37, formerly imprisoned
At seventeen, Maria was involved in a drug deal that turned violent. She was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five to fifty years in prison. Released in 2009, Maria is now a graduate student and a program administrator for the Benevolence Education Project, a community organization for at-risk girls and women. She lives with her two small dogs in a recently developed area outside of Pittsburgh, where rows of matching mid-sized houses and driveways end abruptly in a field at the end of the block. When we meet Maria at her home, she is in the middle of working on her master’s thesis; she closes her laptop and turns off her cell phone to begin telling her story. The television murmurs in the next room, but otherwise the house is silent. Maria does not make eye contact as she speaks; she holds her arms against her chest and hunches over, her long brown hair covering her face. In her narrative, she describes her experiences of childhood sexual abuse, her repeated sexual assault by a prison guard over the course of several years, and how she eventually found the strength to testify against the prison in a successful class action suit.
Names and locations have been changed or omitted in this narrative to protect the anonymity of the narrator. In some instances, dates have been slightly altered.
HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE WEREN’T PART OF OUR WORLD AT ALL
I grew up in Pittsburgh. Our neighborhood was built in the early 1900s by immigrants who came over to work in the steel factories. The houses are nice, in my opinion; beautiful brick homes that were built to last. But they weren’t kept up, so now you don’t see nice lawns, and you see very few parks. If you do see a park, there are prostitutes or drug dealers there. You see graffiti too, lots of liquor stores, and a lot of abandoned homes. On some blocks there’s only one home on the block left, and it’s barely standing up.
Most of the girls in my middle school didn’t make it to high school, especially the Hispanic girls. If you were to drive down the street you would see boys—Hispanic, white, and black—dressed in clothes that represented their gangs. They all had territories in the community, and a lot of them were into drug dealing and violence. You would see groups of girls walking down the street, maybe twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, who’d shaved their eyebrows off and painted them on with liquid eyeliner. Their hair was all curled and they wore tight tube-tops over big pregnant bellies. Us girls got pregnant young, and we lived on welfare. You didn’t see anybody around there working or going to school.
I also hung out on the street with a group of girls in the neighborhood, but we didn’t wear tube-tops and curled hair. We thought we were different, and we didn’t wanna end up pregnant. Even so, we didn’t talk about college, or even graduating from high school. Those things weren’t a part of our world at all.
I lived with my mom and my little brother. I’m seven years older than my brother, so I was like a caregiver for him too. He has cerebral palsy, so that was a huge responsibility. My mom had me when she was fourteen. My father was a teenager too when I was born, and he left my mom, so she had to raise me all by herself. He was white, and she was Mexican. Sometimes she got angry and would say things like, “You’re just like that stupid white boy,” or “You’re just like those hillbillies.” I remember hating that I was so white, and wanting to get a tan so I could be like the other girls in the community who had darker skin because they had Mexican in them.
Growing up, I always felt like I had to take care of my mom, I had to look out for her. I remember when I was a little girl, if there was a noise in the basement, I would be the one to have to go down there and turn the light on and check to see what the noise was. I never felt like a child who had parents who took care of her.
I REMEMBER GOING TO CHURCH AND ASKING GOD TO HELP ME
I don’t remember being happy. Nowadays I go back to the church that I grew up in and I’ll remember being a little girl going to that church and just crying and asking God to help me.
I would say I was probably around ten when our landlord started abusing me. When I went to my mom and told her what he’d done, at that point he had only put his finger in my butt while I was in bed. But pretty soon it progressed to full-on rape. There would be a whole summer and it wouldn’t happen, and then it would happen, and then sometimes it would happen every day for two weeks and then it wouldn’t happen for like four months.
The first time I told my mom, she was upset. But then maybe because she didn’t know what else do to, she asked me, “Are you sure?” She got on the phone and she told my grandma, and she called other people and told them, and it turned into this big debate about whether I was sure that it had actually happened. The person who abused me was drunk a lot of the time, and so they said, “Are you sure he wasn’t just drunk because, you know, when men are drunk they don’t know what they’re doing.” But I was very sure what had happened. I knew that I had been sexually molested.
Afterward, it wasn’t talked about any more. I didn’t want to bring it up because I knew how it made me feel. And we couldn’t talk about it because the guy who was abusing me owned the house that we lived in, and we would have been homeless without him. For her to defend me, it would have turned ugly. Even back then, a part of me understood that it was better to just be quiet.
I got pregnant by our landlord when I was twelve, and my mom took me to get an abortion. I think because she wanted to protect me, she told everyone that I had got pregnant by a boy named Pete that I used to hang around with.
Talking about the abuse is hard, because it means talking about my mother. Maybe, if you’re not from a neighborhood like that, you’d think it was all my mother’s fault or that she should have done something different. I can see now that she didn’t handle it the way she should have, but she did the best she could. She had no support, no education. In her world, things like this happened. She was raised to believe that these types of things just happen to girls, that’s just how life is. Sometimes we talk now and she’s so sad, and so sorry. There’s a part of me that doesn’t like her for letting it happen to me, and for not doing anything about it. But I don’t blame her for what happened. I mean, how can you blame someone who was just a child herself, and who had no idea of what else she could do? Now, as an adult in my thirties, I know that she was scared and frustrated, and I have a lot of understanding for her situation.
I LOOKED FORWARD TO BEING A DIFFERENT PERSON
When I was fourteen I started working at a clothing store in the mall. It was a huge mall, and I had to take the bus a long way to get there. Working there, I met girls from the suburbs. Those girls were my role models! I remember the owner of the store taking me out to eat and telling me I was the best worker they had. She rewarded me with coupons for clothing because I used to spend a lot of my money on clothes. She’d given me the keys to the store and said, “We appreciate the work you’re doing and we want you to have more responsibility. We want you to be the assistant to the assistant manager.” This was like my dream come true. I looked forward to getting on that bus and going to another neighborhood, working at the mall, and being a different person from the poor girl from Pittsburgh no one cared about. I used my money from working at the mall to buy clothes to make myself look like the girls that I worked with. I wanted to be a manager of a clothing store, that was my goal. No one ever told me that I could go to school and actually be something really big.
Then one day, $380 came up missing from the cash register. I never, ever would have taken money from that place. They never directly accused me, but they said, “Maria, you’re the assistant to the assistant manager, so regardless of whether you took the money or not, you’re going to be held responsible.”
I just gave up. I felt like I wasn’t wanted there any more. I felt that the only reason that I was accused was because some of the people I worked with knew my neighborhood, and that my family was poor, because one of the girls had given me a ride home one day. I remember them treating me differently after that. After that, one girl brought me a bag of clothes that she didn’t want. They hadn’t treated me that way before. I didn’t actually tell them I wanted to quit, I just didn’t go back. I was really upset because I had no way to prove that I hadn’t taken the money. If they had only known how important that job and that group of women were to my life. I would have worked for them for free, that’s how much I loved that job.
After that I worked at a meat market, stuffing chorizo. It was really nasty work, but they actually paid a lot more money than the mall did, and I could walk there.
THE JUDGE WANTED TO MAKE SURE I WAS EIGHTEEN WHEN SHE SENTENCED ME
I was in ninth grade when I left school—I was sixteen, almost seventeen. I was very smart, I got really good grades. I could have done well. I just stopped going, and nobody cared. I wanted money to buy things like clothes, and the only way I could get those things was through working.
After I left school I started hanging around with this girl, Teresa. She was really pretty, and very popular, and I started going to parties with her. Her boyfriend was a drug dealer, and we used to go riding around in nice cars playing loud music. That was fun, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it because I thought, I’m not selling drugs—so what if I’m sitting in a car with a drug dealer?
But in 1991, when I was seventeen years old, I became involved in a drug deal. It was a marijuana deal. I was living in a community where people were selling crack cocaine, regular cocaine, and heroin, and honestly, I didn’t think marijuana was as harmful as those other drugs. Basically, I drove my cousin and some friends to the drug deal, and I was going to be paid $50 for it. I dropped them off, and I was supposed to drive around the block and come back and pick them up. Halfway around the block I heard gun-shots, so I didn’t go back to pick them up. Instead, the boys ended up catching up with me on foot, and I let them back in the car.
I didn’t know at that point what had happened—that the deal had turned into armed robbery, and then murder. I was arrested and later convicted of second-degree murder, assault with the intent to do great bodily harm, and armed robbery. I was still seventeen when I was convicted. The public defender representing me said that the judge had told him she wanted to make sure I was eighteen when she sentenced me, so she waited until three days after my birthday. My sentencing guideline recommendation was eight to twenty-five years, but the judge gave me the maximum, which was twenty-five years, and then she increased my top to fifty.1
Several weeks later, I got to prison. It seemed, in one aspect, extremely organized and routine. As soon as I walked in with the new inmates, they stripped us of everything we’d accumulated in the county jail—our clothes, our Bibles, letters and pictures—and we had to put them in a box and send it home. And then they put us in a quarantine room with a lot of other women. You stayed in that room until you were medically cleared to be put in the general population. The room used to be a library, so it was big, but there were about a hundred bunk beds in there, and if I put my arms out sitting on the bed, I could touch people on the other bunks. It was hard. There were about a hundred women in the room and there was no air circulation. You couldn’t get off your bunk unless you asked for permission.
After about thirty days I was put in general population. I actually got out of quarantine sooner than the other girls; because I had twenty-five years, I was “high-security level.”
HE WAS LETTING ME KNOW THAT HE WAS WATCHING ME
In 1993, about two years after I got into prison, the inmates had to pack up and go to a different correctional facility. The first couple of days there were unbelievable—it was much more modern than the previous prison, and much cleaner, with nice landscaping on the grounds. And it was really odd because prisoners were walking all around the grounds. At the previous prison, there were areas in the yard that were designated for prisoners to walk around, but here you could walk anywhere. It was sort of out of control. People were standing around smoking cigarettes and joints and even crack in the bathrooms. Guards were smoking joints with the prisoners. I knew right away that I didn’t like this place.
There was this one officer who would tell me I was pretty, or that I had nice legs. I remember feeling like I liked him telling me these things, but that I felt uncomfortable when he’d do or say dirty things, like when he would give me shakedowns, he’d cup my breasts or say things about my butt, like, “I’d like to lick that butt.” But then if he told me I was pretty, of course I liked to hear that. You know, I like to hear nice things about myself.
This officer knew about my prison life. He knew how much money I had in my account, and he would say things like, “What are you going to buy at the store? You’ve got enough to do a full shop.” He was letting me know that he was watching me. He also knew when I had a visitor, and he’d ask me, “Who is this person? What kind of friend is that person?” Or he’d say, “Your mom came to see you.”
He would come in my unit, into my room, and just stand there and watch me. I wasn’t doing anything in particular; I remember many times he would just stand there and watch me, and there was nothing I could do about it. Other times he would shake me down, and then he would tell me that he liked doing it. A shakedown is where officers come into your room and go through your stuff. That’s normal; they’re supposed to do several shakedowns a day. A pat-down is where they come and actually search your body to make sure you have no contraband. He did both of those quite often.
When he worked in the unit, he would call me to the desk in front of people. That was the most humiliating part, him making me stand at the desk and talk to him. He was old and and he had greasy hair, and he smelled like cigarettes. He had that sly look to him like he was a pimp, like he was trying to pimp me, and all the other girls in the unit could see it. It made me look bad, and it would cause problems for me with the other prisoners. The other girls would call me “bitch” and “slut,” and they would say things like, “You’re letting him do that, you’re letting him do this.” There was nothing I could say or do to defend myself. They were older than me, and I was intimidated by them.
I didn’t really want him to touch me. I didn’t really want to be around him. If it were my choice, if I had anything to say about it, I would not be around that man. But there was no place to go to report him, because what he was doing to me, I had seen it happen to other women, and nobody had helped them, so why would I think anyone would help me?
About six months after I got to the prison, right around my nineteenth birthday, that officer came to my unit when it was count time. When count time occurs, everyone has to go in their room. So he came to my room, and the officer who was working in the unit that day was with him. He grabbed me out of my room and took me into the bathroom right next to my room, and he started putting himself on me and pulling my jogging pants down. He had me against the sink, and he put himself in me. The other officer was standing outside of the bathroom, watching.
That was the first time he raped me. At that time, I didn’t even know that what he’d done was rape, because I’d always had a thought that rape was when someone puts a gun to your head. It was just like when I was a child being abused. The difference was that when I was a child, those things were done in private, and even if people did know, it wasn’t something that was talked about. But in prison, nothing is private, and so people talk about it.
When he was done, I just walked back to my room. My bunkie was there, and she didn’t do or say anything at the time because she didn’t want to get involved. She had her own problems. Things like that were happening to her too, by someone else. Later we talked about it, but not all the time, because it’s not something you want to talk about. Everyone knew that you couldn’t go to the prison officials and give a report, because the prison officials wouldn’t do anything other than retaliate against you.
That officer sexually assaulted me for years. Then he got fired from the Department of Corrections. He wasn’t fired for sexual harassment, even though I later learned that he’d sexually harassed and assaulted many inmates, not just me. He was fired because he had missed too many days of work. Can you believe that? I later learned that there were several reports written about him by his bosses at the Department of Corrections, and in one of the reports they said that he should not be working at a women’s facility. But nobody did anything to stop him from working there. Nobody forced him to work at a men’s facility. Nobody did anything.
After that, there were other officers who would do things to me. They knew about the officer who had raped me, that I had been “his girl”—that’s what they said. So they felt that they could do things to me too, like open the shower curtain when I was showering, or come into my room after I got out of the shower and molest me. They did what they wanted at that time with no consequences. The other officers scared me; they touched me inappropriately and said inappropriate things to me, but there was no other officer that full-fledged raped me the way that one particular officer did. Even the one officer who put his fingers in me, I know that that’s considered penetration, but no other officer made me feel the way that one did.
When you’re a prisoner in that environment, you don’t feel like you have the power to say no. Your life, your every move, is controlled by these people. When you eat, when you sleep, everything is known. At the beginning of my prison term, I didn’t feel like I was a human being. I didn’t feel like I had any rights. I didn’t feel like anyone cared. I never felt like I had the power to say no, until I met my lawyer.
I STARTED TO FIGHT
It was around 2001, when I was twenty-seven, that I turned into a different person. I had heard about this one lawyer, Amanda Taylor, from other inmates. She was known as the lawyer who would protect you, and who was fighting to bring changes to the visiting room because the Department of Corrections had taken away some of our visitation rights. This lawyer was also fighting for us to get better educational programs, and to change prison rules because there was so much sexual harassment inside. I hadn’t heard the words “sexual harassment” before I met Amanda
I had never realized that people would care. With Amanda’s help, I started becoming really, really strong. I finally started to love myself regardless of everything, and I started to fight.
I was one of a group of women bringing a suit against the prison for all the sexual abuse we had suffered. I was willing to go to court, to do depositions. It was very hard, because when Amanda would come to visit a prisoner, everyone knew why she was there. So when you went back to the prison after she’d left, you’d be a target. I had to walk on eggshells every day. I stayed in my room a lot because I was afraid of being written up. I was really isolated.
I became really involved with the case when I spoke out in the media a few times. It had reached the point where no staff would talk to me. By then we had a whole new regime of officers, and most of them were female. Some of them were very neutral on the subject, because they weren’t working in the prison when all these things had occurred. But some of them were manipulated or persuaded by some of the older staff to treat the women involved in the lawsuit in a retaliatory way. They were really slick, and they were really careful about how they did things. They could write you a ticket and get you in trouble for any little thing. They could terrorize you so much that they made you curse them, and then they could write a ticket for it. They could harass you so much that you would go crazy. I learned not to talk to anybody. I stayed in my room. I wasn’t going to let them make me go crazy. If I was going to go crazy, it was going to be from my own demons, not from them harassing me.
I felt very proud to be in this group of women who had gone through similar things and were standing up against these people who had abused their power. It made me feel strong and powerful. It also helped me to deal with my demons. It helped me to not continue to blame myself. I had worked very hard to become the person that I was. So I ignored the officers when they called me a bitch or a snitch or ugly or fat or stinky, or whatever they did or said to me to try to get a reaction. I would remind myself every day that when I left that prison, I never had to see those people again in my life.
By 2003 I had thirteen years left on my sentence, but I had a pending petition in front of the governor for sentence commutation. My guidelines were eight to twenty-five years, and the judge had given me twenty-five to fifty years. So I had been sentenced to the highest range of my guidelines, and yet I had no prior criminal record. Most lawyers who reviewed my case agreed that there was no basis for the high sentence. There were a lot of theories about why. Some people told me that the judge was ready to retire and had become bitter, angry, and cold. But I don’t have any factual reason for the high sentence.
For the next five years, I was waiting every day to hear an answer on my petition. It was on the governor’s desk, and I knew that all I needed was one ticket in my file and my petition would be denied. So I lived in constant fear that anything could happen at any moment, and that it would ruin my chances for freedom. My freedom was all I lived for, but who could live like that, walking on eggshells every day for years? Sometimes I felt like I would have a heart attack.
MY HAPPINESS TURNED TO EXTREME FEAR
Then in 2008 there was a big raid in the unit. It was a really hot day, one of the first hot days we’d had in Pennsylvania. And in prison, the hot days are very, very hot because there’s no air conditioning and no ventilation in the housing units. The squad had come in the unit, and everyone had to go inside this small little TV room while they went in the rooms tearing everything apart. I could hear them in my room. There were three officers in there, throwing all my books around, going through my letters, destroying my belongings, just because they could, because they wanted to. They had these raids to search for contraband, and I had none in my room so I didn’t care. Let them go through my room, I thought. But I didn’t want my stuff destroyed. I was sitting there in the TV room with about fifty other prisoners, and everyone was watching the guards in my room, and I was crying because they were taking my jogging pants and my sweatshirts, and they’re not supposed to take things for no reason, but they did. They were throwing all my things into garbage bags. They were violating the rules, but was it worth me filing something? I thought, They’re not raping me. Rape and taking jogging suits are two different things. Then the counselor in the unit came down to the TV room, and she said, “I need to talk to you.” I looked at her, and I thought, Oh, what’s next? What are they going to come up with next that I did wrong? I followed her to her office and she said, “Close the door.” I sat down, and it was so hot with the door closed that I could feel the sweat dripping underneath my shirt. Then she said, “The parole board wants to see you. I have to get a report ready for them.”
That was one of the happiest days of my incarceration. I had been incarcerated for sixteen years, and the parole board had never wanted to see me. When she told me the news, nothing else mattered to me. Not the rapes, nothing. All that mattered was that the parole board wanted to see me. Then my happiness turned to fear, because a staff member knew that the parole board wanted to see me. Now I was even more of a target, because before that, everyone had known that I was participating in this litigation, and that I was a bitch, I was a snitch, I was this, I was that, but nobody knew I had a petition to get out of prison. Every prisoner who goes to the parole board gets picked on by guards and other prisoners.. So my happiness immediately turned to extreme fear. I didn’t want to go in the shower because I was afraid someone was going to come in and try to hurt me. I didn’t want to leave my room. I would pay prisoners to watch my room when I had to leave it, to make sure nothing happened.
In Pennsylvania, the normal procedure is to see one member of the parole board at your initial hearing. Then if that member votes for release, you have to go through a hearing in front of the full parole board. I finally saw the one member in May 2008. I didn’t get an answer back until March 2009, and the answer was that I had to go through a full public hearing. I was very happy, but it was also extremely hard because at the same time that all this was going on, I was put in protective custody, because at that point another prisoner was threatening to kill me. I had asked staff to move me, but they wouldn’t, so I had to ask for protective custody. This meant that I lost the prison cell that I’d had in general population. I was stripped of all my property and put in a room that people go to when they assault people. I had never in all the years of my incarceration been to segregation or protective custody. But I felt that I had to. Then after protective custody, they moved me to a different unit, and that was another adjustment because now I had to figure out who I should be scared of and who I should and shouldn’t talk to.
After my hearing in March, I had another long period of walking on eggshells. I was anxious. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know if I was becoming paranoid or if bad things were really occurring, so I decided just to stay in the unit and not go out at all.
Then it was August 25, and the warden came into the unit at 8:15 in the morning. She took me to the counselor’s office and closed the door. It was the warden and two deputy wardens, all women. The warden looked at me and said, “I’m here to tell you that the governor signed your commutation today. You’re going to be released in thirty days.”
I couldn’t believe it! I was so happy I had finally made it, after seventeen years. I had made it through everything that had come at me. I remember calling my mom and telling her, “Mom, I’m coming home!” She started screaming and crying, and I was so happy.
A couple of days after I heard that I was being released, one of the women who was part of the sexual abuse lawsuit came up to me, and she said, “I want to talk to you.” So we sat down, and she looked at me, and I could see in her eyes that she was so overwhelmed with emotion. She was almost shaking. She said, “What makes you so special that you get to go to court and tell them what happened to you and you get to go home? What happened to you happened to me, but nobody cares.” When she said that to me, I felt so bad because she was right. She was absolutely right. What happened to her was just as horrific as what had happened to me. And she asked me, “Will you help me? Will you help me write a petition for sentence commutation? Will you help me write a letter to the parole board?”
And so for the final weeks until my release, I spent my days helping other women prepare petitions. None of the women I gave help to got released that I know of. There was one woman, but it wasn’t because of me. She would have been released anyway because she was in her sixties, she had a bad heart problem, and probably didn’t have much longer to live.
WHAT SAVED ME WAS FINDING OUT THAT SOMEONE CARED
I’m a student now, at the University of Pittsburgh. I finished my coursework and am working on my master’s thesis. I also do program administrative support for the Benevolence Education Project, which is a community organization for at-risk girls and women. I started a program at Benevolence called Open Doors for women who have been in prison or jail. The program helps them with résumé writing and interview techniques, basically how to adjust to finding a job when you have a record. I also do community outreach, so I see a lot of teenage girls. They don’t always have money, and they can’t always get government money if they don’t have papers. I try to help them. There was one girl who we helped get a full private scholarship so she could go to Penn; I’m proud of that. There are a lot of girls struggling in the community, and when you see someone working really hard, you can’t help but want to help them. I absolutely believe that what I do keeps these girls out of prison.
I struggle to reach the girls who aren’t in programs, who are out on the street. We might have a night with pizza and dancing, but more than likely I’m not going to get the gangbangers. I want to figure out how to get the hard-to-reach kids. If I could just talk to one girl who was like I was, I would tell her to stay in school and listen to adults. I would tell her to read. I would tell her to love herself. I wish I’d had someone like me, now, to talk to me then.
I made it out alive and I went home. I left that place, and every day I think about some of the women I left behind. And one day I would like to go back there and see them and help them in some way. Until then, I’m just out here telling people what those women go through. I know that what saved me was finding out that someone cared, and I know that will save those women I left behind.
1 Felony murder is a legal concept that assigns criminal responsibility to all participants in a felony in which a death occurs, whether or not the participants knew or intended to harm or kill anyone. Levying a murder conviction against an individual who neither intended to kill nor took any action to do so has been legally controversial, and the felony murder rule has been abolished in all common law countries except the United Sates and Australia. (Guyora Binder, “The Origins of the American Felony Murder Rule.” Stanford Law Review October, 2004)