VINCE:

Day 1. Nearly 13 days after my pronounced sentence of 50 months is handed down to me, I am finally chained up, put into an Olmsted County Sherriff’s van, and driven through Shakopee to St. Cloud.  About a 4-hour trip (stopped to drop of female prisoners at Shakopee Correctional Facility).

I’ll skip the intake procedure.  But it is nowhere near as invasive as I thought it would be.

An hour after my arrival I’m in my new home.  A 6×10 foot combo of cold steel and concrete.  I unpack my pillow case which holds everything I need to survive, kind of.

3 pair state-issued stretch pants that resemble blue jeans

6 pair tighty whities

6 pair socks

5 white Ts

3 blue button-up long-sleeve shirts

3 white towels

1 wash cloth

Sheet and blanket

And the following Bob Barker products:

Maximum Security Brand 3-in-1 shampoo, shave, and body wash

My advice: don’t use it for anything I just mentioned.  I can’t believe it doesn’t say, “Made with real pine!”

Deodorant, a size so small I’ve never even seen in it a Dollar Store.  No scent.

A 4.4 ounce tube of something labled Mint Paste.  I’ll assume it’s for teeth because it’s next to the Safety Brush, which is 4 inches long and flexible so you can’t sharpen it and stab somebody, or brush your teeth.  A 3 inch flexible pen.  Take your standard Bic pen.  Throw away everything except the very middle, then cut that in half.  Here we pick paint off the walls and wrap it around that until it becomes useful for writing.

All set up now.  My first move, grab the 3-in-1 and a razor (forgot that) and go to town on my month-old beard.

Half an hour later, my wash cloth is covered in blood and hair.  And I’m not done.  I’ve left a patch of hair on my chin because that’s what all the kids are doing these days.  That’s when it hits me.  I look in the safety mirror and for the first time in my life, I see age.  And I realize how much time I’ve wasted.  I’m not a kid anymore.  I’m a beat up, 35-year-old con, washed up unsuccessful drug dealer and addict.  And I cry.  Fuck my life.

The last time I cried was about 7 months ago.  It happened about a week and a half after I was arrested.  I had slept off the drugs, something struck me funny and I laughed out loud.  And I wondered if I could remember the last time I had done that.  Then everything came flooding out.

ANNE:

When I found out Vince would be going to prison, I thought the obvious way to avoid the dreaded collect calls would be to move to another country.

The calls go like this: An unknown number shows up on my phone. When I answer, a cheery computerized female voice begins, “You have a collect call from…” then my son’s voice would interject his name, “Vince.” Then a different, condemning, shaming voice would say, “…an inmate in the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center,” or “Woodbury Workhouse,” or “Crow Wing County Jail,” or wherever he was.

OK, you might not hear the shaming tone but I do.

The cheerful voice returns and informs me that I will be charged $9.99 for 10 minutes, that the call will be monitored, and that this “service” is provided by Prison Corporation of America. As if it was some patriotic public service, not a scam to rake in billions from a (literally) captive audience and their desperate loved ones. “To accept this call, press 1. To refuse this call, press 2. To permanently block calls from this number, press 3.”

Vince hadn’t been incarcerated for over 10 years, he had reminded me a few months before. While in his late teens and early 20s, he had been locked up multiple times so that’s how I knew what to expect with the phone calls. But the earlier experiences had been short stints for minor offenses, and had come from jails. Now he was looking at up to 11 years in a prison. A prison. That sounded so much worse than a “jail.” My expectations had been steadily going downhill for years, but this was different, big.

He hadn’t been incarcerated for 10 years, but he had hit the skids every couple of years. The last time, about two years earlier, he had lost his job and, since he lived so close to the edge of subsistence, quickly lost his apartment and all his possessions—right down to his underwear and toothbrush.

Fortunately, I had been 9,000 miles away, working for a human rights organization in Nairobi, Kenya. I was concerned about him, but there was nothing I could do—and being surrounded by people who were risking their lives by confronting corrupt police, or organizing LGBT activists, or just trying to avoid being kidnapped by El Shabab on their way home from work, put things in perspective.

So this time, I immediately applied for a job in Turkey with an organization based in Los Angeles. I figured if I played my cards right I could work in Turkey for four years, travel all over Europe and Asia from there and send Vince a lot of cool postcards, then return to work in L.A. I had it all figured out.

So when I got back to my desk after a meeting and saw I had a call from an L.A. number, I thought “Hurrah!” it was them calling for an interview. For a moment I thought things would actually pan out as I had planned. I was floating toward the emergency exit.

But instead it was “You have a collect call from…”