The United States, with 2.2 million people behind bars, imprisons more people than any other country in the world.
Since 1980, the rate of incarceration for women has risen more than 700 percent. The majority of these women are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses.
The women take their first step of freedom at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Los Angeles, around the corner from Skid Row, where America’s largest concentration of homeless people live on the sidewalk, the lucky ones in makeshift tents. It’s nothing like the freedom you’d dreamed about in your cell. This freedom smells of urine and stale beer. Lingering to check out the new releases are pimps and drug dealers and down-on-their-luck others who may not be intentional predators but who are desperate to find someone to hang on to. Or someone to drag down with them. They all know you are easy prey.
You can almost touch the desperation, the doom in the air. You can feel it on you. On your prison-issue clothes. Everyone recognizes the ill-fitting clothes stitched by inmates: the muumuus with the garish pink and orange and yellow flower pattern; the baseball shirt; the state jeans, so stiff they can nearly stand up on their own—no designer label on the back pocket of these jeans. In order to walk out of prison you had to buy yourself some clothes with the $200 you were given upon release. That money went quickly after you also had to buy your bus ticket, a prison guard watching while you went to the Greyhound window and waiting until you got on that bus and it drove away.
Away, to freedom that was hardly freedom at all but a plan practically set in stone for people like me who came into this world in the county hospital, then grew up in the projects. Or maybe it wasn’t a plan at all; maybe it was the complete absence of any plan.
When you step off at the bus station, you have at most $100 left in your pocket, maybe less if you were only granted half your allowed amount, the rest to be doled out to you months later by your parole officer. There’s no reason why some people have their gate money withheld. Just like there’s no reason to anything in prison. No reason why, on a whim, a guard raids your locker, tearing through your only belongings, dumping your soap powder, and mixing your baby powder into your instant coffee, spoiling both. No reason why some women inmates are assigned to spend their days in a parenting class even if they don’t have children, while others must push a mop around for eight cents an hour, and others have to report to fire camp, going through weeks of rigorous physical training to be awarded an orange uniform and delivered to the front lines of a California wildfire for $1 an hour.
There’s also no logical reason why federal prisons offer halfway houses to those newly released, but state prisons provide nothing. Four thousand newly released women arrive in Los Angeles County every year to nothing. No re-entry programs, no counseling, no services, no assistance. You have no house key, no credit card, no check-book, no driver’s license, no Social Security card, no identification of any sort because anything you were carrying when you were arrested has been destroyed by the state. You’re just one woman in the crowd of mostly black and brown faces, one number in the recidivism stats that are decidedly not in your favor.
Like vultures, the pimps circle, eyeing you, assessing you. The drug dealers circle. You know them from the old neighborhood, and they call you by name, offering their brand of a welcome home party. You have little incentive to say no. Ego tells you you’re gonna make it by any means necessary. Ego tells you you’re a grown woman. But you’re scared. How do you calm yourself? How do you connect with something healthy and hopeful when you’re surrounded by Skid Row? When you haven’t been allowed to make a decision in five, ten, twenty years? When all you want to do is wash prison off you, but you can’t, because it’s in you. It’s seeped into your psyche and into your soul.
One time I stepped off that bus and my father was there to pick me up. But by going with him I stepped right back into a bad dynamic, reconnecting with all the anger and abuse that had sent me out of control in the first place. My whole family, all five of my brothers, have had run-ins with the prison system.
Another time, my husband was there, and I stepped from the prison gates right back into an unhealthy relationship. What else was I going to do? Where else was I going to go? Nothing I possessed was going to get me any closer to a new way of life. I couldn’t even imagine what a new way of life might be. A discarded lottery ticket offered better odds.
All I wanted was to ease the fear, ease the self-loathing, ease the hopelessness. It seemed the only thing in the world I was certain of was how to escape by taking drugs, by self-medicating. Three days: that’s the average time for someone to relapse after getting out of prison. I knew nothing about statistics, but I knew that, in a drug high, I could escape into silence.
The last time I stepped off that bus, I didn’t know it would be the last time. Every time I left prison I left saying to myself, I’m not gonna get caught up again. Saying to myself, I’m gonna make a better life. I won’t be back. The prison guard who put me on the bus waved and said, “We got your bed waiting for you. See you soon.”
Six times I’d been imprisoned and each time I held hope that it would be the last time, but deep down I knew I wasn’t prepared for life “outside.” I’d been arrested over and over again for possession of a controlled substance. You’d think someone in the system might have gotten the bright idea that I needed drug treatment, that I needed therapy. But I was never offered help, and I didn’t know to ask for it because I didn’t know what to ask for. People with my color skin, and who grew up where I did, didn’t know concepts like rehab. I was always remanded to prison.
Even going back some fifteen-plus years, back to before I was first incarcerated, when assistance should have been mine for the taking and when it could have made all the difference. Back to that day when my five-year-old son came in the house to give me a beautiful chrysanthemum he’d picked. “For you, Mama,” he said, then went back outside to play. Marque, my little boy. We called him K.K. He was tall and slim, his skin caramel, his energy boundless. It was a day like any other. I’d picked K.K. up from kindergarten and we’d walked home and it was now around two in the afternoon. I looked down at the chrysanthemum he’d so proudly given me. The cushion of pink petals was crawling with ants. And then, brakes wailed and tires shrieked. The flower filled with ants dropped to the kitchen linoleum.
K.K. had run across the crosswalk and was hit. It could have been anyone at the wheel, but it happened to be a policeman driving an unmarked van. He didn’t see my son. Nor did he stick around. Neighbors and bystanders rushed over. But it was too late.
The loss of my baby filled me with a rage so powerful I no longer recognized myself. I knew K.K.’s death had been an accident, but when there’s an accident, it should be acknowledged. It was, however, no accident that I never did receive an acknowledgment—not from that policeman, or from the department, or from the city. Nothing would have brought my son back, of course, but just that small gesture, just someone bothering to say, “Ms. Burton, I’m sorry,” would have meant something.
When time’s numbing effect began to take hold, my rage was replaced by a depression so deep I felt hollow. How my body kept going was a mystery to me. If I could have stopped myself from breathing, I probably would have. My older child, Antoinette, whom we called Toni, was fifteen when K.K. was killed. She not only lost her brother but also the mother she’d known. My days had no meaning and my nights were sleepless.
I was afraid to sleep. I would see his face, hear him calling to me. I tried everything I could get my hands on to alleviate my pain. It was the early 1980s, the beginning of the crack epidemic, and on the streets of South Los Angeles, there was a lot someone like me could get her hands on.