Our arresting officer was, as ever, kind to us, and warned that when we went inside to be initially booked, we’d be asked several odd questions, such as, “Do you hear voices? Do you want to harm yourself or others?” I guess he knew we weren’t “that kind” of criminal who might go mad behind bars. It seemed slightly funny until I ended up behind bars and saw how one might tip over the edge with enough time doing time.
I was taken into the jail first. The booking agent, I want to call her, was also perfectly nice. “Oh, one of those bypass protestors,” she half-laughed. “Well, I can see wanting to express your opinion on the issue.” She, like other guards and officers we met, made these oblique references to the odiousness of the bypass without fully condoning our actions. Odd! I suppose enough of the women arrested before me had given them the speeches with rationales for why we fight the bypass, and the officers had some sympathy. Or…?
After she asked me a slew of questions, including about medications and depression, she removed from me my shoes, glasses, sweater, anything else I might have had in my pockets that the arresting officer had not already taken. Later, I found, with the cold dungeon like climate of the holding cell, we were given jail issued sweatshirts, socks, and coveralls when we got chilled.
 |
| (Not my actual picture but this is what it's like, except this holding tank is a whole lot newer & cleaner) |
Soon I
found myself in the Holding Tank, a cement block room not more than 8 feet by 6
feet, with a metal sink and toilet all-in-one extending from a corner. A pay phone
was on the wall, though it only took collect calls. One wall had a 5-foot long
metal bench on it, the only place to sit.
I lay down
on the bench and rested while I waited for Maureen to arrive, who was still
being booked. A window onto the guard’s station had a curtain that could be
pulled on the outside for privacy for us to pee inside the holding tank. I soon
pushed the intercom button on the wall and asked someone to pull the curtain. I
hadn’t gotten to relieve myself since the early morning.
Maureen
arrived 30 minutes after I did. We had a relatively good time chatting about
our new conditions, what we had thought about our climate-change-denying
arresting officer, the process of getting booked thus far, the whole
experience.
Our
contemplative and even light-hearted mood changed suddenly when the metal door
opened and the next inmate arrived. From then on, the utter gloominess of what
jail can be descended upon us.
The first
arrival was a 40-year-old woman, whom I’ll call Marta. She had been charged
with slapping her boyfriend when she found him at his home on the couch with
his ex-girlfriend who was wearing his T-shirt and looking very cozy with Marta’s
man. Enraged by his seeming deceit about the innocence of his visits with the
ex, our cellmate had slapped him for lying. After the ex-girlfriend vacated the
premises, Marta and her boyfriend had worked out the problem and were
themselves getting cozy again when the police arrived at the door and arrested
her for domestic battery. Clearly, the ex-girlfriend had called in the charge since
the boyfriend had not pressed charges.
Marta was
from Ft. Bragg and had been brought on the hour-long journey to Ukiah to be put
in jail with $10,000 bail. She wept for an hour trying to figure out how she was
going to deal with this, what would happen with her 14-old-daughter, how her 20-year-old
daughter would get the bail together (which is actually only 10% of the bail)
in order to get Marta out in time to get back to her very responsible job as a
hotel manager the next day.
It was all
so complicated, so wrong, so painful. Maureen and I tried to comfort Marta as
best we could—with little enough time for that since the holding cell was quickly
filling up with one woman after another.
The next arrived
only 20 minutes later, another true sob story: Isabel had been addicted to meth
off and on over the last ten years, though at age 31, she still held a robust,
healthy aspect, compared to the toothless and sunken look of so many meth
addicts. Isabel had gotten off meth for good (she truly believes) a year ago
when she found out she was pregnant with her now 8-week-old baby boy, whom she
was still nursing. As a nursing mother, her breasts were engorged since it was
nearly time to feed her baby. She too was from Ft. Bragg, over an hour away.
She’d gotten a notice about a false check she’d written a year ago for $80 when
she was doing drugs. Since then, she got clean, got married, got a job, and got
her new baby. When she went to the police station that day to check in about
how to handle in a responsible way the charges related to the false check, the
police informed Isabel, “You’re arrested.” Carted off to Ukiah, Isabel had to
leave her baby with her husband, whose own meth habit was still not entirely in
check.
So there
sat Isabel, crying as deeply as Marta was, each of them trying to make phone calls
to get their children and their lives in some order in the midst of this utter
chaos foisted upon them.
Were the
two of them not in bad enough circumstances, in comes Summer, angry and cursing
the officer who had arrested her and plagued her. I cannot even convey the
language coming out of Summer’s mouth in her utter rage. She spent the next
three hours on the phone telling anyone who would listen to her among her
friends and family how unfairly she had been treated, crying pitifully in
between, “I just want to go home! I just want to be with my mom! I just want my
dog!” Yeah, I could relate.
Thinking I
have some communication skills under my belt, I was trying to figure out what
had happened to Summer and the arresting officer that had gone so wrong. I
asked her if she had not overreacted to the arresting officer, who had
subsequently put her in jail on suspicion of being on drugs.
“Look at
me. Do you think I’m using?” she asked earnestly. Well, I actually couldn’t
tell. And then Summer went on an equally earnest rampage about how her family,
Native Americans in a poor part of town, had been hounded by this particular
police officer who, according to her, were out to get this family. She
recounted the deaths and imprisonment of various family members over time, the
disrespect to their Native traditions that she and others had to tolerate. The list
of grievances ran on, and soon I was convinced that I certainly had no idea
what I had been talking about in relation to a young woman who was feeling
tormented by so many ghosts that I could never account for.
In short,
the whole Holding Tank experience was hugely humbling for me. Maureen and I
eyed each other repeatedly, sometimes our eyes welling up with tears
simultaneously as we realized we were in the midst of great injustice or simply
great tragedy, as these young women were in the shock of figuring out how to
cope with being thrown in jail, potentially for days or weeks or months even,
while their lives would go on without them, their children or families in great
need.
In another
hour, another woman, Nina, was introduced into the cell with us, a woman who
had apparently violated her parole. From the looks of her, both her ravaged
teeth and face and how she immediately resorted to sleeping on the floor of the
cell, I figured she was recovering from a meth episode.
I myself
was extremely tired. It was 8:30 pm. We had gotten a meal at 4:40 pm on plastic
trays shoved through the hole in the metal door, for which I was very grateful.
Exhausted from our own ordeal and that of our cellmates, I found a space to
curl up on the floor between Maureen and Nina. With four of us on the floor and
Isabel, the young mother, on the bench, that was the only place to rest. I didn’t
want to think what had been spewed up on that floor, but one gives up a hold on
“decency” under duress.
So Maureen
and I waited out our turn to be booked and told we were going to be released,
whether that would be that same night or early the next morning.
Imagine my
surprise at 10 pm when my name was called and I was finally taken in to be
booked, only to be told by the booking officer, “It looks like you have a court
date on Thursday, so you’ll be in until then.”
“What?!” I
asked. None of the protestors who were first time offenders had been forced to stay
in jail beyond the holding cell thus far.
“Yes,” she
reiterated. I could see on my arrest sheet that the words the arresting officer
had written, “Do Not Cite,” had been crossed out. I remembered the booking officer,
when we arrived at jail, had come out and said to him, “It’s not an infraction,”
and she had crossed out those words. We were no longer part of the “Cite and
Release” gang. Now, it appeared, the police were going to slap protestors with
a more serious response.
From the
booking cell’s phone, I quickly put in a call to our jail support angel, Judi, who took my notes
about what would have to happen to my dog (who now needed an extra day of home
care) and my nephew (whom I wouldn’t be seeing on Thursday if I was still going
to be in jail). I had known that if I were to be arrested, I risked staying an
extra day; in fact, I risked all kinds of trouble. But I had just not expected
it.
And so soon
I was off to jail, fo’ real, a very humbling experience.
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