ANNE

In order to visit a prisoner, you have to fill out a form and be approved. This can take “several weeks”, whatever that means.

So I go to the website to get the form and it advises me to review the rules for visitors, which is seven pages long. There is a separate grid that lists the consequences of breaking various rules.

There is the obvious stuff like, I’m not allowed to bring him a birthday cake with a file baked into it. I’m not allowed to bring in drugs, tobacco, weapons or ammo or simulated weapons or escape paraphernalia. I guess that rules out that coil of rope I was going to give him for his birthday, ha ha.

Long list of clothing restrictions, including those related to gangs, like “no hoodies.”

Once I’m in, I am not allowed to threaten or use abusive language … ooh, I can’t use written abuse, either. I’m not allowed to bring anything in, not even my car keys or a Kleenex, so how would I write something abusive anyway?

My favorites: No masturbation, mutual masturbation, oral sex, or sexual intercourse in the visiting area.

There is a whole nother set of rules for child visitors.

This is going to be a whole new world for me, I think, unenthusiastically. I assume many of these rules were written because someone did something that was “disturbing to others” to use their term. I fill out the form and mail it in. At least there’s no charge for this, as there is for writing, calling, and emailing.

PS: I just found out I’ll be going to Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories for work over the next couple of months.  I want to give the prison-visiting experience the full attention it deserves, so most of the posts for the next month will be Vince’s, until I have time to dedicate to writing.

VINCE

The amount of time some people are sentenced to for drug problems is absurd.  I’ve never spelled that word and I feel as though I’ve done so incorrectly.  But…my neighbor here, with a wife and two kids.  Got caught with a little bit of coke—one gram—think one packet of sugar.  And because of a drug charge 13 years before, he’s gone for 64 months.  Another, convicted of making meth a dozen years ago, caught with a thimble full 6 months ago.  88 months.

Used to be the court system forced people into treatment.  They realized treatment didn’t work, but for the wrong reason.  Treatment worked for me, one time, for 4 years and 11 months, because I wanted it.  I was done, at least for a bit.  But people these days go straight to prison.  Some people really do realize the gravity of their mistakes when they’re arrested. They tell the judge, prosecutors and their lawyers that they want to go to treatment and they are shot down.  Sad.

Laws are now written in such a way that, me personally, I never sold any drugs to anybody wearing a wire, nor did I sell any drugs to a cop or informant. But I was still charged with 1^st Degree Sales. No drugs were on my person, or in my car. I never admitted to having or using any drugs. If I had gone to trial and been convicted, I would have received 98 months because they found an empty box that had contained a scale and more than 10 sugar-packet-sized baggies of meth in the hotel room.

I may come off as being bitter, because I am. Mostly because my actions are responsible for Sarah being locked up. But I am happy that my drug use is over for now. I say that because I have not yet been sober for this entire day. And sobriety is one day at a time for now.

Do I want to stay sober after boot camp? Yes. Will I? No fucking clue. Sometimes the beast is stronger than I am. My problem is not one I can just hand over to Jesus or God and then ignore it. Mine is a work in progress. A learning experience, if you will. Tempt me with a minnow and I may bite. Try to help me and I may run. I’m just starting to figure myself out. And I can be a real mother fucker. And I’m going to write it all down for your pleasure.

[ANNE: Vince tells me he got a notice that he had received a letter from me and it was destroyed. My heart pounds with impotent anger. What had I said? He explains that it had probably been something physical about it that could have conceivably been used to smuggle drugs. Had I sent him a card that had layers glued together? Or something with stickers? Stickers. That was it. I had a running joke with a friend in England about grey vs. red squirrels, and she had sent me a packet of lovely red squirrel stickers as a joke. I had plastered them all over a letter to Vince, and they had shredded it and sent him a notice. Why not photocopy it and give him the copy? Why even tell him he was missing something? That was just plain cruel.]

ANNE

Oh, did I mention that my sister has Stage 4 colon cancer? It’s never just one thing, is it. Notice that’s not a question. When I write a grant proposal, it’s called “providing the context.” So the main event in my life is Vince being in prison. And on top of that, my sister has cancer.

Or, is the main event that my mom has totaled two cars within a span of a few months, causing multiple hairline fractures of her spine (thankfully not killing herself or injuring anyone else), which means she’s in pain all the time and has to wear a brace and use a walker and can’t drive anymore or do most of the things she used to enjoy, like go for a walk?

Or wait, is the predominant thing in my life that my sister’s roof leaks, she can’t work, and she’s overwhelmed by bills, housework, two teenage kids, and an abusive ex-husband? That’s on top of the radiation, surgery, having to wear an ostomy bag that keeps falling off, chemotherapy, more surgery, being told she’s cured, being told it’s back, more chemo, more surgery to come, then more chemo….

Or is it my own apartment, because the maintenance guy who came in to fix the slow kitchen drain punctured the pipe, causing a flood that necessitated the entire room be torn up for—no sink or dishwasher, floor and countertops gone—for seven weeks. A yellow tape across the door that said “Do Not Enter”. A little comic relief: I complained to the building manager about having to wash dishes in the bathroom sink. His suggestion was that I put my dirty dishes in a shopping cart, take them via elevator to an empty apartment on another floor, wash them there, then take them back to my place.

To practice self-care, I went for a hike along the banks of the Mississippi. It was muddy and I thought, “It’s slippery here—someone could fall!” And then the someone was me. Torn knee ligament. Crutches for a month. Here is where I will admit that I love an inanimate object–my car, my beloved turquoise Mini Cooper—which a manual transmission. I found a coworker who traded cars—her old tan sedan was an automatic. The battery died the next day. The engine light kept coming on. The plastic under sheath, which I had never even known existed on every car, came off while I was going 80 on the interstate. That’ll make you feel you are really alive!

And so it seems that challenges just fan out and out and on and on. Going to work at a torture treatment center feels like going to a spa right now, although I sure am having a hard time concentrating. So then I worry I will lose my job, but I can’t even focus on that for very long; my worry jumps back and forth from my mom to Vince to my sister and back and all over the place, like a ping pong ball in a clothes dryer.

VINCE

Bad news of the week.  I’m still in prison. And my roommate went to a different prison. My new cellie, well, he’s been here 5 days and hasn’t showered or cleaned his bunk area.

As I hope Ma would back up, I have no tolerance for racism, ignorance, or intolerance. At some point in life I’ve had friends I’ll never forget of all colors and shapes.  I was told before I arrived here that prison makes people racist.  Although I can tell you with confidence that nothing is going to make me racist, I can see where they are coming from.

Please don’t jump the gun.  I’m not talking about any particular race, creed, religion….ok, I’m sorry, I lied.  The hatred that spews from the mouths of the white people is awful. Of course I couldn’t possibly mean all white people.  I have found my crowd.  But we steer clear of the “Brothers” aka Skins.  No offense, to all good people of any race, but there are some truly useless, no good assholes inside, and outside, of these walls.  And maybe because of who I am and where I have been, most of them seem to be white.  Or maybe it is because I have not seen a rapist that wasn’t white.  But hey, that’s just in prison.  Or maybe it’s me just focusing on anything that takes my thoughts away from my problems.  I don’t know.

That reminds me of a joke for some reason.  “I like my coffee like a like my women–ground up and in the freezer.”  🙂

OK, I’m putting the pen down for a bit. I have to help my cellie out with something that I will write about in just a bit.  Pretty cool.

Later: So the Department of Corrections actually does provide a number of services that seem quite helpful. My favorite, even though it does not apply to me, allows an inmate to write to a hearing officer at the Department of Motor Vehicles to ask that all fines and fees be absolved as part of his sentence.  This means that as soon as a prisoner is released, they are eligible to take whatever tests are necessary to get their license back, or just have a clean start. I’m sure some of you out there know how much of a burden it can be to be paying fines. Well, now a portion of our time is for that.  And of course it does not apply to someone with a vehicle-related offense such as D.U.I or vehicular manslaughter.  I say bravo.

I can hear some of you out there saying, “Prisoners are bad.  Prisoners eat babies.  Maybe everybody should get off the hook for their tickets.”  I invite you to spend one night here with me.

[ANNE: I groan as I stop myself from cutting out his obnoxious, juvenile “joke” about women. I promised not to edit him, no one said that would be easy. He really isn’t any more of a sexist than any other man in his demographic. When he was 10 he even wrote a letter to Mattel to tell then how sexist Barbie dolls were. There, I got my revenge.]

ANNE

As I wrote early on, I work for an international human rights organization. The main thing we do is treat survivors of torture. That is, people who were tortured by their own governments for protesting government corruption, or union organizing, belonging to a certain ethnic group or religion, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’m not a clinician. I do research and I write a lot of grant proposals. I hope my blog posts don’t sound like grant proposals.

We work in about a dozen countries and also with survivors in Minnesota, but the local rehabilitation takes place in a clinic separate from my office. So I rarely have face-to-face interaction with torture survivors. However, I review a lot of reports and find myself crying out in my heart, “Those poor people!” as I read about mass rapes used as a weapon to control populations and what goes on in the unbelievably-named Insein Prison in Burma.

Last week we had an event at which three survivors told their stories. I helped with rehearsing the program so I heard each story two or three times.

There was the man who had almost been burned alive, the young woman who, as a child, had witnessed her mother and father being beaten and dragged away to prison by police in the middle of the night, and the man who was blind in one eye from being beaten by the police in jail after distributing pro-democracy leaflets.

The one I can’t get out of my head…I won’t describe the details but it involved meat hooks. And this is not an HBO series—it’s happening to real people all over the world, right now.

And so I always catch myself from saying things like, “Sitting through that meeting was torture!”

You may be wondering, “Why would anyone work for such a place!? Answer: I’ve been fascinated with everything international, and have felt a calling to help make the world a better place, for as long as I can remember. I’m no saint or hero. I find human rights issues intellectually challenging so I get a satisfying career out of it. I am paid relatively well to read, research, think, and write about torture and other human rights violations all day long. And sometimes they send me to exotic places.

You could say I should feel reassured that the US government doesn’t torture prisoners. Oh wait, it does! Because solitary confinement, water boarding, stress positions, and other things we do are considered torture and/or inhumane under international law. Well, our gov doesn’t torture low-level drug offenders like Vince. That’s true, that’s good. I can’t imagine being the parent of a political prisoner in Cameroon or Syria or Russia.

One upside of working directly with torture survivors is that the therapists see the whole person and they see him or her recover. People are not just torture survivors. They want to get their studies or careers back on track. They make jokes, have hobbies, go to church, and they need to have fun and have friends like everyone else.

VINCE

Today I was supposed to get my indigent canteen order.  It didn’t show.  It would have contained necessary hygiene items and two envelopes.  The weekly allotment.  So for now I will continue to write, and stink.  Oh Shit.  It would also have contained the paper and pens with which I could have continued to write.  So. I will do what I can.  My roommate gave me some soap and toothpaste to get me by. But it is prison, so now I have to blow him.  Ha, ha, ha.  Just fuckin’ with ya!

Yesterday there was a fire in the B Annex.  That is the unit next to and slightly above the one I am in.  It is much smaller and houses low risk offenders with jobs.  Apparently it’s true, if you don’t clean out the lint trap regularly, it will start a fire.

Because there was a lot of smoke, we were all hurried into the gym where we sat for about two hours enduring countless head counts and absolutely no air circulation.  Hot.  On the plus side we got to see a cho-mo beat down.

Cho-mo is the term we use to describe the soulless people who have raped, molested, or both, another human being. Because the State of Minnesota protects these people, because of their sexual preference, it is a hate crime to knowingly assault a child molester or rapist.  Fortunately, we have people in here that don’t give a fuck.  I call them heroes, the 25-to-lifers aren’t going anywhere soon.  So they take it upon themselves to punish those people that society does not allow the victims to punish.

To all those out there, victims of torture, rape, molestation, child endangerment, elderly abuse, and worse, we have your back.  Nobody makes it through here.  A simple phone call to the outside with a name.  The internet does the rest.  They only have to use the MN DOC website.

Murderers, life long dealers, thieves, animals.  I live with them all.  And to be truthful, almost everybody here is a decent person.  When pushed to the edge, everybody can snap.  But we all come together to deal with each cho mo.  Usually somebody is selected from the same race to administer punishment.  And it’s not just once.  When they get to their permanent homes, C.S.C.s (Criminal Sexual Conducts) will be extorted, beaten, raped by men, that are otherwise not gay, and in the worst cases, killed or crippled.  So if any of you think they punishment by the law is too light, which it usually is, people here make sure they live here in constant fear.  It seems that sex offenders do repeat a lot until they actually have to go to prison.

As an example, the first time I saw a beat down was on my third day.  Two men came from behind me and launched an attack.  One grabbed the cho mo’s arms and held them while the other punched so hard over and over in the face that the cho mo coughed up blood and it came out through his cheek.  The guards accidentally filled his face full of mace instead of the attackers.  Oops!