Because of the crack epidemic and the harsh, racially discriminatory policies of the Anti–Drug Abuse Act, one in three black men will see the inside of a jail cell.
The average time served by African Americans for nonviolent drug offenses is virtually the same as the time whites serve for violent offenses.
Terror still gripped me whenever I closed my eyes, so I’d go days without sleep, getting so worn down I’d finally fall out, dreamless. One night, I was driving when I felt the precious veil of sleep coming on. I pulled into a gas station, parked off to the side by a phone booth, and drifted off. I was awakened by the police knocking on my window. They ordered me out, then searched my car.
My back-alley version of antidepressants, my search for nothingness, was sitting right there on the seat. Though the minimal stash I had made it clear I was a user, I was booked, at the whim of the police, for a more serious offense: possession with the intent to sell.
I was taken to the Sybil Brand Institution, where I’d served all those years ago. The holding room was so crowded it felt like a corral for cattle. Finding a sliver of space, I sat on the concrete, just as I’d done as a little girl in Aliso Village. But unless you’re playing jacks, concrete ain’t no place to be. The cell was dirty and littered with cigarette butts and stale cheese sandwiches. At some point a cart came around and cheese sandwiches were tossed to us new arrivals. To quiet everyone, guards tossed in cigarettes. Smoke hung thick in the air. I wondered what Ms. Brand would think if she saw the degradation of her eponymous women’s jail.
For hours I sat there, until a guard pulled me out of the cell and led me to the shower room. She watched as I undressed, her eyes assessing me, and it made me think of my ancestors, ordered to strip in slave pens as masters sized them up. Then, with a flashlight she inspected every crack and crevice of my body: under my feet, down my ear, bend over and cough.
I was told to shower, but only a trickle of water came out. The stiff thing they called a bath towel was the size of a washcloth. From there, I was sprayed, like an animal, for lice—a practice eventually discontinued because of the toxicity of the spray. If your hair was deemed too long, a blunt scissors was taken to it. If your fingernails were too long, they were clipped. I was issued my daily uniform: a starchy cotton top and pants; dingy, diaper-like underwear; and hard rubber shoes—to wear tennis shoes or something with support required you to petition for a court order from the judge. Fingerprinted with black ink, banded with an ID bracelet, a list of medical questions answered, I was led to another corral, this one with phones on the wall. I called my mother.
“I’m in jail,” I said. By this point, she had received this call from all her children, more than once. I could see in my mind’s eye how she was making her disappointed face, silently shaking her head.
“What happened?” she said.
“I was arrested for possession.” I omitted the trumped-up charge.
There was a pause. “Well,” she sighed.
And that was that. I knew when we hung up she’d tell Toni what she’d been saying about me for years: “My husband’s daughter is rotten to the core.” Then Mama would put me out of her mind and return to whatever it was she’d been doing.
I was delivered to my cell. With the War on Drugs in full force, jail capacity levels were disregarded, and each cell outfitted with bunk beds now had an additional mattress on the floor. Behind me, a lever turned, and the heavy steel door clanked shut. I turned the lever inside of me, too, sealing myself off from thoughts, from feelings.
One of the few things I was allowed to do was crochet, and I made a blanket for everybody: one for my mother, one for Toni, ones for all my nieces. It was also my way of trying to provide some reminder of my existence to my family.
A couple months later, I was woken at 3 a.m. with a pull on my leg: “Susan Burton, get up.” Visions again came to me of my African ancestors bound and dragged onto slave ships. I was deposited in another cattle room and ordered to strip. The flashlight was back, making its bodily search. I was given a plastic bag, and dumping from it were the clothes I’d been wearing when I was arrested.
Crumpled in a heap on the floor was my jazzy Neiman Marcus outfit. I stared at the remnants of my former life. I had shoplifted that outfit, as though I could dress up the pain—if I looked good from the outside, it might distract from how mangled everything was on the inside. A sadness washed over me. Then I felt pangs of anger. But you couldn’t get angry or sad in jail because you had no recourse, there was nowhere to put it—you couldn’t talk to anyone about it, or shout about it, or eat it back, or walk it off, or punch the air. So I silently picked up the dirty, wrinkled clothes and put them on, as did the other women in the corral.
Around the waist and around a foot, the other women and I were chained together and led in a shuffling, clanging line to a black-and-white bus. The more experienced ones among us knew exactly where we were going as we traveled an hour east; they knew exactly the difference between county jail and state prison.
The gates to the California Institution for Women opened, and the bus drove past barbed wire and gun towers. This would be my home for the next thirteen months. Our chain gang was ordered inside, and we were called off by our county numbers and then assigned new state numbers, beginning with a W for a woman’s criminal conviction. Orange uniforms were doled out, branded across the chest and down the pant leg: PROPERTY OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA.
Plastic bags came around holding more of our property. There was my purse and its contents: car keys, house keys, my beeper. If you wanted your belongings sent somewhere, you had to pay for postage. Though George had added money to my jail account, which was supposed to follow me here, it had to last while I waited to be classified, which could take some time. Did I want to spend money on postage when I also needed money for essentials, like soap, so that I didn’t have to use the yellow lye-like stuff that gave you alligator skin? Or real toothpaste to avoid the gritty tooth powder? Or a comb that worked on black hair? Or sanitary pads? I told the guard, “There’s nowhere to send it to.”
“Then it’s going to be destroyed.”
I nodded.
Along with the busload of women I came in with, I entered prison the same way I would, I hoped, go out, through what’s called the Reception and Release center. Reception sounded nice and civilized, but really it was a form of quarantine. For six weeks, I waited in R&R to be classified and assigned a work detail.
Separate from the main prison, I was confined to a small room with two bunks, a steel desk bolted to the wall with a round stool bolted to the floor, a small sink, and a toilet right in the open with no walls around it—you and your bunkie got to know each other real well. The room door remained locked, except at meal time, when it electrically opened with a loud pop. As each door popped on down the corridor, it sounded like machine-gun fire. This was the only time we were allowed to leave the room: to walk down the corridor to chow hall. But we weren’t allowed to talk. In chow hall, you opened your mouth only to put food into it. The only sound was the clanging of spoons against trays.
Though we were supposed to be allowed outside every day, it only happened once in a while. To breathe anything but the stale air of my cell, to feel sun on my face, to sit on a little green square of grass, to have a conversation, to play a game of cards. That hour outside was the only time in prison that went by quickly. And then we were locked back in.
On Sundays, if you wanted to pray, you were allowed to go to the auditorium, where a volunteer church group conducted services. Every single Sunday I went to church. I didn’t feel no spirit moving, I just wanted to get out of that cage.
Time dragged on. No one was allowed phone calls or family visits, and we couldn’t receive packages—though someone could mail you paper and a pencil and up to ten stamped envelopes. All there was to do was sleep or write letters or read. A book cart came around, the inmate pushing it announcing the book titles, though you could only choose one to be slid through the wicket in the door.
That narrow wicket was your only connection to anything outside the cell. I wrote letters to Toni and my mother, balancing the envelopes in the wicket for the officers to come by and pick up. Sometimes inmates hollered out the wicket to someone down the hall, but guards would yell at you, “Shut up!” so you saved any hollering for a quick message, like “Bring Danielle Steele to chow hall to trade” or “Anyone got a postage stamp?”
One day I opened a book I’d chosen from the cart to find a candy bar in it, a note tucked under the wrapper—a kite, it was called, for how it flew across the prison. The kite was from my brother Melvin’s wife, Beverly, an inmate in the main yard. She wrote, “I’ll see you soon!”
After some weeks I was summoned from my cell to meet with a counselor. She explained the process of being classified, and how I could work as a porter, or on the yard crew, or in the kitchen, or in the cosmetology shop.
“Going to cosmetology school is something I always wanted to do,” I said. “I’d love to be classified to the cosmetology shop so I could learn.”
“I’ll note this,” the counselor said. I was returned to my cell, having been gone all of five minutes.
I hoped so much to be classified to the cosmetology shop, I dreamed about it. Dreamed how, with this skill, I’d have opportunities when I got out. All I had to hold on to, this dream became larger than anything in the reality of my life.
Finally, after a TB test and a physical, my red ID card indicating I was waiting to be classified was traded for a green ID card with my photo and criminal number: W-31416. That number would remain branded on my mind, no matter how many years passed or how hard I tried to forget.
I was called before the four members of the classification board. The brass of the prison system asked my name, where I was from, if I was married, did I have children. All the while, they each had printouts with all my information, and I watched them check off my answers as we went along. Still, I was giddy about being assigned to the cosmetology shop and having a meaningful way to spend my days.
Instead, I heard: “You are assigned to fire camp.”
Fire camp? I was certain they’d mixed me up with someone else. “I really wanted to go to cosmetology school, so I can have some skills,” I said.
“Fire camp is a privilege,” a board member informed me. Indeed, this privilege was reserved for those who presented little threat of escape if taken off prison grounds. But being sent to the front line to fight California wildfires when you wanted to be learning how to do hair seemed the opposite of a privilege. As for my future as a beautician, fire camp burned that dream to ash. What I didn’t know at the time was that, even if an assignment to the cosmetology shop had been granted, I still wouldn’t have stood a chance of working in a beauty shop on the outside. Most professional licenses—whether it was beautician, barber, social worker, plumber, the list in many states was a hundred job titles long—were denied to people with a criminal record.
Now that I was classified, I was to be moved out of the locked cage to a permanent room along the main yard. But the prison was overcrowded, so around sixteen of us were instead assigned to the day room. The day room was supposed to be where people gathered to talk or play cards, but the tables and chairs were moved out and bunk beds hauled in, forcing everyone to crowd outside if they wanted to socialize.
At last, I was allowed to walk around. My sister-in-law, Beverly, and I finally met up in the main yard. It was strange seeing Beverly in the baggy orange uniform because, on the outside, she was a sharp dresser. She and I had once run fast and wild together. We had used together, and we’d forged together, and that’s what she was in for.
Beverly had prepared a care package with everything I needed: soap, lotion, shampoo, ramen noodles, a can of tuna. We exchanged updates about the rest of the family, and then we made a plan to meet at chow hall.
Most of the time I didn’t want to eat there. A frequent prison specialty was known as Shit on a Shingle, a brown, gooey, flour paste that was supposed to have meat in there somewhere. Chicken was the only food that looked like what it was, except we always knew when chicken was cooking by the strange, medicinal smell wafting through the building. On chicken nights, the running joke was: “What’s for dinner? Antibiotics and steroids.”
How clean your dorm was after the monthly double-scrub determined the order in which you’d be released for dinner, and the line into the cafeteria stretched far outdoors. Whether it was raining or blazing hot, you had to stand in line. Beverly taught me how to fold a sailor hat out of newspaper to keep the rain off my face. Beverly was always generous, but demanded a lot in return. She would look after me, but wanted complete loyalty. I had to agree with her, and if she didn’t like someone, I, too, was expected not to like them. But in the cold and lonely prison, it was always good to see her, and I tried to be generous in return by buying things for Beverly when I shopped at the canteen. It worked out to be a good system, and by sharing our possessions we were rarely without.
The money prisoners made at work detail amounted to spare change, so in order to buy common necessities at the canteen you needed people on the outside to mail a money order to the prison to fill your account. One thing I can say for my family, they always pulled together when any of the Burtons were incarcerated. My brother Melvin was my main runner; sometimes, my mother would deposit money. George, too, would make sure I had what I needed. I was allowed up to $140 a month in my account, and rarely was there a month I didn’t have the maximum to spend.
Four times a year, I could receive a box by mail. These days, prisoners can’t get anything shipped in from individuals, but back then, everybody in my family would pitch in to fill a box. The box could weigh up to thirty pounds, but everyone knew to keep it around twenty-seven pounds in case the scale was off in the prison mail room, as it often was. If the box came in just an ounce over, it would be returned to the sender, and you’d have to wait until the next quarter before you could receive a box again. I’d open my box to find canned chicken, socks, panties, bras, pajamas, thermals, and sometimes jeans or tennis shoes. After Beverly got out, she’d put fancy things in my box, like packaged crabmeat. Liquid perfume wasn’t allowed in prison, so she’d send me Donna Karan fragranced lotion. But before you were allowed access to your box, a guard inspected everything. If any item could be tampered with, the guard opened it and put it in another container. My Donna Karan lotion would always arrive having been squeezed into a plastic baggie.
To me, prison was about learning how to navigate and how to comply. I sized up the personalities—the leaders, the instigators, the troublemakers—and I became the quiet, invisible one. I kept to myself. I avoided trouble. And, likewise, avoided punishment. I never landed in the SHU, pronounced like shoe, the Special Housing Unit—otherwise known as Solitary. The SHU involved more than just the punishment of isolation. In there, you sometimes had to eat jute balls, a ground-up mash of beans and vegetables named for the similar look, texture, and taste of a ball of twine. Frozen and served cold, you occasionally could identify a black speck that was a bean or an orange sliver that was a carrot. A minor infraction, like cussing or acting uncooperative, could trigger a hearing to determine if you’d be further punished with jute balls. Not that you were able to attend your own hearing, you’d merely be informed of the outcome. Some of my bunkies worked in the kitchen preparing jute balls, and I found it alarming the care and packaging that went into creating something meant to choke you when you tried to eat it. A jute ball punishment might last three days, or it could last a month.
To fill the time, I visited the prison library. I watched lifers sitting behind stacks of old law books, turning the pages, trying to find their freedom. I read lots of Stephen King and anything else in which I could easily lose myself.
In order to make a phone call, you had to sign up first thing in the morning for a ten-minute slot, and you were only allowed one slot per day—that is, if the phone was even working. Seemed like America had figured out reliable phone service half a century earlier, but the prison phone would work some days and not others, and no one was ever sure why or how to fix it. The spotty service was especially surprising since the private company that had the prison phone contract engaged in some serious price gouging: all calls were collect, and the recipient was billed $15 for a ten-minute, in-state call. For that rate, you’d think someone from the phone company would be standing there to make sure that prison phone never went down. To make things worse, errors of overcharging were rampant, forcing the recipient into frequent disputes with the phone company. Lots of families simply couldn’t afford to accept regular calls. Think about it—someone with a minimum-wage job had to work a few hours just to cover a ten-minute call with their loved one.
I’d call home weekly if I could get a slot on the call list, but sometimes, for no reason other than to mess with you, a guard wouldn’t let you go to make your call.
Once you managed to get on the list, and were allowed to go to the phone, and the phone was, actually, in service, your call would be interrupted by a repeated recording that you were talking to an inmate in a California state prison, as though anyone needed reminding. When time was up, there was no warning, just a click, then silence. After a while my mother started complaining that weekly calls were too much for her to maintain, and, with all the hassle and the distracting recording, I resigned myself to calling less frequently.
Once my work training began, I understood why some considered fire camp a privilege. I got to spend six hours a day outdoors, away from the barbed wire and gun towers, and was provided good, hot food, like steak burritos. I was also issued an army coat with two big pockets and a collar, which came in handy when standing in the dinner line in the rain or the dry Santa Ana winds. But, despite the perks, there was no way I was going to be delivered to the front lines to fight California wildfires. My only hope was to flunk the physical test. That way, I’d be assigned back to training.
I made sure to flunk, falling out on the timed six-mile hike. And then, several weeks later, I made sure to flunk again, lagging on the pull-ups. With all that training, all those squats and runs and hikes and pull-ups, my body became lean and strong—but then I’d have to fake it and flunk again.
Years later, I picked up a newly released woman from the Amtrak station, and on the drive back to my house, she said she’d been assigned to fire camp. “I felt like a slave,” she described. “They expect you, in six weeks, to be able to climb that wall, and if you don’t, they tack on time and tack on time.” With a hollow laugh, I thought back to how I’d never wanted to pass.