A Knock at Midnight(51)

The characters who peopled the visiting room were colorful, to say the least, their stories eye-opening and intriguing. There was the wonderfully personable Chyann Bratcher, who took our photo each time I visited; I’d been puzzled as to why I recognized Chyann, but Sharanda reminded me that she’d been featured on the TV show Snapped for allegedly conspiring with her mother to kill her husband and split the life insurance proceeds. Sure enough, I’d seen the episode. Chyann was beloved in the visiting room for the kind and careful way she helped children and family members prepare for the prison photos that the incarcerated women cherished so much, photos that said “I’m still here! I’m alive, I exist, I am loved!” She treated every family as though they had paid for a professional photo shoot. They had paid, of course—the prison charged the women for everything—but everyone respected and appreciated her careful diligence.

    One paraplegic woman spent every visiting session passionately making out with her boyfriend when the guards weren’t looking. The public displays were a bit much, but in prison privacy is not an option, and we all tolerated it good-naturedly enough. Their story was certainly dramatic, at least according to the other women in prison—she’d been shot by her husband after being caught in bed with this same lover and been paralyzed for life. Twenty years later, these two still couldn’t keep their hands off each other. “That woman can write with her teeth!” Sharanda told me. “Perfect penmanship. Pristine!”

There were also more difficult stories. During one visit Sharanda asked me to help advocate for a few women whose horror stories of medical malpractice seemed almost beyond belief. “Ashly is so young, Brittany. There’s no reason for her cancer to have gotten this far. She is so talented, sings like an angel, but they’ve put her through hell. And all for nothing! She got a mandatory minimum ten-year sentence for meth. There must be some kind of way to get her compassionate release or something. And she’s not the only one.”

It was just like Sharanda, facing a living death sentence herself, to advocate for the women with whom she’d formed family bonds. Her empathy and urgency inspired me, as always. I corresponded with some of these women in order to share their stories with Mary Price, General Counsel of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, who I knew was interested in compassionate release cases. Ashly wrote me a letter detailing her ordeal so that I could advocate for her, but when I received the envelope, it was empty, its contents censored, confiscated by Carswell officials. We finally connected via Corrlinks and her story broke my heart. At thirty, Ashly was only a few years older than me, but due to medical malpractice and negligence while incarcerated, she’d already had both breasts removed, would be unable to bear children, and would endure chemo for the rest of her short life. Diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer long after it was too late, her already draconian ten-year mandatory minimum sentence for drug possession had become a death sentence.

    Another woman I corresponded with had been admitted to Carswell pregnant with twins. Locked in a cell without medical care for several hours, she began bleeding profusely. The guard on duty refused to take her to medical for another forty minutes despite having her pregnancy papers in hand, and when he finally did, he ordered her to take the stairs instead of the elevator. The distressed woman hemorrhaged at the top of the prison stairwell and was rushed to the outside hospital, where she spent the next three days before being readmitted to the prison hospital with explicit and detailed instructions for the care of her high-risk pregnancy. What followed is almost too gruesome to recount here. Doctors failed to inform her when she lost the first twin, then left the dead fetus and a metal clamp on her umbilical cord inside her for three days. Weeks later she lost the second baby. Parts of her placenta and a piece of the umbilical cord were left inside her for weeks, leading to infection. When the woman later filed for early release, citing the physical and emotional trauma of losing her twins due to medical malpractice, the attorney representing the prison warden argued that her motion was “frivolous.”

The stories of these women and their resilience and dignity in the face of unimaginable suffering moved me deeply. Through visits and emails, Sharanda regaled me with lively stories of her life on the inside—horribly repressive, controlled, often heartbreaking, to be sure, but also filled with the complexities of living, the humor and pleasure and joy of it. Despite trials and tribulations, the women behind the razor wire did what they could to maintain their humanity in the face of an institution that so often seemed designed to strip them of it.



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    PRISON IS TORTURE, but for those with long-term sentences, it is also home. Throughout her incarceration, Sharanda devoted herself to making her present as full as it could be. From the beginning, she was determined not to be a burden on anyone on the outside, and at any rate it had always been Sharanda who looked out for everyone else. With the exception of the meager income incarcerated men and women make doing prison labor—for Sharanda just twelve to eighteen cents an hour for her jobs in laundry and cosmetology—most are dependent upon their families and friends outside for support.

Almost everything in prison, including food, has to be purchased through the prison commissary. Nutrition in Carswell prison had become notoriously poor, and women depended upon items from the commissary to supplement their diets and help ease the psychological burdens of imprisonment. Both to keep her mind busy and to make commissary money, Sharanda threw herself into what had given her such pleasure as a child and through high school—crafting. She knitted quilts, hats, and wall hangings, perfected cross-stitch. She purchased yarn and thread from the commissary and designed elaborate greeting cards, first for friends and family, and then to order on the prison’s black market. Sharanda dyed yarn with coffee grounds to match skin color, and worked from photos provided to her by other women so that the portraits she stitched on the cards resembled as closely as possible the recipient and her loved ones. Her artwork took her hours and served as a form of meditation, allowing her to escape the closeness of the walls, the daily indignities of sharing a tiny box of a room with first one, then three other women as the years of her incarceration stretched on and prisons became more and more overcrowded. Sharanda sent me a card for every occasion, meticulously designed and constructed, as polished and pretty as any card purchased from a gift shop. I kept them all.