PRISON TIME
It was a long time ago, 1970’s New York City. I boarded the Hazen Street bus at 59th & Lexington (in front of Bloomingdale’s) and stayed on board as it rumbled onward, stop after stop, at last crossing the endless causeway, (four thousand feet of bridge separating the “island” from surrounding boroughs) then pulling in, wheezing, at the checkpoint outside the Riker’s Island Reception Center. Slowly, the bus emptied and passengers stumbled into long weary lines, on approach to Visitor Clearance. Planes from LaGuardia (just yards across the water) took off every four minutes or so, flying low and shaking the walls of C-76, the Men’s House, the Adolescent Remand Shelter and the New York City Correctional Institution for Women (WHD: the Women’s House of Detention) – and all the cellblocks on The Rock.
My shoulder bookbag jingled with loose coins and bills – bail money donated for the release of female detainees. Female bails were shockingly low, as low as twenty-five dollars. But twenty-five dollars -- for a woman without access to discretionary funds (or whose pimp typically refused to pony up). She might as well have had bail set at $10,000 -- or a million. Even at the dollar equivalent to cab fare, to someone penniless in prison -- freedom cost the moon.
Pimps, in their great nodding hats and high-heeled boots, gathered a short distance away from the front of the Reception Center, smoking dope and calling out to all women who passed by. They were waiting to “greet” those who’d done their time or were finally free on bail, either former members of their “stable” or possible new recruits. Each woman who wandered, slightly dazed, from Reception -- with a few dollars of state money in her pocket, wearing her “arrest” clothes, with all her other belongings in a paper bag – was approached, solicited and (if familiar to the pimps, welcomed back by force.
When I carried bail to Riker’s Island I had images in my head that I could not shake. I had seen the photos from the uprising and massacre at Attica. I was a young poet, new to New York. I listened to WBAI, stunned by the eye-witness broadcasts: reports of the failure of negotiations after the death of a hostage - followed by the merciless bloodbath. The NYTimes ran a photo of a hastily-scrawled sign reading “We are human”, leaning on the back of an inmate huddled round a makeshift fire in the center of D Yard.
As to the women ‘inside”: If incarcerated men had to hold up signs reminding the world that they were human, I imagined incarcerated women holding up invisible signs stating the same. Women seemed doubly incarcerated: in cells and in their bodies. This was decades before Me Too, decades before LGBTQ – even Roe v. Wade was still a year or two in the future. Women who were locked up usually lost their children to the state.
So I’d found my way to an organization on the upper West Side called The Women’s Bail Fund, a mix of Columbia students & more seasoned activists - a feminist Mao-ist cell. I didn’t take to Mao (“Hold the Mao”! I punned, pathetically, to no laughter.) Laughter? There was no laughter at those mandatory “critical/self critical” exchanges. “A revolution is not a dinner party,” I was reminded often - as I left meetings early to attend literary dinner parties.
But when I learned that the Fund was having trouble finding volunteers willing to ferry collected bail to the Women’s House, I jumped at the chance. I got on the Hazen St. bus., carrying a list of those to be freed. At Riker’s., I searched for the Bail Window. I read out the names (written out for me by the women of the Fund) in a loud voice to an overweight C.O. with dark sweat stains at the armpits of his pale blue uniform shirt, as he peered at me from his cage. I pushed crumpled dollars under the heavy bulletproof screen and he counted the coins and bills, counting out loud under his breath, ignoring my occasional questions.
The Fund listed pregnant inmates as its top bail priority. Not only because women scheduled to give birth in prison received almost no pre-natal and obstetric care – and if hospitalized, looked at being shackled to a gurney during labor and birth. I had undergone a complicated abortion in California, before I ended up in NYC with my fiancé., a young doctor, a neurology resident at Columbia-Presbyterian and Harlem Hospital -- who occasionally moonlighted as doctor-on-call at Riker’s.
Of course I believed in a woman’s right to choose and I’d identified with the desperate situation of imprisoned pregnant women and the children born to them behind bars. Inside or outside prison walls, a woman’s body could turn into a prison. All detainees, male and female, were supposed to be brought before a judge (as per habeas corpus) in what the law indicated was a “reasonable” period of time. Years after my job as a “bail mule”, I recounted, in a New York Times Op Ed how women, not yet charged with any crime, were detained for what are usually considered “victimless” offenses (drugs, shop-lifting, prostitution)– and might end up in prison for months – or even for a year or more, due to “falling off the calendar”. During a woman’s incarceration, her children, if no family member could give them shelter, would become “wards of the state”, disappearing into the foster care system. Incarcerated mothers were uninformed as to their children’s whereabouts and often their loved ones vanished forever. If a woman gave birth in prison, her newborn was either instantly removed or taken away after brief “nursing” interim, which was almost more cruel than the immediate “disappearing.”
So these were The Women’s Bail Fund priorities: Pregnant inmates, those seriously ailing (physically or mentally), suicide risks, those whose children were about to be taken from relatives, and finally: “political” prisoners.
My involvement at Riker’s Island grew -- I taught poetry at the Women’s House on Friday nights, founded a writing and arts program called Art Without Walls/Free Space (that expanded to all New York state prisons) -and worked by day in “After Care”: an upbeat bur nearly hopeless program seeking to find jobs for newly-released inmates. I went home often with my pockets stuffed with scrawled messages for family members, friends, -- messages for children with caretaker relatives on the outside – messages for unknown recipients, asking for help.
Back then (& now) crimes committed by women were largely, as noted, in the “victimless” category – followed by a startling jump up to felony homicide – even Murder One. There was little or no “middle level” crime: burglary, larceny, breaking and entering, armed robbery. Homicides by women tended to follow intimate circumstances. Women killed their husbands or their pimps – and often they murdered them after years of violent abuse. I occasionally accompanied inmates to court, when they finally got back “on the calendar”. One inmate who was charged with homicide (shooting her husband) – told the judge (through the “penguin” or “appellate lawyer”) about decades of savage beatings, until “God spoke” and told her to load his gun, repeat a prayer, then pull the trigger. The “penguin” submitted her plea of self-defense. I remember how intense her hope was for leniency – also based on the fact that she had served time “off the calendar” when she could not make bail. But she was given a “class E felony” – and sentenced.
That same woman came week after week to my poetry workshop on Riker’s. She had scars on her face and body and limped from years of enduring her husband’s violent beatings. Our workshop members read poetry and fiction by Lucille Clifton, Alice Walker, Ai, Tillie Olson, Grace Paley and June Jordan. Also Gayl Jones, whom Toni Morrison, (who supported the workshop) recommended.
I think of the poems written by the woman beaten by her husband, about the night God spoke to her and gave her instructions. “Let him raise his hand to you, as he always done. / Let your blood flow one last time… /But when he turn his face to your child / then you go to where his gun is hid / and turn round three times repeating my holy name / then call to him, look in his drunk eyes /stand in the light and, mother, take aim.”
She took aim.
Wow. So much here that's so important, especially now. I'm thinking about my niece who's nursing a newborn and has an outstanding warrant out against her -- a mistake having to do with probation she should never have been on in the first place. Her lawyer advises they go to court, but she's afraid of the baby being taken from her. An almost hopeless situation, and I know other women face this everyday. Thanks for writing what you write, doing what you do, being who you've always been.
Oh such a powerful piece. And powerful work you did there at Riker's.