UNLIKELY COMMUNITIES

Breaking the Alienation of Incarceration

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When Michigan prisoner Kebby Warner attempted to call her daughter on her fourth birthday, she discovered that the phone number, which she had been calling once a month, was restricted. The reason? Michigan Department of Corrections had started a new phone program with Sprint. Those on a prisoner's telephone list had to pay a minimum of $50 before they could receive a call from their incarcerated loved one. If the outside person was unable or unwilling to pay, Sprint and the prison kept the number restricted. Wittingly or unwittingly, this new system reinforced the sense of isolation and alienation that prisons inflict upon their prisoners.

"Roberta," an incarcerated mother in California, learned of Warner's situation and offered to pay the $50 deposit from her own prison wages. (The pay scale at Roberta's facility ranges from eight to 32$ per hour.) "I know how it is not to hear your child's voice," she wrote in her offer. "I've been there. And thank God for the kindness of strangers that I was able to talk to them [my children] a few times during the roughest times. I would give it [the deposit] to her [Warner], just let me know if I can and where to send it, okay?"

Although women in prison often complain about the apathy among their peers, giving the impression that there is little to no unity in female facilities, these same women have also demonstrated a willingness to share and help each other in times of need.

Simple Actions

Some acts can be as simple as listening. Six years after Michigan prisoner Kebby Warner lost custody of her daughter, she met a prisoner returning from the hospital after giving birth to her first child. "She was distraught! I felt her pain deep in my soul!" Warner reminded the woman that her parole date was only a few months away, encouraged her to focus on that date and offered to listen if the new mother needed to talk about her feelings. Because they lived on different housing units, Warner made plans to meet her on the yard. "I know she's hurting and I want to be a shoulder that she can cry on," she wrote.

When Oregon prisoner "Boo" was taken to a prison infirmary after turning yellow, Barrilee Bannister made a get-well card and had 80 women sign it. After Boo was released from the infirmary, the women on her unit, seeing how much weight she had lost, shared their food from the canteen with her.

While these actions do not overtly challenge or change Boo's medical condition, the inadequate health care system or a protocol that separates mothers from their newborns, they do break through the sense of isolation that prisons inflict upon their prisoners.

In Colorado's Clear Creek County Jail, women detained on immigration violations are housed with citizen women awaiting trial or sentencing. Although the jails receive money from INS to keep these women, no efforts are made to accommodate their needs, such as translation assistance. Sarah Daniel and RJ, two women awaiting sentencing at Clear Creek, remembered that other women often attempted to help monolingual detainees be understood. Women who spoke both languages, no matter how badly, acted as translators. Those who spoke no Spanish used a Spanish-English dictionary to try to help the Spanish-speaking detainees. RJ, who had taken three years of Spanish in high school, translated for one older Peruvian detainee. "We would also exchange English and Spanish by reading poetry books together," she recalled. While the citizen women's actions did not change the jail's lack of translation assistance, they did help alleviate the exacerbated fear and frustration the monolingual detainees must have felt at their inability to communicate.

When Marcia Bunney first began her 25-to-life sentence in California, the prison routine disoriented her:

Mealtimes were traumatic because I had somehow acquired the notion that prisoners were assigned to specific eating areas and that using the wrong door to the cafeteria would be cause for a disciplinary report. This fear caused me to avoid most meals for my first few days in the main population until I became acquainted with a woman on my housing unit who recognized my plight. She literally led me by the hand to the cafeteria, as one would a small child. For years afterward, we often went to meals together, sometimes hand in hand as a reminder of the way our friendship had begun.

The action of that one woman helped Bunney begin to overcome not only her fear of prison, but also the effects of years of abuse she had suffered on the outside. Bunney later became a jailhouse lawyer (a prisoner who assists her peers with their legal cases and paperwork).

Larger Effects and Multiplying Resources

Other strategies have had even broader effects. After Kathy Boudin, a prisoner at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, began utilizing prisoners' interest and concern about AIDS to teach literacy in the Adult Basic Education (ABE) class, her students became aware of themselves as a community — first in the classroom and then in the larger setting of the prison. They not only began to help one another over the stumbling blocks towards literacy, but also used their newfound knowledge of the disease to support and comfort others.

One student told Boudin that a woman on her unit had attempted suicide after learning that she had AIDS. "I'm the one person she told. I know why she tried. She came to me, I'm the person she talks to." She was not alone — although HIV/AIDS had previously been a shameful and taboo subject, prisoners began to seek out ABE students on their housing units to talk about their concerns, fears and experiences.

Sometimes women's acts of sharing have multiplied available resources, such as when women have assisted their peers with their legal work. After losing custody of her own daughter, Kebby Warner used the knowledge she had gained in the prison law library to assist another prisoner with the legal paperwork that kept her from losing her own child. While in federal prison, Yraida Guanipa used her self-taught legal skills not only to advocate for herself but also to help the women around her with their appeals. "They don't speak the language, they don't see their children, so I have to file motions for them," she stated. Colorado prisoner Dawn Amos, who financed her college education by finding scholarships, did not hoard that information: she helped three other women find and obtain scholarships.

Similarly, "Marg" and "Elsie," in two different Illinois prisons, have assisted women around them with their legal work. This sharing of resources is often reciprocated: when "Elsie" was placed on a suicide watch after engaging in a hunger strike against the unsanitary preparation of food, another woman lent her a pen and paper to write letters to outside supporters....