34, formerly imprisoned
The Jim Williams Motel Efficiencies sits along a busy four-lane industrial boulevard on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, Michigan. There’s a McDonald’s to its right, a Wendy’s across the street, and the parking lot for a laundromat and budget supermarket to its left. Taisie likes her single-room unit here, just big enough for a bed and a side table. When she was first released from prison, she tried living with a roommate because it was cheaper, but she moved on when the roommate took Taisie’s money and spent it on crack. Taisie’s voice is even and steady as she describes how she ended up serving a multiple-year prison sentence for check and credit card forgery and felonious assault. Her voice wavers only when she talks about Elaine, the daughter she had in prison, who was taken from her just a few days after the birth.
Taisie’s narrative has been edited from interviews conducted by Voice of Witness and a previous testimony, in which she describes medicals runs to the hospital and programs available to pregnant women in prison.
FLASHES OF PLACES I’VE BEEN IN
My childhood, in my mind, is not chronological. It’s flashy. My earliest childhood memory is of being sexually abused by an uncle, in the bathroom of the trailer I lived in with my parents. I was seven then, and I remember my sister being in a playpen in the next room. I don’t think that was the first time, but I remember it because my mom found us. She cut my uncle up with a knife pretty badly, and then the cops came.
That’s when the relationship between me and my mother went wrong. It was as if it was all my fault, and I’d ruined her relationship with the family. My mother would call me a slut. She’d tell me the sexual abuse was my fault, and there was nobody who could ever help me. She was angry at me, and I was angry with her, too.
My parents worked in migrant camps, picking fruit and working construction, and we moved a lot. I’d wake up one morning and the van would be packed up and we’d be on the road. They just didn’t want to settle down in one place, I guess. By the time I was eighteen I’d been to about thirty-three different schools all over the United States. Sometimes I’d only be in school for a week and then I’d move to a different state. I remember being in certain places we lived in: Flagstaff, Milwaukee, Florida, South Fork, Butte, Cheyenne, San Antonio, Houston. There’s no chronological order for me, just flashes of places I’ve been in.
Life was kind of an adventure. I remember times, like when we lived in Milwaukee, and my sister and I went to play hide-and-seek in the dumpsters in the back alleys with other kids in the neighborhood. There were other times where I camped out in the mountains, just seeing the beauty of the country and the earth and stuff like that.
In Milwaukee, I got accepted into a school for art and dance. I took the acceptance letter home, and my mom said no. She wouldn’t let me do that. She wouldn’t even come to my shows. When I was in Girl Scouts, she stole my Girl Scouts cookie money and I got kicked out.
As long as I can remember, my mom beat on me. She’d beat me with sticks and extension cords or anything she could get her hands on at the time. She’d punch me or grab me by the hair and throw me across the room. She’d go off because the dishes weren’t done. She’d go off because I hadn’t cooked or I hadn’t done the laundry. It was always something I hadn’t done. But I think that I was also really angry as a child. I back-talked her, I didn’t respect her at all. I would do bad things, like break her stuff.
I was thirteen when my mom gave me to the state. At that time we were living in Three Rivers, Michigan. My caseworker from Children’s Protective Services (CPS) was this woman named Eileen. She came and told me that my parents had given me away, and that CPS were taking me out of my home. My parents said I was unruly and out of control. My mom to this day says that she was forced to give me to the state, but if they were taking me away from her, they would have taken my sister too.
At first I was put into this place in Kalamazoo called the Ark. It was a place for kids who had nowhere to go. Then I went to live with a couple, also in Kalamazoo. They didn’t really want to be foster parents; they were trying to adopt a newborn baby because they couldn’t have kids. I stole money from them. I was having sex in my room. I was skipping school. At one point, when I was fourteen, I thought I was pregnant, and when I told the foster parents they called Eileen and said that I could no longer stay there.
I ended up going to Pine Rest Christian Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Grand Rapids. CPS sent me there because I was so angry and depressed. I had a therapist there who tried to establish a relationship between my family and me. My dad would come visit me all the time and take me places, but if my mom came, I had to have supervised visits because our relationship was so messed up. We would just fight when we saw each other without supervision. Still, I wanted her to come. She kept saying she was gonna come to a therapy session, she was gonna come, she was gonna come, and then she never did. My therapist told me that my mom said she didn’t want to see me if she had to have other people there. I was so upset that I ended up slitting my wrists. After that, they put me in what they called the “adolescent watch.”
One night, I put my bag and my makeup Caboodle and all my stuff out the window. Then I went outside like I was going to smoke, and I left. When I got to the road, I saw this semi-truck driving my way, and I flagged it down. The driver was going to Arkansas and I said, “Can I ride?” I was fifteen. I guess at that age I realized what men wanted, and I slept with him all the way down to Arkansas in order to eat and shower. That’s what I did until I got to California—I hitched rides with truck drivers in return for sex. I’d been gone a few months, and finally I called my mom. I hitched back to Michigan and she met me at a McDonald’s.
After my mom came and got me, I remember us smoking marijuana together, drinking together. Then there was a knock on the door and my caseworker Eileen was there with my guardian ad litem—that’s the person the court appointed to take care of me legally. They wanted me to go with them. Eileen was blocking my way to get to my stuff, so I threw her across the room. They called the cops after that, and I remember the cop coming toward me, but then I blacked out. When I woke up, I was in the back of a police car, hog-tied. I don’t remember what happened, but my mom tells me I kicked the cop in the groin and took his gun. I don’t know if that’s true. Then the cops took me to a juvenile home, a lock-up. I was there for three years.
TWO DAYS AFTER I MET HIM, I MOVED IN WITH HIM
I got out of the juvenile home when I was eighteen, and I moved to Kalamazoo, where I met Billy. Two days after I met him, I moved in with him. We would have parties where we’d invite people over to gamble and get drunk and smoke. Mostly we were living in Kalamazoo, but we’d move around from room to room, wherever we could go and party. Billy was very abusive; he’d hit me and beat me up.
One night, he was acting real strange. It was the night he got his unemployment check, and I walked in on him smoking crack—that’s where his money had gone. So that was really the beginning of me doing all the bad check-cashing and credit cards and anything for him to get high, anything to make him happy, because my happiness wasn’t complete unless he was happy. At the time, I was working a lot at Denny’s, mostly at night. I knew that Billy was doing bad stuff with the checks, but we still needed the money that I was making.
Billy got arrested first. I’d told him, “These checks are no good, you can’t cash any more.” But he went to the bank and gave them his ID. The bank employees told him that the computer wasn’t working, have a seat. So the dummy sat and waited for the cops to show up, and then of course they came for me.
I was at the apartment when there was a knock on the door. It was a detective. He said, “I’ve got pictures of you, I know who you are. I know you’ve been using bad checks, so there’s no use in telling us your fake name.” I said, “Okay.” But then he said, “I do know that you’re working every night. So I’ll tell you what. I’ll come back here tomorrow, you’ll come with me, we’ll get you arraigned, and I’ll get you a bond.” So basically he was saying that I could stay out on bail and keep working, which I wanted to do.
Soon after that, I went to the landlord to pay the rent—we were two weeks behind. I had $110 from tips, but we owed $250 for rent. The landlord said I had to get out, that he wasn’t waiting any more, he just wanted the money. I went back to my room, and there was a knock on the door. These two guys came in, saying, “You’re getting out right now. We’re packing your stuff.” They tried to throw my dishes in garbage bags and I told them, “Get the fuck out!” I grabbed a knife and started swinging at them. I think I’d just had it with everything at that point.
The cops came and arrested me for assault. By then I had three felonies that I’d accumulated within seven months, all going on in court. I ended up taking a plea to take care of all my cases at the same time. I was given two to fourteen years for the bad checks, one to two years for the credit card, and one to four years for the assault, but it was all going to run concurrently. Basically, I had a two-year minimum with a fourteen-year maximum. I was sentenced on October 7, 1997, and I was sent to prison in Wayne County ten days later.
I ALWAYS HELD MY HEAD HIGH
When I got to the prison, I did twenty-eight days of quarantine and then they put me in a unit—the prison is divided into units, which are the different buildings. The next day, a doctor from healthcare called me and informed me that I was pregnant. I didn’t believe her, because I’d never gotten pregnant before. I mean, I’d had plenty of unprotected sex, but I’d never gotten pregnant. I had always thought that maybe the guy who molested me when I was seven had done something to me so that I couldn’t have kids, or something like that. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried, because at the time I thought a baby could help all my loneliness. But I’d just never gotten pregnant.
I was told that I was about thirty-nine days pregnant, and that I had twenty-four hours to figure out what I was going to do. Was I going to keep the baby or get rid of it? I was only twenty years old, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Billy was locked up, I was sitting in prison, and I didn’t know how long I’d be there. And I wasn’t talking to my family then, so I had nobody. But I knew I would never have an abortion, unless it was absolutely necessary. I knew I was going to keep the baby. I made contact with Billy, who was as excited as I was, and he promised to take care of our child until I got out.
I am a type 1 diabetic, and I have to take insulin shots. Because of the diabetes, the doctor said I was a “high-risk pregnancy,” and that prison healthcare couldn’t handle my prenatal care. So I had to have weekly doctor’s appointments at a hospital outside the prison.
At times the medical runs were horrible experiences. At other times I looked forward to the escape, even though I went in chains. The guards put belly chains on me and kept my hands cuffed for the whole doctor’s visit, unless the doctor said they had to take them off. It felt horrible to walk through the hospital in chains. One time, I remember I had two armed guards with me. They both had guns on their hips. We were in the regular elevator, and the guard pushed the button to go down. But then the doors opened on the wrong floor, and some guy was there. He looked at me, my belly chains, and the guards, and he said, “Oh, I must have the wrong elevator.” Nobody wanted to be near me. It was embarrassing, but I always held my head high.
I was strip-searched completely each time I left and came back to the prison. That became hard at six or seven months of pregnancy. They made me squat and bend over, spread myself, and cough. I couldn’t balance, so I had to hold on to something with one hand, and spread myself with the other hand. Then I couldn’t get back up, but the guards wouldn’t help me. It would take me about three minutes to get back up on my feet. The guards just stood there and looked at me.
Sometimes a guard would drive like a maniac to the hospital, and when I asked him to slow down, he’d refuse. Other times I began to get carsick, but the guard couldn’t stop at the side of the road because I was a prisoner, and I was forced to vomit in the van.
MY PARENTS MADE BIG PROMISES
At the first ultrasound, maybe at eight or ten weeks, the technician looked at the monitor, got up, and ran out of the room. I panicked, because I figured there was something wrong with my baby. Then she came back with the doctor and she had a big grin on her face. The doctor looked at the monitor and told me I was pregnant with twins. I was so full of joy that first time I saw a picture of my babies on the monitor. I wanted so much to share it with someone, but the only person by my side was a prison guard, and I couldn’t talk to her.
In prison, I was in a unit with women who were all pregnant. I remember being surprised that there were so many pregnant women in prison, some coming to prison just before their due dates. But it was good, because I talked to older women who had been through childbirth before. There was also a childbirth instructor who came from Children’s Services. It was through the Wayne County Incarcerated Pregnant Women’s Program. We had group therapy sessions in parenting, substance abuse, domestic violence, prenatal care, childbirth and postpartum. At times, the instructor tried to talk me out of allowing Billy to take care of our babies, but I insisted.
At seventeen weeks they did another ultrasound, and the technician got up and ran out of the room again. This time I knew that something was wrong. When the doctor came in, he said, “I’m sorry, but twin B’s heart has stopped beating.” I was devastated. I kept thinking, How could my baby die? The doctor said there was no reason, that “sometimes things happened like that.” I was so worried for the other twin. Every week I panicked that they were going to tell me she had died too.
I told Billy about losing the twin, and it made me feel better to have someone to talk to. We’d been writing to each other before I found out I was pregnant. He was on jail work release, working at Burger King, and I could call him collect sometimes. He was there emotionally, and he had been happy for us when I found out I was pregnant. So I was hoping that he’d be there for our daughter, but it didn’t happen. When I was about seven months pregnant, Billy had finished work release, and I called the house where he’d been renting a room. A guy there said that Billy had stolen all his money and disappeared.
Soon after, a woman from Children’s Services told me that my baby would have to go into foster care. I was angry. I thought, Here I am, pregnant, and they’re telling me that they’re going to take my baby. I didn’t want it to happen because I knew I would lose her. I figured I had a choice—foster care or my parents. It wasn’t a hard decision because I had no other choice. I had memorized their last known address, so I wrote them a letter and told them that I had nobody to take my baby. I asked them to please help. My mom wrote back and said she’d talked to my dad and he’d said yes. So then they started coming to visit me.
We had our first visit when I was eight months pregnant. I was nervous, I didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t seen my mom since February 1995, and by this time it was maybe March 1998. We’d been writing letters, but we hadn’t spoken because the calls were so expensive. I was still worried that she couldn’t be a good mother. During the visits, my parents made big promises. My mom said she’d changed, that she didn’t get high any more. Part of me did believe it. But in the back of my mind I thought, She’s lying. She’s the same person she’s always been. But I thought I had no choice, so I didn’t listen. I just didn’t want my daughter to go into foster care.
I FORGOT THAT I WAS A PRISONER. I WAS A MOTHER
My perfect baby was born on June 25, 1998, after seventy-two hours of labor. After she came out the nurses wrapped her up and put her in my arms for a moment, but then they wanted to check her. They thought her arm might have been broken during delivery, so they took her for an X-ray. I was crying when they wheeled me out of the delivery room because I was so scared and worried about my baby girl and what I might have done to her. This whole time the guards had been waiting outside the door. One of them was nice. To take my mind off my baby, he tried to tease me a little about how loud I’d been when I was pushing.
Then they took me to a room on another floor. The guards were sitting next to my bed but they hadn’t cuffed me yet. And then the nurse brought my baby back. She told me my pelvis bone had squeezed the nerves in the baby’s arm, but that the bone wasn’t broken and she would be fine. I was so relieved. The nurse had taken a few snapshots before the X-rays and she gave them to me. I was so happy that I had the pictures; I knew I couldn’t take my baby with me, so it was the best I could have.
I held my daughter and started to breastfeed, but it was too emotional. I kept thinking that I was going to have to leave her, that I was going back to prison the next day. It felt like my whole body was breaking. I couldn’t do it—the bonding was too much. Finally I asked for a bottle. I feel so horrible that I had to do that to her, but I just couldn’t do it.
I named her Elaine, after my baby sister. Elaine means “light.” She is the light of my life. She is my reason for living. Even though she couldn’t understand the words I was saying, I wanted to comfort her with my voice. It made me feel better to know that she heard me.
Elaine slept in the bed with me. I needed her there. I wanted to touch her and feel her and look at her every second that I could. She had to be close to me. During that time, I forgot that I was a prisoner. I was a mother.
I think I stayed up the entire time I was there. I couldn’t sleep, not even for a second. I didn’t want to miss her. But the next morning the guards told me that I was going to be leaving that night, that it was prison policy that a woman can only spend twenty-four hours with her baby before she’s brought back to prison. I stopped eating, because I wanted my blood sugar to be so low that they wouldn’t be able to check me out of the hospital. I just wanted a few more minutes with my baby. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to leave Elaine. I loved her so much.
Then on the morning of the third day, the guards came and told me that they were going to have the hospital take my baby out of my room if I didn’t eat. And then a doctor came in and said the same thing. At that point I basically realized that I had to go back to prison, that I was done. By the afternoon my glucose was fine. I spent the last few hours of that afternoon with my beautiful daughter.
WHEN SHE TURNS EIGHTEEN I’LL BE THERE
The day I went back to prison, I held Elaine in my arms and promised her that I was always going to be there for her. I promised that I would be good, and that I would get out of prison so I could be with her. Then a guard came in and told me that I had to be strip-searched before I left. The nurse took the baby while I went to get searched, and after that she gave her back to me. By then I was sobbing and begging the guards, “Please give me another minute.” But they kept saying, “We have to leave, Baldwin.” I took a breath and gave the baby back to the nurse. Then they put belly chains on me again.
I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. I felt empty, like I was leaving my soul at that hospital. For all I’d been through, leaving my baby was the most painful thing I’d ever felt in my life.
When I got in the van, one of the guards had to sit in back with me. She told me, “If you wanted to have children, you would have stayed out of prison.” I wanted to hurt her so badly, but there was nothing I could do.
When we got back to prison I started fighting with other women and getting misconduct tickets. They called me a “management problem.” I wasn’t thinking about the consequences, I was just hurt and angry, and I wanted my Elaine back.
My parents came to see me about three months after the birth, and they brought Elaine with them. I could tell that she loved my father, that they had a bond; her eyes lit up when she looked at him. Two weeks after the visit, I got a phone call while I was in segregation,1 after one of my fights. I called home, and my mom told me that my dad had died of lung cancer. Then, fifteen days later, I got a phone call from my attorney telling me that my mother had given my baby to the state, and that I had to be in court in the next three days.
I went to court and tried to fight it. My attorney told me to do well in prison, go to school, take parenting classes, basically to do whatever I could. Michigan law states that if a parent is incarcerated for two years, their parental rights can be terminated. I fought for two years, and I went to court every three months. I saw the parole board, but they gave me eighteen more months. When I went to court in September of 2000, my mother testified that she didn’t think I could take care of a baby. A couple of days later I got a letter telling me that my parental rights had been terminated.2 According to the law, I had “neglected” my child because I was in prison. I sat down right there in the prison yard, reading the letter, and I couldn’t get up. I felt so lost.
I appealed, but by that time Elaine was with a foster family. She’d been placed with them in 2001. My attorney told me that Elaine’s foster parents wanted to adopt her, and that they would let me have contact with her only if I gave up the appeal. If I didn’t, the Family Independence Agency would place Elaine with a different family, who would adopt her immediately and seal the file. So I called the foster parents and I asked them if I did stop the appeal, if I would be able to have contact with Elaine, and maybe sometimes get pictures. They said yes, so I gave up the appeal.
Elaine’s foster parents adopted her. I thought they were a good family, so I mostly felt lucky. They were allowing me to stay in contact through phone calls once a month. Elaine wrote me a letter when she was eleven, and she knows that I’m her birth mother.
Her adoptive parents haven’t let me talk to her since I got out of prison in spring 2010, when she was twelve. She’s thirteen now. When I asked about their promise, they said that they didn’t think that I was ever going to get out. They’re a very religious family, and they said that she was getting rebellious and so they wanted to take everything out of her life except God. I asked them if they had talked to her, or asked her what was going on. They said no, that they just were waiting for God to take care of it.
I worry about Elaine. They might have raised her, but she’s got my blood in her. She’s going to question everything, she’s going to have an open mind. I just want to talk to her, to let her know that I’m checking on her. But now they aren’t telling her that I’m calling and writing letters. They promised me that I could see her, that I could be there, but they lied to me.
When Elaine turns eighteen, I’m showing up. I just want her to know that I love her, and that I’ve tried to be there for her. I know I can’t do it until then, but when she turns eighteen I’ll be there.
1 People in prison can be moved to segregated housing, away from the general prison population, for protection or for disciplinary reasons. For more details, see the glossary.
2 For details about how parental rights are terminated, see Appendix V.