, so I refuse to give anything else up. Spiritually, I do things according to what feels good to me on the inside. In prison you’re stripped of everything and you have to go by your instincts, and in doing so I learned to trust myself. I didn’t trust myself when I was younger, but today I trust myself and my instincts. And so now I listen to my body, and what my body tells me to do, because I couldn’t trust the doctors and I couldn’t trust the people who were around me.
ME AND MY SONS, WE’RE GETTING THERE
While I was incarcerated, my kids stayed with my mom and dad. They made sure that I saw my kids once a week while I was in jail, so for the next year or so I saw them. If it wasn’t once a week it was at least twice a month. I kept seeing them until I got to Chowchilla. Then they were so far away, and it’s a very costly and time-consuming drive. The visits went from twice a year to once a year to every three years. I already knew that I was losing them, I was losing that bond. And I tried so hard, making cards and little arts and crafts. I had made money in prison, so I would send them cash to spend for their birthdays or stuff like that, but it just wasn’t enough. They needed someone there every day. I did everything to protect them, but I ended up losing them anyway. By the time my oldest son turned twelve, he was in juvenile hall placements.
When I got out of prison in 2009 I was thirty-three, my youngest son was sixteen, and my oldest was seventeen getting ready to turn eighteen. So I got a chance to pay for things, for his prom and stuff like that. Both of our relationships are very much strained. I know they had a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, but I couldn’t understand why they didn’t hold on to how much I loved them. It’s not like I’d disappeared for fourteen years and then all of a sudden reappeared. I actually called once a week. We did have those visits. Anything they asked me for, if it was in my grasp, I would send it to them. I would sit there and talk to them, write letters, long letters.
But me and my sons, we’re getting there. It’s a slow process. It’s slower than I would like it to be, but it’s a process. I’ve come to some acceptance concerning our relationship. I did not realize that I’d been removed from their hearts like that, and that my mom had taken my place. When I got out, I felt that we’d all been waiting for this time, but I realized the only person that had been waiting was me, and so I had to let a lot of things go.
I’ve suffered enough hurt and pain and abuse. I’ve already felt the pain of someone who was hurting me because they was hurting inside, or they didn’t get what they felt like they needed in life. That’s something that I just can’t go through any longer. I don’t care who it is. I don’t care if it’s my children, my momma, my daddy—I am never going to allow anyone else to put their pain upon me any longer. It’s just the way it is. I don’t have time to waste. I’ve lost too much as it is.
Some time after I got out, I met a man who I eventually got engaged to. One day I was with my fiancé and his granddaughter, playing with her at a park. I saw him holding her, and that emptiness really hit me—the fact that I missed out on raising my children and holding them at such a young age. And the fact that now I don’t have the ability to do that again. I told him, “I’ll be right back, let me go get something real quick.” I had to step away and go to the parking lot area, and I just cried.
I’m hoping maybe God is giving me a second chance with my fiancé having a granddaughter, who I’ll be able to give love to as a mother, something I’ve been waiting fourteen years for.
MY OWN SPECIAL MIRACLE
There were times where I felt like my femininity had been taken from me, times where I felt very degraded. I felt like I wasn’t my own person any more. The part of me being a mother had been taken from me too. So it was a lot of having to hold on to an identity that I no longer had, or trying to remember who I was while I was surviving in this condition.
God has really restored me, more so than I could ever imagine, having gone through such experiences in my life. To come out in one piece, one mind; I’m strong, healthy, able to love, able to trust. You know, it’s my own special miracle. I walk around this life looking at the trees, looking at the grass, knowing that I made it out of a place that was trying to keep me from all this.
Because really, prison isn’t designed for you to leave, it’s designed to keep you. And I don’t care what anybody says—you don’t go in there to get better. Only the strong survive, and you have to fight to get better, and you have to fight and win.
I pray for the girls in Chowchilla. I pray for them and I miss them so much. I’m trying to put myself in a position where I can help them. I would love to be a social worker. Even before that, I want to get some services for domestic violence and gang interventions to get back into the prison. Within the next two years I would like to set up some programs on the inside to get people ready for reentry, for what they’re going to be facing when they come out. I’m working with a couple of people on some curriculums right now. We’re looking toward taking it into the prison in different areas, also to the correctional officers.
We all have our personal obstacles, our personal wars, our personal struggles that we have to go through. In prison there were times when I felt like life was just totally against me and I wanted to give up. I’m so happy that I didn’t, even when there were times I felt like I could not breathe in prison. There were times where I panicked and I said to myself, I can’t do this any more. Somehow, some way, my second wind kicked in. Oh my god, it kicked in. Because I am experienced in this fight, that’s what I’m doing now, I’m helping people. I’m in their corner, in their ring, and giving them towels and squirting water in their mouth and rubbing their shoulders, saying, “You can do it! Listen, next time they hit you like this, you bob, you weave, you move, you shuffle a little bit, now stick ’em!”
Even if nobody else rewards you, if nobody else is there to pat you on your back, if nobody else is there to say, “Job well done!” it is still a personal victory, a personal accomplishment, and that’s where I’m at right now. Prison did not do what it thought it was going to do to me. I won. I won.
But even though it’s a place I would not want for my worst enemy, it was a beautiful place for me. It’s where I learned how to prioritize what matters in life. I learned a lot about who I am because I was stripped of everything. That’s where I found my strength, that’s where I found my value. That’s where I found my voice.
1 Beginning in 1987, some states began to allow evidence of battered woman syndrome—a pattern of symptoms arising from persistent abuse—as a defense in a criminal trial. For more details, see the glossary and timeline.
2 Justice Now is an Oakland-based nonprofit, and the first teaching law clinic in the country solely focused on the needs of people in women’s prisons.
3 California Department of Corrections.
4 602 is the process to file grievances in the California Department of Corrections. For more details, see the glossary.
5 The laws determining how long after a specific event occurs that legal action regarding that event can be brought to court. Variations occur, according to type of alleged crime and by jurisdiction.