ANNE

I have to move. The apartment vacancy rate in the Twin Cities is so low that landlords have the upper hand, and mine is taking advantage of that to raise my rent $307 per month. “It’s a business decision,” they say. “We realize some people will be priced out of the building.”

Some people. I’m one of those people.

My apartment has been my sanctuary for almost five years. But I work for a nonprofit, so I have to be realistic. I gave my notice and then started sifting through the over 16,000 apartment ads on Craig’s List.

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At work, I get emails about prison all the time. One of our funders, the Open Society Foundations, draws my attention to a new federal report that reveals “near-unremitting abuse of juveniles held at New York’s Rikers Island jail.” Thank god Vince is 36 years old, big and tall, and he can look scary when he needs to. There was a second one from OSF about how the suicide rate for people held behind bars awaiting trial is 10 times that of the world outside. Delete.

There’s another one from an organization called Empathy, about prisoners in Uganda. Okay, once again, grateful that Vince isn’t in prison in Uganda. Yet another one from the National Academies Press announcing their new report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States. And then there was this one, from Human Rights Watch, called The Human Rights Case for Drug Reform: How Drug Criminalization Destroys Lives, Feeds Abuses, and Subverts the Rule of Law.

I am researching a big foundation and find this article about one of the family members who was arrested on suspicion of possessing Class A drugs. During a search of the house, police found the body of his wife in their bedroom–she had died two months earlier. A coroner said that her death was as a result of “dependent abuse” of drugs.

Then I find the Public Welfare Foundation which, among its criminal justice interests, aims to “Reduce jail populations through the use of diversion at the front end of the criminal justice system that connects individuals with substance abuse disorders and mental illness to the public health system.” Well duh!

Then I stumble upon JustLeadershipUSA, an outfit with an “ambitious decarceration goal” because “Mass incarceration is the most significant domestic threat to the fabric of our democracy.”

I wonder, if all the money spent on reports and task forces glitzy websites and conferences and foundation executives’ salaries was used to fund treatment for low-income prisoners…nah! What a crazy idea.

Lastly, there is Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Atlantic Airlines and Virgin Records, of all people, writing a blog about ending the war on drugs. All I can think of is the time a friend who travels more than anyone I know let me use 125,000 of her air miles and I flew business class from London to Minneapolis-St. Paul. I waited for my flight in Virgin’s Heathrow “Upper Class” lounge, as they call it there. The décor was fantastically posh and I discreetly gorged myself on smoked salmon and champagne, trying to act like I really belonged there.  

VINCE

Yesterday after I emptied all of the garbages, filled the water container for the pill line, and made my afternoon cup of coffee, I went back to my room to read. I’m in the middle of Relic by Preston Douglas and Lincoln Child. It’s not bad. It sort of has two story lines. One is kind of boring and scientific. The other is exciting and gory.

Anyhow, I got into my room and there it was. Dated my birthday and with my name highlighted in bright yellow, was my acceptance letter to boot camp. Finally!

Here’s how it breaks down. Phase one is a minimum of six months and contains a highly structured daily schedule and treatment-oriented program that includes: intensive instruction on military drill, ceremony, bearing and courtesy; physical training, on- and off-site work crews, cognitive skills training, chemical dependency programming, education programming, restorative justice programming, and reintegration planning.

Phase two is a highly supervised community phase under intense surveillance and lasts a minimum of six months. And the final phase, also six months, is community-supervised release, and depending on behavior in phases one and two, can be shorter than six months. After that is standard parole for the remainder of my sentence, until 7-15-2018.

If I screw up, depending on severity, they can choose to put a location monitoring device on my leg or send me back to prison and take away all my good time. So I would sit in prison until 2018. That’s pretty good incentive.

So…now I wait. One of these nights they will call my name and I will get my red box. When your name is called, you go get a 1.5 x 4’ red bin (or two if necessary). Do not ask the CO where you’re going. They don’t know. In fact, they don’t tell us until we get on the bus. It’s for our safety, or some nonsense. If I knew where I was going, I could tell my family (really, just my mom) and friends. I could adjust my canteen order so I could have money to spend if I do end up at a county jail, and so I don’t end up with a bunch of envelopes and post cards purchased from the DOC that I can’t use at a county facility even though it is a DOC holding facility. Oh my God that sounds so complicated. It is.