A different kind of startup job

Re-employment after doing time in jail is no joke. Some people are going home to supportive families, but some are leaving to a homeless shelter with only the clothes they're wearing. Then you have a criminal record, which makes any kind of legitimate work difficult to come by.

For men, construction seems to be the best bet. You don't need good English or a clean record — you just need to be able to do the work.

Drug dealing is another business with low startup costs. After a small initial purchase, you retail larger amounts. Of course, this is only profitable if you're not sampling the wares too much.

For women, the options are more limited.  When they need rent, or bail for their boyfriends, or drug money, or groceries, a lot of my female clients turn to the oldest profession.

One woman told me she worked as a prostitute but said bitterly, “My mom thinks I'm a whore.”  I was confused about the distinction, but she explained: a prostitute does it because she needs the money. A whore does it because she likes it.  “And nobody likes it,” she said.

Of course, there are prostitutes who like their work.  Freakonomics profiled one such woman who quit her job as a software developer to make $200,000 a year as a high-end call girl.  She described her job as playing the “ideal wife,” making men feel appreciated and placing no demands on them.  The Honest Courtesan is a blog by another such professional. Those richer women are relatively safe from legal action – they're not exposed in the way that street hookers are.

In Massachusetts you can still be jailed for something called “common nightwalking,” which means you were outdoors at nighttime and appeared to be soliciting customers. Unlike a lot of the old blue laws, this one is actually enforced.

I would love to see prostitution legalized.  Of course, if it were formalized (as in Nevada, with licensed brothels and required medical checks), it still wouldn't be practical as a stop-gap measure for some of the people who are now practicing illegally.  But it would provide some of the more determined ones with steady work, and would hopefully prevent some of the robberies, beatings, and gang rapes I've heard about from my clients.  (I'm including robberies perpetrated by the prostitutes, too — know how easy it is to grab a wallet when his pants are down?)  In a legally-run brothel, both sex workers and their customers would have more recourse to the law.

As a side note, apparently there's been a decline in self-care among Boston hookers.  I heard an older woman complaining: "When I was young, the women on Blue Hill Ave used to look goooood.  They had the nicest clothes, the nicest bags, they had their hair just so, they had their nails done.  Now — uh uh!  They look like the cat dragged them in!"  I haven't heard theories as to why this is.

Prison, work, songs

This weekend I heard a presentation of work songs from the prison farms of the early 20th-century south.  Pain, sadness, humor, anger — all were intense in this music.



The vast prison farms were an evolution of the plantations that had been there before. When the 13th ammendment banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” Southern whites did the obvious. They imprisoned their former slaves for offenses like loitering and failing to yield the sidewalk.

If you ever go to Houston,
Boys, you better walk right,
And you better not squabble
And you better not fight.
Benson Crocker will arrest you
Jimmy Boone will take you down.
You can bet your bottom dollar
That you're Sugarland bound.

Of course, hearing the work songs of imprisoned people, I thought of the prisoners I work with in a northern, urban jail.

They spend a lot of time watching TV. I think it keeps people pacified, but I also wonder if there weren't something better they could be doing.  Being idle is especially hard for some of the immigration detainees, who have mostly been manual laborers since childhood. “I worked my whole life,” one of them said, “and now I'm sitting here with my arms folded.”

Work is one thing I wish we could have more of at the jail. After you've been there a while, and if you've stayed out of trouble, you can work if you want to. Men work in the kitchen or print shop, running errands, and cleaning things. Women are taken out of the facility to pick trash and paint walls. They earn about a dollar an hour, but the biggest perk is that it passes the time.  There are more inmates who ask for work than get it.

(More work might have the benefit of reducing prison costs. But I'd like to stay clear of actually making a profit, as the labor camps of the old south did. Economic incentive to imprison people is a very bad thing.)

On the way home from hearing these songs, I talked with a friend who had worked with prisoners at Angola Prison in Louisiana (so named after the origin of the slaves who originally farmed that plantation). She said work there was mandatory, and inmates there spent their first months hoeing the collard fields before they had the option of switching to cushier jobs.



Ironically, hoeing collards is the kind of job idealistic college students love to sign up for. I spent my first summer out of college as a part-time farmhand on a small hippie farm. But I chose it, and I worked with other people who wanted to be there. We sang a lot, mostly happy songs, not the slow-burning songs of slavery. We loved eating the fruits of our labor, just as the inmates of Angola Prison feed themselves. Everything is different when it's chosen freely.

(Side note:
I couldn't write about field hollers and not include Stan Roger's parody, the White Collar Holler.  He reframes computer programming as soul-crushing drudgery, presumably in contrast to the old-fashioned fishing and sailing jobs he loves to write about.  The song doesn't resonate for me, because most of the programmers I know have a good bit of freedom and enjoy their jobs.  Again with the autonomy and the work satisfaction.)




The other thing I wish we could have more of at the jail is creativity. The emphasis is on passing time rather than doing anything with it. Some inmates make ingenious things with their hands – teddy bears sculpted from soap and delicately tinted with toothpaste. A Christmas tree from a carefully deconstructed toilet paper tube. And those more frightening creations in the contraband exhibit they show you at orientation: the blow-darts made from staples, the shivs made of toothbrushes and razor blades, the hotwired contraptions used to heat urine to boiling temperatures so it can be thrown in an enemy's face.

That kind of destructiveness is the explanation given for why inmates can't have any materials: no colored pencils, no yarn, no crochet hook, no wood to carve, no guitars. But sometimes I wonder if they'd be less destructive if they had something constructive to do.

Of course, like those older prisoners, they still have word and song. Those inalienable tools are alive and well in the form of rap. I have yet to hear the compositions of any of the inmates I work with, but several of them have explained how important it is to them.

One more song to finish with.  Hear the anger channeled into work:

Finding water

On Christmas Eve, one of my relatives had a re-commitment ceremony. She and her boyfriend had gotten legally married last year, but none of their family was present, and they wanted to have a ceremony with us.

We all gathered in the living room, sat silently for a while, and then the couple exchanged vows. (A Quaker wedding has no clergy; the couple give their pledge to each other without a third person mediating.) The two of them stumbled through the old-fashioned vows, but afterwards they began to speak freely about why they were together.

The bride has always been a black sheep in the family. Since childhood, she's had some serious psychiatric and behavioral problems. She spoke about meeting her husband when they were both in a PTSD treatment center. At the time she met him, she had been wearing pajamas for a month and wasn't brushing her teeth. They both had insomnia and would meet at 3 am to drink coffee and talk for hours. She knew that if he loved her when she was at her worst, he was a keeper.

Her husband spoke simply about meeting and loving someone else who understood pain.

It moved me more than some of the carefully-orchestrated weddings I've been to. These are two people who have suffered greatly. I work with many more people like them, people with trauma histories, people to whom life has not been kind. I thought about all the broken people out there, and I was so glad that two of them found each other.

Tonight, I asked the bride's father for some cuttings from his plant collection. He showed me his cacti and succulents, desert plants that grow thorns and tough hides to protect themselves. Inside, they trap precious moisture.

“I took a cutting of this one and left it in an empty pot for a few months,” he told me, holding up a plump green stem. “No water. After three months it was hardly shriveled at all. It was starting to put out roots, getting ready to grab on as soon as it touched soil.” It seemed miraculous that a plant could survive that long on only the moisture from the air.

And I thought of his daughter, thought of my clients at the jail and all the other people who live in a harsh and deadly environment. About the thorns and tough skins they grow to save themselves from the desert.

Recently a client told me his mind was “like a tape recorder,” remembering every kind word he heard from me and other staff so he could play them back to himself. In the scorching environment of jail, he was saving up those droplets of kindness to stay sane.

Even the toughest, the most scarred, the most bitter of people are hiding a thirsty heart. Sometimes their tendrils are reaching out for it, searching for a hospitable place where they can latch on and get some of what they need so much.

Here's to the couple whose improvised wedding moved me so much yesterday. It's hard to form a healthy relationship when you hurt a lot, and I don't know how successful they'll be. But they've found some sweetness and nourishment in each other, and I hope together they can drink their fill.

Reunions

My sister shared this video of one of her second-grade students reuniting with her mother, who's been stationed in Afghanistan for the last year. It's a lovely moment: the moment of realization, then the silence, the rightness of being near each other after too long apart.

It makes me think of the mothers I work with in the jail. A World Apart, Christina Rathbone's excellent book about women in a Massachusetts prison, describes another reunion after two years of separation between mother and son:

“...she ran over and grabbed Patrick, sobbing, almost unable to breathe. Pat burst into tears too, and clung to her. Across the room, her father started to cry, the officer in charge of the visiting room that night started to cry, and one by one the inmates and even their visitors started to cry along with them.”

The male inmates sometimes talk about their children, but not with the same longing the women do.  Many of the mothers describe a physical craving to be near their children, a hunger for the sound of their voices and the smell of their hair.

They worry endlessly about their children's well-being. Have they eaten enough today? Is he doing all right in school?  Will she be mad at me when I come home? How can a toddler understand I didn't leave her on purpose?

They talk about how much they want to keep their children safe from all the terrors of their own childhoods: the sexual abuse, the neglect, the beatings. For some of these women, their relationship with their children is the only non-abusive relationship they've ever had.

The mothers' pain is one side of the coin.  The other side is the children's pain, which I can only imagine.

The United States has the highest imprisonment rate in the world.  That affects not only the people who are locked up, but their families.  Every time we imprison a person, we take away a part of a family.  We should think carefully about whether it's worth it.

Walking

My aunt has lived in Brooklyn for decades and never been mugged. She attributes it to her attitude. I'm not sure exactly what her method is, but for years I've tried to copy it. When I transitioned from the suburbs to the city, I decided that this meant not interacting with strange men.

At first, I applied the same method to walking around at the jail. Passing men in the yard or in hallways, I stared resolutely ahead, ignoring them. I hoped this would make me look like I knew what I was doing. I did the same in the neighborhood outside.

I soon realized it method just made me look scared. And it must feel insulting for a man on a street in South Boston, or in a jail for that matter, to see a white woman in business clothes refusing to meet his eyes. Trying to pretend he's not there, regarding his very presence as a threat.

If someone on the street wants to mug me, they'll do it. Ignoring them is not going to stop them. And all those other people who have no interest in mugging me – we might as say hello when we pass. We might as well say, “Good morning.” We might as well smile.

As if we are not afraid of each other. As if we are just people, walking.

What are prisoners like?

Last week I started a new job as a mental health clinician at a jail. I hadn't really thought about working in that setting, but I decided to give it a try.

In the job interview, my boss asked what I thought inmates would be like. I said "varied," which apparently was a good answer, because she hired me. I was very curious to find out what the people would actually be like.

Some initial impressions:

- The male inmates are mostly very polite to me. I've never been called ma'am so regularly, nor had so many doors opened for me. I was expecting constant sexual harassment, but it hasn't happened so far.

- I'm allowed to bring library books to the people who can't leave their units. They all want horror novels. The women also read a lot of Nora Roberts romances.

- Most of them were physically or sexually abused as children.

- Exercise is one of the few goal-directed activities that's possible in prison. There are a lot of seriously buff people.

- I was expecting people to claim that they had been framed, but so far I haven't heard that. I've heard a couple of people say they confessed to crimes a relative of theirs committed, because the relative already had a worse criminal record and would serve a longer sentence for the crime. I've also heard people say they didn't commit the particular crime they were convicted of, but that they had done the same thing in the past and not gotten caught. They seemed to feel it all came out even in the end.

- Lots of tattoos.

- Everyone has insomnia.

- They miss their families.

- They're not allowed to have regular pens or pencils, and they all hate the flexible pens the prison provides because they're so annoying to grip. They get excited if you let them write with your real pen.

- When I ask what helps them get through difficult times, many of them say "reading the Bible." Judging from their spelling, some of them are barely literate, so I'm surprised that they get much out of a book as dense and convoluted as the Bible. From a humanitarian perspective, I wonder if the church could advise reading an easier book for comfort and advice? Maybe something in the vein of Pilgrim's Progress? Could we ask Thich Nhat Hanh to draft something?