11 Months in County

When I arrived I was almost seven months pregnant but still not showing. I was sickly thin, strung out, and spiritually bankrupt. I felt rejected and less-than. I had betrayed myself and my family. For all intents and purposes I had been behaving as a liar, cheat, and a thief. I had no right or reason to expect the support of the people I Loved or who somehow still Loved me. The father of the child I was carrying was still technically my husband and we had a son together who wasn't yet two. I thought this man to be my sole-mate, the only person I would ever connect to on the level that we had. We had an intense history and although outwardly we seemed to be opposites, we were spiritually and emotionally bonded like identical twins. He had forsaken me and commanded my son as his property, denied my current state of pregnancy, and then once convinced that there truly was life created by us a second time, denied his paternity. I was devastated, crushed, and utterly broken.

I don't recall the first few days in any kind of detail. I remember being forced to rise and march in a single-file line, hands tucked into the waistband of the outfit I would come to know as "blues" three times a day to the chow-hall. I most definitely didn't want to put anything called "chow" into my mouth, and the trip to and from that building seemed never-ending. I remember vomiting until nothing came out of me except the bitter taste and bright green sticky bile that came from deep within my guts. I remember continuing to vomit beyond that, sure that I was going to rupture internal organs. There was no sympathy or assistance from my fellow inmates. I was housed in a dorm with a 64 woman capacity, 32 inmates on each side of the building, 16 metal bunk-bed type racks per side, separated by a bank of toilets and makeshift showers. The facility was in the midst of controversy. It was commonly known that it should be condemned but was too profitable for the local government to allow. It was filthy and inhumane, and only kept livable by those of us who had no choice but to call it home. My state of sickness negatively impacted the dorm as a whole and for that, I was targeted. It wasn't until my pregnancy was confirmed and the news of this had spread throughout my new peers that they relented at all. I gradually began to rise out of my opiate withdrawal and became able to wander into the yard surrounding the dorm to feel sun on my face from time to time. Initially I had no cup to drink with, I had to get water directly from an outdoor fountain covered in mud. I will do my best to describe the day-to-day routine I encountered and explain as much about the environment as possible along the way:
The entire dorm was awakened at about 5:45 am daily. The glaring fluorescent lights would come on and a deputy's voice would screech over the loudspeaker in the room. We were to awaken, dress, wash up, and line up within fifteen minutes. We had to be completely out of the dorm and in a line at the gate of the yard fence, awaiting a deputy to open it and usher us to chow. Sometimes it was very cold in the morning, sometimes raining. We still had to stand outside and wait for the deputy, silently and obediently. Once the gate was opened, we had to tuck our hands into the waistbands of our pants, and trudge to the chow-hall staying inside of a narrowly painted path. We stood in line and waited to be handed a tray. There was probably an assortment of about five different breakfasts that were served in rotation. On a good day we would get a small sealed tub of cereal and a banana. On a bad day, dry grits and a cold piece of bread. We were always given six ounces of fat-free milk. Once in a while a small plastic cup of juice, probably around three or four ounces. When I first got there we were given packets of sugar and butter when appropriate. By the time I was released, there were no more condiments given whatsoever. We had approximately ten minutes to eat the breakfast from the time we entered the hall. We were excused row by row. The hall was huge, and served about eight dorms total at one time. They would feed one half of the facility then the other, with the indoor cells, administrative segregation, and medical units separate. The chow-hall's plastic picnic tables were completely surrounded by deputies at all times. When signaled, our row had to stand and take our trays in another single-file formation to three big wastebaskets manned by trustees. We dumped whatever was left on our tray into the trashcans, piled the dirty trays onto a rolling cart, and made the trek back to the dorm with our hands tucked into our waistbands. Most of the inmates would command silence when we returned, because they all wanted to go back to sleep. So we would climb back into our racks, which were simply metal bunks with flat steel bottoms, lined with a two-inch thick mat that offered no comfort to speak of. We were given one sheet to line the mat with and during the winter one cotton blanket and one wool army-style blanket. After the coldest part of the season they would take the heavier blanket away. It would start to get noisy in the dorm around 8:00 am when some of the residents would rise and turn on the TV that was bolted into the upper corner of the room and covered in a plexiglass box. There were no volume or channel controls. Other inmates would start up games of cards, greedily grab up the one censored newspaper that the entire dorm was allowed, or engage in other activities that they almost certainly didn't entertain on the outside. There would be individuals or groups of women singing gospel or top 40 songs. There were some that walked laps inside the dorm or held exercise classes. There were some who became artistically creative beyond the imaginings of most, using colored pencils, magazines, cheap paper, and deodorant to create masterpieces. At about 10:45 am we lined up for chow again, and went through the same routine as the morning for our lunch. We commonly referred to lunch as "circles and squares". It seemed everything served at lunch was in one of the two shapes. Circles of lunch meat, squares of bread. Squares of processed cheese, circular Styrofoam cups filled with soup that was comprised of the last week's meal leftovers. Circles and squares. Sometimes on the way back from chow, we would be stopped by the deputies and asked to "shake down", to lift up our pant legs and un-tuck our shirts. Inevitably, an orange or a stale cookie would go rolling across the asphalt out of someones attire, and the entire dorm would suffer a consequence. The deputies were fond of putting us on lock down, where we had to return to our dorm and stay on our bunks with no TV until the next chow time, save for short trips to the restroom. No showers, no talking, no noise that could be overheard in the deputy's station which was a small office affixed to the front of the dorm. I personally enjoyed lock down. I would sit on my bunk indian-style, either reading a badly dog-eared book or bent over myself flat on my forehead with my arms outstretched in front of me in deep meditation. When I first arrived at Los Colinas I was nowhere near a state of enlightenment that awarded this experience, but by the time I left I could take trips entirely out of my body and the facility, and spent much time in this state. The last chow experience of the day was around 6:30 pm. Same drill, same terrible dining experience.

These three daily excursions marked the passing of every day for me. Initially it seemed like eons from breakfast to dinner, but by the time I was close to being released, I looked forward to them just to mark the passing of time. In between these three daily events there were many other routine experiences. Laundry exchange once a week, where we would line up at the gate after breakfast to exchange dirty for clean. We were allowed to have in our possession at all times two pairs of tube socks, one pair of hard rubber sandals, two pair of large (and largely unsanitary) white cotton underwear, two ill-fitting and extremely uncomfortable bras, one blue canvas shirt and one blue canvas elastic-waisted pair of pants, and one yellow cotton nightshirt. All of these items were loudly stamped "SD COUNTY JAIL" in one area, and "LCDF" in another, which stood for Los Colinas Detention Facility. Besides these items, we were allowed three books at a time on our bunk, ten pictures of a specified size mailed to us and reviewed prior to receipts, and five letters. We were allowed to keep commissary food items that we purchased. We could have pencils and stamped envelopes, and precious few other things that were able to be purchased. Everything in our possession had to be kept inside of a grey Tupperware tub, about three feet by one and a half, and maybe eight inches tall. Other weekly routine events were the ordering of commissary items on Sunday evenings, during which we were told by a deputy how much money we had on our books to spend, and given order forms similar to testing sheets we used in elementary school. You know... fill in the appropriate bubble with the #2 pencil. Thursdays the commissary items were delivered and it was like Christmas to those of us who had money to spend the prior Sunday. Thursday evenings were rowdy and loud, chock full of inmates on sugar-highs who had ingested near dangerous amounts of instant coffee and cheap candy.

I could fill up chapters with details about my arrest, my case, and my ten or so court appearances before I was sentenced and knew exactly how long I was going to be there, but oddly enough, those things aren't what make my story important. What matters and what I want to share with you is who I was when I arrived, what happened, the choices I made in reacting, and who I am as a result of all of it. I'm going to take a moment here to warn you that this story and the intricacies of it are not for the faint of heart. It's no Vietnam horror tale, but it's not a fairytale either. Most importantly, it's all real and true. I will embellish nothing and will most likely struggle to reveal the events and my experience as honestly as I can without candy-coating or downplaying anything. It's important to me that you know what the human spirit is capable of not only withstanding, but under which conditions we can actually flourish.
I spent the first few weeks in serious withdrawal. There was little time to think about the seriousness of my plight, to wallow in regret or remorse, or to worry. I was too busy throwing up, shaking, sweating and freezing, and staring at the filthy ceiling in highway-long stretches of insomnia. For the next month or so I was entirely consumed with thoughts of suicide. I would lay in that cold metal bunk and try to devise ways that I could pull off the feat without being caught too soon. I could feel the baby growing and moving inside of me, and all I could think about was how to rip my thin sheet into strips and tie them together to form a rope and noose. I couldn't locate a spot sturdy enough to hang from with any kind of privacy, so this idea was abandoned. I thought about ways to fake possession of a weapon and rush an officer in an attempt to be fatally shot, but I was honestly afraid that I would merely be wounded and end up in solitary confinement, which seemed worse than the environment of gangsters and junkies that I was already in. I was constantly on the lookout for a sharp instrument or an object that I could sharpen, and dreamed of cutting my wrists in the shower. But I knew that the blood would pool around my feet and be noticed before enough could drain from my body. There was nowhere to hide. There was nothing to do but endure. There were brief and painful letters and calls from my family. My 16 year-old daughter had been flown back to the Midwest after my arrest to be with my Mother. I talked with them and they loved me and hated me with a passion I could feel. My brother and his wife came to visit me, and this was somehow more difficult than having no one come to see me at all. We would sit on opposite sides of a thick pane of plexiglass talking on telephone receivers but looking into each other's eyes. I was sure I .could see my brother's heart breaking whenever I caught his gaze. The Christmas Holiday came. I have never experienced a deeper sadness than spending Christmas Eve lying in that bunk and watching women around me writing to their loved ones.