There was a chill in the air as I walked to my cab. I had been waiting for this moment for 3 years. As I got in and we pulled away from the place I called home, my stomach got queasy and I felt nauseous. As we went down the mountain side, I watched the world go by. When we made a turn, the contents that were in my stomach ended up on the floorboard and a wave of heat hit my face from embarrassment. I got this fear of dread because of the unknown that lay ahead.

First of all, let me give praise to the most high!

Jail to me was a hard lesson to learn. Back in my days 80s 90s we had rules now there is no rules… Back there you had to have permission to rumble now they just free fall. Jail taught me structure respect and not to judge a man.

That one and only phone call that could have been made, that should have been made wasn’t made.  Why? The guilt, shame, and embarrassment from where I was actually located kept me from making that phone call.  The caller ID would read Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center. How could I make a collect call to my father saying I was in custody and going to jail.

The dictionary describes jail as a place for the confinement of people accused or convicted of a crime. This definition is 100% true but there is a deeper definition especially for those who have personally dealt with incarceration, like I. The most basic fact that everybody knows is that your freedom gets taken away, so does your dignity… As an incarcerated individual, you get absolutely no respect. How could you expect that when you have committed a crime?

Tears come to my eyes when I think about a 10x8 cell surrounded by bars, a metal bed, a desk, a toilet, and a sink, squeezed all in one cell in Buena Vista State Penitentiary. A program called Therapeutic Community. I call it forced sobriety, a reprogramming community to tell the truth.

As I lay in bed, a crisp chill is around the windowsill and I’m looking at the snow falling in large beautiful flakes. Each flake has its own design, and I’m thinking that like everything else in creation, so do fingerprints.

           Because the bed I’m lying on is not my own. It is my bunk, in a large dorm of about 40 other women. And I somehow feel lucky, even locked up, that I have a bed right next to the window, where as the seasons change I get a certain show of beauty from mother nature. 

It’s 2AM on a Monday morning. I hear “Robbins get your stuff, you’re out.” I’m half asleep when the guard tells me this, so I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or not. Then she yells at me a second time to hurry up. I jumped out of my bunk, grabbed my blanket, pillow and bag with all the standard issued jail items they gave me at booking & I was out the door. 

My name is --------. Living in a house with both my parents and my six siblings was very challenging. We all had a good life. My parents took good care of us, we had what we needed. They were very strict parents. Watching my brothers and sister go through their ups and downs with the law, going in and out of jail, I remember going to visit my brothers in prison and it was not a nice place to go.

It came again. That very first horrifying night terror that started the whole ball rolling. Darkness, me running for my life from something so evil it could make my heart stop, turning as I fall, looking up into a pair of extremely menacing eyes, waking up instantly, realizing I am back in my own special cell, tied down again.

I remember walking into that pod in prison. My first day I was so scared and felt so alone. The faces, the smell, the ugly hard concrete columns and floors. But then I was approached by a man with a bright smile and in his hand he had a cup of coffee. He spoke and said, you thirsty? I felt like I could take a breath. 

I wake up to do my normal routine and decided to go do my laundry early on a Thursday morning. It to me seemed like everything was ok... As I'm packing my laundry to leave a detective walked through the laundromat and I'm not thinking anything from that so I continue to walk out the back door.

For as long as I can remember I was affected by the criminal justice system. I would visit my uncles, brothers, and cousins with my grandmother and mother, who both, no matter what they did, supported them. From a very young age I was able to see the effects it took on my family financially as well as mentally. Watching my mother raise her children with the help of her mother showed me that in the event of an emergency never fold. I witnessed my brother in 1980 being dragged out of his bed by the police.