The Visiting Room

Loneliness gnaws at the essence of who we were. The hunger for connection with the outside world is what, in the end, turns us callous, creating delusions that we are better off lonely. —Abraham Macias, Pelican Bay Prison

When my parents and I visit Cook County Jail for the first time in February 2009, it is a Saturday and the place is jam-packed. We squeeze into the slow-snaking security line, which curves around several ropes and bumps up against the doorway. Some visitors stare at their feet, hands stuffed in their pockets, trudging forward every few minutes when the line loosens. Others shout to their children to stay within the roped boundaries, fearing that they'll be booted out for causing a disturbance. A thin, shivering woman standing in front of us is shaking her head over and over, rocking a blanket-covered baby in her arms.

As we inch closer to the metal detector, a guard pulls a tall young woman off to the side, gesturing to her short skirt and scoffing, "You think you can come in here like that? Huh?" After a few hesitant protests—"Sorry, sorry, I didn't know"—she walks away slowly, toward the exit, face in her hands. We follow commands, removing our shoes and socks, stepping through the metal detector, raising our arms for the pat-down, following the officer who escorts us across the yard.

After a three-hour wait, we're called into the visiting room, and we file through the narrow door. It's a short, dim corridor lined with wobbly stools facing a thick wall of plexiglass with several barred holes. On the other side of the plexiglass, Kayla shuffles in with a few other women. They scrunch down in a row, each opposite their visitors, and lean toward the holes. We start talking—well, screaming—back and forth. We don't scream because we're fraught with emotion, though we are. We scream because we can't be heard otherwise, due to the thickness of the plexiglass divide and the compressed cacophony of the fellow visitor-screamers competing with us on either side.

Eventually, I just go for it and press my mouth up against the bars of the hole so Kayla can hear me. I taste sweat and sour steel.

"How's it going?" I scream.

"It sucks, what do you think?" Kayla shouts back. "I feel like my life is over. But, at least, I'm working out." She twirls, her dismal blue smock flaring wearily.

Kayla's arms have grown quite muscley (push-ups are a favorite pastime in jail), and her eyebrows are meticulously groomed, if a little greasy.

"Your eyebrows look awesome!" I yell.

"Thanks—we did them with thread that we pulled out of our jumpsuits!" she yells. "They don't let us have tweezers! I learned it in Audy Home." The "Audy Home" is the old name of Chicago's juvenile detention center, where Kayla spent some time in 2005 and 2006. Now she pauses, then knocks her head lightly against the plexiglass, her eyes closed. "But no one gives a shit about my eyebrows, if you think about it. I just don't know what else to do."

Mom and Dad take turns. Then I'm back on the stool. We quickly run out of things to talk about: Kayla doesn't want to belabor how hopeless and miserable she's feeling, and I don't want to carry on about the happy things in my life—or the frustrating things in my life, most of which seem ridiculously trivial given the circumstances. Later, my dad observes, "What's left to scream?"

Soon, a jarringly loud buzzer sounds, silencing all conversation. A guard calls time: Our thirty minutes are up. Kayla and her companions rise to march out. "I miss you I miss you I miss you I love you ..." Kayla calls, the ends of her words quivering. She touches her fingertips to the plexiglass before she's led away. Then, "TIME!" a guard barks on our side of the glass, and we fall in line, too.

They Make Life Matter

The visits my parents and I pay to Kayla in jail are accompanied by a constant mantra that pulses through all of our minds: This is temporary. We're white, we're middle class; my sister and I grew up in a neighborhood where few people had ever been in prison. Kayla's sentence is not long. Our privilege affords us the opportunity to frame imprisonment—the first time around—as a bad dream. Regardless of how relieved we are that Kayla has been incarcerated, that she's off the street and probably sober, implicit in the relief is always the notion that this saga will come to a close, that "real life" will return, even if it doesn't last.

For a whole lot of other visitors, trips to prison are infused with a more painful pulse. This act of visiting is the real life of their relationship. It lives this way over the course of many years and, sometimes, forever. And so my visits to Kayla are laced with thoughts of the families I've come to know through my interviews, families whose bonds are maintained—and often lost—through bars.

One prisoner's familial situation has permanently set up residence in my mind by the time Kayla is incarcerated. She is Danielle Metz, a California prisoner and mother of two who's been separated from her children for most of their lives. I first wrote to Danielle in 2007. I was plugging away on a couple of long feature articles about federal prisoners serving life sentences, and was knee-deep in bland, evasive statements from members of Congress, most of whom didn't intend to lift a pinky to contest the harsh policies in place. Danielle's lucid honesty shone through the murk. She was serving three life sentences plus twenty years for a cocaine "conspiracy" conviction. (Her husband was a high-trafficking dealer.) Danielle was locked up in Dublin, California, more than two thousand miles from New Orleans—her home, and the home of her parents and two kids. Citing racism (she's black), poverty, negligent public defenders, and unjust sentencing practices, Danielle expressed little hope for a commutation of her sentence, barring a pardon from the president.

"My story is like a lot of stories you see, but can't really put a face on," she wrote me. "In communities where I'm from, this type of thing happens all the time." It's true: One in 40 American kids has a parent in prison, and for black kids, it's 1 in 15. Increasingly, those parents are mothers; women are the fastest-growing group in prison.

No matter what problem we were discussing—federal parole, the pardon system, prison conditions, useless lawyers, useless laws—Danielle's letters wandered back to the topic of her children. She was grappling with a stark, practically unanswerable question: How do you parent from prison? It's a question most prisoners are asking themselves, since a considerable majority of them have kids...