Category Archives: domestic violence

Prison News Round Up

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ANNE

I am leaving for Berlin in two days, so I’m going to review a pile of prison-related articles that I’ve accumulated—over a period of one weekend—that’s how often prison is in the news.  I’ll give you the downers first, then the positive ones.

Ohio is having trouble obtaining drugs used to execute people, so the Ohio DOC has obtained an import license from the Drug Enforcement Administration to buy sodium thiopental and pentobarbital from overseas.  Wow.  Where overseas, I wonder?  They “decline” to name the countries.  I’m thinking China, North Korea, Iran, or Yemen, since these are our fellow members of the death penalty club.  In case that doesn’t work, Ohio legislators passed an “execution secrecy law” (I am not making this up) in hopes it would get small-scale drug manufacturers called compounding pharmacies to sell them the drugs.  These are unregulated companies that have been in the news for sickening people with contaminated pharmaceuticals.  But hey, if you’re trying to kill someone, who cares what the quality of the drug is?

In Wisconsin, there is a prison guard shortage that has prompted two correctional facilities to call in guards from other institutions and pay overtime.  So let me get this straight—we pack our prisons full of nonviolent drug offenders, which costs us taxpayers an arm and a leg, then we have to pay overtime to get guard coverage, which costs us more.  Great system!

Which leads me to this editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Finding solutions for overcrowded prisons.”   I like the opening line: “Either Americans are the most evil-people on Earth or there’s something terribly wrong with their criminal-justice system.”  They mention something that’s news to me: “It’s a stretch to suggest that the bloated prison population is due mainly to the sentencing of nonviolent drug offenders.  It’s not.  Most of the increase comes from locking up greater numbers of thieves and violent criminals and keeping them behind bars longer.  Even if all nonviolent drug offenders were set free today, the prison population of 2.2 million would drop to only 1.7 million … Still, on the margin, granting early release to nonviolent offenders and shortening sentences to better match crimes seems a sensible step….”

This information is new to me, and I wonder why I haven’t read it elsewhere.  Everywhere else, the narrative is that, if we just release all the nonviolent drug offenders, our prison population will be drastically reduced.  But if there are more violent criminals in America than elsewhere, maybe we are the most evil people on earth.

Still, 2.2 million total prisoners minus 1.7 million nonviolent drug offenders is 500 thousand people—not insignificant.  And when you figure it costs (on average) $31,000 a year to keep someone in prison, that’s over $1.5 billion a year.

On the same day, there was this feature article about Damon Thibodeaux, an 18-year-old who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder who spent 16 years on death row before being exonerated and freed, in large part due to the efforts of Minneapolis attorney Steve Kaplan.  Thibodeaux had been raped and beaten on a regular basis by his step “father” since the age of five and so he was easily bullied and manipulated into confessing to the crime.  It’s a heart-rending story, but it has a happy ending.  As I’ve written before, an important element of recovery from anything is feeling that you belong.  And Kaplan has gone the distance to help Thibodeaux adjust to life after prison by including him in family and other social gatherings.

And there was this little factoid in The Week: that every day, on average, a dozen people die behind bars.  The leading cause?  Suicide, in local jails; cancer elsewhere.

Below are some prison-related images.  The bully one made me shudder, because it’s how I felt when I was kicked out of Moose Lake for wearing “revealing clothing.”  It wasn’t about my clothing; it was a power trip.  Related to that is an interview with Richard Zimbardo, who led the Stanford Prison Experiment in which students were assigned to be prisoners or guards.  The “guards” quickly became sadistic.  “I lost my sense of compassion, I totally lost that,” said Zimbardo.

Next time, the good news.

DesktopBully

Starting Life Over / A Life Over

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VINCE

As of yesterday I have a total of $238.90 in my gate saving account.  So, double that, and you have roughly what a prisoner makes in a year through our various jobs.  The most I made was 50 cents per hour sewing underpants together in Moose Lake.  The least I’ve made was here, in Willow River.  Divide $2.50 by 16 hours.  I’m horrible at math.  [15.6 cents per hour]

It’s not much to work with.  I’ve mentioned before that half of our pay goes into savings and half we can spend on items that for the most part, are well over retail price.  My current paycheck is $35 even, every two weeks.  So I get $17.50 to spend on envelopes (61 cents each), shoe insoles ($2.10 for two pair that last exactly two weeks), paper, pens, pain relievers, muscle rubs, and all the stuff we need/use, we pay for.  But, our food, bed, heat and AC, electricity are provided at no cost to us, so I’m okay with it.

Happy July fourth.  [The blog is several weeks behind real time.]  We will have a three-day weekend starting tomorrow (Friday).  That does not mean we have the day off.  In fact, we work extra hard, so that we won’t want to be incarcerated for holidays next year.  Well, that seems to be working for me.

—

Every time I catch myself thinking or saying that I’m tired, I think back to a year ago when I could be awake for days at a time.  Paranoia would set in after day three or four, and I would often take thing out of context and think people were out to get me.

I would hear my name in groups of people, or I thought I did.  Casual conversations would, in my mind, be people plotting to steal from me or turn me over to the cops.  I would flash them an angry face and storm out of wherever I was.  This was often when I would go out behind the wheel of two tons of steel.

On day five, the visual hallucinations kicked in.  Often I would see the same vision.  Snow coming down from a cloudless sky on a summer day.  I knew it wasn’t real, and I knew I shouldn’t be out in public like that.  But I had to keep “working.”  No more.  I’m so glad I got arrested.

Actually, I’m glad they sent me to prison.  I believe it’s the only way I could have quit.  Not just using, but the lifestyle that accompanied it.  I had to get away.  Most users/dealers just keep on racking up charge after charge.  Then end up with 10 year sentences because they showed career criminal tendencies.  I took the deal I made for prison time and at the same time let my co-defendant off the hook.  Now I’m ready to start life over.

[ANNE: Not everyone can start over, like Vince.  As delightful as snow falling on a summer day sounds, drugs and drug crimes ruin lives, families, and communities.  Here is just one story about a man who was found unconscious in a hotel room while his toddler daughter wandered crying into the lobby with a soiled diaper and his infant son slept on the floor near his methamphetamine pipe.  Meth, which is so highly toxic that people who sell their homes now have to sign statements swearing they have not used or made meth on the premises.  How will this father ever, ever get over the guilt?  What will social workers tell the toddler when daddy goes away to prison for years?  How will the father and son ever make up for the lost opportunity for early attachment?  How will the mother and father ever repair their relationship, if they aren’t already divorced?  Maybe now you won’t think I’m hard when I say Thank God Vince never had children.]

The One I Love

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VINCE

I passed a drug test and breathalyzer. I knew I would, but I did get a little nervous. Well, nothing to fret over now.

—

I remember a lot of good from Aspen Glen [the subsidized housing complex where we lived until Dr. Wonderful came into our lives]. Twenty plus years later, I still think about my daycare family—Duane and Mary and their three kids James, Shawna, and Michael. I spent years with them after school and playing with the kids on weekends. Even after we moved I stayed in touch for years. I really do miss them. I wonder if they wonder about me.

I also remember fondly my years at Bel-Air School. Years later I drove by it, and was surprised at how small it was. Everything is big when you’re a kid.

I remember when the suburb of New Brighton itself was small. Woods everywhere. Again, driving through years later, it looked commercialized. The town I grew up in, plastered with big city names. Big City businesses. I remember when the employees at the Red Owl grocery knew me. That was the first place I ever stole from. I got caught the first time. Oh, how things change.

—

I went out on another RJWC this week (Restorative Justice Work Crew). We spent five hours at a nursing home in Moose Lake. We cleaned all the exterior windows of the facility, then picked at the never-ending supply of weeds in the various gardens. I found quite a few agates in the landscaping. We’re not allowed to keep them so we put them in a bird bath for all the residents to enjoy. They always look nice underwater.

Agate

One of the hundreds of agates Vince collected before he was incarcerated.

—

So far, it’s been raining all day. This is the first time that it’s a rained on a Saturday while I’ve been at boot camp.

If it’s raining, we don’t have to go out and do work crew stuff. I don’t mind working, I never have, but this is a good opportunity to catch up on a lot of things, including writing.

One of my friends sent me a picture of my dog Willie. I instantly became sad. I miss him so much. It’s amazing how close we can get to an animal. He has been through so much with me. He’s about 12 years old now. I can’t wait to see him again.

Who knows how or what dogs think about. Somehow, I know he misses me, and we will both be just as excited to see each other, only I will have tears in my eyes.

79 days and a wake up, and I will have the ability to start figuring out how to get him back in my life.

[ANNE: At first read I thought these passages of Vince’s were not very interesting. After typing them and re-reading them, several things struck me.  1) He is capable of reviewing the past and remembering both good and bad things.  Most of us need to live more in the now, but addicts need to be able to reflect back on the past before they can move forward.  2)  He has at least one hobby, agate collecting.  Hobbies will be important diversions for him once he’s released.  3) He has someone (his dog) he misses; he can’t wait to be reunited.  Someone to miss, and who misses you–I would hope that’d be an strong deterrent to ever being locked up again.  I hope Willie lives a very long time.]

The Restorative Powers of Kittens

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ANNE

When Vince and I started blogging, I didn’t realize that a theme of redemption would emerge. Vince is transformation is probably obvious. Mine is subtler and has unfolded over many years.

I have been thinking about this lately because in the spring and sumer I get dozens of emails a day from the Humane Society about stray kittens. What does this have to do with redemption?

I signed up to do foster care of kittens a couple years ago. These kittens are born in warehouses or barns or even under car hoods. The mothers, if they survive, are emaciated and barely old enough to conceive. So that’s part of what makes fostering redemptive for me—giving care to vulnerable teen moms that I didn’t receive myself.

I keep these kittens, with or without moms, until they are old enough to be spayed/neutered, then turn them back to the Humane Society. It’s not all fun; I’ve had entire litters die because the mother was so dehydrated. Kittens have been smothered by their litter mates. One lost an eye to the claws of a litter mate. So it’s kind of a nature-tooth-and-claw experience.

People wonder how I don’t get so attached to them that I want to keep them. I think fostering is the ideal set up—I get the cuteness of kittens and the Humane Society pays all the vet bills and provides the supplies. I travel too much to have a permanent pet. When I turn them back in, I know they will be adopted immediately—there’s a huge demand for kittens. And I’m not even that much of a pet person.

So why do I do it, and what does it have to do with redemption? I think it goes back to one of the few memories I have of my dad.

A few weeks before he left home forever, he had been gone for weeks and showed up with a black kitten. I must have been seven, and my three younger siblings were thrilled. I was too, but also leery because I knew my mother was not thrilled. I can see now that the kitten was my dad’s wedge to get back in—if my mother had demanded he turn around and leave, “and take the darn kitten with you,” she would have been the bad guy.

I remember dad telling us to hold her gently and not fight over her because she was a living creature with feelings. He said her name was Surprise! and told us to always say it that way, like there was an exclamation point.

So then dad was back home, and the next day he went out to buy some cat food and kitty litter. He was gone all afternoon and missed dinner. My mom tried to put us to bed early. We did what we usually did, laughed at her and ran in four different directions. But I also can still feel how anxious we all were.

Dad made his appearance just as the cat had crapped under someone’s bed. My mom began to reproach him because of course he was drunk and hadn’t brought home any pet supplies.

We kids were giggling until dad roared, “I’ll Get that goddamn cat!” He ripped the kitten out of my sister’s hands, strode to the top of the stairs, and hurled her down the staircase like a fast ball, screaming, “You goddamn piece of shit!” He raced down to the landing, grabbed Surprise before she could get oriented, and sent her hurtling down the second set of stairs to the first floor.

All of us—my mom and the four of us kids—huddled at the top of the stairs. Someone was whimpering but I had learned to be silent, no matter how frightened I was.

That’s when I had the thought that would teach me to never make wishes:

“I wish he was dead.”

A few months later, he was.

Surprise! not only survived but had a litter of eight black kittens six months later.

Much later, there was a (nonviolent) incident involving cats and Vince but that’s his story.

Who could not feel their soul restored by kittens?

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A Room with View

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VINCE

Today we watched a movie in treatment called 7 pounds.  (The number is shown in that form in the title so I can’t be faulted for not spelling it out.).  It stars Will Smith.  And it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s really sad.  Funny in the right spots.  And at one point in the beginning he says to a man when asked why he was deserving of his help, “Because you’re a good person, even when you think nobody is looking.”

I liked that.  I want to be like that.

Throughout my life, I have always thought of myself as a good person.  Unfortunately, I haven’t actually acted like one very often.

From dealing drugs to stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down, to abandoning friends and family alike, I’ve done nearly everything possible to be a bad person.

I’ve looked into that a lot over the last two months, done a lot of soul searching, taken my moral inventory.  I can see the harm now in the things I’ve done.  Now I’m starting to build myself back up.  To gain the confidence I never had.  I can be that good person I’ve claimed to be.  I am going to be a good man.

—

Last night at 2100, like every other night, we stood at the POA at our bunks, waiting to be counted.  This time I noticed that it was still light out.  It reminded me of my childhood in Aspen Glen, the suburban subsidized housing complex we lived in until my mom met Kermit.  I remember staring out the window at the other kids still playing outside.  I don’t remember how old I was, or what time I had to go to sleep, but I do remember hours of boredom.

No boredom here.  Today we were allowed to raise our Reebok Step up to ten inches.  Ugh. What a difference.  For 40 minutes, they extra two inches made me sweat like a hog.  (That’s what she said?)  It was a good workout.

[ANNE: I feel myself getting defensive as I read Vince’s memory of Aspen Glen.  There must have been hundreds of kids who lived there.  We moved in when Vince was four.  Maybe he was staring out the window at the other kids because he was four and I actually enforced a bedtime, unlike a lot of the other parents.  There were good parents there, but there were terrible ones too.  And a lot of them, like me, were completely overwhelmed and exhausted with work, school, household chores, and parenting.  Sometimes I couldn’t stay awake past 9:00.  Unlike me, Vince is a night person, so I can imagine he was bored because he couldn’t go out and play and he couldn’t go to sleep.  But it’s not like I kept him locked in his room and slid trays of food under his door—just to be clear.]

Whole Lotta @#%$

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VINCE

About twenty minutes ago we had our first monthly review.  I had high hopes that the worst of our group would be called out.  They were not.

I was pretty much passed by.  Mostly because I don’t get into too much trouble.  They did say that I need to challenge myself and run more.  To do that, I’m going to run on my off day, to see if I can build my stamina.  I’ve made a lot of progress since I was locked up nine months ago, but not enough.

I lost about two pounds and lost 1% body fat since I arrived here at boot camp.  It’s a start.  I can see in the mirror that I’m becoming muscular, toned.  I must work harder.  I will work harder.

—

30 days in boot camp and I can make my bed, iron nice creases into my khakis, and run farther than I ever thought I would.  If you would have asked me two years ago if I would ever run two miles total in my lifetime, I would have said, “Hahahahahahahahaha.”  You get the picture.

The point is, that I—we—are conquering the obstacles that seemed so daunting just a month ago.  We’re even starting to get along.  We still bicker, but what else could be expected, we live in the same room, shower, @&%$, and shave together.

—

My mother brought up a man named Kermit.  She didn’t include his last name or real first name but when I said them in my head, I became angry, which rarely happens.

Yes, I got to see the Red’s [baseball team] win the 1990 World Series right in front of my eyes.  It was cool as hell.  But that was probably the only highlight of that period of my life.

I remember where I was standing, on the back porch of our green apartment building on Dayton Avenue when she told me I had a brother.

Let that simmer.

photo-2

The third of four places we moved to in one year after the Kermit debacle.

—

In that same apartment, I remember getting a dog.  He was a sheltie, and I named him Flash.  He was…special.  Maybe flat out retarded.  And one time oh god it hurts me still to think about it, he ate an entire box of giant chocolate bars I had to sell for a school fundraiser, foil wrappers and all.

I know I don’t remember the correct sequence of events, but I know this: he @&%$ everywhere. He @&%$ outside, he @&%$ on himself.  He @&%$ on the piles of @&%$ that he had @&%$ on himself.  That was just outside.

Hoping he was done, we brought him inside so he wouldn’t freeze to death.  We shut him in the bathroom for the night, and when we opened the door in the morning, I will let my dear Mother take over from here because I am not allowed to use profanity in my writing.  Holy flippiin crap.  Nobody will ever see what we saw that morning.

[ANNE: I don’t care to elaborate on Vince’s dog story above. I am not a dog person, but I thought every boy ought to have one, right? Especially after what I had put Vince through with Kermit. I was wrong.

Vince says he rarely gets angry. Elsewhere in this blog, he writes about “anger coming off me like steam.” I wonder if he’s dulled his anger for years with chemicals, is just now experiencing it unfiltered, and doesn’t even recognize that?]

California Dreaming

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ANNE

And then Kermit changed his mind. He just wasn’t ready to get married. It was too late for me to keep my job or housing. He mailed me a check to carry me over for a month.

—

So Vince and I never moved to California. Instead, we moved into a friend’s unheated attic that winter until we could get a foothold and start over. Then we moved again, and that didn’t work out, so we moved again. Vince changed schools three times that year. I started working as a freelance writer so I could say I was self employed instead of unemployed. Also because I was too depressed to get out of bed, so woodenly depressed that I wasn’t thinking about Vince. Facing the impact of my behavior on him would have produced such massive guilt that it would have pushed me over the edge.

—

But wait, there’s more!

I went back to Kermit, after months of him apologizing, begging, wooing, and having massive bouquets of flowers delivered to my door.

And so Kermit and Vince and I flew back and forth, and the hurled Coke can turned into me being hurled—hurled, punched, kicked, and strangled. Once, in the course of strangling me, Kermit broke his own thumb. I can still see him standing over me, as I choked and gasped my way back to consciousness. “You bitch! Look what you did—you broke my thumb!”

—

A few years ago I had an x-ray for some reason, and the doctor asked me about my old neck injury. “Looks like you had a pretty significant injury,” he said. I had no idea what it could be, until a few days later it dawned on me that this was probably from the time Kermit had tried to strangle me.

—

The only ones who knew what was really going on were the St. Paul Police, St. Paul Fire Department, and Vince.

Kermit and I went camping in the Grand Canyon, where he beat me black and blue in our tent (but only where clothing would cover the bruises; he never hit me in the face). I escaped to the car, locked myself in, and shivered through the night. Back in St. Paul, I went to the police, who photographed my bruises. They couldn’t do anything because Kermit was in another state, but I thought telling others would keep me from going back to him.

When I tried to cut it off, Kermit would call 911, say he was my doctor, and tell them he feared I was having seizures. Would they go to my house right away and check on me, breaking down the door if necessary? I would hear banging on the door at 3 am, and find firefighters with axes posed to smash down the door.

I kept flying out to see him, spending money I didn’t have. That’s right, Kermit never paid. One of his recurring accusations was that I was a gold digger, so although he made at least 10 times what I did, he never paid for my tickets. He did fly Vince out for the World Series, and they drove up to Oakland in a limo. He bought Vince an A’s hat and jacket and full collection of baseball cards. Vince was in thrall to him.

Kermit and I took a road trip to Napa and visited vineyards. He bought expensive bottles of wine for his “collection” Which never made it back because he drained them all.   He told me he had access to drugs he could use to kill me if I tried to leave him, and no one would ever be able to figure it out because, after all, he was a genius.

I can’t bring myself to write about how it ended, but it finally did, with an interstate restraining order against him.

Vince knew I had done the right thing but he was crushed to lose his idol. Was it this episode that set Vince on the road to prison—on top of not having a dad, growing up in poverty, having a depressed mom, and being genetically loaded for addiction, compounded by all his bad choices?

Doctor Wonderful

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ANNE

People have asked how Vince can write so well, considering he dropped out of school at 16. First, I read and talked to him from Day One. Second, I got a full scholarship to send him to a Montessori preschool. Then, even though I am such a city person that I break into hives when I pass outside the city limits, I moved to a suburb in order to send him to the highest-ranked public school system in Minnesota.

Vince was 10 when I finally finished my college degree. That enabled me to get a new job that paid $20,000 a year—$20,000!—that seemed like a fortune. I also loved the job, which was at a private university. Vince and I lived in a safe and clean—if vanilla—subsidized housing project. I had pulled myself up by the bootstraps, and the future looked like it would only get better.

Here is where I “mom up” to the episode that really blew us off course and (I think) screwed Vince up.

As I type the words, “And then I met a man…” I feel my palms start sweating and my stomach tighten.

—

Let’s just call the man Kermit, because he was about as short, slippery, and spineless as a frog.

Kermit was originally from California and was finishing his neurosurgery residency in Minnesota. He adored Vince, the poor fatherless boy with the big brown eyes and quick wit, and Vince adored him. Kermit adored me, too, the spunky single mother with blonde hair and great legs who read novels by the pile. He only read medical journals.

Looking back, I guess I fell in love with him because I felt sorry for him. He had been abused by his mother. He told me about it in great detail. I tried to empathize by telling him about my alcoholic father who had beaten my mother in front of me and then committed suicide. He said that wasn’t the same thing at all—since my dad had died so long ago I shouldn’t blame my problems on him. Besides, Kermit would say as he slugged down his fifth rum and coke, you can’t hold an alcoholic accountable for what they do when they’re drunk; they can’t help it. Now, his mother was really abusive, and she didn’t even drink! The Witch was still alive. Becoming a brain surgeon had been his plan to escape from her and never have to ask her or his dad, who was a saint, for anything ever again.

There were a few episodes of foreshadowing, like when he got jealous and hurled a can of Coke against my kitchen wall, and left me to wipe up the mess. Or when a cop pulled him over for erratic driving, and he flashed his hospital ID and told the cop, “You wouldn’t want to throw me in jail, would you officer? I might be the one you need to operate on you if you get shot.” He laughed about it when he told me later.

But then he moved back to California to join a practice there, and begged me to marry him and join him. I said yes.

He was living in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Pacific, but he hired a realtor who started sending me full-color glossy profiles of million-dollar houses. “Just get rid of all your furniture and move out there asap!” he’s say. “You can go shopping wherever you want and buy all new furniture!” He had bought a red Maserati, but he would buy me an SUV—a Mercedes, of course—not a Ford! Vince would go to a private boarding school, and wait—what? When I expressed hesitation, Kermit accused me of not wanting the best for my child.

Alarm bells were going off in my head but I ignored them. My friends and family were beside themselves that I had not only met a man, but a rich one—a doctor! And so I quit my new job, gave notice on the subsidized townhouse, and gave away most of my belongings. We were moving to California! What could possibly go wrong?