My Detox Girlfriend Is In Prison....In Florida.
I found my ‘detox girlfriend’ on Facebook. Rather, I found multiple profiles, none of which had been updated since 2018. Because I am very smart, I thought perhaps she had found her way back to prison, but really, I worried she had died. After a 10-minute Google search, I discovered that she was, in fact, incarcerated (again) in Florida, or as I like to call it, the flaccid penis of America. It’s pretty easy to find loads of information about convicted felons on the internet, and her file dates back to 2007 when we found ourselves joined at the hip in the basement of a detox in Fall River, Massachusetts. My detox girlfriend—I’ll call her Sarah—was 22, a heroin addict with a record, and I was 26 and a bloated sloppy drunk with a coke problem and one minor arrest. She stuck up for me when another young ward of the state threatened to pop my blind pimples (a side effect of detoxing, a staph infection, and a touch of the Mersa virus) with a safety pin.
SSTAR Detox in Fall River, MA where I graduated from detox to the basement.
“Leave her alone. They’re UNDER the skin. There’s no head!” It was love at first sight.
My would-be assailant disappeared the following week after leaving the ward during a day pass in which she gave the last of her 5 children up for adoption. Of course, I was sad, but I was relieved to not have my roadmap of a face be the highlight of leisure time. In recovery, sadness becomes callousness. The reality is that most addicts don’t get clean the first, second, third, or fourth time. Some of them never get clean, and a lot of them die. After so many relapses and deaths, the rest of us become apathetic, not out of lack of empathy or compassion, but because allowing ourselves to be deeply affected by continuous tragedy is a slow suicide in itself—sort of like drinking and drugging without the intermittent bouts of euphoria.
I sent Sarah an email, put $10 in an account so she could respond to my email, and another $20 in her jail bank account for fun stuff like $4 Snickers bars and two-ply toilet paper. She wrote back almost immediately. She told me how good it was to hear from me but admitted that she was having trouble “placing me.” Now, this is someone I’ve thought about nearly every day for 13 years. She played a pivotal role in my early recovery and she was also the first person I’d been ‘romantically involved with’ without being under the influence. Even then it was a secret, closeted thing because fraternizing was off limits. My good behavior and disinterest in sneaking into the men’s ward at night, allowed for certain privileges like staying up late to watch movies with my secret lesbian lover unbeknownst to the night nurse, Sweet Ginger. Our friendship graduated to an innocent romance that lasted about two movie nights before I was abruptly shipped off to a halfway house, and Sarah and I fell out of contact. I found it absurdly hysterical that something I’d been obsessing about for over a decade had little to no impact on her, making me The World’s Least Memorable Detoxing Lesbian! She asked for photos to jog her memory to no avail. She politely blamed it on the course of her life after our institutionalization.
A couple of photos she printed out from the JPay kiosk and mailed to me, with a thank you card. They are suspended on my refrigerator with the help of Sophia from the Golden Girls.
Since 2007, she has been in and out of drug treatment. Most of these programs will keep you for seven days (the detox), and if you’re lucky (or unlucky) you’re granted a 28 day visit but this all depends on insurance and the likelihood that you won’t take off into the night with a new boyfriend. As with any institution, there are gatekeepers at the helm making personal judgments and monetary decisions. When Sarah wasn’t in detox, she was in and out of jail for possession of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia, violating her parole, and most recently, possession of MDMA with intent to distribute, prostitution, and one count of armed robbery. From these charges, one could easily deduce that this person is a drug addict whose addiction has significantly progressed. Since she’s lived in Florida, she’s been incarcerated more often than when she lived on the east coast and has been further ‘victimized’ by outrageous bail amounts that someone from even a middle-class family would have trouble affording. Collectively, her bail adds up to roughly $15,000 since 2012. I don’t know many people who could afford to pay that, let alone the average $500 per arrest. I believe it can reasonably be concluded that the justice system is less interested in reducing recidivism rates, or even collecting bail (which they know people can’t afford), and more interested in punishment and the ability to claim some kind of moral superiority; to divide citizens into the good and law abiding and the bad, defective, lawbreakers.
Prisons are useless at achieving their purported aims: Punishment and reintegration into society. I am focusing explicitly on my friend Sarah, an addict, and people convicted on 1-2 year sentences in the state of Florida. To include all prisons in the country, violent crimes, and thinking more deeply about race, gender and class, would require far more research and a lot more paper.
That’s a lot of prisons in a state kind of shaped like a dick.
The Florida Department of Corrections has 143 facilities statewide, “including 50 major institutions, 16 annexes, seven private facilities (contracts for the private facilities are overseen by the Florida Department of Management Services), 33 work camps, three re-entry centers, two road prisons, one forestry camp, one basic training camp, 12 FDC operated work release centers along with 18 more work release centers operated by various private vendors (FDC oversees these contracts).” The FDC website boasts that that it is the “largest state agency in Florida with a budget of 2.7 billion” (taxpayer dollars) and the 3rd largest state prison system in the country. There are almost 1 million inmates incarcerated in the state and roughly 155k on probation. Way to go, you guys. Congrats on not allocating that money to public education. Well done. And shouldn’t the fact that there are only THREE re-entry centers out of 143 total facilities tell the public something about the fallacious narrative that the prison industrial perpetuates? If rehabilitation and reduced recidivism were in fact goals, logically there should be more re-entry centers dedicated to the transition from prisoner to free citizen, right?
Prisons themselves are not profit centers, yet drugs, the judicial system, and the prison industrial complex work together and are dependent on recidivism to keep this very expensive machine going. They are dependent on addicts to get caught with a crack pipe, re-enter the revolving door and waste taxpayer dollars on a system that DOES NOT WORK. Narcotics laws have focused on punishment rather than on the treatment and rehabilitation of drug abusers predictably causing the crime rate in the country to soar. The prison population in Florida alone has skyrocketed 1000% since 1970. To keep up with ‘demand’, private corrections firms started operating facilities in Florida in 1995. Today, the state houses about 10% of its inmate population at seven of these privately-run facilities that are run by three private firms—and pays three prison companies more than $170 million a year to run them.
Although prisons claim to offer rehabilitation, people who have been incarcerated know that this is a joke. Ideally, rehabilitation is a many-pronged fork with which the formerly incarcerated might wield upon re-entering society and indulge in meals of vast opportunity. As they eat, they move forward, step-by-step with a confidence gained from time served well. Unfortunately, the opposite happens. What prisons do is make it difficult to stay in contact with the outside world, and while I understand the concept of punishment in theory, if the purpose of prison is to rehabilitate, community is necessary. The FDC in recent years has expanded its dealings with private companies that do business in its prisons — generating more revenue off inmates and their loved ones. Prisoners are cut-off from the outside world because it’s too expensive. One of the largest revenue generators for the state prison system has been its canteen contract. Prior to 2014, with a different vendor, the canteens netted about $31 million a year for the state’s general fund. The current contract, with Trinity Services Group, averages more than $35 million per year.
A typical JPay kisok. Jpay offers and installs these machines free of charge and are therefore able to charge whatever they want as a private company.
Every time I send an email to Sarah in prison it costs me about $2. If we video chat, that’s $4 for 15 minutes. On top of the cost of the items at the canteen, friends and family have to pay other fees to this separate vendor, JPay, to get money into their inmates’ banking accounts, which they use to make purchases. It cost me $24.50 to put $20 in Sarah’s inmate bank account. Jpay pockets the $4.50. It is more expensive to wipe your ass, brush your teeth, and talk to your mother—or hey, maybe an AA/ NA sponsor—while you are in prison. While this might seem like a fair deal to those who believe that people in jail have broken a tenuous social contract and deserve these mild inconveniences, I doubt very strongly that anyone would believe that nearly 1 million people in the state of Florida deserve to not talk to their mothers over a weed conviction.
I’m going to get a little deeper here. One of the reasons this whole machine works is because the rest of us are inundated with stereotypes, laws and domestic policies that categorize the addicts/ incarcerated people as subhuman—at the very least, the knowingly broke the precious social contract that the rest of us abide by. Their problems are moral, ethical, and chronic. The broader issues are both systematic and deeply entrenched in ideological assumptions about those who are addicted and/or incarcerated. Drug addicts. Alcoholics. Felons. They shouldn’t be doing heroin or drinking so much. They shouldn’t have robbed that gas station for crack money. They should have simply separated themselves from their addicted family members and picked themselves up by the bootstraps. They shouldn’t have had children, married that guy, left treatment, been arrested in the first place. And goddamn right they shouldn’t be able to vote, EVER.
Me and a couple of friends at the Emerson House in 2007. I am holding my favorite baby, Michaela.
When I went to rehab—and I did the whole fucking thing, detox, 28-day program, halfway house, sober living, AA, monitored reentry into the ‘real world’—I was told constantly that I had potential. I was told by nurses, administrators, therapists; and I think this potential was contingent on two things: my whiteness and (although at that time I was not college educated) my perceived education (I was polite and followed the rules minus the secret lesbian affair). As an overweight, zit-faced, detoxing mess, I had this coveted potential. This potential was evident when my family visited me every other weekend—a sober, well dressed, educated, white, heteronuclear gang. People of color are not viewed as having inherent potential. Neither are poor white women with criminal records, or prostitutes and single mothers with multiple drug convictions. To the system, and to the individuals that make up the system, these people are expendable, undeserving of kindness and opportunity. They are not ushered out of detox and into van that will deposit them at a beautiful halfway house on Cape Cod named after Ralph Waldo Emerson; they are not encouraged to apply to prestigious liberal arts colleges.
And then, as Robert Frost so eloquently put it, I chose the road less traveled and my friend chose the one she’s used to. I don’t think Robert was ever institutionalized—I could be wrong—but it impacts people’s perception and cognition. The world becomes very small and hyper-focused on idiocy and the minutia of daily life; boyfriends, candy bars, second-hand clothes, Redbull, and clean urine. We all devolved into 13 years old girls at SSTAR. Without guidance and practical instruction as to how to navigate the outside world, women are released from these environments and into the wild, doomed to repeat the cycle—it’s even referred to jokingly as “wash, rinse, repeat.” My detox girlfriend is a good person. She’s found Jesus in prison and is a member of some kind of “born again” group. She’s frustrated because prayer and meditation aren’t alleviating the burdens of her circumstances. She will be released in 10 months to three kids, an addicted mother, and a criminal record. She will be perceived by society as a “bad” person. She will not have the right to vote, drive, or be gainfully employed. She will depend on the kindness of strangers until the stigma abates. She is not broken, but the system sure as shit is.