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The Forgotten Voices of Women in Jail
The storefronts on Baltmore's East Eager Street make a strange market place where people barter for state-rationed
constitutional rights. In a world where money buys freedom the yellow glow of a "Bailbonds" sign lurks
like a dusty beacon at the far edge of purgatory.
That's one side of the street; on the other are entrances to Central Booking and Intake Facility, the Baltimore
City Detention Center (formerly the Baltimore City Jail) and the Maryland Penitentiary. The penitentiary looks
like a gothic aviary, and on hot summer afternoons the dehumanized convicts within holler and cackle like caged
birds of prey.
The Women's Detention Center (WDC) houses people awaiting trial, often for as long as 90 days. Some detainees are
regulars; being incarcerated for two or three months at a time is part of life. It might follow a period of heavy
drug use and depression or maybe a severe beating from a boyfriend or husband. Other inmates, the un-indoctrinated,
are living in hell. The inside of the jail stays humid, whether it's January or July. Human energy seeps through
the concrete walls. The visitor is bathed in a sort of mental and psychic sweat. A lot of thinking goes on when
there's nothing to do for weeks on end. It's conceivable that the guards and visiting attorneys feed off of this
raw human deliberation and emotion like perverse vampires of the damned.
Visitors to the WDC often feel disoriented. A guard will guide them through a labyrinth of narrow corridors and
heavy doors. The elevator seems unbearably slow and too much like a jail cell. Most of the women here live in dorms.
There's room to move about; and the walls don't seem to close in, at least at first glance. The smell of bleach
pervades the facility; cleaning and disinfecting seems to be ongoing. What sorts of solvents act on the minds of
the incarcerated? What brings so many women back here again and again? For many, the outside has very little to
offer: no community or friends, no family, no job.
Ironically, in this dismal and antiseptic place groups of 4 or 5 women are allowed to attend workshops where they
learn to write songs and lyrics as part of an "activities" program at WDC. Under the care of local musician/composer,
Billy Kemp, these unfortunate women are given a chance to express themselves through words and music in a public
performance. Their audience is the guards, administrators and fellow inmates.
Many of these women will never have a trial and will have their charges dropped. The prospects of getting out of
the system are very good for those charged with less serious crimes. Activities are designed to give them hope,
courage and confidence, probably more for the transition to the outside world than for coping with the inside.
Faced with endless days and nights, with nothing to do but think, their words come out lean and muscular, distilled
to the raw facts. Experience is not a product of the imagination; there is no poetic license for those who have
looked deep into the mirror of their own souls. Nothing comes out that has not been subjected to severe cleaning
and inspection. Understandably the words don't flow out like water; the music is not pretty and catchy. The listener
is assaulted with fact and experience, because fantasy is no better than a vial or a needle. Inmate, Icey Jones,
waxes unpoetic in punchy rhythm about HIV:
This epidemic is serious,
even the blind can see
That it's spreading wide and fast and shouldn't be taken lightly
I don't know about y'all, but I know what I'm about
I'm already closed in, I'll be damned if I'll be closed out.
Ms. Jones delivered these lines in front of a hip-hop rumble: Bass and drums making hollow shockwaves in the jail's
gymnasium. With a Cheshire grin she faced her peers just as she faced the guards and the warden. Self-consciousness
gets left at the door here. When a poet discards her self-image and lets her self take over the delivery is as
direct as a slap in the face. The crowd might get rowdy; dancing might break out until the guards sense a loss
of control. Sometimes the words push the envelope of restraint, where a strange willingness to let it happen is
barely tempered by a sense of duty and a fear of the power that wants to get loose.
The privileged poet may have developed and refined the imagination. Image making can be a craft, a product of schooling.
There might be an understood system among colleagues, a guide for stringing and delivering images. Fantasy is a
precious thing: the wellspring of raw material for the great craft. For the underprivileged fantasy is hammered
out, flattened and depleted by blow after blow. Very often drugs fill in the gap, supplying synthetic fantasy when
reality has swallowed whole the natural tendency for it. Detainee, Mookie Hawkins, spells it out for us:
I went from public
schools
Straight to the college of the streets
And got degrees that you only get from knowing
That thing called Dope
There may be no return to the thing lost. When a child is afraid to dream, when she feels no desire to imagine
the future she may lose the connection forever. Once the notch is cut Dope gets a lifelong license to fill it in:
Now it's twenty some
years later
And I have been used and abused
Yet I can't stop loving
That thing called Dope
Even though it has taken my family and friends
And has placed me in prison once again
I still have an illusion about
That thing called Dope
Many women turn to God where Dope has forsaken them time and again. I wonder if God follows them back to the streets
when they leave this jail. Does God ease the pain of the next beating, the next mother's rejection; does God help
them see a way through poverty, through ignorance in the face of a very smart market: the market for human souls?
Some of these women find a nameless strength, a deity within:
So don't think I'm
bluffin' Boo/ Just lookin' out/ ain't no frontin'
Learn to love yourself and you can climb the highest mountain…
…It doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor
Black or white/Get it right/Life is worth the fight.
But still, a theme of dependence on God runs through most of the lyrics. It is as strong a theme as self-reliance;
it goes hand in hand with it. But reaching to God for help is more a sign of humility than one of resignation.
Anita Davis tells us how her mother "…taught me how not to run and how to stand strong; And ask for God's
guidance when I am wrong…..I will now hold onto God's great hand; When I am in situations I cannot stand"
In contrast, in "Ain't No Game" Davis takes a matter- of -fact view, leaning toward personal responsibility:
Prison to some is
just a game
Most of the faces are always the same
Keep coming back is all they do right
You let them go today, they'll be back tomorrow night
Not me I won't come back no more
You won't catch me in a line-up or with my face on a floor…
All I want to do is get uptown to my kid
Not come back again and brag about the time I did
If I never learned before I sure learned know
That the system ain't playing they tryin' to lay my ass down
Prison to me just ain't no game
Cause being in jail my life ain't the same
Maybe when people can't afford to be quiet about their desperation is when they write the most compelling and honest
lines. Being quiet while floating in the mire of the criminal justice system is a "no way out" way of
coping. The unwritten laws that keep the same segments of society poor and desperate for generation after generation
cut no slack for the meek, no mercy for those who accept their fate.
When the guilt that comes with getting into trouble with the law (None of these women are violent offenders) wears
off, some of the strong ones make an effort to break out of the pattern of least resistance and feel the strength
to leave behind the underclass stigma into which they were born. In "My Turn" Mae Wright looks the judge
"straight in the eyes" and proclaims her personal right to succeed in life: "My turn, my turn. It's
my turn, my turn."
Plenty of us have something to write about. It's always important to us when the inspiration hits. But how many
of us write from a reality bigger than that of our own enclosed world of imagination fed by educated interpretation?
It's the rare experience to hear words that have no basis in the imagination; words that are needed to tell it
like it is and to lay claim to what it could be. Once life's basic needs are met the poet faces the danger of letting
her own imagination rule her senses. When the incarcerated have so much to write about the privileged poet should
take a cue and find things on the outside worth exploring with poetry.
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