21, currently imprisoned
Sarah Chase sits in a prison several states away from her family, friends, and everything she has known. She keeps busy with books, crafts, and writing, but she is lonely. She was sent here because of her relationship with a guard at her previous prison. Because of her new prison’s inaccessibility and the high cost of phone calls, Sarah shared her story with us through letters and one short phone call. She described her experiences of childhood neglect and brutal rape, and how, in 2007, she was sentenced to twenty years to life for the murder of her stepmother. In one letter, Sarah included a picture of herself. It showed a petite young woman with large eyes and very long blonde hair, wearing prison sweats and smiling cautiously at the camera.
GOD SPARED MY LIFE FOR A GREATER PUNISHMENT LATER
My father was a missionary pastor in Meridian, Nevada. We were Evangelical Christians. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, taking care of six kids—four girls and two boys. We were very poor, but my mom worked miracles. She made our clothes or found bargains at the thrift stores. She always made sure that we had food to eat. I remember making “mommy mud pies” to try and cheer her up, as she was always very sad and often in tears.
Due to our religion, life was different. My brothers and sisters and I lived in fear of everyone else, as we were taught they were doing the devil’s work and we had to be very careful not to displease God. When I was six, my parents divorced. My mom decided to go to college to be a nurse, as she had dreamt of doing since her own horrible childhood. During the divorce, the courts gave custody of the three oldest girls to my mother, and custody of my two brothers and me to my father. They split us fifty-fifty, like property. I first started drinking when I was nine years old. My mom says I tried to kill myself around then. I don’t have many memories of that time in my life, but I do remember being very sad and feeling totally alone.
My mom was busy with college and she really couldn’t supervise all the kids. We would do dumb things, and because my mom was overwhelmed, she would become abusive, mentally and sometimes physically. Also many of the men she brought home would make passes at my sisters. Because of all that, all of my teenage sisters moved to my dad’s and lived with me and my brother. What teenager wouldn’t want to move back with our father—after all, he was gone for weeks at a time on work trips, and our house was the party house when he was gone. When he was home, us kids would clean up and keep the friends away. But there were times when my mom came to pick us up for the weekend and our house was so trashed that there was literally a foot of filth on the floor and no food in the house. She began to take pictures every time she came over, to build a custody case against my father. A woman my dad probably met online moved into our home and she took care of us. She says that when she met us I only had one pair of panties and no clothes that fit me. I had cavities in most of my teeth and had no clue how to properly care for myself. Unfortunately she was only around for a year, because while she loved us, she maxed out all my father’s credit cards buying things we needed. It forced him to file for bankruptcy and he threw her out.
Shortly after, Child Protection Services (CPS) took all of us kids away from our father and placed us with my mother. I was ten years old when I went to live with her. By then, she’d gotten her nursing degree and was living in Carson City. I turned eleven years old that summer. We lived in a trailer park in a double-wide trailer, and my mom was usually working twelve-hour shifts. My brother and sisters eventually ran away to Meridian to live with my dad, leaving me without them. I got more depressed. I attempted suicide at least twice more, once by hanging myself and once by taking a bottle of pills. Apparently God spared my life for a greater punishment later.
After my second suicide attempt, I spent several months at a psychiatric hospital called West Hills Hospital in Reno, Nevada, where the staff tried to figure out what was wrong with me. Eventually I was sent to a long-term treatment center called the Adolescent Treatment Center in Reno, where I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At the treatment center I felt like a guinea pig. I was placed on different prescription medications: Zoloft, Neurontin, Depakote, Seroquel, Thorazine, Vistaril, Topamax, Trazodone, Paxil1—and those are just the ones I remember. None of the pills seemed to be helping, and some made me feel worse.
Later, when I went to prison, I found out that I’d been misdiagnosed. The prison psychiatrist said that there was no way I could be bipolar. That doctor said the meds were actually what messed me up to begin with. I wish I had known back then that I wasn’t the one who was mentally ill. My parents had the problems.
I was neglected and abused, but I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t want to go back to my dad’s, as he’d remarried by then and my stepmother hated all of my father’s kids, but especially me and my oldest brother. She called us names, she told us that she couldn’t stand us, and that if my dad had to choose between us or her, he would choose her. The games she played were endless. She would freak out like a child, throwing things, slamming doors, threatening to eat lots of sweets, as she was diabetic. Everything was about control. However, when I’d tell my counselor at the treatment center what it was like at home, it was hard for him to believe me, since my father was a pastor and my stepmother was a preschool teacher, and they drove to Reno every week for family counseling.
My stepmom made life hell, and I turned back to drugs and alcohol. I felt hopeless and I wanted to die. My life at this time was very chaotic, and I began using meth as well. A cellmate I had at the treatment center would sneak in meth sometimes, and we’d do lines and eat it. I’m certain I was locked up for short periods of time in juvenile detention centers for running away and stuff, but that period of my life is hazy due to all the drugs I was doing then.
At that time I was thirteen and still on probation. One of my rules on probation was to take my prescription pills, but my pills made me go from wanting to hurt myself to getting really violent and angry. School was really hard for me because I had so much going on at home, but I had to bottle it up, since my stepmom was always looking for a reason to call my probation officer.
I went to live with my mom the summer before my freshman year. I loved it. But then she began to date my future stepfather. He would yell at me and say I was possessed by demons, so I ran away. I was gone with strangers for a week or two, getting high on meth the entire time, and had no intention of ever going home again. But I was reported as a runaway, and the cops started looking for me. One night, I was taken to a gas station by a woman who lived where I was hiding. She made me promise not to tell where I was or who I was with, and then she let me call my sister, Mary, to come get me. Mary took me home that night, but the next morning she let the cops get me. I was taken to West Hills Hospital again to detox. I was really messed up. After that, my mom threw my stuff out and told me I could never live with her again, so I was released to live with my father in Meridian.
I WAS NUMB TO THE WORLD
The summer I was fourteen, after a three-day binge on meth where I hadn’t slept, my stepmother told me that she was taking me to get drug tested and that I was going to jail, so I ran next door to stay with my best friend’s mom. My best friend wasn’t there at the time—he was in California with his aunt and uncle. I would smoke weed with her, sometimes several times a day. One day, my friend’s mom also allowed her forty-seven-year-old uncle to start shooting me up with meth—I had never shot up before—and then he raped me. For the next week they shot me up and raped me over and over. Then they sold me to their drug dealer to pay for drugs. He watched my friend’s mom do things to me, and I had to do stuff to him and sleep with him. As brutal as the rapes were physically, psychologically I suffered the deepest wounds that would take years to heal.
Once, when I was being raped, some friends of my rapists saw what was going on and went next door to my stepmom. They told her where I was and what was happening to me, but she just told them to leave. Then she pretended not to know where I was or what was happening to me. She even called the police asking if they’d found me yet, saying that she knew something bad was happening to me and that they just had to find me. And all the while she knew I was next door, being raped.
The people who my stepmother turned away went to the police, but unfortunately one had a warrant out for her arrest, and she was put in jail. Two days later, the police came to get me. By then I’d been at that house for six days, and I believe I was totally brainwashed or something, because when the police came, I was protecting the people who had done horrible things to me. I actually had it in my head that my rapists were trying to protect me from my dad and stepmom, and that they cared about me. I was messed up. After the police got me, I was placed in a foster home for several weeks, and finally I was released to live with my sister Mary in Sparks, Nevada. I’d just turned fifteen. I was so messed up from the rapes that I had no respect for myself. I was embarrassed, ashamed, and blamed myself for it all. I was numb to the world. I dressed trashy and would sit at bus stops waiting until a stranger would come by and pick me up. I didn’t care if anything happened to me. I also started having blackouts at that time.
I was spun out when I showed up for my court date about the rapes. The judge ordered me to be detained until I could get into treatment for both the drug abuse and the rapes. So I was then taken to Western Nevada Regional Youth Center, where I stayed for three months in an empty cell. I was locked down for twenty-three hours a day, awaiting an open bed at Spring Mountain Treatment Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. Then a bed opened and I was transported to Las Vegas, where I spent the next year.
During that time, the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the rapes caused me to have night terrors, flashbacks that resembled seizures. I had conversations I have no memory of, and blackouts where I would get violent. Other girls at the treatment center would make comments and then I would freak out and beat them up. Afterward I’d have no memory of any of it.
I punched walls and doors, bloodying my hands. At night when I was asleep, I would claw at my private parts and be screaming and thrashing around, and staff would have to wake me up. The medications were not helping.
I had one good counselor, and she had me do packets from a book on PTSD, and that really helped me. The packets were designed to help me deal with guilt, denial, blame, anger, mistrust, feelings of hopelessness and self-hate. It made me draw pictures and remember details that I desperately wanted to forget, but it made me see things clearer and feel confident that I could protect myself in the end. I pretty much had no choice but to get over it. I was tired. I wanted to be happy.
I THOUGHT THIS WAS HOW THE REST OF MY LIFE WOULD BE
I was released at sixteen years old back to my father, and I was still on probation. For the most part I tried to stay clean and sober, but I was not happy. I really didn’t have friends at that point, and the trial for the rapes was starting.
We lived in a small farm town with a few horse ranches around. When I was seventeen my dad and I got into a big fight about a horse that was supposed to be mine, but that he had put in his name. I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad that mad. I left the house and went to my boyfriend’s, and then I got a call from my dad saying I needed to pack up all my stuff and get out of his house. He said I needed to be home in ten minutes to do that or else. I was really, really scared. I don’t why, but I had a bad feeling that my dad was going to hurt me, so I asked my brother to come with me.
I made it exactly on time, but my dad told me that he’d already spoken to my probation officer because I hadn’t got there within ten minutes, and that I was going to be locked up. All that was going through my mind was the last time I was locked up and how horrible it was. I don’t remember anything after that. I blacked out, like I did after I was raped. The next thing I remember is being in my parents’ room inside the house, holding a gun from my boyfriend’s house. My ears were ringing so bad and my stepmom was on the floor. I went to the church where my grandparents used to go, and I think I blacked out again. The next thing I remember is crawling through fences from the police.
As soon as the cops came to get me, I got to see how I would be viewed and treated for the rest of my life. I was dragged through the gravel in front of the house, even though I no longer had the gun and I wasn’t resisting. The cops told my dad that they would do anything and everything to make sure that I got the max.
I was seventeen years old, I was terrified, I had no clue what was going to happen to me, and I had absolutely no one fighting for me. I was taken to county jail. In county the cops were horrible to me. For the first couple of weeks I was kept in a rubber cell, with only a mattress, a blanket, and a roll of toilet paper. There wasn’t even a toilet, only a hole in the ground. I slept on the mattress on the ground, and sewage would rise up on the floor. Ants would crawl all over the ground and all over me, not to mention the bugs that would crawl up from the hole in the ground. When I was let out at night to shower, the porters would clean the rubber room with ammonia and bleach together, and the cops would put me back in there. I would be coughing and choking and I’d hear them laughing.
The worst thing was that one of the men who raped me when I was fourteen was in the jail that was housed right next to me. For two weeks, the cops would let him yell at me and taunt me.
There was only one cop who treated me well. I wanted someone to be nice to me, so I didn’t care why he was doing it. He would stand out of the camera’s view and he’d put his hands through the bars and touch my breasts, or put his hands down my pants and finger me. Sometimes he’d take me to another room without a camera and “pat search” me, feeling all over me and inside me, but the room was right by other officers, so we didn’t have sex. In December 2007 I was sentenced as an adult for first-degree murder. Everyone told me that if I didn’t take a deal I would get one hundred years for shooting and killing my stepmother, so I pled guilty. The trial judge gave me twenty years to life.
The women’s prison is in southern Nevada, so women in northern Nevada who are sentenced to prison are taken to the men’s prison first to await transportation to the women’s prison. For eight days, me and an old lady sat in a cell with nothing. We were given dirty orange jumpsuits to wear, and we never got to change them. The room was freezing, and the blankets didn’t keep us warm; they were dirty and had holes. We had nothing to properly bathe ourselves, no way to comb our hair. The cell was disgusting, and we were locked in it 24/7. The officers would ignore us altogether or call us whiny, needy bitches if we asked for anything. It really scared me, because I thought this was how the rest of my life would be.
Eventually I was taken to the women’s prison in Las Vegas. The woman who raped me as a child was there for another crime, so after intake I was put in protective custody. I didn’t want to be in protective custody. I felt it was a punishment—I wasn’t a kid any more, and I could handle myself. Then the prison decided to place me in the mental health unit because it was locked down, and therefore they could ensure I wouldn’t be in contact with the person who raped me. At least that way, I wasn’t in P.C. and I could still do some programs.
I MESSED UP, BUT DID I DESERVE TO LIVE IN FEAR?
There were officers who I was close to. One touched me and let me touch him down there. He led me to believe he loved me and would help get me out if we were together. I was hoping that, by doing things he asked me to, he would get me out. Another officer would hold me, feel my body, but nothing really bad. Eventually I told the prison about them. As far as I know, nothing happened to them.
Then I got close to a forty-five-year-old officer. At the time I thought he was the only person who cared about me. I did anything for him, as I didn’t want to lose him. I lived in a cell alone, and whenever he came around I would take my clothes off and he’d watch me get into different positions and do things he asked. Once in a while he’d open the door and kiss me and touch my naked body. Once he even came in during count2 and kissed me all over my body and put his mouth between my thighs and performed oral sex on me. I wanted it, though; he didn’t force me. He set up a P.O. box on the outside and we wrote letters to each other using that box.
I had no one and he acted like my knight. But as the relationship continued, I began to realize that he was taking advantage of my situation. I realized that, in the real world, I probably wouldn’t have looked twice at him, and if a man his age pursued me I would probably have been afraid and got help. It was true, even if I hadn’t been willing to admit it. So I tried distancing myself. When that happened, he got scary. The last night I saw him, I tried breaking things off and he tripped out on me. I was outside my cell, alone with him in the dark where no one could see us. He told me that I was dumb and I didn’t know what I was doing. I was crying and he grabbed my arm, but then two superior ranking officers came out and saw us. It was pure luck, because the situation was getting worse and he was scaring me. He looked crazy.
There was an investigation into our relationship, as by that time many things had been overheard or witnessed, but I refused to cooperate. I thought that if I told the truth, nothing would happen to me, but I knew he would lose his job. So I denied everything to protect him. But somehow his wife found our letters. When she turned in my letters to him, he was fired and I was given two years in the hole3 for not talking to begin with. Mind you, officers are walked off all the time for having sex with the girls. And no other inmate ever did hole time for having sex with a guard. I was being punished for protecting him, not for what we’d done.
Life got a lot worse after everyone found out I’d had a relationship with an officer and he’d gotten fired because of it. Everyone quit talking to me. The officers would totally ignore me if I needed something. They started tearing up my cell every time they had “random” cell searches, leaving everything trashed so bad I’d often have to spend hours trying to clean up and salvage what photos, letters, and other paperwork they hadn’t destroyed.
The officers started to taunt me so bad that the other girls in the hole began to scream and yell at them, telling them to leave me alone. Their solution was to move me to the death row cells where no one could see or hear what they did to me. The morning after I was moved to death row, I woke up with hundreds of thousands of little bugs crawling all over me, the blankets, and the bed. They were coming from cracks in the walls and they were all over the floor, everything.
Needless to say, the officers refused to move me to another cell. When I’d try to ask for something I needed, they would close the door between me and them. Even when they came around to pass out food trays through slots in the door, they would often ignore me completely.
These officers are supposed to be here to protect us, not to take advantage of us. I was being punished for being a teenage girl when these grown men were trying to get with me. It was unfair. I messed up, but did I deserve nearly two years in the hole? Did I deserve to live in fear?
MOSTLY I SIT AND TRY AND STAY POSITIVE
In January 2010, I was taken to a men’s prison in Carson City, Nevada, to await transfer to another facility out of state. I spent five months at the men’s prison, waiting for them to find a state to accept me. For the first six days I got put in a cell alone, with nothing. On the sixth day, when I asked a nurse if I could get my clothes washed or some clean underwear, an officer came back screaming at me. He told me to “leave the fucking nurses alone” and that he wasn’t going to put up with my “high-maintenance bullshit.”
Eventually they put me in the infirmary with women who were sick and dying. The sick women were in the men’s prison because the women’s prison didn’t have a sufficient medical unit. Often, only about ten feet or less from our window, we would watch the coroner’s van load up the dead bodies of inmates. We’d listen to officers laugh and make jokes about them, like, “Well, that’s one more down.”
When the officers found out about my relationship with that officer in Las Vegas, they started making my life hell. They filed false reports on me, and told me that if I gave them any problems they’d put me upstairs with the inmates who’d lost their minds. I don’t know what was in the reports, but a caseworker at the prison told me that she kept getting reports on me and I’d better knock it off or I’d have everything taken from me and be moved upstairs. When I asked her what she was talking about, she said, “Quit fucking playing games. You know what you were doing.” That was a typical response. They said I’d be stripped down, strapped to a bed, and drugged so no one would have to deal with my shit. My time there wasn’t easy.
On May 13, 2010, I arrived at this women’s center where I am now. It’s in the middle of nowhere, where I have no one. I’ve only been here for six and a half months, but I’m still not adjusted. It’s a “safe” prison. It’s definitely not the environment I’m used to. Only one officer has truly been inappropriate with me, and he transferred to the men’s prison.
Your crime determines the color you wear at first, and the privileges you get. The fewer points you get, the more privileges you get. For example, yellow is for intake and segregated people; blue is for inmates with eighteen points or more; red is for inmates with eleven to seventeen points; and green is for inmates with zero to ten points. If you’re under twenty-six years old you get two points. If your crime is violent you also get points. For me I got five extra points for first-degree murder. Prior convictions give you points, so some people come here already condemned. Then you can get points for disciplinary behavior. We’re housed by color. Green inmates get all day out and can work anywhere; blue and red get four hours out of their cell, yellow get five hours out if they’re intake and three if they’re in segregation. I was blue when I first got here. Now I’m red.
I’m lonely here, and I don’t fit in. I can’t afford college4 and I can’t apply for almost any educational and job training opportunities because I have a life sentence. Mostly I sit and try to be positive. I work, stay physically fit, write, and read—I like to read political and historical books—anything that keeps me from feeling like I am rotting away. Right now I am writing proposals to get things changed for the better in here. I want to start advocating for inmates being targeted. I’m also hoping to start a newsletter for the facility.
I feel like I’m wasting away in here sometimes, so I busy myself with little projects for my family. I call my dad often, and for the first time we have a good relationship. I call one of my sisters regularly, and some holidays I get to talk to my other siblings. My dad and new stepmom visit, and all my sisters and my mom have visited. I make my entire family gifts at Christmas. I crochet a lot of things for them, like stuffed animals, blankets. I’ve also made jewelry and picture frames, and some drawings. I’ve written down my favorite recipes to make little cookbooks for them. I can’t talk to them about a lot of things, but I’m glad I’m still involved in their lives somewhat. It kind of feels like we’re strangers; we aren’t real close, but it’s okay. I love them all very much still.
I hope to get out of here one day and have a family, a home, and a business, but I’m not sure what kind yet. I’ve grown up a lot. But I still have to serve a long time before I can even ask for parole.
1 The medications in this group are often used to treat depression, anxiety, seizures, bipolar disorder, alcohol withdrawal, and symptoms of schizophrenia.
2 A regular prison security procedure where inmates return to their assigned cells to be counted by prison staff.
3 A colloquial term for administrative segregation or solitary confinement, where a person in prison is isolated from the general prison population for disciplinary or security reasons. For more details, see the glossary.
4 Due to cuts in federal and state grants for prison education, the Department of Corrections has been forced to cut its free course offerings. Many women are thus required to pay local community colleges for credits necessary to obtain their degrees. The community college closest to Sarah Chase charges $103 per credit hour—$1,236 for a full semester. These fees mean that a college education is unobtainable for many people making prison wages.