A world apart, p.16
A World Apart, page 16
Now things were no better. Although fancy clothing brands were no longer allowed, Canteen sold Levi’s and Nikes, and these almost always cost more than the brand-name knockoffs women’s families used to send in. A pair of Levi’s, for example, cost $43.69 from Canteen. A shirt, $26.88. The wealthier women in prison could still buy at least some new articles of clothing. But the poor, who could no longer receive generic or secondhand items from home, now had to do without altogether. What little money they managed to earn went almost exclusively to buying the basics: tampons, soap, and deodorant.
As in all U.S. prisons, a black-market economy is booming in Framingham. Unlike men, however, who are most interested in acquiring makeshift weapons and drugs, women in prison spend small fortunes on illegally procured underwear, food, and makeup. At MCI-FRAMINGHAM all three rest in the hands of an inmate named Louise Cato.
Serving a three-year mandatory for trafficking three tenths of a gram over the limit for possession of cocaine, Louise is upbeat, smart, and engaging. It is a pleasure, always, to see her. She works a forty-eight-hour week as the head chef at Framingham and still finds time to take university-level classes on the side. She came to prison with almost forty college credits, which she had picked up here and there during her travels around the country, earning “a few credits at Hartford—not Harvard. I always say that—Hartford, not Harvard!” She was now such a good student (3.38 average) that her math professor requested she be allowed to take an individual, directed study in physics.
In addition to her legitimate activities, however, Louise is the prison wheeler-dealer, the queen bee, the woman who makes whatever you want to happen, happen.
“I’m a major asset here,” she told me matter-of-factly when I first met her. “Imagine there’s something that you really want. Now imagine that you can’t have it. Except if you get it through me.”
With the help of a female officer, she smuggled makeup: lipstick (price varies, she takes specific brand and color requests) and eyeliner (Wet ’n’ Wild), a half a stick of which she sold for ten dollars. Her best-sellers, currently, were tweezers, which fetched fifty dollars a pair—a massive amount in a prison economy.
“Fifty dollars!” I exclaimed. “What do people use them for?”
“For tweezing,” she replied, like I was an idiot.
Louise smuggled drugs into Framingham when she first arrived. She’d been placed in Brewster One, the same large dormitory in which Denise spent her first few weeks. Louise had never been an addict herself, but when she saw all those “girls thirsty for dope,” she hooked up with a CO whom she’d known on the street and started selling it big-time. The business came to an abrupt end when the CO was transferred for fooling around with an inmate. But Louise found it a relief to stop pushing the hard stuff, especially as dealing in makeup, and better still, her own artwork, was just as profitable.
These days women came to her for greeting cards instead of drugs, which she provided with message or without, depending on how much each customer could afford. More tantalizing still, she provided both inmates and COs with intricate and highly specialized designs for tattoos. These she prepared meticulously, in ink, on a one-to-one basis. At least four Framingham COs actually went to a tattoo parlor to have these affixed permanently to their bodies: Officer S. has a cross made out of barbells in front of a globe all broken up and in flames. Officer D. has a combination moon and sun. Officer V. has two, both fairies; and Officer P. has an armband and tribal art on his back encircling his kids’ names.
In addition to the makeup and cards and tattoos, Louise also ran a “food scam,” which involved making made-to-order meal packets (vegetables and rice; chicken and rice; cheese, peppers, and onions) for just sixteen dollars a week, and a “clothing racket,” which, with the help of the property officer, provided access to a handful of real stores on the outside. Along with the Canteen company itself, Louise’s clothing business was perhaps the only thing to have profited by the recent Canteen clampdown. She’d sold two shirts on the morning of our visit alone.
All this activity could have made Louise the wealthiest woman in Framingham. But that wasn’t why she did it. She’d have had more than she could spend working just half of her scams. Instead, the furious and constant juggling kept her on her toes, she said, alert and alive and, most of all, dignified. Aside from the food, which she insisted be paid for in cash, she preferred to exchange the rest of her services for items direct from Canteen. “I’m a hoarder,” she told me. Right then her locker contained ten cans of soda (Coke and Sprite), fifteen beef salamis, six bags of rice, a pile of M&Ms, a bag of bagels, three bottles of shampoo, three of conditioner, and three of hair gel.
“I’m a nut about the stuff, because I’m so afraid of not having,” she said. “It’s like an addiction. It comes from the street. You're always worried about not having on the street.”
Like many women at Framingham, Louise grew up without much adult supervision. After running away from home, she took care of herself on the streets of Boston from the time she was thirteen. Unlike most women at Framingham, however, Louise found she was up to the task, at least financially. “I had my first apartment before I got my period,” she told me. She started out running numbers with a Chinese man and soon graduated to selling crack, and then heroin, in a park on Green Street, where she was stabbed in the stomach at the age of fifteen. Later she went to New York and hung out with a group of Dominicans who moved her up a few rungs on the drug-business ladder. She told me that she has sold drugs to “judges, cops, lawyers, and selectmen.” When I told her I didn’t believe her, she named names: “It was mad shit!” she said. “My son’s father, he’s a crazy fucker. I was all happy selling my little drugs until I met him. I could tell you stories about robbing drug dealers for Ks of coke.”
“Don’t people kill you for doing things like that?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, straightforwardly. “I been robbed, raped, beaten. I seen my cousin get his head blown off. I’ve seen a lot of murder. A lot of shootings. A lot of fights—I seen a lot of bad shit, but I’ve seen a lot of beauty too. I been through almost all the states and have lived in a few too—mostly in Arizona and Virginia and Florida, though I dislike Florida. I also lived in the DR for eight months and in PR for a couple of months, and I’ve visited Sicily, where my father’s family is from. And Jamaica. I often say that I’ve lived more and seen more in my short little life than most people have.”
This was what seemed so different about Louise. After nearly two years of visiting women in prison, she was the first I’d met who embraced her choices, good and bad, as her own. The first who didn’t seem at least partially defeated by the horror that ran through her life’s center as a result. Claiming the chaos of her life by continuing, even at Framingham, to live on her own terms, she was able to fight despair effectively. As she said, “In here, it’s who you know or who you blow. I might manipulate things, but I’m not going to kiss their ass, and I can’t kick their ass. Dignity is a big thing in this place, and any tiny little way you can keep your dignity when you have to stand up and be counted every night like sheep is important.”
Finally I’d found the woman I didn’t even know I’d been looking for—the fearless, self-sufficient she-criminal: brazen, brash, and smarter than the men who ran things. She’d never done drugs, never been an addict or an adult victim of domestic abuse. She ran her own show, even here at Framingham. Most of all, she wasn’t afraid.
“See, a lot of people have fear of repercussion in here. Me, on the other hand, I have nothing left to lose. Nothing. The way I see it, they can’t take anything more away from me than the judge did the day he separated me from my daughter and sent me here. And then I got the gift of the gab too, you see,” she told me. “Eighty percent of the time I can talk my way out of something. I hardly ever get in trouble. Even when I get caught red-handed I kid and joke and whine and play and I get out of it—never get a ticket, never get written up. Except for the bust that ended me up here, I was never busted, never once. I’m smart,” she said, “I do things smart and I don’t get caught.”
It was almost time for count. The visiting room COs were already circling, asking if visitors would stay until after or leave now.
Exuberant, almost joyful, I asked Louise what she planned to do when she got out. I was expecting big ideas, elaborate plans of brazen criminality. Instead Louise turned away and said in a quiet voice I hadn’t heard until then: “I don’t know . . . I never had to work the legal hustle . . . It’s my biggest fear. I’m afraid to leave here. I am. I have nobody out there no more. Nobody at all.
“You know, I weighed four hundred and forty-eight pounds when I came to Framingham,” she told me after a pause. “That was why I had the gastric-bypass surgery. To reduce the size of my stomach, stop me from being able to eat so much.” Louise is about five feet two. It is impossible to imagine her that size.
“Could you walk?” I asked stupidly.
“Yes,” she said. She could walk. She’d sold drugs all over the Cape when she was that size. She’d gained the weight slowly. “I ate when I was happy. I ate when I was unhappy. And after my daughter, the weight just added on, and added on. It’s the only thing I fear more than leaving,” she said. “Getting big again. I still have about fifty extra pounds on me just from the skin. My own stretched-out skin. It’s horrible. I feel like anyone who looks at me must get disgusted.”
I looked more closely at Louise now, more gently. She was close to tears. The depth of female sadness never ends, I thought.
Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I asked her then about the large tattoo that stuck half an inch out of her sleeve. She pulled up her shirt with a wry smile and stretched her arm toward me. But the drawing was intricate and difficult to make out.
“It’s my cousin’s face,” she said. “His scream, when he got his head blown off.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked, out of my depth again.
“Because I had nightmares about it every night, and it helped get it out of my system,” she replied. Looking hard I saw it then—the wild and agonized distortion of a face at the moment of violent death. A perpetual, deafeningly silent scream.
THE DEPARTMENT OF Correction knew nothing about most of Louise’s scams. In general they do everything they can to prevent this kind of stockpiling. While prisoners are allowed to buy as much food as they like from Canteen, strict limits are placed on personal-hygiene items. At any given time, each inmate is allowed fifteen. Depending on the officer, a piece of soap in a soap dish could count as one or two items; a toothbrush, toothpaste, and cup as one, two, or three. Closets can hold six hangers, three per inmate, which may hold two pairs of sweatpants, five pairs of pants, ten T-shirts (bras count as T-shirts too), five dress shirts, two pairs of pajamas, one dressing gown, and one pair of slippers. It is in order to maintain compliance with these regulations that groups of COs occasionally descend on a unit, forcibly evict the women from their rooms, and search them for “contraband”: an extra pair of underwear or pillowcase, one bottle of shampoo too many, perhaps a sample packet of makeup pulled from a fashion magazine. The authorities don’t even pretend to expect to find anything else. In the six years Deputy Superintendent Foley has been at Framingham, he confessed to having seen a weapon—a knife—only once.
“Bend-over-and-cough” inmate strip searches, both before and after a visit, form the frontline protection against incoming contraband. Inmates are not allowed to go to the bathroom during a visit at all. If they really must pee, the visit is terminated. Visitors are allowed to use the single-stall facility underneath the clock, but the door must be unlocked for them by a CO, and they are patted down both before and after the trip. Contraband does sometimes work its way in despite these precautions, and because of this, tables were recently pulled from the room altogether, replaced with row upon row of forward-facing chairs like those in a movie theater.
The inmate phone system has been set up to circumvent illegal activity at its source. AT&T and MCI have been competing fiercely for the market since the early 1990s, when the prison population first passed the one-million mark. In an attempt to secure primacy, both have developed a series of fraud-detection devices that monitor and control inmate access to the outside world. These include three-way-calling fraud prevention, caller-ID blocking, and on-site recording and compiling of calls. As well, televisions for the correctional market are built in transparent casings by KTV so that contraband cannot be hidden inside. Even Colgate is doing its part by marketing translucent toothpaste in a transparent tube: “Clear tube and clear cap help solve security issues in correctional facilities,” its promotional literature proclaims. “Colgate is the only national brand with a CLEAR toothpaste and tube.”
CORRECTIONS IS A huge business these days. With more than two million people behind bars the (literally captive) market is now bigger than major-league baseball. Bigger even than the pornography business. In addition to individual inmate spending, the government of Massachusetts spends more than $860 million every year on its prison system—and Massachusetts is relatively small. Larger states such as California and Texas spent $5.1 and $5.2 billion respectively in 2003. Contracts, then, can be worth millions. Private companies do all they can to give themselves the edge. And the place where a lot of the hardest selling is done is at the annual American Correctional Association Conference.
The conference is open to anyone willing to pay the $310 entrance fee. For the most part, it is attended by correction and state-government officials looking to make contacts and strike deals, as well as by representatives from more than 450 individual companies. The masthead on the conference’s glossy brochure pretty much says it all. The thirty-six corporate conference sponsors include AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Canteen, and Securicor.
In 2001 the huge exhibition hall was divided into corridors (euphemistically dubbed “avenues”) lined with more than four hundred exhibitors, each in its own prefabricated display booth. Everything from new prison buildings, body armor, and detention equipment to dentistry products, fans, and eyeglasses was being sold. Toilets were also on sale, as well as uniforms, detergents, and videotaped, “in cell” educators. Each exhibitor had its team of salespeople in well-fitting suits, or skirts and scarves and high-heeled shoes, tempting possible customers to their stands just as they do at any corporate get-together where there is a lot of money being made. A sales conference is a sales conference, it seems, no matter what is being sold.
Not that some displays weren’t particularly unsettling. The semiautomatic “Pepper Ball” machine-gun stand drew a huge crowd of people waiting for their chance to shoot at a three-dimensional dummy prisoner. But the chair-restraint salesman, the man whose company’s tagline is “the CELL the size of a chair” and whose display featured an adaptive sheath for young children (juvenile accessory kit RC 1500), was only a little more off-putting than the Verizon Intellifraud salesman and his clean professionalism.
People selling “body bunkers” and ammunition and chains, people inventing new “spit guards” and 45,000-volt stun guns, which come with “complete legal service . . . in the event of litigation regarding product use and/or ‘use of force’ issues,” mingled easily with well-dressed architects and lighting specialists and slick, twenty-firstcentury steel designers. They were there to make money, all of them, and were doing so well, apparently, that the premise behind their enthusiastic activity, the fact that the prison business was booming, had become an unquestioned cause for celebration.
Certainly the man selling the restraint chair felt no apparent self-consciousness about the feverish tone of his sales pitch. When I told him that the chair looked impressive, he said that yes, “it’s been blamed for a lot of things—but it works.”
When I asked what it had been blamed for, he whipped out a sheath of papers and then flipped through them to a page labeled “Autopsy Report.” The page was almost entirely covered by two bold diagrams of a woman’s body, front and back. Drawn on these body shapes were representations of wound marks across the upper half of her skull, between her breasts, and across her ribs. The salesman told me with a disbelieving chuckle that this woman’s lawyer was trying to prove that she had died as a result of the chair. “Ridiculous!” he said, rolling up the sheath of papers again and tossing them behind him on the shelf. “Ridiculous—but we have to pay attention to stuff like this!”
CANTEEN WAS ALSO well represented at the conference. Large advertising banners hung from the ceiling, and a slew of giveaways were handed out by roving representatives. The saleswoman staffing its main stand was particularly pleasant and well informed. She explained that Canteen was merely a subdivision of Compass, an eight-billion-dollar company based out of London. Outside the corrections field, it feeds 13 percent of the U.S. workforce every day, through cafeterias in companies like Microsoft, IBM, and American Express, she told me with the kind of professionally smiling pride most usually seen in flight attendants.
“Canteen has the purchasing power and flexibility to offer our customers competitive commissions while keeping the prices to the customer within market trends,” she said. It has also become the largest correctional vending and food provider in the United States. In this country alone it feeds 150,000 inmates three times a day. Typically, she could tell me nothing about women in prison per se, or their dietary needs. But when I asked if they provide different menus for different states, she said that their menus were, in general, “all the same—the big difference is between county and state facilities.”
In county jails, she went on to explain, they provided a caloric intake, per inmate, of between 2,800 and 3,000 a day, while in state prisons they provided between 3,000 and 3,600. When I asked if she knew what accounted for this difference, she smiled and leaned in toward me. “Inmates in county jails serve less time than those in state prisons,” she said.
