One in every 125 white children has a parent behind bars—for African American children, the rate is one in nine.
In the mid-1970s, an effort at prison reform inadvertently created more problems than it solved. California was one of the first states to address the arbitrariness and inherent racism in sentencing by mandating that similar crimes receive similar sentences. In theory, this was lofty, but the way it played out in reality was unexpected, and unfortunate.
The reform meant that people would no longer be sentenced to an indeterminate time, such as five-to-ten years, but rather, a predetermined sentence correlated with a specific crime. While this helped to eliminate various forms of discrimination at the sentencing level, it also eliminated the consideration of any extenuating circumstances. For example, there’d be no leniency shown to an eighteen-year-old mother caught stealing baby formula; theft was theft. Additional unintended consequences of the reform reverberated beyond the courtroom, directly affecting prisoners. No longer was a prisoner evaluated at intervals to determine her readiness to be released. Instead, the primary purpose of prison shifted from rehabilitation to punishment.
This legislation, coupled with slashed state funding and extreme overcrowding, turned prison classrooms and gymnasiums into barracks to house more and more and more prisoners. I would’ve jumped at the chance to take a class of some sort, but vocational training, college degree courses, and drug rehabilitation programs had all but vanished.
I knew of a few trade classes that were still offered, but it seemed the only prisoners who got into these were the lifers. It’s no exaggeration that the lifers basically ran the prison. Because they typically held the clerking jobs in the sergeant’s office, they were the first to know most goings on. They’d see when a slot for a trade class was opening and would quickly assign it to another lifer. From the sergeant’s office, they also signed you up to see a doctor, ran the visiting room, and had the authority to do bed moves—and many were glad to accept money in exchange for a requested bed, which could get you out of a bad situation or surprise you with a worse one.
As for the trade classes, other than something to pass the time, they were mostly useless. Learning to print prison bulletins on equipment so outdated it was obsolete anywhere other than prison did nothing to prepare someone for a job on the outside. In a technological world, the prison system was like an Amish village.
Another disturbing area was prison medical care. You couldn’t choose or, for that matter, refuse, a doctor, and there was no such thing as a second opinion. If you were assigned to see Dr. Advil, it hardly mattered what ailment you went there for—even if it was serious—you left with only Advil. If you were assigned to see Dr. Pap Smear, you knew, even if you went in for something as obvious and far removed as an eye infection or a broken toe, he’d give you a pap smear. Another doctor brought a fishing rod to work and wore a hat with lures dangling from it as he examined you.
For prisoners with a serious condition, it could be a nightmare of ridiculously long waitlists and misdiagnoses. If an inmate needed surgery but had a history of drug abuse—as most of us did—she was denied painkillers, which often meant the prison staff was blatantly disregarding an outside surgeon’s prescription and orders. I watched many women, post-surgery, suffering in unnecessary pain. This was long after the Supreme Court’s 1976 landmark decision that inadequate medical care in prisons was considered cruel and unusual punishment. But go ahead and try to assert your Eighth Amendment rights from behind bars; it was all but impossible.
Prisoners were billed for all medical services, the money automatically deducted from your account. California prisons imposed a $5 copay for each medical visit, which sounded nominal until you considered a prisoner earned merely pennies an hour. If multiple doctor visits were required, it could break you. There also was no consideration that some prisoners made eight cents an hour while others lucked into a $2-an-hour job, yet everyone was subject to the same copay. If there wasn’t enough money in your account to cover your medical bill, the balance would automatically be deducted from future earnings. Some prisoners could never catch up. Other parts of the country were far worse. In Texas, copays were a whopping $100. In Alabama, prisoners were responsible for actual medical costs, and the balance—what could be tens of thousands of dollars—would follow you after your release. If you didn’t or, more likely, couldn’t pay your bill, the state could issue a warrant for your arrest.
I learned, early on, to avoid going to the doctor and, fortunately, I remained healthy enough to do so. Suffering through minor things like a cold or the flu without any meds seemed, to me, a far better option than subjecting myself to the crapshoot they called a medical system.
After serving thirteen months, I was assigned a release date. As the day neared, my excitement became overrun by a growing fear. I’d made a promise to myself that I was going to get my life together. But, deep down, I knew I was unprepared to re-enter the free world, even though it was all I thought about. I wanted to be brave, but I was coming out with no skills, no training, no job leads. I hadn’t made a single decision in over a year. How was I going to walk out of there and be different, and expect my life to be different, when nothing else had changed? It was like walking into the rain determined that this time I wasn’t going to get wet. But I still had no umbrella, so how the hell was this time going to be different than the last time it rained?
Release day: I rolled up my bedding and carried it with me to the gun tower. I gave my name and W-number, and the gate rolled open so I could pass through to R&R. I turned in my bedding to the inmates working there, and an officer fingerprinted me out. Of course, this simple process took over an hour. Then I perched on a bench for another hour until a guard drove up to take me and the other women getting released to the bus station.
I got off the bus. Downtown L.A., around the corner from Skid Row. I was going to try to find my way, I told myself, and told myself, and told myself. Telling myself so fiercely that after a couple weeks of trying to get an ID and trying to get a job and trying to earn some money and getting knocked down and kicked back, I felt like such an utter failure it seemed too unbearable to go through all this and try to stay clean. I had the desire to be productive, to be useful. But how? Finding a new direction seemed all but impossible. I was lugging around all the stuff of my past, and the rope to pull myself up was slipping through my hands.
At some point, you just let go.
Toni had never visited me in prison. She said it was because when she’d gone to the prison several years earlier, when she was fourteen, to visit her aunt Beverly, she’d just seen the movie Helter Skelter and spotted Leslie Van Houten of the Manson family sitting down the row. In a panic, Toni flew up from the bench. This called the guards’ attention to her, which wouldn’t have been a problem except that Toni was wearing blue jeans. Visitors had a dress code that excluded denim, khaki, and a list of other garb that could lead guards to mistake a visitor for an inmate, or the other way around. Both Toni and my mother, who was with her, had forgotten the no-jeans rule—and, apparently, so had the guards who’d allowed Toni to enter. Already spooked by the Manson girl, Toni was on edge when a guard cornered her, asking, “What’s your number?”
“I don’t have a number,” Toni said.
The guard motioned to another guard. “She has blue jeans on.”
“They let her in with blue jeans,” my mother explained. But the guards weren’t buying it. They cleared out the visiting room except for Toni and my mother, and then locked down the prison for a headcount.
“You can’t hold me,” Toni protested. “I’m underage.” But for nearly three hours she and my mother were locked in while every prisoner was counted. When they finally were allowed to leave, Toni insisted she would never set foot in the place again.
Still, I imagine it was deeper than that. Between my brothers and me, Toni had been to the Criminal Courts building, to the county jail, and to the state prisons too many times, and she was tired of it. Tired of keeping track of who was about to be transferred from jail to prison, and hopping from the women’s county jail and then down the street to the men’s county jail to put money in our accounts so the maximum amount would transfer with us. She was tired of accepting the collect calls, tired of planning days around visiting hours. She felt her reward for being well behaved and a good student was that she had to run around and take care of all the adults who were screwing up their lives. By the time Toni got old enough to decide, she decided to distance herself.
When I was released, Toni was in college at UCLA. Though she was living in one of the efficiencies behind my mother’s house, the rest of her life was separate from and unfamiliar to the rest of us. She was straddling two different worlds. And I could see the strain. Her friends from the neighborhood hounded her, saying, “We hardly see you anymore.” Her boyfriend from high school—a nice kid who I’d watched grow up—became distant when Toni started college and he didn’t. The rift made Toni resentful. She’d been working and going to school year round ever since she could remember—and she was burned out. I noticed signs that she was starting to rebel. For the first time, she started to hang out. She stopped showing up to class, and, unbeknownst to me, she lost her scholarship. She later would admit, “I looked up one day and had blown it all.”
At nineteen years old, Toni became pregnant. She gave birth to a healthy daughter and named her Ellesse. I often screwed up the spelling, but the pronunciation was simple, E-lease. I dressed that baby girl up like my little doll, had her wearing designer jeans from Nordstrom’s. I’d seen with my own mother how failed mothers could get a second chance with their grandchildren, but it took me a while before I could see it in myself.
Toni and her boyfriend moved in together, but he had a warped sense of responsibility, of what fathers are supposed to do. He was trying to be cool like my brother Melvin, who’d been his idol growing up, but he forgot to notice that Melvin was available to his children.
Toni, however, was determined to avoid the downward spiral. She began interviewing for jobs, and the one she wanted most, because it had the highest salary, was in the county jail. She scored in the top percentile on a mandatory entrance test, and was then brought in for an interview. They asked, “Do you have any family members who have been incarcerated?” She thought, Where do I even begin? Though I had just gotten out, two of my brothers were still in. Toni answered honestly, and was denied the job.
Eventually she heard that Pacific Bell was hiring, and she thought this might be an opportunity for a stable, long-term career. After she got the job as an information operator, she took her little girl in her arms and said, “This is where it begins, Ellesse. This is for the rest of our lives. I get to redeem myself, and we get to take this ride together.” Toni worked as much overtime as she could get, both to save up money and to stay away from the rest of us as much as possible. She quickly moved up, getting promoted to service representative, and eventually to Human Resources. To think that my daughter had such maturity, while there I was: still lost and mired in my grief and addiction.
Any number of things could have landed me back in prison. I occasionally missed a meeting with my parole officer—which was caused by the bigger issue that I was having a tough time staying sober. But what landed me back in prison didn’t have to do with my parole violations. I was in a liquor store when a man came at me, grappling for my keys. He wrestled them from me, but I went after him. As he ran outside, I latched on to him, trying to stop him from taking off with my car and everything in it. By that time I’d gotten nickelslick; people knew who I was, they knew what I had. I wasn’t a random target. From the driver’s seat of my car he fired a gun. The bullet went through the window and into my right shoulder.
The next day, my friend Joe from the neighborhood came to see me in the hospital. “Sue,” he said, keeping his voice down. “They’re coming for you.”
I unhooked myself from the I.V. and snuck out. Back home, Mama told me the police had been by, bothering her with all sorts of questions about the carjacking. Figuring I’d head this off, I went by myself to the police station to make a statement. An officer brought me into a room, closed the door, and questioned me about what I was doing at the liquor store.
“I stopped in for a Häagen-Dazs,” I said.
They questioned me about the shooter, and I described him as best as I could remember. When they were through, I was led from the room. But as I was about to leave the station, handcuffs were slapped on me. I was accused of leaving drugs in the room where I’d just been questioned. But I didn’t have any drugs.
I would explain this to my public defender during the few minutes we had to talk before my hearing—which was a few minutes more than you often got. Most of the time, you met your lawyer as you were standing before the judge. I’d had this lawyer before, on an earlier offense, and he vaguely remembered me. “Boy, you sure have bad luck, don’t you?” he said.
I told him I was innocent.
“We can’t say that,” he replied. “You’ve been convicted for drugs before. You won’t be believed.”
I seethed. Contrary to the core principles of our justice system, I bore the brand of a drug offender, making facts irrelevant. I was offered a plea deal of eighteen months. But it wasn’t really an offer, it was a threat. And this talk with my lawyer—it wasn’t for my benefit, it was only occurring because my name had been called from the docket. I asked what would happen if I refused to plead guilty and instead exercised my constitutional right to a trial. “You’ll get the maximum of five years if you don’t take this offer,” he replied.
I was trapped, just as everyone I knew who’d stood in this spot and followed the instructions of a public defender had been trapped. But what would happen if everyone refused to automatically plead guilty and exercised their right to a trial? Some twenty years later, I’d ask this question to civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander, who’d detail our exchange in the New York Times. Over 90 percent of criminal cases close in a plea deal, she’d write. The dirty little secret was that if fewer than 30 percent of people charged with a crime exercised their constitutional right to a trial, the justice system would crash. There simply wouldn’t be enough lawyers or judges or time. The right to a fair and speedy trial merely sounded good on paper.
Even if the odds were against me, there was something about standing up for myself. But when you’re poor, you’re relegated to being just another body passing through the system. I looked up at the judge awaiting my so-called decision, and I buckled. I took the eighteen-month sentence.
My anger smoldered, festering deeper. Several years later, in 1998, Los Angeles’s Rampart police station, which neighbored the station where I was arrested, was sued over what the Los Angeles Times called “the worst corruption scandal in L.A.P.D. history.” Officers were accused of fabricating arrests, falsifying evidence, and using excessive force, especially against minority victims. More than 140 civil suits were filed, with total settlements estimated around $125 million. I could say with certainty that it wasn’t only the officers at the Rampart station who were rogue—they were just the ones who got caught. We were dealing with police who, when called to a homicide, would walk over the bodies looking for property to take—but under the country’s seizure and civil forfeiture laws, this was not illegal. Each time I was arrested, any money I had on me disappeared. The police said the cash was evidence. But none of this “evidence” would be recorded on booking slips, none showed up in court documents. This time I was going to prison not on evidence the police stole but evidence they planted. As if I’d voluntarily walked into the police station with illicit drugs and then left the drugs on the table? C’mon, that was preposterous.
I was now the taxpayer’s problem. And the shooter—who’d been caught a few minutes after the robbery, around the corner from the liquor store—would soon be too. Early one morning, a prison guard woke me with a tug on my leg. I was taken to court, only this time my handcuffs were removed and I was led to the other side—but not really, it only seemed that way for a few moments. After I positively identified the shooter, I was escorted out, handcuffed, and taken back to prison.
The truth was: I didn’t have drugs on me when I’d gone to make my statement about the shooter at the police station—but I did the night I’d been shot, and that’s no doubt what the shooter had been after. At that point in my life, crack was all I could afford. Had I been arrested by the feds the night I was shot, the amount of crack in my possession would have subjected me to the mandatory minimum law. The Anti–Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 had ratcheted up sentencing for all drug offenses, even for marijuana, but it especially singled out crack. Possession of 5 grams of crack (worth a total of around $100) would trigger the same sentence as possession of 500 grams of cocaine (worth a total of around $150,000) or of 100 kilos of marijuana (worth a total of around $20,000). These disparate and nonsensical sentences had been passed into law without any hearings, without any expert testimony from judges, law enforcement, drug policy experts, addiction medicine specialists, or the Bureau of Prisons.
Under federal law, I could have been facing thirty to forty years. Although I’d been framed, I’d also been granted the lesser of two evils.