48, formerly imprisoned
On a sunny fall afternoon in northern New Jersey, Francesca and her husband Michael meet us at the Unitarian Universalist church in town. The couple has driven over an hour for the interview, and both are friendly, although shy at first. Michael has agreed to walk around the town for a few hours so Francesca can tell her story. Francesca grew up as the youngest of six in a working-class Italian-German family, and is now the mother of two adult children who refuse to see her. A survivor of chronic childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, and drug addiction, Francesca has battled mental illness since she was a young girl. She has been home from prison for not quite a year, having served six years for armed robbery. For the entire first year of her sentence, Francesca was housed in solitary confinement.
I JUST KNEW I WANTED TO BE NUMB
I was born in a little town in the Northeast. When I was growing up there was nothing but farmland there, but now there are million-dollar homes, with the rich and the lovely and all that stuff.
I’m the youngest girl in the family. Back then, as long as you were old enough to make a bottle for your younger brother or sisters, you were old enough to take care of the family, so we never had babysitters. There were six of us all together, and my brother and sisters basically raised me. We were all eighteen months apart, and very tight—actually too tight. We didn’t know how to separate from each other, and there was a lot of violence between us. Both my father and my mother got violent too.
During my childhood, starting when I was six years old, I was sexually abused by siblings and cousins. I had a pattern of just following anybody who would give me a little bit of attention. I just had this innocence then. I just wanted to believe that everybody was good, and if you were nice to me, I would just go with you. I couldn’t take tension and anxiety well, so I just wanted to make everyone happy. I wanted to make everything calm.
I started cutting when I was ten. I began cutting because I didn’t know how to deal with painful and terrifying emotions. In my home, it wasn’t permissible to show emotions, so the only time emotions existed was when they exploded into violence. Cutting allowed the evil feelings, the guilt, the remorse, and the anger to flow out of my body. The feeling of release from torture and satisfaction always followed the cutting episode. It got really bad when I was twelve, and that was when I started going in and out of psychiatric wards. At first, my family would put a bandage on the cuts and figure it was just what I did, and would tell me to cut it out. But eventually, I got in trouble for the medical bills. I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and dissociative symptoms, and I was on a lot of psych meds for most of my life.
When I was twelve, I met James. He was nineteen and had already dated two of my sisters. There were four of us sisters, and we were all allowed to have male or female visitors in our bedrooms at night. We were also allowed to drink and use drugs in the privacy of our rooms. My mother felt it was safer for us to do bad at home than to get hurt out in the real world.
James started coming into my bedroom at night when I was twelve, and then we eventually started dating. Even though he was of age, he was still immature, and he was an alcoholic and a drug user who hadn’t finished high school. After a while I became a user too. I did a lot of pills, and when I turned sixteen, I sought out heroin because I just knew I wanted to be numb.
I ended up marrying James when I was nineteen, and a year later I gave birth to my daughter. James never lifted a finger. He never changed a diaper, never took a dish out of the sink, never did anything. He wasn’t really physically abusive at first, but he used to throw things, and he was a screamer—very intimidating, just like my father. It was really very scary. I was always cringing, it was like my insides were shaking.
It took me fifteen years to leave him. All that time he wouldn’t let me go. I had restraining orders, but they weren’t like they are now. He could basically stalk me as much as he wanted because there were no stalking laws. As long as he stayed fifty feet away from me, he was fine. So he would come up with a hammer in his hand and he’d say, “I’m fifty feet away from you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I worked at the deli counter of a local food store, and once he went there and said, “I’m gonna put your face in the meat slicer.” Oh my god, it was so awful. I attempted suicide several times.
The police kept saying that there was nothing that they could do about it until something happened. And then something happened that was so bad. Four years into our marriage, we had a fight one night and he broke a wooden broom over my back. When he thought I was going to kill myself over it, he drove me to my parents’ at 3 a.m. and kicked me all the way to the door while I was holding my three-year-old daughter in my arms. I refused to go back to his house without a police escort. When the police finally went into his house, he had clippings on the wall of men who had killed their wives and kids.
I divorced my husband in 1992, when I was twenty-nine. I stayed single for a while and then I met Sam, who was three times more abusive than my first husband. I guess he felt like he hit the jackpot when he met me because I had really low self-esteem and was really overweight, and I would agree to a lot of weird sexual things. By the time my second husband got finished with me, I was wearing blaring red lipstick and I was working in the go-go club, stripping every night and going home to put all the dollars on his desk. Eventually I got pregnant, and he got angry because I wouldn’t be able to dance and make money. He beat me in the belly until I lost the baby. I laid in bed for about three days, and he wouldn’t let me go to the hospital. Finally the baby passed in the toilet. It was horrible, and I knew at that point that he was just going to kill me, so I left. But by the time I got out, I was pregnant with my son. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I quit heroin cold turkey, and I didn’t do it again for ten years. Then, at my six-week checkup after the birth of my son, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer. I had several scrapings of my cervix, and a cone biopsy to remove all the cancer cells. I was given Percocet for the pain, which eventually triggered my addiction. When my daughter was thirteen and my son was four, I went full-blown back into addiction, and I ended up in jail over it. I called my mother and asked her to bail me out, and my mother said, “If you sign the kids over to me, I will bail you out.” I said, “Absolutely not. I will not sell my kids for bail money.”
I found a friend to bail me out. I went to court, but the jail had given me the wrong courtroom number. I waited and asked around, and I guessed I must have been put on the docket for another day, so I went to my mom’s house to pick up the kids. She told me I’d just lost custody of my kids, that the judge had signed them over to her that morning in court because I hadn’t turned up. Even though there had never been any Division of Youth and Family Services cases against me before, and I had never really been in any serious trouble, they signed my kids over to my mother. It turned out I had been only two courtrooms away. I remember my brother yelling in my face, calling me a crackhead, and my mother yelling that I was not allowed to see my daughter alone. I felt so small and worthless. Every time I went to see my kids, I ended up crying and skulking, until I eventually didn’t go back any more. I was convinced that they were better off without me.
Within three weeks after I lost custody of my kids, I got on a bus and went to New York City. I ended up living under the George Washington Bridge for two years. Without my kids, I had nothing.
I was eventually arrested again, in 1998, for stealing. I always had a petty theft problem. I always felt that if I went into a store and I didn’t steal something, I was getting ripped off. I have to tell you that I come from stock like that. My father was a Teamster truck driver, and everything that we got came in boxes and crates, and everything was openly illegal. In my family, it wasn’t wrong to steal. After getting arrested that time, I decided I wanted to go back to my kids, and I went and put myself through a rehab program. When I entered that program I tested positive for hepatitis C, but it was early so I didn’t get treatment. That is also where I met my current husband, Michael. I got clean, but they put me in a halfway house that was like crack city. Michael was visiting someone else there, and he was still a stranger to me then, but he just saw something in me and said, “You don’t want to stay here.” He took me to his house, and we’ve been together since then. Around that time, I went to court and started legal proceedings to try and get my kids back. I did get my son back in 2000, after nearly two years of visitations, but my daughter was sixteen by then. She had emancipated herself and was living on her own. Social workers asked my son to choose between living with my mother or with me. At that point, I’d been clean for a long time, but the social workers told me, right in front of my son, that he had said he’d rather be with his grandmother. How could the social workers ever expect him to trust anyone ever in his whole life? They were tearing that kid apart. I know what I did was wrong, but what they were doing was more wrong. So I took myself out of the competition.
I was in a house with my husband and I had a normal life, but the pressure of doing without my son was breaking my heart. Soon after returning my son to his grandmother’s house to live with my mother, I went off smoking, shooting, doing pills, and everything else for about two days. The cops found me sleeping in the car in a parking lot across the river after my husband reported me missing. I said to the cops, “Do I have to go home?” And they said no, and I said, “Okay, then I’m not gonna,” and I went back out again. If I had just gone home at that point, I would not have ended up in prison. I just wanted to run away from all my issues, to run forever. So I went back out onto the streets and started using, and after the third day I ran out of money. By the fifth day, after the morphine lollipops, the morphine patches, heroin, crack, the cocaine, and all of that, I was a mess. I was in my car and I pulled into a supermarket parking lot in perfect view. I don’t remember much, other than saying to a lady in the parking lot that my husband was in the hospital and he was having a hard time and that I wanted money. She was probably so scared of me, but in my mind, I was thinking, Why isn’t this lady giving me $20 or $40?
I said to her, “I’ll mail it back to you. Please, give me money before someone gets hurt.” She opened her wallet and I picked out two twenties. Then, twenty-four hours later, I went back to the same place and asked another lady for another $40. This time I had a knife in my hand, and it worked again. Another twenty-four hours and I was back again to the same place. Now, tell me this is not insanity. I mean, who goes back to the same place three times? But on the third night, the police were there, waiting for me.
I EVENTUALLY MADE FRIENDS WITH THE MICE
Never before had I been in the criminal justice system. My psychiatric evaluation came back and it said I had diminished capacity, but when I went to court, I realized they were going to try it as a criminal case. Even though I had gone into rehab from the street with a diagnosis of dissociative disorder and borderline personality, the judge looked at me and said, “You look fine to me.”
I was sentenced to seven years for armed robbery. I had to serve 85 percent of the sentence before being eligible for parole, due to the violent nature of my offense.
When I first got to the county, I was immediately isolated and put on suicide watch because of my psych record. I had no clothes, just a paper suit. I was put in a room with glass windows all around so other inmates, everyone, can see you. I couldn’t shower alone and I couldn’t have a razor. I could understand not having a razor, but I couldn’t have a comb, a brush, or a blanket. And because they thought I might hang myself, I couldn’t have a sheet either.
I had to hold my emotions in, because if you cry, they send you back to maximum security so that you don’t hurt yourself. But then you lose all the status you may have earned by working up to minimum, and you have to start all over again. You can’t get to the halfway house until you do this, so in many cases your time gets extended. If you get sent to the men’s prison in Trenton for serious mental evaluation, then they stop the clock on your sentence while you’re there. So I had to tighten up and act like everything was all right. I just had to lay there and pretend I was sleeping and curl up in a ball. It’s so inhuman. I felt like I was trying to come out of my body.
After seven days, I was moved to a facility where anyone who is sentenced for murder or armed robbery or is in protective custody is housed together, but are not allowed out at the same time. I was in the cell for twenty-two hours a day and allowed out for two hours for rec and my phone call and shower, but I was never out with another human being. I never saw anyone or interacted with anyone, unless on a visit, for an entire year.
When I first came to jail, I was scared of the dark, so just going through the terror of wondering who or what was going to crawl out from under my bed to get me was torture enough. But I eventually made friends with the mice, and started naming them. When the officers set sticky traps, I would secretly remove them so my friends wouldn’t get hurt.
Other girls in secure cells would scream out of the side of the door to each other, but I did my time alone. I read and did a lot of yoga. I also noticed I paced a lot. Animals in cages at the zoo have the same behavior, circling back and forth to the edges over and over again.
When I got released into general population, I begged them to put me back into isolation. It was overwhelming to hear all those noises all at once, and to interact with people. I was a bit paranoid, and it was too much stimulation for my senses. I had formed a whole new me in the sanctity of my cell, and I felt no connection to the outside world.
I WROTE AND I WROTE AND I WROTE AND I STAYED IN MY HEAD
I was mute by choice for my first year and a half in prison. I didn’t let anyone speak to me. I kept my head down, and it was like I wasn’t there. They tried to give me jobs. First they had me watch the garbage bins to make sure that they didn’t overflow, but I was such a mental wreck then, it was difficult for me to be anywhere but under my covers. I just cried all day. Then they put me to work in the sewing factory, but not on a machine, I wasn’t stable enough for that; they had me cutting the white strings off the garments. But really that was too much for me, and I started crying then too. It was torture for eight hours a day. So I asked for solitary, and I told the officers, “There is no way you can torture me more than you are doing now.”
Those first couple of years in the segregation unit there was nothing to do, so I took pills. In prison there is a high market for tranquilizers and barbituates, painkillers also. The girls with prescriptions do what we call “cheeking.” You pretend to swallow your pill, stick it between your teeth and gum, show the officer your empty mouth, and then go somewhere and spit it out. You can get $1 to $3 a pill, which is payable in items bought from the commissary, since we couldn’t use money. It’s actually disgusting, because you’re eating something someone had in their spit. A lot of diseases are spread this way. I took painkillers until August 2006, when I made a conscious decision to stop. It’s the best decision I made.
Another common practice is to make a “punch.” A group of girls will get together and all put their psych meds in a container of ice tea, sometimes up to thirty pills, let the “punch” brew, and everyone drinks a cup of it. This can knock you out for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. A girl on my wing got airlifted out because she overdosed this way.
I faced a lot of abuse in prison. I asked for protection a few times while I was there, from both inmates and officers. The first time I asked for protection was because I was being abused by another inmate. We were on the same wing, which is a long trailer with thirteen beds on one side, and I had to walk by her to get to the bathroom or to get anywhere. Every time I went by, she would say, “I smell white people,” or something like that, and threaten to hurt me for going by her. She was part of a gang and had a lot of power behind her. The abuse was so bad I was just not making it. I thought, I can’t live under these conditions any more. I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I can’t get to the bathroom, I can’t take a shower. It was the same as the abuse on the street. I asked for help from my regular officer, and he told me that there was nothing he could do for me. He told me to work it out myself and said, “There are no cameras on the wing.” So after that I snapped, and I really started acting out. For the first time in my life, I told someone that I was really gonna bash their head in. I guess it represented things in my life where I just felt people weren’t helping me and protecting me. It felt like it used to with my brother and sisters, and I never really had the nerve to stand up to them, like I was a coward.
And then the prison doctors took me off of my medications without any help. In 2007, I went for my regular psych meds: Klonopin twice a day, Vicodin three times a day, and Risperdal. They told me everything but the Risperdal was discontinued because inmates were selling it. Well, I wasn’t selling mine, I needed it—I’d been on Klonopin and other psych meds since I was fifteen.
I suffer from extreme anxiety, and anyone can see that when they’ve been with me for a while. When they suddenly took me off, there were withdrawal symptoms; I had diarrhea for about four days until I couldn’t take it any more. I was so distraught that my officer sent for emergency help. When the assistant administrator came to see me about it, he said, “Let me tell you something. I’m here to protect and serve. I’m not here for your convenience. I’m here to make sure you get food and wake up in the morning.”
I got so mad that I started refusing Risperdal, which was my anti-psychotic medicine. So they threatened me with the psych unit, which they would do on and off for the rest of my stay. It was like a noose around my neck. You always have it in the back of your head. If you don’t act right, if you don’t get out of bed, if you don’t do this, then you’re going to the psych unit.
I had a lot of mental illness problems in my past, but in prison, you’re not allowed to have them. It’s not acceptable and they threaten you. So you have to internalize. So what I did was, I wrote letters every day, sometimes three times a day. I wrote my daughter and my son and my husband, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I stayed in my head.
AS LONG AS NO ONE DIES ON MY SHIFT, I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU DO TO EACH OTHER
In 2008, I had to go to the lieutenant because this crazy lady was living across from me, and her crazy was running into my crazy. She told me she was going to cut people, and she was threatening violence and telling me who she was going to do violence to. At first I kept telling the prison staff, “You’ve got to get this lady away from me,” but nobody would understand. I went to the psychiatrist, I went to the officer, I reported it to everybody. I can’t tell you how many times I sat there and pictured myself dead. It’s a miracle that I made it through alive then. Finally I made friends with the lieutenant, and went to him about the crazy lady. I said, “I can’t do it, not one more day. I just can’t live under these conditions,” and he moved my room. But then the officers on my unit retaliated. They tried to sabotage his decision by calling the psych unit to have me moved there. It didn’t work, but they tried. Another retaliation came when a new officer was put on the unit who was very disrespectful to women. He saw what my weaknesses were, so he used to jar me when I was sleeping. He would come in and wake me up out of my sleep and I would have nightmares. This officer obviously had issues with women, and he had to prove his manhood by demeaning them. Most women wouldn’t allow that, but he preyed on the weak ones who’d been in abusive relationships all their lives. I fit that category. Plus my PTSD1 made me more fun to mess with, because loud noises or sudden movements caused me to jump and react. This officer would come right next to my bed when I was sleeping and scream my name really loud, just to enjoy my anxiety attacks. He was doing this for a while, and then he had me in the bathroom, telling me I couldn’t go out on smoke break until I’d scrubbed all the rust out of the tub, but it was a stain that wouldn’t come out. He would have me digging dirt out of drains, but I was still stupid and not standing up for my rights yet, so I was actually doing what he told me. But after about three or four months of this, I finally filed a grievance against him. That was the first time I’d ever written up an officer, and it was the first sign that I was getting better. I went to the prison administrator, who said, “You’ve been here for three years and I’ve never even heard your name. That’s so unusual, for someone to be so under the radar, so it’s got to be true.” After that, the abuse from that officer lightened up a lot. But the rest of the officers, let me tell you. Half of them spend half their time in the bathroom texting, and the rest of the time, they’re getting blowjobs in the bathroom, or they’re calling you “crackhead,” or “toothless,” and that’s when they are not high themselves. Several officers went to rehab while I was there. One married a pregnant inmate to avoid going to jail for sleeping with her, and some were dismissed for sexual assault.
There is such a thing as a “quiet storm.” This is a pre-arranged fight by inmates that other inmates cover up. Most officers allowed this, and they’d say, “As long as no one dies on my shift, I don’t care what you do to each other.” That was the famous saying in there. Sometimes, just for fun, the officers would take a Blood and a Crip, who are usually held in separate wings, and have them switch their spots, just to watch them fight. I saw three girls get airlifted out. For them it was just pure entertainment. And again they’d just say, “As long as no one dies on my shift.”
I have hepatitis C, but I was not really treated for it during my whole time in prison. When I went in I clearly told them I had it and I asked for treatment, but they refused to do more than give me a biopsy. They said that because my liver was only in stage one of damage, that it wasn’t high enough to qualify for treatment. But my viral load is 10 million, which is high. Also they used my mental state against me and said I was not a candidate for treatment because of my past depression and suicide attempts. They just took bloodwork every couple of months, and not even that much, because due to my IV use, I’m a really hard stick, and they didn’t want to be bothered.
I eventually forced them to do a biopsy, because I had started learning my legal rights. During the biopsy, I was handcuffed and shackled while they put a foot-long needle into my side to get a piece of liver out. Not only was this shackling demeaning, but it made the whole experience even more painful and stressful.
I still haven’t been treated since my release. I’m still trying to find a hepatitis clinic that will accept my dismal insurance.
On top of this, my teeth are all gone now. When I first got into the halfway house, I asked the dentist for oral surgery for gum disease because I was in so much pain and my teeth were coming out of the gums. He replied, “Come back in six months and see how they feel.” I told him I was being released in five months, and he said, “Oh well.”
I didn’t want to get treatment in the halfway house anyway, because the dental office was in the sex offender unit in a men’s prison, and the male inmates used to jerk off while you waited for your appointment. The waiting area was surrounded by glass walls, and the men would expose themselves and pleasure themselves. I thought, I’d rather lose all my teeth, and I did.
HOW DO YOU GET FROM HERE TO COLLEGE?
When I got to the halfway house, I saw an African American lady who was carrying a book-bag, the kind with the wheels attached. Everyone else at the halfway house was wearing t-shirts and talking about drugs. That lady was close to fifty, and she had done more than twenty years inside. She wasn’t trying to fit in, and she wasn’t ashamed of her book-bag; she held her head high. She walked like she deserved to carry that book-bag, like she had every right to get a college education.
I wanted to be like her, free of shame, so I asked her where she was going with that bag, and she told me, “College.” I said, “College? How do you get from here to college?” She told me about the program at the local community college that helps students in the halfway houses enroll in school during the day, with a set of academic, social, and financial support.
The administrators at the halfway house told me it was too late for me, that registration was already over, but I just kept calling and calling. I insisted. I kept fighting for my education.
Most of the inmates aren’t educated enough or tenacious enough to keep up the fight. It is so hard, though. But I am so blessed, do you know what I’m saying? I’ve got an education now. The state pays for my bus fare, my books, and I get a check at the end. It is like God stepped out of the sky and shook my hand. When I’m done with school in December, I want to start a business to help people like me, who are coming out of prison with little idea of what to do. Even if I can just help navigate people to the right agency, I think that would make a huge difference. Now they just dump people out on the street without any support or idea what to do to survive. I want to help them.
Today I see a therapist and I’m on minimal medication. My belief in myself is what keeps me clean and sober. I’m not garbage. That was a hard lesson to learn. My own mother hasn’t talked to me in years, and my children didn’t accept me back when I came home, but I’d lived my entire life trying to make other people happy. Look what it got me. Now I live a quiet life with my husband, who waited seven years for me, and accepts me for my faults because he knows my heart is pure. I am not a criminal; I am a person led astray, who didn’t have enough confidence to do the right thing. I am now a grown-up, and I take responsibility for my actions.
I entered prison at forty-one, but emotionally I was twelve. That girl doesn’t exist any more.
1 Post-traumatic stress disorder. For a description and a list of symptoms, see the glossary.