Experience in jail

I was handcuffed at my home and driven to a processing station at the county “Justice Center.” Officers stood me against the wall and patted me down for contraband, checking my pockets, stripping off my socks, pulling out the insoles of my shoes.  Other officers emptied my bag and wallet of their belongings, took my ring and hairclip from me, and wrestled my tennis shoes free from their laces, putting everything they had collected into a sealed plastic bag. Occasionally they asked me about this or that they had found among my things: looking at my business cards, “Do you know anyone famous?”, or at the Kerry and Obama stickers that adorn my little makeshift Metro card case, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican? Because if you’re a Republican, I can take you to see the commissioner right away.”

They were joking and generally amused. I was sobbing and shaking. This was the worst day of my life but just another work day in theirs, just another tawdry soap opera of thousands they had watched unfold. I don’t think they were trying to be cruel. This is just the system.

Then I was taken to a cinderblock-and-steel cell at the far end of the cell block and told that when my “paperwork was done being processed” I would go to see the commissioner.  Thanks in part to my race, economic class, lack of prior arrest history, and the sympathetic nature of the crime I was charged with, the officers were generally as friendly and polite as either the system or their temperaments, hardened by everything they had seen, allowed them to be.

In my windowless cinderblock cell at the far end of a windowless hallway at the far end of a windowless processing station, was a spattered toilet/sink combination with leftover urine from an earlier occupant, a long metal bench, the scratch marks and graffiti and apparent feces smears of a thousand former prisoners, and nothing else. With no clock and no companion other than the echo of far off voices at the other end of the hall, I had no way of telling time. I was waiting for my paperwork. I didn’t know if hours had gone by or only minutes. I didn’t know how long it would take for my paperwork to process.  They’d made it sound like a quick matter.

I walked around my cell. I waited. I thought about my life and the series of choices that had led me to that cell. I thought about what to do when I got out. I thought about the pain that had overwhelmed me the last few days and re-lived the gory details of my husband’s betrayal in my house, in my bed. I got upset. I calmed down. I made up my mind, and then re-made it. I thought about how hungry I should be, given that I hadn’t eaten since learning about the affair two days before. I began to panic. I called out for food. Nothing. I called out again. Finally I was begging. My face pressed to the 3” by 10” slot in my jail cell door begging for food. They brought me a ham sandwich. I nibbled as much of it as I could get past my teeth and then cradled it, my dearest possession.

Then I was okay again for a while. Clutching my beloved ham sandwich to my chest and contemplating my life again, again and again, reliving my choices past and future. But still more time passed while I waited for processing. A lot of time. Or maybe not. I was absorbed in the misery that had brought me there but slowly I began to focus on the misery that was my present.

I’d never before been somewhere where I truly couldn’t leave if I wanted to, where I was truly locked up against my will. Sometimes, in a meeting or at a social function or in a church service, I had thought, “I’m stuck here and I hate it. I’m not allowed to leave.” But, of course, I always could have left if I’d chosen to. Adult life involves a lot of doing what we don’t want to do, but it also usually involves a fundamental element of choice so obvious, so taken for granted, that it’s a genuine shock when it’s ripped away. I have never experienced before what it’s really like, what it’s really like to not be able to leave a place even if you threw the entire weight of your body against your cell door or screamed or begged for mercy.

Why was it taking so long? Had I been forgotten? Were they punishing me? Had some new evidence been introduced complicating my “paperwork”? Was my husband conspiring against me? What was going to happen to me?

When Hurricane Sandy was about to hit, Mayor Mike Bloomberg declined to evacuate Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail complex. Most people didn’t care. Why should honest rescue workers devote time to helping hardened criminals? (Never mind their constitutional requirement to do so.) In Phoenix, Sheriff Joe Arpaio built his infamous “tent city” to house Maricopa County’s jailed in tents in the Arizona desert. Temperatures in the tents have been known to reach 115°F. Amnesty International has labeled it a human rights abuse. But the good people of Phoenix love “Sheriff Joe” because he treats the criminals like they deserve to be treated.

But the thing about jail is that it’s not prison. Even if you think that convicted criminals don’t deserve humane treatment, that’s not really who the jailed population is. Otherwise law-abiding wife catches husband cheating. She loses her mind in rage and grief, clawing at his face, drawing blood. She goes to jail for second-degree domestic assault. Should she be denied evacuation during a hurricane? Should she be locked up in 115° heat? Should her misdemeanor charge equal a death sentence? What about the people in other cells, those locked up for unpaid civil fines and fees? What about the people who will eventually be proved innocent by a court of law?

Locked up in a cell, with no human contact and a mind reeling, you realize that it doesn’t matter that much whether this is your first offense, or fifth, whether you’re here for carjacking and murder, or just parking tickets and smoking weed. You’re still the societal trash that’s locked up. You’re still the jailed. The system has you and it will proceed at its pace and by its rules.

That’s not to say that my treatment wasn’t better than the treatment received by others. It was. And I have never been so grateful in all of my life to be white, well-spoken, moderately attractive, and clearly middle class. Even officers who might have resented me for my obviously charmed lot in life, might not have dared show it since they knew from my belongings that I had a powerful employer and might myself be powerful on the outside—although I'm not. And many were genuinely and sincerely sympathetic with the weeping, cowering woman who whimpered that her husband cheated on her.

But that kind of reflection is easier on the outside than on the inside. Alone in my windowless cell at the end of a windowless hall in a windowless basement, alone for hours, I asked myself: If the fire alarm goes off, will someone come get me? Or will I be left here, caged in like an animal while everyone who can flee, does? That’s when you know what it means to not be able to leave. When you realize that you are there until they let you out, forever perhaps, because you are utterly at their mercy in the most profound way. When you realize that in an emergency, you might sit there, helpless, locked in a 10’ x 10’ box, waiting for a fire to reach between the bars for you, or for a flood to float you to the ceiling before bogging you lifeless down to the floor again.

And that’s when I broke. Utterly, completely, definitively. I'd come in at noon but how long had I been there, alone? I called out for the time. What time is it? Please, what time is it? What time is it? Please, how long have I been here? What time is it?

“I’ll talk to you when you get out,” came the answer.

How long will that be? What’s going to happen to me? When are they coming to get me? Half an hour, or five hours? My stomach jumped into my throat every time the keys jangled somewhere outside, somewhere along the long hallway of cells. Have they forgotten about me? I’m cold and I can’t stop shaking. Can I have a blanket? Can I have a blanket? Are you out there? Can you hear me?

And finally I was just crying out again and again, curled up on the floor near the door of my cell, more wounded animal than person.

Please help me, please help me.

Help me.

Help me.

Help me.

Please.

Please.

Please, help me.

Please, someone.

Had I had secret information to give up, I would have. The site of my nation’s missile silos? Yes, anything, please just help me.

It was so easy to break me. Watching movies we identify with the hero who survives it all. I was broken by a mundane betrayal and a few hours caged alone in a jail cell with only my own crushing despair, panic, and fear as torture.

They moved me from one cell to another at the front of the hall while a cleaning woman splashed an overpowering disinfectant around my former cell. From my new cell, I could see out into the processing area.  “Please can I stay in this cell?” I begged. Why? “Because I don’t want to be alone."

It occurred to me even at the time that they might have been keeping me separate as a favor, or because there weren’t many other women there, and not out of some kind of maliciousness. They may well have been surprised by the speed with which I fell apart, familiar as they are with people who’ve been through the system before, or know it from friends and family members. Because if you know the system, if you know what’s going to happen next, it might all be pretty boring and tedious. It is, after all, just long periods of waiting with nothing to distract you. No one was beating me. No one was waterboarding me.

But it had broken me anyway. The timelessness, my helplessness, my panic at being trapped like an animal, my ignorance about my fate, my fear. I went back to my former cell and before too long (and against the counsel of the rational voice in my head cautioning that I had to Just. Keep. It. Together.) I soon resumed my former state of uncontrolled sobbing near the door, pleading to not be left all alone. Please, someone help me.

They transferred in a composed African-American woman holding her paperwork. She had been peacefully lying down in another cell when they moved her into mine. “They saw that I wasn’t bothered and they didn’t like it, so they moved me here to mess with me,” she told me. That’s possible, I thought, or maybe they just wanted me to stop howling at them like a madwoman and give them some peace. Maybe they weren’t punishing you, but taking compassion on me. Maybe they thought I was at risk of losing my mind if they left me alone any longer and they didn’t want some white woman to have a psychological breakdown on their block with all of the bureaucratic headache that might mean. And if they were worried that I was breaking psychologically, they were right to be. I was.

When Samantha arrived (not her real name), she told me what to expect. She gave me knowledge about what was going to happen to me, and that knowledge was empowering in a way that I could never have imagined. “The commissioners don’t even come on until after the court has closed for the day,” she told me, “and that doesn’t happen till 4:30. It's only just after 4 now. So it’ll be 5, at least, before they’re settled and even thinking about reviewing cases. Did you see how many people were in front of you on the list?” 

I remembered watching them write my name down on a whiteboard but hadn’t processed it as meaningful to my existence in anyway. Thinking hard, I was third maybe, or somewhere near the top. “Good, that means they’ll probably get to you tonight. I don’t want to alarm you, but since it’s Friday, at some point the commissioners could decide to call it a night and then you’ll be here till Monday.” Where will we stay, here? Will they give us blankets? Will they feed us? “No, this is just a holding cell. If we’re here till Monday, they’ll move us to another facility with beds. We’ll lose our street clothes and we’ll be with other women. But the best case scenario is that you probably won’t be out of here until 8 or 9 tonight.”

I’d never considered that I might be held till Monday, dressed in jail uniforms with whatever new official humiliations that that might entail, simply because the wheels of justice grind slowly and a commissioner might want to get started on his Saturday. But knowing that I wasn’t going to be seen for hours more, if at all tonight, meant that I had some scope for my expectations.

I was being arrested, the arresting officer told me several times, because state law gives officers no discretion over making an arrest when domestic violence has occurred. A fight had occurred, my husband had an injury, and state law compelled them to take me into custody no matter how they personally felt about it. I understand that law is designed to protect battered spouses, especially women. If the law says that the abuser must be taken in, regardless of what the abused says, then there’s no way for the abuser to intimidate the abused out of help. Even caught up in the law, it makes sense to me.

For several months prior to this, as a purely academic interest, I’d been contemplating the inevitable collateral damage that all large systems require. In practical application, there’s nothing to do about it. If policymakers provide enforcers with discretion, they can abuse it. If policymakers don’t, they implicitly accept that some unintended individuals will be swept up with the rest. So they make a law they believes serves a greater good one way or another, and then we citizens hope to never end up on the wrong side of it. Because if you are on the wrong side of it, your life very quickly ceases to be your own.

I was arrested because the system required it. I was held as a part of that system. I might fall deeper into that system if I couldn’t be processed out before the weekend. Prior to my arrest, I didn’t understand the real consequences of my actions. I didn’t have any concept of how quickly you could go from confronting your husband in your home over his affair to spending four days in jail, or worse.

Samantha delicately told me that, as a white woman, I lived a life very much removed from her reality when it came to law enforcement. As a well-read, socially-conscious liberal, I knew that intellectually long before we met. I knew that I had freedom of movement in department stores, I knew that I was never going to be asked to step out of my car just because I was driving while black or brown.

At some point following birth, I had adopted into my subconscious the idea that I could behave in a certain way without consequences. I could yell at a cabbie who clipped me in the crosswalk. I could argue with the people outside my window who woke me up at 4am. I could lash out at my husband when I discovered he was cheating on me. I would be given the benefit of the doubt. Just that morning I was halfway through a Rolling Stone article on yet another young black man shot and killed by yet another angry white man under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. The young man and his friends, all middle class kids, had been playing their music too loud. They didn’t keep their heads down. One of them died for it. Very sad, we should definitely do something about those vulgar laws, but not applicable to me.

When the system took over, it didn’t change the key blessings of my existence. I’m not going to be profiled by store clerks or police officers or white NRA members who think they can kill with impunity. But it did open my eyes to a degree of precariousness with which we all live.  I’d always known there was a line, I just never knew how close I had been living to it.

Samantha was there because one day in 2010 she lost her job.  And then she lost her home. And then she and her daughters were living out of their car. And then the registration lapsed and she couldn’t afford to pay it. And then she was repeatedly caught driving a car without paperwork because the more fines she accrued, the less she was able to pay. Now she had a good job once again and a stable life, but she learned that there was a warrant for her arrest so she voluntarily turned herself in.

It was a story I’d heard before: ten years ago it had been my boyfriend’s. An unemployed student in Arizona, couch-surfing with friends when he couldn’t afford rent, he’d been unable to pay to renew his car registration and was caught driving. They suspended his license until he registered his car, but he had to drive to school and was caught driving on a suspended license. And so it went on for years. He was never jailed for this. In retrospect, I realize how easily he could have been, and how terrible the consequences of his crime of being poor would have been if he had ended up in Sheriff Joe’s ‘justice’ system. In ways I only understand now, he was so very lucky. He didn’t know it, but he was putting himself at the mercy of a capricious and brutal system; he was counting on his privilege as a white college kid and didn’t even know it. 

I know, because by the end of my day in detention, I’d heard a variation on that same theme several times—not just from one prisoner to the next, but from the commissioner to the prisoner: “Unpaid registration: $100 fine. Unpaid license fee: $50 fine. Unpaid tickets for driving without registration: $250.” For this, the detainee was literally in shackles.

When my time to see the commissioner came, I left my cell and joined a group of five black, mostly young, men. We stood against the wall as one by one officers cuffed our hands tight to our waists and shackled our ankles. Then we were ordered to march in a single file line, five black men, one white woman, out to a utility area connecting our holding cells with the hearing rooms.

I’d seen enough movies to know how shackled prisoners shuffle, now I was experiencing it. I wished I’d thought to wear long pants before being arrested, I wished I’d thought to wear shoes that didn’t require laces. The shackles cut into my ankles and there was no way to walk that wasn’t painful. My feet would slip around in my laceless shoes, making the metal gouge deeper into my flesh. The floor was slippery from a recent mopping but I couldn’t hold onto anything to steady myself, or even to brush my hair out of my face, because my arms were so tightly strapped down to my stomach.

I don’t know what I was expecting from the words “commissioner” and “hearing room” but this wasn’t it. The commissioners, two young African-American women, sat on one side of a bank teller display. Their side was like an office, with books and photographs and memorabilia and warm lighting. Our side was a table, with a stool bolted to the concrete floor, and walls of peeling yellow cinderblock under fluorescent lights. We six prisoners sat there together, listening as each answered in turn:

Full name

Date of birth

Full home address

Previous names you’ve been known by

Height

Weight

Prior arrest history

“Married, single, divorced, or widowed?” Pause. “Married.”

“Do you have children dependent on your income?” “Yes, two.”

“Are you employed?” “Yes”

“Who is your employer?” Pause, mumbling now. “The US Congress.”

Chuckles from my fellow arrestees.

“How much do you make?” “$80,000”

Audible gasps from my intently-observing audience. It occurred to me that it was possible that I made more than the officer supervising our hearing process and more than the commissioner set to rule on my fate, though I have no idea how much either really makes. If I did, I didn’t know if that made my situation better or worse.

“You have been charged with second-degree assault. This comes with a maximum sentence of ten years in prison and a fine of $2,500. Your court date has been set for May 16. You are to be released on your own recognizance.”

Some grumbling there from the men in the room. Two of my peers had been required to post bail. But I was coping with what had never before crossed my mind: ten years in prison?

I know what you’re thinking, what everyone tried to assure me of, but it’s a very different thing to dispassionately evaluate the likelihood of a sentence possibly administered to someone else and to be sitting, cuffed and shackled in your laceless shoes, with your half-eaten ham sandwich lovingly folded up into your pocket, with no way to keep your hair out of your eyes, and to hear that such a thing is in the realm of the possible.

What everyone else in that hearing room heard was that I was going to be free tonight, and that seemed grossly unfair to my fellow arrestees. Big surprise, the wealthy white woman’s getting out.  But what I heard was that it was suddenly possible that my life would be destroyed in a way I could never have previously imagined. I was in the hands of the system. And the system could be merciful, or it could punish me egregiously.

When the commissioners had reviewed the six of us, we shuffled back to our holding area to reverse the process of shackling and cuffing and to be put back in our cells for more “processing” before we could be released. Alone in my cell once again, I began to panic. What if they don’t process me in time? What if I end up stuck here overnight even though I’m supposed to be set free? What if they forget about me?

These are silly thoughts if you have the perspective of an officer, if you’re sitting on the other side of the bars. But putting me back in that cage made me feel just as terrified as I’d been before Samantha came. They said processing would take 20-30 minutes. How long has it been? Has it been 20 minutes? Or only two? I just want to get out. I want to be on the other side of this cage door.

They released me into a literally dark and stormy night in a deserted court complex along with several other co-detainees who now knew my home address and how much I made. For all of my cultural enlightenment, I still felt very much like an intensely vulnerable, lost little white girl all alone with her dead cell phone and no idea where she was with no one around but a group of angry young men who had every right to resent her for all that life had blessed her with. I had no time to contemplate what awaited me at home and in the future. I just had to get out of the rain, get safe, find someone to take me... somewhere.

Today I know that if I ever lose my temper again, I’m risking time in that cell. If they want to—and sometimes even if they don’t—they can lock you up for almost anything. And when you’re there, you’re disposable, you’re collateral damage. Probably everything will work out fine for you. Probably you’ll be released and as long as you make it to your court date you’ll be fine. Probably your life will go on after this blip, especially if you’re white and middle class and you learn an important lesson.

But it’s a terrifying thing to know that no one can guarantee you anything once you’re in that cell. How long the system will keep you there, what will happen to you if there’s an emergency and the public decides it’s not worried about evacuating you, what happens when the people in charge of you decide you can ‘keep’ till such time as it’s more convenient to deal with you.