by Mateo Hoke
You had the hole. But then you had the hole inside of the hole. Even when you’re in the hole, you were in a hallway with twenty other cells, so we could pass things from cell to cell through little openings, so we still had contact with each other. But there’s another door at the end of the hallway with two cells that are separate that are even smaller, and they’re under twenty-four-hour surveillance. A lot of the time if you get sent back there, you’re back there by yourself. I could do the hole inside the hole, because my routine didn’t change. But it does get to you. I hallucinated all the time in solitary. I’d see a little boy out the window. I’d think it was my first son, but I knew that couldn’t be right, that he’d passed. When my mind would start to slip, I’d hear him say things: “Mommy, stay strong mommy, I’m here mommy. I’m here for you.” I didn’t feel so alone when I saw him. I’d start to sing, sometimes I would dance. It would make me happier.
If you want to know how I felt, put yourself there. You put yourself there and you visualize that to be you. You visualize how you enjoy hugs and being treated warm and kind. But now put yourself inside a cell or a cage where the trash and the garbage can has more regard than you as a human being, and then you tell me how you feel. I mean, even the trash gets out, but you don’t.
You don’t see nobody, day after day. You get an hour on the rec yard, but if it’s raining, you can’t go out. You have ten minutes to take your shower and clean your room, take your trash out. Sometimes it’s not enough time. Then you have to be back in your room, in your cell. If you don’t make it, you get another report. If you get a report while you’re already back there, you have to do an additional ninety days. Your world becomes consumed inside a six-by-nine prison cell, year after year after year. You’re just in complete despair. After a while, you start to lose hope. You feel helpless. You just sit there, and you sit there, and you sit, day after day. What kind of life is that for a human being?
Women who were thrown into solitary, it affects us so horribly, mentally. A lot of them just went completely insane. You go to an animalistic level that I never witnessed before until I got to prison. One girl was eating her feces and throwing urine. She was a young girl. I saw her eat her feces then smear it all over her body and the walls and the bars. The guards restrained her and gave her Haldol and then just kept her sedated. Then they made other inmates go in and clean it up.
A lot of women didn’t make it out of the hole. I remember one young girl in the hole, she was twenty-six. I’d known her mother too, and her mother got out, and I’d kind of promised to look after her girl. This girl would come to me sometimes, like when she was sick, or when she needed wisdom. Well, she ended up in the hole within the hole, and it was affecting her. When I was able to talk to her, she told me, “Ms. Mary, I can’t take the hole anymore. It feels like the walls are closing in on me.” She was talking in a way that I knew she was getting to a breaking point. So I asked a guard, “Could you let me go back there and take her cell and she can come in mine? She’s at a breaking point and I don’t think it’s going to turn out good if she’s back there by herself.” And the guard said, “You don’t tell me what to do, you don’t run nothing around here! You think you’re runnin’ shit, but you don’t tell me what to do. I’ll check on her when I’m ready to check on her.” So to spite me, she didn’t even look in on her. And the girl hanged herself. She didn’t survive. And I took that real, real hard.
I was angry. I was beyond the point of being able to respect any of the guards. I was saying things like, “Y’all murdered her, and you know you did. I told you all to go check on her and you refused out of spite.” Because of that, they put me in the tank. The tank is worse than the hole inside the hole. In the tank, they strip you buck naked. They take all your clothes, put you in a smock, take your mattress and pillow, and give you a blanket/mattress thing and a roll of toilet paper. You can’t make phone calls, can’t get mail, you don’t have communication with anybody. If they want to punish you real bad, they put you in there. And you know if you go in the tank, you might not come out alive. I went in not expecting to come out. I was in there two weeks. I kept my mind busy making flowers out of the toilet paper. My whole cell was filled with flowers. I was able to get a magazine from the guards, and I’d leach the ink out of the magazine pages to color my flowers. There were flowers all over the head and foot of my bed, the sink, the floor. That’s how I made it through two weeks.
But that was the hardest time for me. I was losing hope of ever coming out. I was losing my will to live. I felt like I had no purpose, that my purpose for being on earth was over. I understood though that those were the kinds of thoughts I was being programmed to have, and that’s when I kind of fought back to get control of myself. But that’s what happens to the mind in isolation.
I didn’t get many visits in prison because my family was so far away, but I got a visit once while I was in the hole from a Muslim sister, and I got letters while in solitary. The only reason I got out, I think, is my son Greg kept contacting the prison wanting to see me. They didn’t have an official reason for keeping me in the tank, so that forced them to let me out.
I WANTED TO TAKE AWAY THEIR POWER OVER ME
It went on like that for years. The rule was women couldn’t cover their hair at all for the first three years I was there, and so I spent a lot of time in the hole. Around 2010, it got to the point where I got a medical order from Earl K. Long hospital that the hole was detrimental to my health, and they could no longer put me in the hole. Then I spent more time in general population.
In the compound, in general population, I didn’t get very close to my roommates—that’s what cellmates were called. I had a routine, and I was disciplined. I’d get up early, I’d make prayer, read from my Quran, go get food, come back and do yoga and writing. Some of my roommates weren’t so disciplined and wanted to spend their days talking about what this one was doing down the hall, and I wasn’t interested in any of that. I didn’t socialize much.
I didn’t spend as much time in the hole after the first seven years. But things would happen. One time, a girl tried to take my Scrabble board, and so I fought her. Her friends joined in, and I grabbed a chair to defend myself. That’s what I went to the hole for, for assault with a weapon, even though I was just defending myself.
Once I realized that this was the worst that they could do to me, I wanted to take away their power over me. I began to find solace inside solitary. I had my Quran and my prayer rug. I could also read other Islamic books, other books under the umbrella of religious artifacts. Otherwise, all there was to read was just paperback novels—all kinds of rubbish, but nothing to feed your brain.
SISTER HEARTS
I honestly think they let me out because I was so much trouble. I mean, I made it so they had to let people observe their religions, even the Wiccans. And let me tell you, the prison did not want no witches having a service. I was released April 21, 2013. Usually they give you $10 or $20 and a bus ticket, but they didn’t do me like that. They put me in a van and chauffeured me to New Orleans, they wanted me out of their hair so bad. They brought me to this place called the Exodus House. It’s a facility for people in substance abuse recovery and with mental disabilities. I was going there as a dorm mother. I was supposed to look out for the women in one of the buildings. My first night there, I go into the apartment. It’s a four-bedroom apartment. It smelled like a dump and it was just as filthy. That’s where I was supposed to stay. I said, “Okay, I’m going to deal with this because this is where I have to stay. I’m just going to make the best of it.” I cleaned the place up, started cooking for everyone. I worked for my room and board. I was there three or four months. I would have stayed longer, but my supervisor started making advances on me, and when I turned him down, he told me it was time for me to go.
Reentry for women and senior citizens in this country sucks. Being free was overwhelming. I didn’t know which way to go. I second-
guessed myself. I didn’t know how to think. I had been looking for apartments, but they were all so expensive. I wasn’t making any money and I didn’t have any money. I went to this apartment on Amelia Street where I’d seen a “For Rent” sign, but it was filthy. Roaches were everywhere, falling down in my hair when I opened the door. It smelled horrible. The window was broken. But when Exodus House put me out, that was where I went, since all I had in my pocket was $40 I’d made selling drinks and chips at Exodus House. I became a squatter in that apartment. I remember my first night. I slept on my clothes. And then I started cleaning and fixing up the place. When the owner found me there a month later, he was so impressed with how I’d fixed the place up he let me stay. And he paid me to fix up other apartments.
During that time, Imam Rafeeq NuMan and some Muslim brothers from my mosque used to come and get me on weekends. They would take me to a flea market across the river and drop me off. I would get things at the flea market and then resell them. I’m an excellent salesperson. And that’s how I started making money again. It helped me pay my bills in my new apartment and get things that I wanted. At first I would go to thrift stores and buy stuff and I’d put it in a suitcase that had wheels and I’d roll it up and down the street, you know, how bag women do with the grocery cart? The only difference was I had a suitcase and inside that suitcase I would sell my little wares and I would get my profit and I kept turning—I’d flip that money and flip that money. And that’s how eventually I built my business, Sister Hearts. Last year I did well over $150,000 in sales.
When I tell people I started my business with $40, they look at it like, unbelievable, but I really did. All the employees here are ex-offenders. If someone out of prison comes in and says, “I need a job,” I’ll do an interview on the spot. But if you just want a job, then this is not the place for you. It really isn’t. Because a job means I’m gonna tell you everything you need to do. And you gonna do whatever I tell you to do. This is more of a program than a store. This organization is one that promotes mental and emotional rehabilitation and transition. It’s about learning skills to take care of yourself after prison.
The name “Sister Hearts” comes from the way I felt about some of the other women in prison. I can’t use the word “friends” because it’s too loose. Those were the women who held me when I cried. When I was hungry, those were the women who stole food out of the kitchen for me to eat. When I was sick, those were the women who went to the medicine line and hid pills under their tongues to bring back to me. Those were the women who sometimes lied for me and stole for me and fought for me and fought with me and stood beside me, Black and white. Saying “sister heart,” is very intense for me. Every time the words “sister heart” rings off someone’s lips in this free world they’re remembering my sister hearts in prison.
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3. Prison Policy Initiative, 2010 US Census data.
4. St. Gabriel is the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, located in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, seventy miles northwest of New Orleans.
BRIAN NELSON
age: 53
born in: Chicago, Illinois
interviewed in: Chicago, Illinois
Before he was even a teenager, Brian Nelson was living a life straight out of The Outsiders or West Side Story as a member of the Simon City Royals street gang on the North Side of Chicago in the late 1970s. In the early days, Brian’s gang life largely revolved around partying, trying to meet young women, and getting into fistfights with rival gang members. When handguns started appearing on the scene, however, a lifestyle that might have once been possible to romanticize from afar quickly turned deadly. Brian became a “gunner” for his gang, and a close friend was murdered. The violence escalated rapidly. In 1983, Brian was charged and convicted of murder, and he was sentenced to twenty-six years in the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Once in prison, Brian was placed in various forms of solitary confinement, but it wasn’t until 1987, when he refused a prison warden’s request to mediate an in-prison gang feud, that his nightmare really began. Brian was put on “the circuit,” an unofficial program employed by prison officials for individuals they deemed to be most troublesome. Prisoners on the circuit were continuously shuffled to and from solitary confinement units across the state without any explanation or sense of where they were. Brian was also subjected to tremendous physical abuse on the circuit, including being used for live training exercises for Illinois correctional officers. The circuit was exposed in part by a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by Brian. He was taken off the circuit in 1993, although he continued to be subjected to other forms of solitary afterward. He was released from prison in 2010.
Brian now works as a paralegal for the nonprofit legal services organization Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, where he regularly corresponds with people currently incarcerated in Illinois jails and prisons—many of them in solitary confinement. Brian speaks about his torture at the hands of the Illinois Department of Corrections, why many days he feels like he is worse off now than when he was released from prison seven years ago, and how answering prisoners’ letters is a form of therapy.
DOING THE BASIC THINGS THAT KIDS DO
I think I was fourteen the first time I was put in solitary. I was locked in solitary because I was so small, they didn’t think I could be around the other kids. I don’t remember what that time was like. I’ve put walls up about that. Me and my doctor talk about it, and she worries for me, that the walls will come tumbling down, and I’ll hurt myself remembering.
I was born in 1964 in Chicago and I grew up on the North Side. I have one brother, two sisters. My older brother is Roy, my older sister is Kelly, and my little sister is Wanda. And we’re all one year apart. Mom and Dad had a handful. My dad, Robert, he worked at a printing company and my mom, Patricia, worked in the garden industry her whole life.
We grew up during the late sixties, early seventies doing the basic things that kids do—playing football in the street, softball in the parking lot, fast pitch against the brick walls. Went to St. Benedict for school. I’m white, and the neighborhood I grew up in was predominantly German, Italian, and Irish. We had a huge house, big backyard. Back then, in our neighborhood, we all knew each other. And it was sort of a Saturday ritual when my mom made homemade pizza. A lot of our friends would be on the front porch stairs in the summertime waiting for it—everybody loved my mom’s pizza.
In most of the neighborhoods, everybody hung out with each other on the street because there were a lot of middle-class families. There were maybe twenty-five kids just on one block that were all similar ages, and then next block over were other friends of all the same ages. We were riding bikes and playing tag in the alleys, on the garage roofs, around the train tracks and everything. We didn’t have the worries of drive-bys or all the craziness. It was more innocent stuff.
I JUST STARTED GETTING IN TROUBLE
In elementary and middle school I was more the “sitting in the back of the class just watching” type of student. And then, I want to say sometime in sixth, seventh grade, in the mid-seventies, I screwed up and got involved with gangs. I started hanging around some guys in the neighborhood who were into the street life, sitting around in the park partying, chasing the girls.
I don’t remember the first time I decided to hang out with those guys. We just grew up in a neighborhood, and they were part of it. I remember hanging out and some guys from another neighborhood came in messing around, and we just started a “rumble” fight. The rumbles were with these little baseball bats you’d get at Wrigley Field. That was one of my first big fights.
Soon I was more aware of there being different neighborhood gangs, the Bel-Airs and all these different street gangs. We were the Simon City Royals. Simon City was started from Simons Park. It’s a park on the northwest side of Chicago. The Royals were another group, and they merged and formed the Simon City Royals.<
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One gang would be on one block and one would be on another block, and they would just fight over something stupid, but most of it was over a girl—“Hey, what did you say to my sister?” I was never the one doing the fighting.
At first, when I started hanging out with those guys, my parents had no idea. And gangs were not prevalent back then, there was no awareness of what wearing certain colors meant or that sort of thing. When I got arrested, cops explained to my mom and dad what I was involved in. And of course my parents tried to talk me out of it, but it was too late.
The gangs weren’t racial. There was no racial identity with the organization or anything like that. Basically we just wanted to party, go to rock concerts, smoke our weed, do our acid, and hang out. But every once in a while, these other groups would come in and try to intimidate us, or tell us we couldn’t do this or that, or beat us up at school.
There were times when we were kids that the cops shut up a park where we would fight a different gang. They’d know there was a feud going on between the two streets. So the police would say they’re gonna set up a football game with the two gangs. And basically they were just setting it up for a fight. But there’s no weapons involved, and everybody just beats the crap out of each other and gets it out of their system. Everybody’s just sitting on the ground all whipped and tired, ready to sort of laugh about it afterwards.
Winter was like a truce period because nobody wanted to be outside. Chicago gets mighty cold in the winter. And there were times we all partied together, go to the lake and go smelt fishing together, drink beer, race cars and motorcycles.
