45, formerly imprisoned
Emily is a tall, African American woman with the physique of a basketball player and a strong, firm handshake. She has asked to meet in the family restaurant across the street from the prison in which she spent most of her twenties and thirties. Visible from the restaurant is a patch of green surrounded by triple barbed wire—the prison yard. Emily likes the view because it reminds her of when she was inside, and how she would fantasize about eating at that restaurant. She says it gives her strength to remember. Over the course of the meeting, Emily tells of being raised by a crack addict mother, of her younger sister’s pregnancy at thirteen, and of her decision to go into sex work at sixteen in order to support her sister and baby nephew. The conversation falters only once, when she starts talking about the crime that put her in prison. Emily describes how, in November 1986, she stabbed a man to death while defending herself against sexual assault. A year later, she was convicted of first-degree murder and given a mandatory life sentence. “I can never forget what I did,” she says. She also describes her experiences of being abused and retaliated against in prison, and her decade-long fight to bring to justice those who perpetuated the abuses.
I ALWAYS TRIED TO MAKE EVERYBODY HAPPY
I grew up in Detroit. I remember always being in charge of taking care of my little sister, who’s twenty-two months younger than me. I remember holding her hand and walking her to school, with the house key tied around my neck on a shoestring.
My sister and I were supposed to go over to our father’s house every weekend because he paid child support. I wanted to go and see my father, and my mother took that as a slight. At first she was just verbally abusive. She would say things like, “You ungrateful bitch. I take care of you every day, I feed you and you want to run over there to him.” Then in 1972, when I was six, he married a woman called Danielle. I don’t have any bad stepmother stories, only positive ones, because Danielle took me in when my mother threw me out, and even to this day, I go over there. She gave me a huge barbecue when I came home from prison. She hired a DJ, and she even had a porta-potty in the backyard.
My mother was definitely meaner after my father remarried. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want her to be mad at me and I didn’t want her to think that I liked my stepmother more than her. I always tried to make everybody happy, and I’d try to make my mother happy, but it didn’t matter. Sometimes she would tell me she hated me and that I was the reason for all of her problems. She was fourteen when she had me, and she resented having to get married so young.
My mother began using drugs when I was twelve. She was on heroin and cocaine. When I was fourteen she beat me really bad because I’d hidden her drugs. My little sister said she’d seen me with the drug kit, and then my mother got really mad. She slapped me, she punched me, and she hit me with an extension cord, a coat hanger, and a metal curtain rod. I was bruised and bloody, and I was lying in a fetal position covering up my face. And she kept saying, “Uncover your face, uncover your face.”
After that happened I went to the Children’s Center,1 which is where we got counseling. My case manager’s name was Miss Quinn, and I remember when I first walked into her office she gasped at the sight of me and put her hand over her mouth. She called Protective Services and they took me away to a school for girls in Detroit. It was nice there; they were really kind to me, and they let me go to my father on weekends. He and Danielle would pick me up and then I got to spend time with him. But I still thought it was my fault, because I was thinking that, had I never hid her drugs, she wouldn’t have done it. When my mother and I went to court, she said how sorry she was and that she really didn’t mean it.
My father was trying to get custody of me, but then my sister got pregnant when she was thirteen and I just flipped the script. I really felt responsible for her. I told my father, “No Daddy, I have to go home, I have to go home.” He said, “Emily, that’s not the place for you. Me and Danielle’ll take you and we’ll help you and we’ll raise you and do what we can for you.” But all I could see was my sister, poor thing. She’s pitiful, you know; my mother spoiled her to death. I couldn’t imagine her having a baby. Still today, my sister’s totally irresponsible, in and out of rehab.
My mother was out on a binge when my sister went into labor, so I took my sister to the hospital to have the baby. Mind you, I was just fifteen at the time, and my sister was thirteen going on fourteen, and I was down there with her having this baby. Afterward I knew that I had to take care of this baby and I had to make sure my sister was okay. I was the only one who could do it.
I COULDN’T GET ENOUGH MONEY FOR THE HOUSE NOTE, THE ELECTRIC BILL, THE LIGHTS, THE GAS BILL, THE CAR NOTE
By the time I was sixteen, my mother had started staying away for weeks at a time. It was just me and my sister, and we didn’t have any money because my mother would take all of it with her. My sister was just hanging out in the streets. I remember diluting my nephew’s Similac until it looked like skimmed milk. He’d be constantly crying, and I knew he wasn’t getting enough nourishment. I’d thought about getting a job at McDonald’s or Burger King, but I knew that I just couldn’t get enough money for the house note, the electric bill, the lights, the gas bill, the car note. And I really couldn’t leave my sister in that house with that baby for eight hours to go and work a shift anywhere. Finally I went up to the grocery store on the corner and told the man who worked there that I wanted to sleep with him for some money. We went to the local hotel. After we slept together, I didn’t even know how much money to ask for. He gave me $50 and we went back to his grocery store. I got milk, diapers, the cheapest pork steak, rice, beans, cornbread, and chicken. In Detroit there’s a street called Woodward where all the prostitutes go, and all I could think about was the ladies that stand on the corner with the really short skirts on. But then my mind went back to, Now I have some milk for my nephew. I bet he won’t be hungry today, and I bet he won’t start crying after I give him this bottle.
I remember running into the house and taking out a can of formula and a box of cereal. I was gonna make my nephew the best bottle he’d ever had. My sister was in the back playing loud music with some of her friends, so I went and got my nephew. Then I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the counter and I started feeding him. If you could only have seen him looking up at me!
The next day I went up to the store and asked the man if he would introduce me to his friends who owned grocery stores and gas stations, because I knew I couldn’t go and stand out on Woodward. People would see me and then they would know what I was doing. So he did just that. He introduced me to the other men in the neighborhood who owned gas stations and party stores and liquor stores and grocery stores, and that’s what I started doing. We would go to fancy hotels, we would sleep together, and they would give me money.
I dropped out of school in the tenth grade. I couldn’t do what I was doing and go to school, babysit my nephew, make sure my sister went to school, and be there for my mother.
I remember once when I was really happy. I was probably still sixteen at the time. Our house note was $500 a month. I was struggling to pay it, and all I could think of was, I don’t want to lose our house. I went to the mortgage company, and I asked the man if he could decrease our payments if I slept with him. He was looking at me like, You cannot be serious. But I was really aggressive, and I asked him if we could go out to have a drink. So we went out and had drinks and he liked me, so he arranged to federally subsidize our house through HUD.2 That broke our payments down to $250 a month. I feel like that was one of the best things I was able to do, because the mortgage had been such a burden.
I KNEW I WAS GOING TO TAKE CARE OF THIS CHILD
One day, when I was seventeen, a guy forced me into a car at gunpoint and he and his two friends raped me. I went to Detroit Receiving Hospital and they did the rape test kit. I had vaginal bruising and bite marks on my breast and on my thighs, and they found three different types of semen in me. The police got the guys and they had the evidence. Later, I went to police headquarters with my mother, and the female officers in the sex crime unit there were really nice to me. But my mother told them, “We aren’t gonna press charges. We aren’t gonna testify against them, because they’re thugs. They are not throwing a Molotov cocktail through my window.” When the officers said, “Well, what about her? What about what she wanted to do? Do you even know what they did to her?” my mother said, “She’s fucking guys anyway. We’re leaving.” That’s exactly what she said. I remember going home and taking a shower and crawling up in bed and just crying.
At that time, I had a boyfriend who was a drug dealer. I never told him about the rape. My boyfriend helped me out a lot so I didn’t have to prostitute myself any more. One day we got pulled over by the police, and my boyfriend gave me his gun. The police officers had him get out of the car and they shook him down, and then they were looking at me. They said, “Let us know, what did he give you? What did he tell you to hold?” My boyfriend was on the other side of the car, mouthing to me, “I love you. Don’t worry about anything.” Then one of the police officers found the gun on me.
My boyfriend came down to the jail with his attorney and got me out. I got three years’ probation for that case, even though it wasn’t my gun. At the time, I did what I did because I felt that this was what a good woman did for her man.
It turned out that I may have been maybe a month pregnant when I caught that case, but I didn’t know it. Almost immediately after that my boyfriend went to prison, in 1983.
When I was pregnant I read about everything and I ate the right foods. I wouldn’t even eat ketchup because I didn’t want the acid in the tomato to thin my breast milk. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, and I made all of my checkups on time. I would take a towel and rub it across my breasts really hard to toughen up my nipples, because I wanted to have my breasts in good shape for breastfeeding. Then I would massage my nipples with lanolin. I’m telling you, I was crazy.
My daughter was born on March 27th, 1984 at 9:42 in the morning. She was seven pounds and eleven ounces, and twenty-one and a half inches long. I had just turned eighteen. My boyfriend died the following year; he was killed in August of 1985. I was really sad because he’d done stuff for me that nobody else had ever done. We used to have so many meaningful conversations, and I knew that I could share stuff with him that I couldn’t share with others. He was the very first man who ever told me I was smart. He told me that I was going to be something, and that I needed to go to school.
My daughter is my pride and joy. My first vow to her when she was born was, “I will never ever spank you. Never.” I didn’t have a good upbringing, but I knew I was going to take care of this child. And to this day—she’s twenty-seven now—I’ve never ever spanked her and I’ve never called her out of her name. Those are two of the things that I’m most proud of, because I felt like what my mother did to me still affects me today, and I didn’t want to do that to her.
My mother came to the hospital, and I was really happy about that, because I think by then she’d had something like thirty days clean and sober. I was so proud of her, and I thought she was so pretty. She was bright and so bubbly. She had a beautiful smile. I named my daughter Andrea, after my mother.
I had completed maybe two and a half years of the probation when I had my baby, and I was going to my probation officer like I was supposed to. When my daughter was about two, I started working in a club. I had got my own apartment by then so I needed the money, and I didn’t want to go back to prostituting. My sister and my mother were living together down the hall from me, and sometimes they would watch the baby for me when I worked.
When I told my probation officer where I worked, she said, “Oh, you can’t work in an establishment that sells liquor.” She told me I had to quit. But I was bringing money in, I was able to pay for everything I needed. I had my stuff together and I felt like she was being really unfair. I didn’t quit, and so they violated my probation. The judge sentenced me for my last six months to a residential facility called Evolution House, and my dad and his wife Danielle looked after my daughter. I didn’t want to leave her, but it was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because the people at Project Transition showed me how to take care of myself.
At Evolution House I took my GED and passed it the first time. Then I went to Ross Medical Education Center and studied for seven months to become a medical assistant. Danielle was a lab tech at Sinai Hospital, and she gave me a bunch of her white uniforms. Then one of my aunts got me a job as a health aide in this really nice senior complex called the Jefferson City Apartments. I would work for four days straight and then I would come home for three days. I was being paid really good money. It felt good.
THAT’S WHEN I STARTED TO FIGHT
I met Stanley, a resident at the Jefferson City Apartments. He was eighty-one years old and I was twenty. I would stop at his place sometimes and wash his dishes up for him. He used to give me money, and I was overly flirtatious with him. We didn’t have sex; we just kissed and touched. He said that he was impotent, so I felt really comfortable just being over there with him. He was really nice, but my aunt told me, “You’re gonna have to stop seeing Stanley, because people will think you’re trying to use him.” So I said okay, and I stopped going to see him.
On the night of November 5th, 1986, Stanley called me. He wanted to know why I hadn’t been to visit him. I said, “My aunt told me to stop seeing you because people in the complex were talking.” Then he said, “You need to come out here and talk to me.”
I waited for my father to go to bed, and I took a cab out there to see Stanley anyway. When I got to his place, he was sitting there drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. I sat on the couch and he said, “Now tell me the real reason you don’t want to see me.” I told him, “My aunt said that people were talking, and trying to say that I was manipulating you and taking your money.” Then it was like he went from zero to sixty. He said, “No, you just used me. You don’t wanna see me any more. You probably have some little boyfriend. You know, all he’s gonna do is get you pregnant!”
I got up and I tried to go toward the door, but he got up and grabbed me. He was eighty-one but he was in really good shape. He might’ve been like six-one, six-two, over 250 pounds. We were struggling and I was still trying to go toward the front door. We went into the kitchen, which is right near the front door. He said I wasn’t going anywhere, and he kept trying to kiss me. I can remember his saliva being on my cheeks and across my mouth. Then he got a paring knife out of the kitchen sink and he said, “We’re gonna fuck tonight.” I put my hand over the blade, he pulled the knife back, and it cut my pinky finger. To this day that finger doesn’t bend like the other ones do. When I looked at it, I saw all of this blood and I just started crying. That’s when I started to fight. We slipped and he ended up on top of me. He was trying to pull his pants down. I felt around for the knife and I picked it up and I stabbed him.
When I went to trial, the prosecution said I’d stabbed him between thirty-two and thirty-five times, and that all of the stab wounds were located in an oval shape under his left armpit. Stanley stopped moving, and I remember pushing his body up and trying to stand up. I looked at him and I just knew he was dead. I went in the bathroom and I washed my hands and wrapped a towel around my hand. I went back and I looked at him and he was still. I’d killed him. I put the towel in the bathroom sink and I left.
The next morning, my father saw the paper and said, “Emily, look at this.” I went down to my bedroom in the basement and I just started crying. I had so much rage and so much anger and so much hurt and resentment in me, and Stanley had caught it all. He didn’t deserve that.
Three months later, on February 11th, the police called all the Jefferson City Apartments home health aides and the maintenance workers in for questioning. They asked for all of our fingerprints. So I gave my fingerprints, and when I went home that night I got a fifth of Tanqueray and Rose’s Lime Juice. And I drank, drank, drank. My stepmother heard me crying at 5:30 in the morning, and she sent my father downstairs to my bedroom. He found me sitting in there with my hands on my face. I was crying and I had scratch marks on my face from my nails. My father said, “What’s wrong? Tell me what happened.” I wouldn’t say anything. I just kept crying. So my stepmother said, “Wrap her up in a blanket. We’re taking her to the hospital.” When I got to the emergency room I just freaked out. I started screaming, and the nurses restrained me and took me to the psychiatric unit.
My father would come and see me every day, but I would never say anything. I would just sit by the window. I was thinking about Stanley. I was thinking about all of the men I’d slept with, the drugs that I’d done, my mother, the drugs she was doing, my daughter, how I was going to survive, what I would do. Sometimes I would have crying spells, and the nurses would come and give me an injection and just knock me out. They released me after thirty days of hospitalization.
After I went home, I quit my job at Jefferson City Apartments and got a job at a clothing store. I was there April and May. Then May 9th, 1987, the police came to the store. I was in the back hanging up stock when they went to the front desk. I knew they were there for me. They said to me, “We have a warrant for your arrest for robbery and murder.”
I STARTED THINKING, THIS IS WHAT I DESERVE
I had two trials. The first trial I testified at, so I was able to tell my whole story, that his wallet with $61 and all his credit cards in it was right on the coffee table. I could testify that he was found with a gold watch on, a diamond ring, a sterling silver ring with a precious stone on it and a large gold chain. His car keys, everything was right there in his apartment. So they couldn’t say it was a robbery and a murder. The jury deliberated for three days and declared a mistrial.
Then I had to have the second trial, but in the second trial my attorney didn’t want me to testify. My attorney said I didn’t come across well to the jury, because most people cry when they’re talking about something so tragic, and I wasn’t crying. I just wanted to tell my story as clearly and as quickly as possible. My attorney said that wasn’t a good idea. I felt that he was wrong, and I remember at that point I started to shut down. I had been so adamant about everything, and I felt like my attorney should have supported me, but it wasn’t like that. So I didn’t testify at my second trial, and I was found guilty of first-degree murder. On November 9, 1987, I was sentenced to a mandatory life sentence. The judge said that I’d leave prison in a pine box.
Once I was sentenced, they took me straight to Huron Valley Women’s Prison that same day. I was twenty-one years old.
In prison I guess you could say I was vulnerable and way too trusting at first. I trusted this one officer and he took advantage of me. Every day he would come in and tell me how beautiful I was or how pretty I was. I hadn’t had anybody say that to me in so long, and I fell for him.
I remember the first time he tried to touch me, I said, “Ouch, don’t do that.” And he said, “Oh, you know you want me to do it,” and he did it anyway. It could happen anytime. If I was standing in the counselor’s door talking to the counselor, he would come up behind me and squeeze my butt cheek. I couldn’t say anything. I just started thinking, I killed a man who was trying to sexually assault me, and I’ve been gang-raped before by three men. This is what I deserve. I started not caring.
The officer would come into my room on a midnight shift and I would be asleep and he would wake me up and say, “I want you to suck my dick.” In the beginning I was like, “Ah, no.” But he would grab me by the back of my hair or something and I would do what he wanted me to do. I didn’t tell anyone because they had seen us talking, so I thought, If I go and try to tell them something, they’re gonna say, “Oh, you were asking for it. You wanted that to happen.”
By 1988 I was in charge of the kitchen, and one day I got into a fight in there. I never usually fought, but I think the reason I did it was so I could get away from that officer. After I had the fight in the kitchen, I went to the segregated house unit. While I was in seg3 I heard that the officer had raped another girl, and I felt so guilty. I thought that if I’d stood up and said something, that wouldn’t have happened to her.
There was a lawyer who was trying to bring college education to the prison, and I finally told her what was going on. She told me to write a grievance, and to tell the warden, the deputy warden, and the inspector. The officer was immediately taken out of the unit, and he was put on a stop order that prevented him from coming to work in the prison. It was really hard, because then I had to deal with the women who were mad at me, because everybody liked him. They said he was cool because he would let them get away with stuff they weren’t supposed to be doing. And the officers, they were pissed off at me because he was one of their own.
The retaliation was horrible. The officers made me submit urine samples on a weekly basis. They would wake me up on the midnight shift and tell me to come drop urine, even though usually you do urine drops on a day shift. It was horrible. They would come and shake my room down. I can remember some of the female officers saying stuff like, “Well, that’s what you get.”
I was at Valley from December 1987 until May 28th of 1992. Then they closed Valley and transferred all of us to Robert Scott Correctional Facility in Michigan. I was elated, because I felt like this was going to be a whole new start. But it wasn’t so.
Some of the officers that came with us, they immediately pointed me out. They said, “Oh, that’s the bitch that’ll get a man,” or “You gotta watch out for that one. She’s a set-up queen.” I’d hear what they said and I’d keep it moving.
By then I decided that I was going to think about some college. When college first came to the women back in 1989, I really wasn’t comfortable—I wasn’t ready, and I knew it, so I didn’t go. But by 1992 I was ready to go full-fledged with my education, and that’s exactly what I did.
I STARTED FEELING LIKE IT WAS NEVER GOING TO STOP
I lost my visitation rights permanently from 1996 until 2002 because of two substance abuse tickets. I was the very first woman in the state of Michigan to ever get a permanent visitors restriction for that reason. One ticket was for an 800-milligram Motrin that I didn’t have a prescription for, but I was cramping and I got one from another girl. The other one was for an iron pill. I had iron pills prescribed to me because I had low iron, and I had kept them a little bit too long, so they were out of date. Those two tickets were considered substance abuse.
The visitors restriction impacted me deeply. The inspector who enforced it—Inspector Donald—was horrible, and I felt like he was trying to set me up. He was having my room torn up all the time. He said I was selling drugs even though I wasn’t. At one point he sent two officers to shake my room down, and they planted marijuana in my room. The stupid part was that one of them wrote an incident report and said that I had loose marijuana in my make-up bag. And then the other officer said it was wrapped up in aluminum foil and ready for delivery. I had to go down to Wayne County for court, and the judge threw the case out. Inspector Donald was sitting behind me, and I’ll never, ever forget the look on his face. He was frowning at me so much. He was just so eager to get me. The officers even noticed it, and some of them would say, “Dang, Madison, what’d you do to him, ’cause he really wanted you bad.”
Another time, in ’96, some friends of mine in prison drew a chalk outline of a dead body right in front of my window. They put three bullet holes in the head and then they wrote “Donald” above it. Inspector Donald saw it and sent me to seg. Anytime you get to seg, they have to serve you with papers clearly stating what you’re being held for. The papers said an investigation was being conducted to see if I was going try to have Donald killed. I thought, You cannot be serious. All because of the chalk outline that I didn’t draw?
Then the warden came back to seg to see me and she told the officer to release me. But I thought, What if Donald does something, or has something done to me? So I signed myself into protective custody, which meant I stayed in seg. I was there for about four months. The officers there would bring me cold food. So if I had beans for dinner, they would be so cold they would be gel. I knew it was being done purposely. I complained, and the deputy warden told the officers that if a prisoner in seg complained about their food being cold they had to use the microwave to heat it up. So then all the officers got mad at me again. They would say, “We’re so sick of you, Madison.” I didn’t pay any attention, because the bottom line was that I knew I didn’t have to eat cold food.
After I got out of seg I had a new roommate. An officer named Edwards was sexually abusing her. After a while they split us up as roommates and moved her to another unit, but they put him back in the same unit with me. So I wrote a statement on her behalf. Then Edwards came to my door and said, “I hope you aren’t going to testify, because if you do, you know what’s going to happen to you.” I was really scared. Then, in January of 1997, that officer came to my room and sexually assaulted me. He said, “You’d better not tell anybody. I can reach you wherever you are.”
That’s when I started feeling like it was never going to stop. I felt like I just couldn’t take any more. Between the sexual assault, the innuendos, the verbal attacks, the retaliation, Inspector Donald—I was just ready to give up. I stopped eating. After three days of not eating any food or taking any liquids, they shipped me to HVC, the psychiatric hospital. I was there for a year, from February 1997 to February 1998.
I hoped that I’d finally be someplace where I could get some help, where I could talk to somebody. But no, the officers who took me there spoke to some of the staff at HVC and they told them all sorts of things. So it was just more of the same. I felt like it would never stop. I thought, This is what I’m going to have to do the rest of my life—listen to them badger me, belittle me, humiliate me. This is what I’m going to have to do.
I DIDN’T BELIEVE IT UNTIL THE DAY I WALKED OUT OF THE DOOR
I tried to hang myself in the bathroom. But I stayed in there too long and the officers found me. They stripped me and they put a little pink gown on me. There were five males in there with me, and they five-point restrained me. That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced. Then they put me on one-on-one suicide watch, but the staff person assigned to me was male. In one-on-one, the staff person goes to the bathroom with you. I thought, Why would you do this when you already know my history? I felt like all of that was done purposefully. I was on one-on-one for twenty-nine days, and then I just got so fed up, I stopped eating again. My blood pressure dropped down to eighty over forty and they had to take me to the Duane L. Waters Hospital. After a couple of days they asked me if I was going to start eating, and I shook my head no. That’s when they put the tube down my throat to force-feed me. Then after a couple of days I told them they could take it out and I would eat. I was at HVC for another couple of months, and in February they transferred me to Florence Crane Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Michigan.
The retaliation and harassment started as soon as I hit the ground, because the warden wanted me to go to a unit with an officer who was a defendant in the sexual abuse cases. They knew I was helping with those cases.
I was at Coldwater for fifteen months, from 1998 until 2000. I was there when the third sexual assault occurred. I filed a complaint, and the prison doctor did the rape test kit and said everything was negative. By then I was on a writ for my criminal appeal, which means I was transferred to a county jail so I could go back and forth to court. While I was there, I tested positive for gonorrhea. I just couldn’t believe it. I had been locked up for thirteen years and I didn’t know how long I’d had gonorrhea.
After the lawsuit was over, I was transferred to Western Wayne Prison in Michigan. It was like all the other places I had been to, because the officers knew who I was and were like, “Oh, lord. We don’t want her here.” But I could finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. I enrolled in the Residential Substance Abuse Therapy (RSAT) program. I feel like that was the best program the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) ever offered to anybody. I’m telling you, that program made such a difference in me and the way I feel. It was just amazing. Another program was the Assaultive Offender Program (AOP), which just taught me so much about who I was and why I was the way I was. Before I got into the AOP, I didn’t know who I was. I was full of false pride and bravado, and I hadn’t gotten to know my strength. AOP taught me to think about what I do before I do it, and to rethink it. It taught me more than anything to accept full responsibility for my behavior. It was then that I stopped getting into trouble in prison. Everything had been because my mother did something, or a man did something. I stopped blaming people and I stopped being a victim. It was just amazing. I feel like everybody going into the system should do that. It meant everything to me, and it changed the way I look at life.
I was eligible for parole in 2004. Of course they didn’t let me go. But after 2004 I knew it was just a matter of time. I knew I needed to keep my nose clean, do all that I needed to do, and have something else positive to take back every year I went back. In 2000, when I was at Coldwater, I’d got my bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. My major was psychology and my minor was sociology. I kept doing what I had to do, and I finally made parole in August 2009. I didn’t believe it until the day I walked out the door, because I knew that they could take it back for any reason.
When I left, I felt like I was starting my life all over again; I had a second chance. Now I’m forty-four and I have a ten-year-old grandson, and three granddaughters who are six years old, three years old, and eight months old. The birth of my fourth grandchild was the first time I had ever witnessed one of my grandchildren being born, and I thought that was such a beautiful experience. My daughter had the baby on a Saturday and she was back in school that Tuesday, so I was there with the kids every day, spending the night, just being there, helping my daughter with my grandchildren. It was phenomenal.
A few months after I came home, I started volunteering with a girls’ group in Ann Arbor, acting as a mentor to help at-risk girls stay in school, stay off drugs, and not get pregnant. I did that for a year, and now they’ve hired me as a paid mentor. I love my job so much. I’m doing good work and I feel good about it. I really feel like I’m making a difference in the lives of others. I like to talk to people about their choices and the consequences, because I know about all of my choices and consequences. If I can help anybody avoid what I went through, that’s what it’s all about.
1 A service agency in Detroit for at-risk children and youth.
2 The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a federal agency that over-sees public housing and tenants’ rights.
3 Segregation/segregated housing, which is isolated from the general prison population. For more details, see the glossary.