by Curtis Bunn
“They taught me to gamble. I learned to shoot dice on an ironing board,” Simmons recalled. “I remember taking home my first dice and shooting them in my own neighborhood when I was twelve.”
By fifth grade she spent most of her time at her father’s house. She loved riding on the back of his motorcycle. So one afternoon when he headed out to make a delivery to the housing projects, she grabbed her helmet and hopped on the back of the bike.
Her dad seemed to be in a real hurry. She kept patting his back and saying, “‘Slow down. Slow down.’ I held onto him tight with my head against the back of his leather jacket,” she remembered.
As they drove up a hill to the projects, a kid in a go-cart was headed down. The bike and the go-cart hit each other. Simmons flew through the air but got up and brushed herself off.
Before she could fully recover, her father whispered to her, “Take this down to Miss Shirley’s house.” Simmons walked the short distance to the house and gave Miss Shirley a two-pound bag of marijuana. An ambulance and police car arrived at the scene of the accident. On her walk back, Simmons felt pain in her knee and sat down on a wall. Her father saw her and sent over a paramedic.
“The go-cart handlebar went through my kneecap. I had on jeans,” said Simmons. “My socks were red.”
Both she and the teenage go-cart driver were taken to the hospital right across the street. In her book Keep It Movin’! Simmons wrote: “I remember thinking, at least the drugs and money were safe.”
She was hospitalized for six months with a compound fracture of her kneecap. When she got out, she had on a cast that covered her hip and leg on one side. Because her mother, a psychiatric aide, was working and not at home all day, her parents decided Simmons would stay with her father.
She was happy and envisioned watching TV in bed and eating everything she liked.
“Instead, that was the first day I was sexually abused by my Dad,” Simmons said.
She was twelve years old. She didn’t tell anyone.
When she was on her feet again, she began to smoke weed and drink alcohol. Her brothers taught her how to package and sell a “nickel bag,” or five dollars’ worth of marijuana, to make money.
She sold joints at school. She was popular, played softball, ran for “Miss Pickett Middle School,” and was called “Missy” by everyone.
In eighth grade an assistant principal caught her with marijuana in her pocketbook, took her to the office, and called the school police. An officer handcuffed Simmons and walked her down the halls to the police car outside.
“I felt embarrassed. The halls were crowded. I could hear people saying, ‘Dag, look at Missy.’ ‘They locking Missy up.’”
But once outside, Simmons said, “I wasn’t scared. I thought getting arrested was cool and didn’t matter.”
She got kicked out of school. Her mother picked her up from the police department.
“She was mad, but she couldn’t say much ’cause she smoked weed, too,” Simmons said.
At home, she was still being sexually abused. At age fifteen, she had what she thinks was a “mental breakdown.” She didn’t speak for forty days and was placed in a children’s psychiatric center and diagnosed with depression.
She didn’t utter a word about her sexual abuse. “I guess I was numb to everything,” Simmons said. “What shook me out of my depression was I had a roommate who was pregnant by her dad. Her baby died, and she lost her mind. One night I woke up and that girl was dressed in my clothes and standing over me saying, ‘You killed my baby! You killed my baby!’”
The incident terrified Simmons, who decided to leave the facility. She started talking—except she still didn’t speak about her own abuse.
“My pop would give me money and drugs. I had the finest clothes and jewelry,” Simmons said. She felt guilty for accepting gifts from her father and enjoying them. While other teenagers drove used cars, she drove a new Cadillac he provided. “He would give me things and say if you want to go to the mall, come do this and that. I stayed high.”
For a while, she delivered drugs and carried money back from the South for her father. She tried college, spending a semester at Cheney University. But she was too mentally damaged to be disciplined enough to follow rules or attend classes. At home, the incest continued until she moved to Los Angeles at age twenty-seven.
By this time, she had fallen in love and had a daughter, a child she left with her favorite aunt Jean, voluntarily giving up her parental rights. Her daughter’s father eventually joined her, and the two worked for a company selling magazines and books.
But Simmons had a bad cocaine addiction—and got pregnant again. She returned to Philadelphia alone and gave birth to her second daughter in January of 1994.
She tried being a hands-on mother, taking her daughters to Los Angeles with her. But that lasted just a few months. She was still an addict and unable to work, so in desperation she returned the children to her aunt in Philadelphia.
Finally, in 1996, all her demons caught up with her, and Simmons was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with possession of narcotics with intent to distribute. She became the statistic she’d avoided for so long, the increasing number of women imprisoned, especially for drugs, a number that had increased at twice the rate of men since 1980.
She was sentenced to six years at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, California.
“I was all alone,” she said.
A cellmate told her to try God, something Simmons had avoided. After all, she wondered, how could God allow her to be abused by her father? But she started going to church and she said after one particular gathering she felt “saved.”
“There was a woman and she told us how she had been molested by her dad and used to shoot drugs,” Simmons said. “Her story just touched me, and I wanted to be saved, too.”
She returned to her cell and started praying, just as the chaplain had suggested.
“I prayed and cried. There was a small window—and I saw a light in the window,” Simmons said. She also saw a bright light shining down the hallway of the jail.
“That was my first experience of knowing God,” she said.
She turned from the circle of friends who gambled and smoked to the group that went to Bible studies. A chaplain advised her to go straight into a drug rehab and mental health program called His Sheltering Arms once she was released. Normally, during her shorter stints in jail, Simmons would arrange for a drug dealer to meet her outside the facility upon her release, but not this time.
She walked out of prison on October 23, 1999, and entered His Sheltering Arms, staying for six months. While there, she revealed for the first time that her father had sexually abused her. She was motivated by listening to other women tell their stories.
“People were very honest,” said Simmons. “One girl told how she was on drugs and allowed her son to be sold for drugs and had so much guilt and shame. Her honesty made me be honest.”
Simmons put up her hand to speak, and before she knew it, she had blurted out her secret.
“I had promised I would keep that secret the rest of my life. I shocked myself,” she said. “A counselor pulled me aside and said, ‘Thank you for your bravery. We’re getting you some counseling.’’’
She received counseling and initiated communication with her daughters. At first her mother and her daughters did not believe she was drug-free. But in time, her mother accepted Simmons had changed and even helped her pay court-ordered fines so she could come home.
In Philadelphia, Simmons fought her aunt Jean in court for custody of her children. It took time, but she proved to the court she had taken parenting classes and drug and alcohol treatment and had a full-time job. On March 15, 2003, she won custody of her girls.
“I was excited and nervous—and they were, too,” she said. “We stood at the bus stop and I called my mom and said, ‘I got the kids and we’re coming home.’’’
In early December she moved into her
first home, which she secured through Habitat for Humanity. Later that month, she and the girls had what Simmons refers to as her “first clean Christmas.” They decorated the Christmas tree and hung blinking multicolored lights on the banister leading upstairs to their bedrooms and around the doorway to the kitchen.
On Christmas Eve they left cookies out on a plate for Santa. While the girls slept, Simmons sneaked out to get two bicycles hidden in her car, thankful to the social service agencies that had donated gifts to the girls.
“I remember looking at the bikes, the cookies, and lights and crying,” said Simmons. When the girls were younger, Simmons would take the Christmas toys to the drug dealer to exchange for crack. By the time the girls woke on Christmas Day, most of the toys were gone. Sometimes Simmons pulled out old toys, wiped them off, wrapped them, and placed them under the tree. “This year, I wasn’t selling their toys for crack.”
And on the first “clean” Christmas, she watched the joy on two faces and enjoyed the laughter that filled the house, and she knew her old life had ended and a new one had begun.
Her youngest daughter, Traynesha Allen, has fond memories of that period.
“It felt normal because we had our own bedroom,” Allen said. “It was safe and clean and comfortable.”
Her mother missed the first seven years of her life and the first nine years of her sister’s. Allen remembers that both she and her sister took advantage of their mother’s feelings of guilt.
“My sister came from a place of anger, so a lot of stuff she got was because she was angry. For me, I was happy to get the stuff, but it was like my mother was saying, ‘I’m giving you this stuff because I wasn’t there.’”
Allen believes her sister suffered the most from their mother’s absence because she did not always live in a healthy environment and was not always treated well. Once the family was reunited, she said her mother also worked ten hours a day, which she now believes was an attempt to catch up for time missed building a career.
“We got up and got ourselves dressed and went to school and she was working,” Allen said.
Life was peaceful in their new home except for the constant arguing between her sister and mother. Her sister moved out when she was fifteen. The two still have a strained relationship. “My sister definitely still has a lot of hurt,” said Allen, who is twenty-six and a social worker. “I think I’ve learned to cope and maybe mask any pain, so I don’t re-traumatize myself.”
But Allen wishes she, her mother, and sister spent more time together, and she believes prison or the “time away” helped create barriers in her family. (Simmons’s oldest daughter did not want to be interviewed for this project.)
Simmons has two granddaughters: Traynesha is mother to one, and her sister had her first child this year. Allen said the baby helped soften the relationship between her sister and mother, but the tension and discomfort between the two persists.
“My mother is very focused on what she is doing. She is a huge support and role model on the professional side,” Allen said. “She will give you money, but I would prefer time together.”
She thinks her mother’s view of family is “tainted.” But it must be difficult for Simmons to have an understanding of family that isn’t sullied by sexual abuse. Both of Simmons’s parents are alive, yet she has never talked to them about her sexual abuse. She has only told her daughters her story.
“I wouldn’t say I have a good relationship with my father. I don’t hate him. I’m just neutral,” Simmons said.
She believes her mother now knows about the abuse, but they haven’t spoken of it.
“My [life] coach keeps saying I need to talk to my parents about it, but I haven’t had the heart,” said Simmons.
Once, when Traynesha was young and going over to Simmons’s father’s house to visit, Simmons did threaten her father, saying, “If you ever touch one of my daughters, I’ll get you locked up.”
In 2015, Simmons received a full pardon from the then-governor of California, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, which meant restoration of all citizenship rights.
She has also authored a book offering encouragement to others working to overcome addiction, Why Not Prosper? The Decision Is Yours! She helps other women build new lives, operating Why Not Prosper, a nonprofit she founded that helps women returning home from prison to find jobs, become mentally healthy, and stay drug-free.
She has earned a couple of undergrad degrees, as well as a master’s in clinical and counseling psychology and a doctorate in ministries. She lied about her criminal record on entrance applications, knowing some colleges will not accept convicted felons. Today she has $160,000 in student loans. While in general, federal financial aid is available to all but a small subsection of people who have been convicted of felonies, Simmons followed the advice of school counselors and applied only for financing in which her criminal record would not matter.
By her own account, Simmons has helped 1,000 women through Why Not Prosper. She provides housing for twenty-five women at the three locations of her program, knowing some landlords will not lease to a person with a criminal record, even though they may collect and retain application processing fees. Also, her women need a permanent address so they can receive other benefits for which they are eligible.
Simmons wants the U.S. criminal justice system to offer more diversionary programs that treat people with addictions as people who are ill and need healing.
“If the judge knows Sally keeps smoking crack and stealing, then the judge needs to listen to her story and put her in rehab. Test her every week and put her in a program,” she said. “Treat her in a restorative justice way instead of using punitive justice.”
Meanwhile, Simmons said she is seeing more mental illness among women, especially since COVID.
The Growth of Punishment
During the eighteenth century as the proliferation of prisons expanded in the North, white slave owners in the South tried and sentenced enslaved people in plantation “courts.”
Few Black people ever made it to a prison.
At one point, Virginia punished free Black people convicted of serious crimes by selling them into slavery.
At first, Southern legislators hesitated to establish prisons for fear of creating a white criminal underclass, something that had initially also concerned Northerners. And Southern governors did not want racial mixing—even in their prison systems.
They also wanted prisons to be profitable, which spurred the use of inmate labor to produce goods. Jails even charged some city slave owners to “store” or punish their enslaved people.
But most enslaved people met their fate at plantation trials and were punished, in horrendous ways, at the discretion of slave owners. Prisons and asylums were for foreign-born and poor whites. Then in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, except “as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
To maintain control over the 4 million newly freed people, Southern states drew up Black Codes, limits on the movement of Black people. Codes included restrictions such as “walking without a purpose” or “walking at night.” These codes evolved into Jim Crow legislation, laws that institutionalized racism, crippling the economic, social, and educational growth of Blacks, limiting them to certain jobs, banning them from sharing public facilities with whites and prohibiting them from voting—laws that have similar consequences as those enacted today against people with convictions.
Jim Crow laws were aggressively enforced, which meant law enforcement focused its attention on former slaves, perhaps marking the beginning of the “official” overpolicing Blacks endure today. As a result, the conviction rates for whites accused of crimes dropped substantially while the rate for Blacks dramatically increased.
The number of women in Southern prison systems also increased in the postwar years, and virtually all of them were Black.
Without slavery, the South needed laborers, and so Black people were arrested on flimsy
charges, such as vagrancy, and sentenced to hard labor. For decades after the Civil War, state judges sentenced offenders to work on chain gangs on county roads, railroads, or other local improvements. Convict leasing, which had become popular in the North by that time, was adopted by Southern states. But in the North prisons only contracted out the prisoner’s labor, while in the South the state government basically turned over the prisoners to former plantation owners and companies that leased them. These southern contractors, responsible for the total care of prisoners, set up their own “penitentiaries.” Some 90 percent of these prisoners were Black.
Imagine the fear of Black prisoners leased to former Confederate officers, some of whom were also Ku Klux Klan members.
Convicts worked in the most dangerous and unhealthy conditions in phosphate mines, on railroad operations, and in turpentine plants. In Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, author Douglas Blackmon tells the story of Green Cottenham, the son of a formerly enslaved couple, arrested for vagrancy in 1908 and sentenced to six months’ hard labor. His original sentence was three months, but the “convict” was required to pay a fee to the sheriff, the judge, and other local officials. When he could not pay the $38.40, three months were added to his sentence.
Cottenham was leased by Shelby County, Alabama, to a U.S. Steel subsidiary, where he served in shackles alongside more than 1,000 convicts, digging coal with a pick in the dark and damp mines. In five months, Cottenham died of tuberculosis and was buried with mine debris.
The mining company had leased him for twelve dollars a month. The deputy who arrested Cottenham received a fee for delivering him to the mine. In fact, this human trafficking paid the salaries of law enforcement.
Len Cooper, a writer who grew up in Birmingham and now lives in Naples, Italy, said as a child his grandfather, Daddy-Yo, always told him, “Mister Lincoln ain’t freed no slaves.”
In one account Cooper wrote about, from when his grandfather was seven in 1918, he and three friends ran from white men who wanted the boys to get into their new car. Cooper’s grandfather made it home; the three others did not. Twenty years later, in 1938, Cleveland, one of the boys, returned home.
