States with the toughest crime laws saw the largest spikes in prison population over the past two decades. California’s Three Strikes law, one of the harshest sentencing policies in the country, sent people to prison for life for offenses as minor as petty theft. At one point, “strikers” made up a quarter of California inmates, serving extreme sentences that didn’t fit the crime, on the taxpayers’ dime.
With my arm in a cast and sling as the bullet wound healed, I was sent to the handicapped part of the prison. There, I met a woman who’d also been shot in the shoulder, in nearly the exact same spot. But instead of having her arm in a cast, she was paralyzed. Every time I saw her, an orderly pushing her around in a wheelchair, I was stopped cold. My shoulder would heal, the cast would come off, I’d be left with only a scar. She was in that chair for life.
The irony was that prison allowed me to heal. I had been running hard, using to numb not just my mind but also the physical pain of the bullet wound. Had I not been arrested, I don’t know that my body would have held up.
When I was ready to be transferred out of the handicapped side, there was no bunk available in the main prison because of overcrowding. Women were being incarcerated at record-breaking rates and for lesser and lesser offenses. The state system ran out of W-numbers and began assigning women WE-numbers. Still under construction at the time was the $140 million Central California Women’s Facility, which would hold the title of the largest women’s prison in the world (and which, only a handful of years after opening, would be stuffed to double the intended capacity).
To deal with overflow, I, along with a bus full of women, was sent to Avenol, a men’s prison. Not that Avenol had room for us. They’d vacated an occupied yard, and it was clear from the way we found it that the men who’d lived there had been mad about wherever they were being forced to move on to. For an entire week, we scrubbed the filth left behind, cleaning up scraps of food, even feces, to make the building habitable.
With all the shuffling around and shoving together, no wonder California’s prisoners had the nation’s highest suicide rate—a shocking 80 percent higher. Buses loaded with prisoners were spotted driving aimlessly around the state, stopping at a prison for bathrooms and a meal, and then it was back on the bus, driving for several hours to another prison to use the bathrooms and get a meal. At any given time, it was speculated that busloads of prisoners were living on the road in what amounted to mobile prisons, waiting for word that someone had been released or died and a bed had opened up.
Unlike the women’s prison, Avenol was all concrete and black tar. There was no lawn, not even a sliver of green. There was, however, an area where chickens and pigs were raised and slaughtered, but inmates who worked there talked about how weirdly deformed many of the animals were—a chicken with one eye, pigs with crooked legs. What’s for dinner? Antibiotics and steroids!
I’d been forty-five minutes from my family when I was at the California Institution for Women, but Avenol was 180 miles away. A six-hour round trip was a lot of time and gas money for someone to come sit on a bench and talk to me. So no one visited. As isolated as I felt, inmates several years later would have it worse when California’s backhand solution to reduce overcrowding was to ship people out of state, sending more than eight thousand prisoners to Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Arizona.
After serving a year, I was released on parole, and my father took the long drive to pick me up. We were happy to see each other, though I knew he was saddened by what was going on with me, and with all his children. He preached a little about getting my life together. But then he let it go. I was no different than him, and no different than just about everyone else we knew. Our entire community had come undone. Mass incarceration was in full swing, and we were all targets.
I went to the unemployment office, I filled out applications in stores, I asked around if anyone knew of a job. But I had to check that felony conviction box, so all I saw were heads shaking no. The State Department of Rehabilitation was supposed to help me find a job, but nothing came of that. What I really needed was a college degree, but I also needed money to live. So I eliminated school as an option, and no one counseled me otherwise.
Then, a man with cream-colored skin and green eyes came by. There was something about him that captured me. He’d grown up in northern California. He dressed immaculately. He drove a Mercedes and took me on dates at nice restaurants. Everyone called him Chief, a nickname given to him as a child. So I called him Chief too, which didn’t feel as off to me as it should have.
Chief had a mystery about him, and all the women wanted to get with him, but he was mine. It would take some time before his allure began to fade and I realized that what I’d mistaken for mystery was really arrogance and secrecy—and drugs. But I was to blame too. I didn’t want to know, so I turned my head, yet again, repeating the same damn cycle, jumping from the skillet to the frying pan.
One day I called Toni and said, “Come to Vegas! I’m getting married.”
There was a pause on the other end. “To who?” she asked, before declining the invitation.
Though I can’t blame my actions on the drugs, I was high when I said my vows. I had no idea what a good man was supposed to be, but Chief supported me financially and never raised a hand to me, and that meant something. We moved into an apartment, and I began collecting as many different types of plants as I could find. I filled that house with big plants, little plants, tree-like plants, in the bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, lining the hallway. The plants were alive and beautiful, they wouldn’t bother anybody, and I could watch them thrive. I watered them and shined them and talked to them. When Toni came over she said, “I feel like I’m walking into the Amazon. Why am I knocking leaves out of my face?”
I replied, “I’m cleaning the air.”
Toni and Chief tolerated each other and even found some enjoyment trading recipes. But Chief’s aloofness began to make me paranoid. So did the drugs. The scene was no longer the high-flying, big-money 1980s; it had become sad and desperate. Dope doesn’t exactly compel you to be a kind, considerate person, and I treated myself and everyone around me poorly. I was still mired in anger and filled with hurt. Hurt people hurt people, and that’s the spiral in which I was trapped. Inevitably, I landed right back in prison.
The story would repeat itself. The story that, each time, I’d lay out before the judge: “My son was killed, I’m trying to numb the pain with alcohol and drugs. I’d like to get some help.” But the gavel would come down with a smack, and the judge would say: “Prison.”
I’d sit in the county jail, then get transferred to prison, where, for six weeks, I’d be held in R&R in that cage, taxpayer dollars paying for me to sit there all day long doing nothing. I’d get yet another physical and another TB test—one in county jail and then another in prison, even though it was only a couple of months between tests and the entire time I’d been confined to a cell. On it would go, for the next decade: sentenced to sixteen months, I’d do ten months. Two years, I’d do fifteen months. Three years, I’d do twenty months. I was a sad, lost, broken woman. I was an addict, an alcoholic. Not once in those courtrooms did it go down differently. Not once did a judge say, “Let’s defer her to treatment.” I didn’t know to ask for anything different—treatment wasn’t something offered up to people from my community. All I knew was that we went to prison for this stuff. All I knew was that it went: the gavel would smack, “Prison.” Smack, “Prison.” Smack, “Prison.”
One time, I was in the holding room of the Criminal Courts building, waiting to go before the judge—even though the mandatory minimum laws all but rendered judges powerless—when I noticed a newspaper lying on a bench. For the past two months I’d been sitting in county jail and hadn’t seen a newspaper. Flipping through, I glimpsed a photo that looked like my mother. I read the caption. It was Mama. She was ceremoniously activating a stoplight on the corner where, eight years earlier, K.K. had been killed.
My head reeled. According to the article, Councilman Nate Holden was holding a town hall meeting when someone stood up and told K.K.’s story. The councilman then went door to door looking for me, finally knocking on my mother’s door. She invited him in.
When my name was called I took the newspaper with me into the courtroom and showed my attorney. “It’s all here,” I pleaded. But the gavel came down, and I was sentenced to twenty months in prison.
Six weeks later, when I was finally allowed to sign up for the phone, I called my mother and told her I’d seen the article. “Did you tell the councilman why I wasn’t there?” I asked. “That I was awaiting sentencing?”
“No,” she replied.
I could hear her shame seeping through the line. I hung up, knowing I’d resent my mother for this for a long time. I resented Mama for lots of things.
When I next talked to Toni, I told her I’d seen the article. “Were you there?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But I didn’t want to be in the photo. It all seemed too little, too late. My brother’s dead, my mother’s in prison. So when the photographer came by, I moved to the side.”