Always Watching: Stories that need to be told

I still have nightmares of being in that confined space. Of the blank, white, cement walls staring back at me. The window that was too dirty to see out of. The bars that kept me confined. The thin blanket that did nothing to keep me warm. I sat up all night shivering. Wearing my second pair of pants over my arms in a feeble attempt to stay warm. I drank warm tap water out of the sink. I paced around. I jumped up and down. I tried anything I could to stay warm. When I asked the guard for another blanket she laughed in my face. 

The guard walked around every hour and glanced through the bars just to check if I was still alive or if I had somehow found a creative way to off myself I suppose. She looked at me through the bars like one would an animal in a zoo. Not as a fellow human being, as something to contain, something to control, as less than human. 

My mind was spinning at full speed. How did I get here? How can I get out of here? The fear I felt was so intense it didn’t even feel like I was in my body, more like I was floating above it. 

People always want to talk about what led to this circumstance. What did you do to end up here? Why did you make those decisions? 

That’s what they want to hear. That is where they assume the trauma comes from. 

And while that is certainly a story of its own I don’t think people who haven’t had to contend with the criminal justice system themselves realize how much trauma is accumulated after you get arrested as a direct result of the system that is supposedly supposed to “help” you. 

No one knew what I was doing during the time before I was arrested. Not my parents, my friends, my siblings, no one. When I had to make the phone call to tell my parents I had been arrested I was terrified that they would be so angry with me they would hang up the phone and refuse to help me. 

Thankfully I could not have been more wrong. My parents jumped into action and within a day had found me the best criminal defense attorney they could in the area I was arrested in. The lawyer was extremely helpful and miraculously was able to get me out of jail pretty fast and I was able to fly back to Texas and live with my parents while on pretrial. This story, my story, was only made possible by the fact that my parents have money and they love and support me no matter what. In other words, the birth lottery. 

My cellmate for part of the time I was in jail had a completely different story. She was back in jail for another probation violation from a charge she had originally acquired a decade ago. She was poor, didn’t have family support, and once she got out of jail she didn’t have a job, a place to stay, a car, or anyone to help her. 

She would get by for a little while every time but then inevitably something would happen that would send her back to jail on a violation for months at a time and then the whole process would start over again when she was released. A completely vicious cycle. 

This time she had missed a meeting with her probation officer because she had no way to get there. So now here she was once again stuck in a jail cell, 6 months pregnant, with little to no access to quality healthcare. Not to mention, this was during the winter in New Jersey. It was freezing and snowing outside and the jail had very bad insulation. It was cold in there all the time but so much worse at night. We would all be shivering. And at this particular jail they for some reason cancelled yard time in the winter months. That means months of never stepping foot outside, of never feeling the sun on your face, of never getting even a whiff of fresh air. It’s downright cruel and was definitely making people sick. 

Sadly, my cellmate’s story is the more common one. That is why jail is known as a "revolving door” and it is no accident. 

Over the course of my time in jail, pretrail, and probation, I met so many people with similar stories. For many, once you enter the system they make it nearly impossible to ever completely escape its grasp. 

Even once you finally do, a felony is akin to a storm cloud permanently floating above your head. No one wants to hire you, to lease an apartment to you, to give you a loan, to trust you. All the things we so desperately need to survive in this society you have to fight tooth and nail for even after you have done your time, gone to all the therapy, paid your fines, met every requirement possible, even once it’s been years and years. You still have to face these barriers like it happened yesterday. 

I remember once I finally got through my hearing and was sentenced to probation,  I flew back home and showed up at 8 am to the government building where I was to meet my probation officer and do my first check in with them. I arrived early, told the front desk who I was there to meet, they handed me some paperwork to fill out, and I sat down in the waiting room. I ended up waiting over an hour before I finally saw my probation officer. Thankfully for me, I didn’t have anywhere else I needed to be that day and I brought a book to read so I was fine. 

However, as I looked around at the other people in the room I saw, nervousness flash across their faces, rapid foot tapping, eyes darting to the clock. One man stood up, walked up to the front desk and said to the receptionist, “Pardon me, do you know when they are going to call me back? I have to be at work at 9.” He tried to keep his composure and say this as calmly as he could muster but you could hear the suppressed panic in his voice. He had been there since before I arrived and now it was about 20 minutes until 9. The woman at the front desk replied, “No I’m sorry sir I don’t know how long it will be, they will get to you when they can.” 

As the man turned around and headed back to his seat he looked as though he was in physical pain. He reluctantly sat back down but he remained at the edge of his seat, rocking back and forth. And he was not the only one who seemed to be concerned at the time passing by. 

At that moment I thought about how difficult it is for anyone with a record to get hired. I thought about how fragile that situation is. Losing a job is stressful for anyone, the cost of just existing in this society is astronomical and rising all the time, but for someone who managed to get a job with a record losing a job could be even more costly. Who knows how long it might be before they find someone else who will hire them, much less a job that has decent pay. And when on pretrial or probation any change of employment is seen as suspicious. Especially if you are fired. 

I just imagined what that man was going through. He had shown up to this meeting early. He did what he was supposed to do. And now it looked like he was going to be late to his job not because of anything he did, but because they kept him waiting for over an hour. And if god forbid he did get in trouble or lose his job due to being late I’m sure he would get absolutely no sympathy from the system that is claiming they are “helping” him. 

This is one example of a much, much larger issue and something I ran into repeatedly dealing with the system. Archaic ways of doing things that slowed everything down for everyone and were just very inconsiderate and oftentimes made zero sense. And this is also an example of what I mean when I say that dealing with the criminal justice system traumatizes you over and over again, even once you are out of jail. 

The hypervigilance of having to deal with everything being a potential threat to your autonomy. Of someone breathing down your neck and judging everything you do. Even the mandated recovery programs and therapy sessions that are supposed to be helping you. 

The therapists I dealt with had so many preconceived assumptions about me and my experience they could have led the sessions without me saying a word. 

I never felt like I had to mask more than in those sessions. Of course I wasn’t okay, none of this is okay. But you think I am going to say any of that to someone who can report anything I say back to my probation officer. 

I had to do the same substance abuse program twice. Once on pretrial and once on probation. I did everything I was supposed to the first time and I never failed a drug test but they made me do the whole thing again. What is even stranger about that is that I never had an addiction or substance abuse problem, that had nothing to do with why I was arrested. I told them this over and over but it seemed like everyone just assumed I must have a substance abuse problem and didn’t listen to a word I said. 

One counselor I had did finally listen and recognized after getting to know me and seeing my record that in fact I had never had a substance abuse disorder but get this, he told me this to my face during one of our sessions, “I can clearly see you don’t struggle with addiction but I have to diagnose you with something in order for you to keep coming to these court mandated sessions so I am going to diagnose you with a substance abuse disorder.” What? I’d like to say I was surprised by this but unfortunately that was just one more nonsensical piece of the system to add to the growing list I had been noticing. 

I met a man who served in the military, he was a sniper. He had killed 28 people in combat. He was only 25 years old. When he came back to the states he couldn’t cope. He said he had flashbacks of the people he had killed all the time. He couldn’t hold down a job. He was losing everything. 

Some of the officers at the military base he was stationed at in Texas were smuggling drugs across the border to make some extra cash. They asked if he wanted in on it. He was struggling so he said yes. Later he ended up getting arrested for this and when I met him he had been on house arrest for months awaiting his hearing. Being isolated had only made the flashbacks and his depression worse. He couldn’t work anymore and the future looked grim. 

Where do you even begin to dissect how messed up that whole situation is? 

That is a clear example of how the law only applies when it’s convenient for the system. Murder a bunch of people in cold blood in the name of profit, fine by us. But how dare you step a toe out of line trying to make money to survive after we traumatized you for life and stripped you of your ability to function. You should be grateful we let you murder those people, move on, and get back to work. 

I realize that many people never encounter someone with a story like this, or they never hear them out on what their experience was actually like. 

They don’t realize the backwards cruelty and constant threats to your autonomy that many people have to deal with daily. Nor do they realize the state of constant hypervigilance that creates in your nervous system. They are lucky to not know.

If we are ever going to reach prison abolition, restorative justice, and community care, we are going to have to rip their bandaids off.