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by
Susan Burton
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January 30 - February 21, 2022
Just like there’s no reason to anything in prison. No reason why, on a whim, a guard raids your locker, tearing through your only belongings, dumping your soap powder, and mixing your baby powder into your instant coffee, spoiling both. No reason why some women inmates are assigned to spend their days in a parenting class even if they don’t have children, while others must push a mop around for eight cents an hour, and others have to report to fire camp, going through weeks of rigorous physical training to be awarded an orange uniform and delivered to the front lines of a California wildfire
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“We got your bed waiting for you. See you soon.”
but deep down I knew I wasn’t prepared for life “outside.”
You’d think someone in the system might have gotten the bright idea that I needed drug treatment, that I needed therapy.
you didn’t speak up to the master, no matter what, no matter if the master was right or wrong or crazy as a loon, you didn’t say a damn thing. That’s how it was for my ancestors, and that’s how they taught their children, and that’s how my parents taught me.
The Watts riots saved my mother from the visit.
Watts was one of the only areas blacks were permitted to live.
By 1965, Watts was boiling over with decades of employment and housing discrimination, segregation, extreme poverty, and police abuse. On a scorching August night, when a white policeman arrested a young black man on suspicion of drunk driving—and then arrested his mother and brother, who showed up to the scene—a crowd of onlookers protested the officer’s harsh treatment. More officers arrived with billy clubs, and that night the pressure cooker of Watts exploded.
The riots pounded on, the National Guard took over, and the city enforced a curfew at dusk.
The riots raged for six days, leaving thirty-four people dead and over a thousand wounded, with four thousand arrests and tens of millions of dollars in property damage.
My mother came to visit. One day she brought a sack of red cherries. We went for a drive and I was eating the cherries and spitting out the pits. Mama said, “Eat all the cherries you can, ’cause you sure don’t have one anymore.”
We were victims of the limitations society hoisted on us, which we then internalized as our own. We had no safety net, no system of support, no community or services to turn to and say, dignity intact: “I need some help.”
My sense of self was so warped that I believed my ability to divorce myself from my emotions was my greatest asset.
The vast majority—75 percent—of crack cocaine users are white or Hispanic. But nearly 85 percent of people in federal prison for crack offenses are black.
More than a decade would pass before a San Jose Mercury News reporter, Gary Webb, reported a bizarre and devastating link between a CIA cover-up and the explosion of crack cocaine in South L.A. According to Webb, the sale of crack in my neighborhood was funding a war three thousand miles away by, astonishingly, arming the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The way it worked, he explained, was that the CIA facilitated massive amounts of cocaine to be flown into Los Angeles, with the same planes returning to Nicaragua stocked with weapons.
Nancy implored, “Just say no,”
The Reagans waved the American flag, but this wasn’t, in actuality, a war on drugs. It was a war on people: black people. We were sold down the river by the government—yet again.
A frequent prison specialty was known as Shit on a Shingle, a brown, gooey, flour paste that was supposed to have meat in there somewhere.
While this helped to eliminate various forms of discrimination at the sentencing level, it also eliminated the consideration of any extenuating circumstances. For example, there’d be no leniency shown to an eighteen-year-old mother caught stealing baby formula; theft was theft.
Instead, the primary purpose of prison shifted from rehabilitation to punishment.
California prisons imposed a $5 copay for each medical visit,
In Texas, copays were a whopping $100.
In Alabama, prisoners were responsible for actual medical costs, and the balance—what could be tens of thousands of dollars—would follow you after your release. If you didn’t or, more likely, couldn’t pay your bill, the state could issue a warrant for your arrest.
Toni had never visited me in prison. She said it was because when she’d gone to the prison several years earlier, when she was fourteen, to visit her aunt Beverly, she’d just seen the movie Helter Skelter and spotted Leslie Van Houten of the Manson family sitting down the row.
At nineteen years old, Toni became pregnant. She gave birth to a healthy daughter and named her Ellesse.
Possession of 5 grams of crack (worth a total of around $100) would trigger the same sentence as possession of 500 grams of cocaine (worth a total of around $150,000) or of 100 kilos of marijuana (worth a total of around $20,000). These disparate and nonsensical sentences had been passed into law without any hearings, without any expert testimony from judges, law enforcement, drug policy experts, addiction medicine specialists, or the Bureau of Prisons.
To deal with overflow, I, along with a bus full of women, was sent to Avenal, a men’s prison.
Everyone called him Chief, a nickname given to him as a child.
Dope doesn’t exactly compel you to be a kind, considerate person, and I treated myself and everyone around me poorly. I was still mired in anger and filled with hurt. Hurt people hurt people, and that’s the spiral in which I was trapped. Inevitably, I landed right back in prison.
to treatment.” I didn’t know to ask for anything different—treatment wasn’t something offered up to people from my community.
Our teacher was a former prison guard, not a therapist. We were assigned a textbook and watched stilted educational movies about addiction.
As a mother, Toni was beyond strict, and I knew her biggest fear was that Ellesse would stray down a bad path, like the rest of us. Or that she’d end up like K.K.
Clinton would apologize for his anti-crime legislation. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,”
I likened her attitude to how many of the black prison wardens acted—different and apart from you.
Only with some years of distance would I come to understand that they, too, were caught in a system and a culture. Their culture was power.
A decade later, when I was honored as a CNN Hero, I’d thank George Cameron on international TV for standing by me, his devotion proving that anybody can be that one person who believes in you.
the executive director, Demetrius Andreas.
Walden House funded $35 per woman per day, to be used for shelter, transportation, and meals.
To my surprise, Ms. B referred a few women to A New Way of Life. Some years later, I would see her again. I was at an Erykah Badu concert and the odor of weed was wafting from the group in front of me. I looked over, and there was Ms. B. I watched her notice me. Then I wondered how many people she’d sent back to prison for marijuana offenses. After the lights came up, she turned to me and said, “Don’t mention this.”
But then he added something I’d never heard anyone talk about before: that the barriers were by design.
It benefits from repeat customers.
My eyes were popping. I knew the phrase the forest for the trees, but now I got it.
“Here I’d been thinking the War on Drugs was really a war on black people and on poor people,” I said. “Now I’ve got to add a war on immigrants to this list.”
So many people in communities like mine were caught in the same vicious cycle of desperation and punishment. Only to be subjected to continued punishment and exclusion even after paying their debt to society.
Sadly, it wasn’t uncommon for women inmates to resort to bartering sex acts for basic necessities.
As an official from Valley State Prison spoke, she casually mentioned that they ask pregnant women going into labor if they want to get their tubes tied. The meeting room fell silent. Performing sterilizations in prison for any reason other than medical necessity was a violation of state law—likewise, it was illegal to seek a woman’s consent for a tubal ligation while she was in labor.
Not that it mattered: lifers weren’t allowed to have family or friends pick them up,
But to me this was the dog chasing its tail: if no one engages the voters in low-income communities like South L.A., why would they be inspired to go to the polls?
They were all cronies, indoctrinated in the same old-boys’-club ways. In L.A. County—the largest sheriff’s department in the world—the average sheriff stuck around for two decades. Which was why there’d been only four sheriffs since 1932—fewer sheriffs than there’d been popes at the Vatican during the same timeframe.
The other officer was sentenced to jail for one year, though he was allowed to serve his time exclusively on weekends.
