Spending 97 Months in Family of Felons

On Dec. 1, 1989, I was told how long. Ninety-seven months. On Dec. 20, I was told where and when.

Beginning Jan. 10, 1990, at noon, I was to report to the Federal Correctional Institution at Pleasanton. Eight years of my life were to be turned over to the United States Justice Department. These would be mandatory years, which means no parole, no chance for early release.

Barring an Act of Congress, I will leave prison Jan. 21, 1997. Eight years in prison, more time than I spent in college, more time than high school, more time than my marriage lasted. It is a time segment like I’ve never known, with no frame of reference.

I called ahead to see what was appropriate to take to prison. I had never been before.

I was arrested on a Friday morning in April of 1989. I spent the weekend in jail. It was my first and only experience with incarceration.

I arrived at the Pleasanton gate, suitcase in hand trembling inside. I’m 42 years old, a schoolteacher, divorced, mother of two. I’ve always told myself that if I survived childbirth, I could survive anything.

On this sunny day in January, I wondered.

The officer from Receiving and Discharge came to the front reception area to pick up her new charge--me.

She quickly went through my suitcase, separating what I could keep from what was to be sent home. My purse was sent home along with the suitcase.

I am no longer a valid California driver. My checkbook, children’s pictures, credit cards, the tangible life accessories that defined me, were left in the suitcase.

I am now an eight-digit number assigned by the U.S. Marshal. My only identification is a plastic card with my picture and number.

My favorite sweater I could not keep. I wore my Reeboks, but I was not allowed to keep them either. I had to buy Reeboks from the prison commissary or wear prison-issue shoes. For the first month of my sentence, the commissary was out of Reeboks.

The check-in process involved filling out forms, picture-taking, fingerprinting and body-searching. The latter involves undressing completely in front of an officer who checks each article of clothing, the seams and pockets, raises your arm so she can see around your breasts, looks between each toe, in your ears, your mouth (tongue out). You shake your hair, finger-comb it, squat down and cough, bend over, pull your cheeks apart, and get dressed.

This done, I was presented with one eerie question, “Is there anyone here who would make it impossible for you to stay here?” I had seven co-defendants, none of whom I know or would recognize if they sat down beside me. I answered, “No.”

On April 28, 1989, I had boarded a plane at LAX bound for Seattle. A man I knew there had asked me to do him a favor. He said he needed something from Los Angeles but didn’t have the time to come to get it.

Perhaps I was too trusting, but I was not suspicious, even when he said he would pay me $500 for “my trouble.” The next day, a man I didn’t know dropped off a black leather gym bag at my home and gave me money to buy a plane ticket to Seattle. I did not examine the contents of the bag. I should have.

When I got off the plane with the gym bag in my hand, my Seattle acquaintance met me. We walked to his car talking about the weather, his private investigation business, and other things.

At the elevators in the parking structure, he told me to wait for him while he got my money. Within 60 seconds, it seemed like I was in the middle of a scene from “Miami Vice.” Men were pointing guns at me and yelling.

As they grabbed me and snapped the handcuffs on my wrists, I asked, “What did I do?” “You know,” said my captors. “You know.”

The formalities of checking in to prison were over. I was given a plastic bag of bedding and another bag for all my clothes that I was allowed to keep.

They give us what we need: two pairs of socks, three pairs of khaki pants, six bras (one style suits all), six shirts (men’s khaki), six T-shirts (Army green and white), six pairs of panties, not necessarily the right size. Laundry soap is rationed for one load per week.

We walked out of the windowless reception office onto a college-type campus. The officer generously, he told me, carried one of the large bags as we walked to my dorm--in Pleasanton parlance, the unit.

Pleasanton is a co-ed administrative facility. My unit is divided; men have three-fourths of the space, women have the rest. I asked the unit officer to place me in a room (cell) with a nonsmoker. I was accommodated.

My roommate told me she was “a racist lesbian.” Our room-sharing lasted about five days before I was moved, apparently at her request. I humbly moved in with a sweeter woman from New Orleans.

The units are molded concrete, modern-looking structures with vaulted ceilings and skylights all around.

I had been very fearful about women’s prison, having seen only the Hollywood visions of them. It was a relief to see the modern structure.

The wall facing the compound is all glass. It is two stories high and angles steeply toward the middle of the unit. The staff offices are located in all the corners of the building. We have a counselor to take care of all the in-unit problems, a case manager to handle the legal problems with the Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Justice Department, a unit manager to cope with the more major problems of the bureau and our cases or with problems we may have with our case managers.

I type in a small room with a window wall that looks out on a lawn, small flower garden, pine trees, another unit, and in the background the double razor-wire fence.

The sprinklers come on automatically at night. We are situated in the rolling hills south of Oakland. The hills are dried and brown. Our compound is lush and green.

I am presented with the idyllic setting and feel betrayed. What does it mean? Where am I in all of this?

The unit is at once the private place of “home” and the public place of sharing with about 220 other inmates. The noise reverberates so that at times it is difficult to hear the voice of the person standing next to you.

Solace becomes sacred and rare. The cell or “home,” as the experienced call it, is a small room with a bunk bed, desk, two lockers (like old-fashioned wardrobes), sink, toilet and lamp. The bedding is U.S. Army surplus, including the military insignia.

The people I love smile permanently in their pictures pinned on my bulletin board. Pictures of people I don’t know also smile at me, my “bunkie’s” family.

I remember the moments when the camera clicked, the laughing and loving. Now there is this separation and loneliness. Nothing much is said between us and I’m filled with things to say.

The walls are newly painted white; the linoleum floor is yellowed with old wax. All the rooms open onto the great room, either from a second-floor balcony or the first floor. MTV and HBO blare from the great room TV.

There is a duty officer who handles the incidental details of making sure women are not in their rooms having sex with each other, stealing food from the cafeteria, or hoarding hair dryers, irons and ironing boards.

Officially, there is no smoking except in our rooms. We spend a lot of time cleaning and are dismissed for meals based on the cleanliness of our units. Of the three units, ours is always last.

Except for the employees, everyone here is a felon. Some of them are famous: the woman who tried to assassinate Gerald Ford, the woman who laced the Tylenol capsules (a sweet friendly countenance), a San Diego woman who defrauded people of millions of dollars.

And there are the not-so-famous, like the pregnant woman who in two weeks will give birth to a baby she must give up for five years.

My first day, I was impressed with the number of women my age and older and their racial diversity. Thais, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Colombians, Mexicans, Canadians and Russians, all are here.

The crimes are as diverse as the people who committed them, but most, like me, are here for drug-related offenses. The real face of crime doesn’t look like I thought it would.

Common courtesy is a casualty of confinement. Rudeness and crudeness (the language would match the worst of the drunken sailors and the harshest of street rappers) are routine. The incessant bickering and loudness resonates and pounds and says nothing, nothing at all.

Street hollering, country hog-hollering, angry hollering. Can we talk? No, we holler , and my English teacher said there wasn’t such a word.

My first prison job was in the kitchen. Everyone must serve 90 days in the kitchen. I worked in the dish room. It is the place where the dishes and all the pots and pans are washed.

The garbage disposal was broken so the dishes were scraped by hand. Inmates shoved their trays with all the leftover foodstuff in our direction.

When our shift was over, we were covered with Cream O’ Wheat, scrambled eggs, potatoes, ketchup, mustard, garbage. At the end of seven hours, we had earned 77 cents and spent most of that time on our feet.

We all work. Unless someone is medically exempt, they have a work assignment. The game is to get a work assignment that requires the least amount of effort, or the most amount of money, if money is necessary.

We are only allowed to spend $115 per month in the commissary, most work assignments pay about $5 per month. Some, like my kitchen job, pay 11 cents per hour.

There is no one here who ever cut hair professionally. But there are many here who say they did. Hairstyles and colors are limited. Long, long hair is often indicative of a long, long stay.

The telephone is our lifeline. All 220 women share four phones. The time limit is 20 minutes per call. (Large, obnoxious, inconsiderate women routinely talk longer.)

This gives me 20 minutes in which to do that which I spent 24 hours, seven days a week doing before I came here--that is, being a mother.

“I love you and I miss you and I want you to come home,” my children say every day on the telephone.

We have a candy machine here that eats our money. Women who are large, larger than the 6-foot-tall machine, grab the ends and turn it sideways, forward and backward until the snacks fall out.

This is not life as I knew it.

The life I once lived no longer exists, only parts of it remain. Love and family take on exaggerated dimensions. I ask much of those I love.

I want to call home and hear my daughter and my son tell me they love me.

I want my fiance to reassure me he is still there. To know, to hear their voices, their life, is soothing. I can face another day with just one reminder that love is out there.

Hendricks, who holds a master’s degree in education from Indiana University, is a former Los Angeles schoolteacher. Although she pleaded guilty, she is appealing the length of her sentence. This was originally received as a letter to View.