When the One You Love Is Behind Bars

By Silja J.A. Talvi, Colors Northwest. Posted February 2, 2008.

A story like this needs to be told, but it's painful in the telling.

I write articles for a living, because I need to tell people's stories. It's a blessing -- and sometimes a painful aspect of my existence -- that people from all walks of life seem to want to tell me their stories, whether I ask to be told or not. Sometimes I seek those stories out to begin with, and sometimes I ask permission to turn their stories into articles that allow others to listen to them. Journalism comes naturally to me. But I think of my profession more as a way of letting the stories be heard and considered than as a "career" that I've chosen for one reason or another -- and wealth or fame are certainly not among them.

I love writing meaningful stories of all kinds, but there's one kind that's my particular passion: "muckraking" journalism. Within that broader field, I've specialized in criminal justice/prison issues for the past decade. Through personal interviews, statistical analysis, research studies -- and a wide variety of visits to jails and prisons nationwide -- I've always sought to uncover what really happens behind imposing, concrete structures, barbed wire and the confines of tiny prison cells which now contain 2.24 million Americans. (The U.S. has the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in the world.) My work has always been framed in the context of the imperative that our society should provide fundamental civil and human rights for all. As a result, I have a rather obsessive passion for getting to the bottom of things, to understand why people behave the way that they do, and how social trends and public policies evolve (or devolve) in the way that they do.

Again, my journalism been about other people, but this is a different kind of story, about the pain and lasting trauma of experiencing my loved one getting arrested on a nonviolent drug charge. It's about the struggle to keep both of us going both during and after he was thrown into the vortex of the prison system.

It had been an awful, nearly unbelievable coincidence that Tommy* was sentenced shortly after I signed a book contract to write about the plight of women in prison. For the first few months after his arrest and sentencing, I didn't know what to do with myself. I had seen and interviewed so many people moving through the various echelons of the system that I initially reasoned that I could handle it. After all, I thought I knew what to expect. I understood criminal law, and what I knew from prisoners about doing time. But when arrest and imprisonment happens to a loved one, it cuts so deep that you start to feel as if you're serving time along with him. I had to watch Tommy struggle visibly with the untreated mental illness that directly contributed to the behavior that got him arrested in the first place. I watched him get marched into depersonalized jail hearings and treated like trash.

Like most drug-possession-related defendants in this country, Tommy pleaded guilty at the recommendation of just about everyone involved in his case. I didn't disagree, especially if it meant the possibility of a shorter sentence. The hard evidence was overwhelming, obtained through a number of "snitches" and two undercover buy operations. Tommy was selling ecstasy, actually eating most of it himself in an ill-fated attempt to try to stay "happy" after he lost custody of his kids; survived several suicide attempts; and had been living on the streets for several months.

Say what you will, but I had taken Tommy in six months before his arrest. All of this started with a chance meeting at a bus stop downtown. I sat alone, the way that I do almost everywhere I go, holding my own against any kind of chaos that might swirl around me. But Tommy broke through with the look in his eyes: sincere, kind, and a bit of an awkward goofiness that made me smile. After that, I kept running into him all across the city. Tommy's eyes still lit up, and he still had that goofy grin when he saw me, but he seemed worse for the wear. A couple of months later, I saw that the man with the gentle smile was on the verge of giving up altogether. He had nothing left, and I had something to give: a warm home, a couch, and the knowledge that he would not steal from or take advantage of me. People thought me crazy, but I knew that he needed to know, unconditionally, that someone actually gave a damn about whether he lived or died.

No matter what you think of that -- and there are many reading this who find the very idea of taking in a homeless person or his drug use reprehensible -- I saw the remnants of a brilliant, beautiful spirit in Tommy. In a way that was quite familiar to me, I saw that he was self-destructive, trying to stay afloat in the only way that made seemed to make sense to him at the time. I can't explain it, but we fell in love. Tommy moved in, and I set about trying to help him make it through.

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Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It's So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008), and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.

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