Misconceptions about Prison
By: Sabrena Morgan
Tags: Prisoners, Prison, Prison Reform, Misconception, Incarceration

When you have been shown and told certain things about a group of people your entire life, you fall into a trap of other people’s perceptions, misconceptions, and beliefs. Thoughts predict feelings, and feelings and emotions lead to actions. So, if your beliefs make you think crazy, incorrect things about a group of people, it impedes hope for change and understanding. Then one day you might just meet someone from that group that shatters all you thought you knew. I never thought I would belong to a group of people that others consider outcasts, but here I am, an inmate, in prison, with a federal identification number, a felon, I am one of THOSE people I have been warned about. What I know most people think about inmates, I have come to find, is incorrect. I believe the more people are educated about who is currently sequestered in prisons, it might help to change beliefs and attitudes, and thus, change the prison system. I think it is so important to uncover the unseen of who make up these minimum-security camps; these inmates might just make you second guess what you thought you knew. I know I was wrong. So here I am, in prison, studying prison and the inmates around me and sharing stories with readers that just might shed some light and maybe stir some emotion to bring about changes.

I believe most people aren’t in prison because they are bad people, they are in prison because they made a mistake, one that led to incarceration. All it takes is one mistake, but that one mistake, that one lie, can easily change the trajectory of your life down a slippery slope that heads toward a hard trail. We all make mistakes, we are humans, and many of us have done things that could easily land us in prison. Humans are fallible and can easily lose their way. I look around here at the mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters that are beautiful, loving people that lost their way and it breaks my heart because most are truly no different than the average person that makes up the population of our country. Instead, they are making up our growing prison population. Just to be very clear, I hear horror stories about people in state prisons and higher security facilities that do heinous acts to harm people, I am NOT speaking about them. What I am talking about is the nonviolent people that live at camps, the people that surround me every day and sleep around me at night.

I’d like to tell you a story. Once upon a time, I had been here at camp for about two months and I was mowing and weed eating with the mow crew in front of the administration building and a cop car pulled up. Even when you are already in prison, the site of a cop car will still churn your stomach and take your breath away, if you have been through an indictment that resulted in arrest. We all watched as they got the prisoner out of the backseat, like we were watching a TV show. She was in a yellow jumpsuit that was probably a size 5x and she was completely drowning in it. Her feet looked like clown feet; in shoes she could barely walk in because they were ridiculously large. Her feet and hands were shackled. They even had a black box over her cuffs. A black box restricts movement even more than handcuffs and is terribly uncomfortable. She looked like Hannibal Lector without the spit mask. We all just sat there watching like it was the most exciting thing we had seen in a long time, because it was.

As we watched her hobble along and disappear into the administration building, we were like dang what did she do to get here like this and why do they have her like that? You see we are at a federal prison camp with no fence, just a painted yellow line that says out of bounds, and very little interaction with any guards. While many of us had the county jail/federal holding experience and arrived somewhere nearby on Con Air, the airline that flies with U.S. Marshalls all over the country transferring inmates restrained with shackles and chains. It is standard for federal travel arrangements for getting here and somehow it quickly becomes a faint memory. How do you possibly forget something like that? Unless someone is a self-surrender, a scene like this, just isn’t new. But people don’t arrive at the door of this prison like this. The shackles and restraints are long gone for this leg of the journey and taken off after you land and get in the van, so watching someone go through this just two months after my own journey, really stuck with me and bothered me. So, who is this mystery lady that they were so cautious to handle? Well, now she is my Bunkie and one of my best friends.

When we were done mowing and off work, we were coming by the administration building on the other side, the side where the inmates live, and there she was again. Only this time she was unshackled, unchained and in clothes that fit. Just like that, she was transformed. Smiling, happy, friendly, funny, and a totally new creature.

We were instant friends and we had just had someone quit the mow crew, so we asked her if she wanted a job. She never ended up mowing but a few months later she and I ended up with highly sought-after warehouse jobs and now we live together. My drama free, easy going Bunkie, that makes time so easy to do that arrived looking like a she was a raving lunatic.

After being convicted of a nonviolent crime, she was held at a maximum-security state facility that kept them in huge jumpsuits about five times larger than their bodies due to lack of funding and that was all they had. The maximum-security facility had very little free movement and was a completely different environment, she had lost her freedom and her ability to be her happy go lucky self. She was surrounded by violent inmates that had lengthy sentences so being herself meant something totally different than being herself in a peaceful existence here. Someone’s environment can have such a huge impact on a person and affect them completely. In a highly stressful, hostile environment you must fight to survive, not here.

In a prison camp, we are cage free chickens free to roam about most of the time, and in her cage free environment, she sings like a bird in the choir and thrives with a great job and lots of friends. She is a responsible, caring, loving, funny person. There is no fence and she doesn’t leave. She follows the rules and walks the line every single day.

That is generally what we do here, follow rules and stay inside the painted yellow lines. It is a peaceful, calm environment with expectations of how we are to act and live; being nonviolent peaceful people, we do just that. I can’t help but wonder how many people are caged in a high security facility, heavily guarded with highly restricted movement, surrounded by violence, would actually thrive if moved to a facility such as this one. All it takes is a painted yellow line and the knowledge that any serious mistakes and you are gone, without a chance of returning. The reality is there are plenty more inmates on the way. With thousands of people housed in federal holdings waiting for sentencing and thousands more out on pretrial already coexisting with society, the beast will continue to be fed, and the prisons will never empty.

I know when I was indicted, I had a dramatic arrest and taken in to be arranged and sent to a federal housing over an hour away. I was there just a couple of days and then put right back on the streets for pretrial. Pretrial is exactly like probation but without a conviction and it’s this weird limbo between freedom and prison where you drown in the reality that lays ahead. You are under strict rules and guidelines for the duration of this portion of your journey. During pretrial is where your brain plays tricks on you and you can easily convince yourself that if you perfectly walk the line, they will surely give you a break. That doesn’t happen, the details may very at the end, but don’t fool yourself, you are done and pretrial is just grooming you for your future and when the time comes they are going to hit you hard. I was to check in with my probation officer regularly. He was an extremely nice and helpful man and I have a ton of respect for how respectful and kind he was. He was such a pleasure to work with and I asked him if that was normal. He told me that when you are doing the right thing, probation officers are normally going to be pleasant.

I also had to submit to random drug tests while on pretrial. I was on a system called code-a-phone. Every day I would call a number and put in my code, which I later realized was my federal identification number and would be a big part of my life for a very long time. When I put in my code the response would indicate whether I needed to give a urine sample. On the days I needed to, I would drive about 30 minutes to the nearest location to give a sample. It was normally quick, but extremely far out of my way. I remember driving in a snowstorm to get there and about having a heart attack. I had tried to call everyone I could think to either come in the next morning or see if there was another option, but I was making that trip whether I liked it or not. Luckily, I had started out hours in advance because I could never get through to anyone and it took me several hours to get there and even longer to get home. I knew I had to get there, and I made it, but I will never forget it. After about a year, I was taken off code a phone and for the next two years I just did a sample when my probation officer asked me to. It was few and far between by the end of the three years. I never had a failed drug test and there was a part of me that was grateful for having the possibility of a test looming in my head to keep me on the right track.

Part of the conditions of my pretrial release required me to go to an outpatient rehab. It originally started with five days a week and eventually I was only going one day a week. I enjoyed going there and taught people how to make huge paper flowers, and they let me decorate. I had fun. The nice part is the feds will pay for any treatment, counseling and medications you may need to help with your recovery.

This experience was enough to kick my addiction and turn my life around. It took this massive happening for me to change my ways and I am extremely grateful. I knew one mistake and my freedom would be taken from me.

That was all I needed to change myself, everything about my life and how I lived it. I also had something to prove, to myself and to the ones I love. I felt like I was finally fighting for myself and it’s something I continue to practice today.

After three years of doing extremely well under scrutiny, my freedom was taken from me anyway. I went into federal holding after taking my plea and held in a maximum-security facility for a year waiting for sentencing. Then I was taken to Oklahoma City transfer center and then to Pekin, Illinois, both via Con Air and under heavy security, handcuffed, shackled, and chained. I’ve managed to follow the rules without any problems or incident report. I work, teach, study, volunteer, and give back to my tiny community alongside an average of 270 women and many do the same as I do.

In conclusion, before incarceration, the image of an inmate was things I’ve seen in movies and on TV. The peaceful creatures that roam freely here would not make for good TV. That’s why the people portrayed for drama were people in cages acting like animals, and maybe it’s like that some places, but here, it’s not. Just like my Bunkie, when people are moved to a different environment and expected to act accordingly, humans will rise to the occasion. My Bunkie had been in a high security state facility and in one fell swoop, found herself at a low-level federal camp. Her state bid was over, and the federal government found her to be at a much lower security level. How the state had her at maximum and the federal government at minimum, I will never understand. But I can’t help but to take it a step further. I ask myself how many of these ladies would be doing amazing things back in their communities and with their family and children if given the opportunity? With strict rules and guidelines and little room for error, I’d be willing to bet the majority would walk the line and do just fine. With so many that have already experienced pretrial successfully, why not put them back out once again? I think only people with loved ones incarcerated or the people that have been in themselves fully understand the need for reform. I encourage everyone to learn more about the folks that make up the prison population and the prison system itself.