Visiting family in jail
I just came back from seeing the movie Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington. In the movie, Denzel plays a former prize-fighter who was framed for a robbery/murder he didn’t commit and spent close to 30 years in jail for it. He was only let out mainly because of the efforts of a few people that found out about him and made it their mission to get Rubin "Hurricane" Carter out of prison. The movie had a lot of parallels to my life right now. Partially with a lot of the work a bunch of us have been doing to help free Mumia Abu-Jamal. But more closely, to my step-father. My step-father has been in jail for almost a decade now and has spent almost half his life locked up. There was a scene in the movie when these people went to visit him in jail and it reminded me of all the times that I had visited Chad in jail and of all the other friends and family I have visited in jail over the years. The scene when all the families were standing in front of the jail waiting to come in was a little too familiar to me. The first time I went to visit him in jail was when I was 12. I don’t remember much about that visit, but he was locked up again a few years later and that experience is still fresh in my head. He was in Huntsville, Texas and serving three years for drug charges. He was addicted to heroin and this was his third time in jail since he was 18. The whole process of going to see someone you know while they’re in such a fucked up place is a very uneasy experience. As soon as we got to there, there was this big area outside the prison where all the families went to be counted before they could be let in. Just before visiting hours started, the guards would come out and line all the families up and search them. Then we’d go through these metal detectors and wait in this other room until we were allowed to go to the main visiting room. Once we went inside, we found a little table where my mom and all us kids sat down and waited for Chad to come out. Then all the prisoners filed out. It was kind of like you were waiting for someone to get off an airplane. Everyone walking out and waving to get their family’s attention. The waiting rooms were always crowded. All these people, crowded together to visit their son, brother, father, grandpa or whoever the state decided to take away from their homes. It was an odd experience to say the least. We’d fill up on vending machine snacks while my step-father asked us all the how life was going for us. Asking about school, our friends, what kind of music we liked, all that stuff. Never talking about where he was or letting us in on just how fucked up prison was for him. He was a drug addict in jail because he was an addict, and finding out that jail was like drug city. Prison has nothing to do with correction. It does nothing to keep people from going back, in fact it does the opposite. The irony of someone being taken away from their families because they did drugs and putting them in a place where they’re even more easy to get than on the outside didn’t escape me. A friend once told me that you could trade a bag of Fritos for almost any kind of drug you wanted. Institutional madness. Facing this kind of stuff isn’t easy for anyone, much less on a kid. Since he was all the way in Huntsville and we lived about a days drive away in Corpus Christi it was tough to see him for more than twice a year. He was eventually let out, but because of lack of help that he never received on the inside as soon as he got out, he went back to same lifestyle within no time at all. It’s not so easy to kick that kind of shit as they make you believe in all those Nancy Reagan bullshit propaganda after school specials. He went back to jail a few years later and has been there ever since. He was fucked by the state into skipping all his trials in exchange he’d go to a federal penitentiary instead of a state pen. They lied to him and sent him to the much worse state pen. He’s been there almost a decade now. I haven’t even seen him in 8 years. He has Hepatitis now and doesn’t think he’s gonna live much longer unless he gets some treatment, but the state pens have real shitty medical facilities and often make the inmates pay for any treatment they get. My mom and I and his aunts are writing to the parole board trying to get him paroled to a federal prison where he can get the care he needs, but it’s a losing cause. Once someone gets incarcerated, it’s like they’ve disappeared from the face of the earth. That’s what I was thinking when I saw that movie, just what a fucked up system we have. Families destroyed over bullshit that they perpetrate themselves. Remember the CIA/South Central story a few years ago. All that kind of stuff makes me want to tear every prison wall down. It’s all so frustrating. Especially when so many people I know have been to jail. Friends, family, acquaintances, etc. It makes me mad because all of it has become so familiar in my life and it shouldn’t be. It’s just so fucking frustrating. All of it. |