Visiting a Women's Prison
"You look like a bunch of angels," says Diane to the group of young violent offenders. Everyone's laughing. We're all at ease now. But two hours ago, heading into the maximum-security lockup at the state's largest prison for women was a whole different drill, even for Diane, a former addict who now works at Grand Central Neighborhood Social Services, a midtown agency for the homeless.
When the six of us arrived at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in northern Westchester, we placed our cellphones and beepers into a locker. The guard looked through our bags and told us not to take anything from the inmates. There were warnings for visitors who leave gifts: "No glass containers. No thongs. No black, blue, orange, or gray clothes." No thongs? The barbed wire was the only thing apparently amiss amid the scattering of buildings, trees and blue sky. We entered another one-story building and signed our names again. Our group consisted of Jeff Grunberg, who runs Grand Central Neighborhood; Ron, his brother, who edits its publications, BIGnews and Upward; Steve, a college friend of Jeff's who helps with art-related matters; Robert, a writer and veteran who used to be homeless; Diane, who's the agency's housing director; and myself.
John Haggerty, the prison's vocational education supervisor, was our guide. He showed us the 80-year-old prison nursery from the outside. Babies are born at a nearby hospital while their mothers do time. Someone in our group asked John how inmates got pregnant. Perplexed, I glanced over at Diane. "How did they get pregnant?" she repeated, laughing and carrying on with Robert. "The usual way."
We walked inside another building and into a classroom. About 25 women of varying skin shades sat along three rows of desks. A few stood in the back. They watched us as we headed into the room. Everyone seemed relaxed, except for the six of us. Diane spoke to them of her past?the homelessness, the shelters, the drugs. Landing at Rikers, she claimed, was the best thing that ever happened to her. The crowd responded with mumbled "Mm-hhmms." The women we met are between 18 and 25, and have less than five years left to serve. They're learning how to invest in the stock market, buy cars and balance checkbooks. Since this career development class was instituted in the spring of 1999, the prison's seen only one of its former students back at Bedford Hills.
A woman with straight, dark, shoulder-length hair calls me over. She wants to know how she can get her story into a magazine. I tell her to start talking. She says that she shot someone in her boyfriend's family, but after telling me that, she doesn't really delve into the details. Her sentence expires in five months; she's taking her GED test soon. She hopes a friend of hers, who runs a life insurance firm, will give her a job. She starts planning aloud: about how she'll work, how she'll drop her daughter off at child care during the day, how her cousin will take care of her kid evenings, how she'll take night classes toward a college degree.
Venus, another inmate, says her mother was addicted to crack. One day, she and her loan shark argued and the loan shark attacked Venus' mother. Venus shot the loan shark in the arm. The bullet hit a lung; the loan shark died. Venus was offered manslaughter, but she wanted her case to go to trial?after all, she'd committed the crime to protect her mother. She lost, was charged with second-degree murder and got 15-to-20. She's about 27, Diane guesses, and has five years of her sentence left to serve.
The bell rings and the class period ends, and we leave the grounds.
"I thought there would be a bunch of old broads, like the kind I used to run with," Diane explains as she carries away the hanging plant she got from the prison greenhouse. "These were little kids, who don't do anything there but go to school and rest."