We spoke with Alisha last night, and have some disappointing/upsetting and urgent updates:

She received word that her legal team’s latest efforts for an appeal have been denied by the Illinois Supreme Court. They have taken the case as far as they can, and as such, will no longer be representing her. There is one more legal course of action she can take, a writ of habeas corpus…she has 90 days to file this, and at this time is open to, but unsure if this is worth pursuing.

She is in need of a $400 filing fee to be a part of a suit against Cook County. We are in IMMEDIATE need of these funds to ensure she can be involved in this case. Please contact us immediately if you are or know a donor who wants to support her in this way. The deadline is October 14th to file. This is an urgent need! We are also still accepting donations toward this thru our fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/support-alisha-walker

On top of ALL of this…she has a sever cold, nasal swelling, chills, and a painful sore throat. What did the prison give her when she paid for and was finally able to visit the clinic? ONLY Ibuprofen and told her to “stop complaining.” She let us know that numerous fellow prisoners have had strep throat recently, and the flu is rumored to already be circulating. This lack of medical care is nothing new, but it’s a further punishment the prison visits on folx sick and inside.

As she was recounting these updates and upsets, she was also recommitting herself to struggle and organizing. Talking about her self-care plan and how she was preparing mentally and emotionally to fight back. This is our comrade. She’s strong and capable and used to the criminal legal system’s bullshit. She is not resigned, but rather, undeterred in doing what she needs to do to survive and take care of herself.

We will keep up the fight for clemency, support and care until our friend is free.

https://www.change.org/p/bruce-rauner-clemency-for-criminalized-survivor-alisha-walker

Two of our comrades had a great (albeit always frustrating because of COs and new prison visitation policies) visit with Alisha yesterday! We’ve got some important updates to reemphasize!

Alisha is so overjoyed by all the letters y’all send! If you’d like a response from LeLe in a timely fashion and in a manner that’s more comfy for her to write a lot using AND is the most affordable method on her end, please consider corresponding using Connect Network Messaging.

You can search Alisha, or any other pen pal by their last name, and “offender number.” Alisha’s last name is Walker, Y12381 and she’s at Decatur Correctional Center in the Illinois DOC system. Sending 20 “emails” only costs $4. She can get them directly on her hand-held device we bought her!

You can find more information here: https://web.connectnetwork.com/communications/messaging/

Great news!! Alisha’s comrade and roommate Tanya got the funds for furlough through generous donations from y’all and local area churches!!! Tanya will be able to go home to spend some time with her mother Vickie!! Alisha sends her love and thanks for this quick mobilization of support!

As always we’re able to visit and do prison outreach through y’all’s monetary support and our sex work. If you want to make sure Alisha has funds for commissary, email, phone and visits please consider donating here: https://www.youcaring.com/alishawalker-1147127

Last week Red drove out to visit Alisha again, and LeLe had some new asks to share!

-She is so overjoyed by all the letters y’all send! If you’d like a response from LeLe in a timely fashion and in a manner that’s more comfy for her to write a lot using AND is the most affordable method on her end, please consider corresponding using Connect Network Messaging. You can search Alisha, or any other pen pal by their last name, and “offender number.” Alisha’s last name is Walker, Y12381 and she’s at Decatur Correctional Center in the Illinois DOC system. Sending 20 “emails” only costs $4. She can get them directly on her hand-held device we bought her!

Emails don’t work for you? No problem just let her know when you write and please keep sending those physical letters of love and support to LeLe at:

Alisha Walker – Y12381
Decatur Correctional Center
PO BOX 3066
Decatur, IL 62524

You can find more information here: https://web.connectnetwork.com/communications/messaging/

-LeLe has decided to investigate college programs!! She is looking into college correspondence classes that accept Second Chance Pilot Pell Grants currently and recommendations from any current or formerly incarcerated students! Please send along any info or insight you may have!

-She’s currently reading “Invisible No More” by Andrea J. Ritchie and says that it’s a “…damn difficult but incredible read.” She’s about halfway done right now and plans to write a short review!

-The prison is still limiting how many books she’s allowed to have at a time. So she’s still advising people to hold off on sending books as gifts HOWEVER she is in need of composition notebooks! These can be ordered via amazon and mailed to her mailing address listed above. The prison does not allow the “black and white” comp book cover style though. So if you’re feeling generous, please send any other cover color combo. We know…it’s a ridiculous policy. One of exceedingly many.

-The prison is still censoring her mail. It seems that her regular writers (Red included) are unable to send zines and photographs or lengthy letters anymore. We’ve been in direct correspondence with the mail room officers at Decatur, the property officers at Decatur and the intake staff. No one can give us a straight answer, if they even decide to respond. So if you are writing to Alisha, please try to send photos–let’s see if we can get some through to her!!

-LeLe sends her love and appreciation to everyone for continuing to support and encourage her to read, organize and resist during her incarceration.

Alisha was nervous about us driving in the rain. She called twice to check on us while we were on the road. It’s about three hours without traffic or under normal weather conditions. It took us a long while to reach the prison because the torrential downpour forced us to take it slow almost the entire way. Using phone calls (anyone who is used to how expensive and precious they are will tell you) to check-in on us was beyond considerate, and was not thrifty. It was touching to be checked-in on, something that we wish we could do for her, whenever the want or need to will arise. Unfortunately calls from prison are just that, from and not to. You have to wait to check up on your loved ones. When a few days go by and there’s silence, you are forced to infer the worst, because of the shitty prison mandated phone usage protocol.

The rain flooded the low roads practically the whole way to Decatur. It was nerve wracking and I felt terrible–we were panicking our friend.

We have not seen Alisha since her (incredible) Shakespeare performance in April and were beyond excited to catch up. We brought zines (Support Ho(s)e Year One, A Survivor: Alisha Walker, and Client & Co-Conspirator) as well as the comic book about our first visit with Alisha called “No One’s Victim,” published by Vice Versa Press, to try and include them in a property drop off (as a property officer had advised me over the phone) since the past four times we’ve tried sending them, they’ve gone missing. We also brought more money for snacks during our visit. As we pulled into the visitor’s parking lot it was really pouring. We grabbed all of our identification, cash, vending machine money card, zines and shoved everything down our shirts as we hurried in the cold rain toward the processing area.

I hate this place. We hate this place. Everyone should hate this place.

We walk in: “What’s that under your shirt?!” A CO yells out as soon as we come in from the storm. A has all of the precious print material we’ve brought for Alisha protected from the rain under his shirt. We look up, “it’s raining, they’re publications we’re dropping off.”  I’ve met these COs on duty at least half a dozen times and they still ask if I’ve visited before. I say yes, they hassle me about my expired driver’s license and my renewal print-off. They hassle us about the zines and comic. This really infuriates us. The zines and comic look “homemade” (they are). We can’t drop them off…we have to mail them in…only “publications” are admitted this way. I plainly explain that they were purchased (they were not) publications. They say that doesn’t matter. I ask what constitutes as “publication.” They say a professionally produced magazine or book. I explain about Vice Versa Press publishing the comic…they say it still looks “homemade,” and the won’t approve it. They tell me I have to mail them.

I raise my voice. I rarely do this.

“I have tried mailing them in. Four times.” They tell me I must be mailing them wrong…Then they look through them more and see a photo of LeLe that appears to be a screen shot of her during a video visitation. They start lecturing me on how this could get her a citation and list-off creative punishments if this is the case. I ask them if they’ve ever used skype or known someone who used skype before they were locked up. They didn’t get my inference so I said I didn’t take a pic of her during a video visit and removed myself from the intake area to go piss before the full screening/inventory. I splash water on my face, I look like shit. I am so fucking angry. We lock up the zines and comic in our locker with our IDs, and it’s A’s turn to take a piss. I go through screening first. The CO begins lecturing me again about video visitation protocol.  

I’m better at playing dumb and nodding this time.

She sends me through to a room where she touches my breasts and makes me take my shoes off. She grabs my hair bun and yanks, “just making sure!” …Of what, if I feel pain?

A is screened next, I can hear the CO who’s screening him offer a similar lecture. A is better at keeping calm, he always is. We go into the visitation room and LeLe’s wing mate is there having a visit with her brother, his kiddo and another friend. Alisha comes in shortly after this, a complete 180 from our last visit where we waited hours to see her after the play. The kiddo is very interested in us and Alisha for most of our visit, asking questions and dancing around, showing off her daisy barrettes that make truly wonderful sounds as she throws her head around dancing– they click and clack into each other.

We take a photo. We laugh wildly because LeLe sprang this on us, and quite frankly A and I were not our most photogenic–but of course LeLe was! She had on some gold eyeshadow she had made.

LeLe had her hair done-up differently, in a half-bun; it’s lighter, the sun bleaching it more and more because she’s been working outside, a new job cutting grass that she’s really liking because she’s left alone and gets exercise. She makes $30 a month doing (at least) 8 hour shifts per day, every day. She does the entire prison grounds over the course of the week. Essentially she gets $1 per day for her labor.

She’s giddy and nervous, in a good way. She likes a fellow visitor in the room and it shows. More on that when that fact doesn’t threaten either of them…

She spends the visit mostly talking about wanting to go to college, and talking about the research we’ve been doing on correspondence courses and how she can best get an Associates degree while inside. She updates us on what she’s reading, she’s deep into “Invisible No More” by Andrea Ritchie and she’s revisiting “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.” We talked about afrofuturist sci-fi (a genre she adores) and how she’s basically doing upper level college reading already. She reminds us she’s still got like 60 books from supporters for her birthday to go through, and how thankful she is for this.

As an aside–after she reads a book, she donates it to the prison’s library which is woefully understocked and most features self-help books (she despises these) and romance novels (she tolerates these).  

We talk prison medical treatment (we agreed it’s bogus to use the word “care” in relation to anything in a prison) and how fucked it is. She started taking birth control and now she really can’t stand chow hall meat. She’s been craving fruit and juice and yogurt. Things she can only get when we visit and buy them from the vending machines…and that’s if the machines are stocked. Thankfully they are, so we can. She gets her fruit and yogurt fix.

We do our normal organizing debrief to wrap up our visit, filling her in on project ideas, taking cues and inspiration from her thoughts. We talk about the other folx we’ve been talking to inside and what they’re thinking and feeling. She reports back on her contacts some more. It’s like working with someone who can read your mind or at least anticipate the capacity/building/organizing needs. It’s pretty fucking remarkable. That’s gotta be what’s meant by the saying “find your people.” She says she’s ready to be free–she’s been ready. She’s “got work to do.” 

– Red 

Look at our beautiful comrade! This photo was taken for Mother’s Day and the prison finally released it to us!

Learn about her case here: https://vimeo.com/255412331

Support her here: https://www.youcaring.com/alishawalker-1147127

Sign our petition for her clemency here: https://www.change.org/p/bruce-rauner-clemency-for-criminalized-survivor-alisha-walker

I really anticipated not being able to write a reflection that would be of much value after this visit.  I was excited to see my little sister light up a stage, as I expected she would, and she did.  It occurred to me that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the first Shakespeare play I could recall seeing staged professionally, a kind of symmetry which is interesting, but so distant now that any comparison would be irrelevant.  I thought about how Shakespeare has mostly been burdensome to me, reading Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar in high school, mostly deftly avoiding The Bard in college, holding the hand of the love of my life through a couple of performances at the sadly departed Oracle Theater, being forced to teach him to university students in New York this coming Fall…in all, not much connection to speak of.  Alisha was excited, that is really all that mattered, and I had every suspicion that her excitement would translate to the stage.  But that I would be able to translate that excitement of hers, the only real curiosity or interest I had in the production at all, was far more in question.  As it happens, there was more than enough to share, and the best antidote to my own Shakespeare skepticism to date.  But more on that shortly.

The prison really is a wholesale despicable institution, which ought to have been made more than clear over these previous entries.  The check-in process for what is obviously a mass of visitors, many of whom are entering the prison for the first time, is completely asinine and reflects the open disdain of the institution and its staff for the people (and anyone associated with them) therein.  More than an hour after the supposedly mandatory, strictly enforced entry time, we are shaken down and then herded in groups to the auditorium.  We see a barren garden space, and a variety of other facilities which are vacant and disused due to funding cuts and general neglect.  I cannot help but imagine myself in one of the empty meeting rooms, lecturing college credits in one subject or another, and am stricken that I could not do so even if I lived in proximity.  The local university which co-sponsors this project must have a flock of adjuncts who would jump at the chance for more work, and—here I speak from direct experience—the opportunity to teach an especially motivated student body who can truly benefit from quality instruction.  But, alas.

The theater’s only decoration is comprised of a few religious tapestries, assumedly sewn by prisoners at some point, enforcing a broadly Christian uplift, “Christ loves his daughters,” and that sort of pabulum.  The ironies of Christ, himself a death row prisoner, used as inspiration or solace for these very flesh-and-blood inmates, forced to squander their energies in the name of the state’s wholly backwards notions of “rehabilitation” and “paying a debt to society” are beyond gauche—they are aggressively sacrilegious.  

The stage and wings curtains are irresistible to these incarcerated women who are bubbling over with anticipation, not least because they are in a costume other than the one the state has deemed appropriate for their confinement.  They poke their heads through at intervals, disavowing every Broadway convention, waving to their audience and pointing out faces to join to names, promises kept, reunions nigh.  Some of these families and loved ones have seen their absent mothers and daughters and sisters in nothing but drab polos and scrubs-like pants for years.  Today they wear dresses (like our Alisha), or men’s trousers with suspenders, or, in an entirely convincing bit of gender fluidity, a construction worker’s outfit, including an expertly-traced mustache and beard.  I could not have been alone wondering how a couple of men were allowed to be in the cast, so carefully and convincingly were makeup and costume applied.  Alisha warned us that some of her fellow dancers were a bit…understudied…and I braced for the director’s introduction, which could go a few different ways, most of them bad.  What we got was mercifully brief, focusing on the efforts of this cast and the students who had helped stage the production.  I exhaled at the lack of condescension and braced for a staging of my own partner’s favorite play, basking in the good will and cheer of so many who shared the same wound of absence, the sting of which these few hours would reduce at least temporarily.

In a word: it was good.  I am writing this at all because it was really, truly good.  These women seem to realize—through hard, terrible, hourly reminders—that this is a singular opportunity, and if they do not exploit it to the fullest, they will regret it.  Or perhaps they have all learned to act due to some other exigencies, some alternative dramatic requirements.  I can only use my sister’s experiences as a guide, but judging from those, I know well that one is forced to give private and semi-public performances constantly inside these walls, which are designed as much to shield the inside from the outside as the other way around.  You act for a spectrum of COs who are openly hostile and racist, pretend both to themselves and you that they want to be your friend, try to fuck you and then brutalize you for fucking anyone else, treat you as the subhuman that the system has decided you are, often all wrapped up in the same person.  You act for paternalistic wardens who cannot decide between using saccharine platitudes about rehabilitation or stentorian, cinematic, marshal discipline.  You act for your fellow inmates, friend and enemy, confederate and accomplice, snitch and elder, lover and indifferent.  You act for yourself, whatever you need to be that day or hour, isolated in seg, forced into community at mess, literally enslaved at work.  Alisha acted on the outside too: she was a worker and right up until and through the role changing from service provider to prospective Black sex worker homicide victim, she understood her roles and acted with aplomb.  I do not have to imagine very far that these women who share the stage with her all have analogous versions of the same.

So it is not that I am surprised that they have some predilection for acting, exactly.  I am not all that shocked that they hit their cues, their blocking, they recall all the lines nearly without fail; good acting is like that, you forget somewhat that it is being performed live at all.  What surprises me—leaves me gobsmacked, would be an apt descriptor—is the exercise of what has been left to each actor’s discretion.  The principal actors’ line delivery is little less than revelatory; it never before struck me how much annoyance and frustration could be bound up in a Shakespeare play.  Many of these women are essentially shouting their lines, spitting out the syllables at fever pitch emphasis, challenging one another to find the next emotional register.  In a play with relatively little actual fighting and death, Puck’s mischievousness is given a nefarious edge, the two “male” leads are violent not just which each other but with their chosen and unchosen paramours, and Nick Bottom is portrayed so uniquely in his boorish effulgence that I will not be able to consider the character without reference to this performance ever again.  So, again: it is good.  But it is something else, an excess of the words on the page and the usual Shakespearean innuendo and narrative tautness.  It is, for lack of a more immediate term, an expression of longing which is palpable without becoming maudlin or overwhelming the play itself.  If I were prone to discerning magic in such a place, which I have been trained not to be, I would see the walls of the small auditorium crack and shudder at the force of the line readings, the COs’ legs buckle at the explosive passions portrayed before them, the warden’s head bowed down at the madrigal music, hundreds of years and thousands of miles divorced from its designed context, issuing from the back of the hall.  But the only magic which endures is that which recommits me to destroying these institutions, and the fire in the eyes of the young woman onstage about whom I have come to care so dearly.

Speaking of which, the performance continues long after the curtain drops.  We are in line for photographs with our beloved actress, and when we attempt to get quick duo shots in each combination of the three of us with her, Alisha and mine is deemed excessive.

If there is any cosmic justice in a universe that would place this haughty, sickly condescending woman as master over these others, then she has made a grand mistake.

I know Alisha is emotional in that she is empathic and extremely sensitive to the needs, wants, and triggers of those around her.  I have known her in love, in despair, in optimism (nearly unflappable), in muted sadness.  But anger, truly personal, raging anger, not until now.  The expression of “fire in one’s eyes” is hackneyed to meaninglessness and it may yet be proven that it was some trick of the light in that auditorium, but I saw in those eyes an enflamed scene of a great, righteous hand contacting each outstretched digit at once against the smug, ridiculous face of the master in a ‘POP!’ that would have reverberated for a full second in that theater.  Saved from certain assault by the prospect of months in isolation and an extended sentence that would keep my sister from a niece and nephew born since she was inside, as well as all the critical work she needs to be outside to do, I have to believe the warden will carry an ember of the hatred she sparked in this young woman who on the one day she was able to look something like she desired requested an additional photo and was denied.  We have since learned this warden was walked out of the place by officers in disgrace, and I am forced to reconsider my view of magic in Decatur Correctional.  I hope her cheek itches eternally where that right hand might have scratched it.

The post-show visit itself nearly did not happen as we waited the better part of an hour to be released from the auditorium, and then another for the guards to notify Alisha once we made it into the visiting room.  Most families were turned away from visiting at all, which was wrenching, and had we not come from so far I would have requested that we let some others take our place.  But it is nearly impossible not to be selfish with our modicum of time.  You know what happens next, a queer combination of a heart swelling and then fracturing, breathing in the moments which I hope I am soon given license to forget, replacing them with sitting side-by-side at a bar, or on a beach, or texting silly or important things at will.  But today I was inspired in an unexpected way, and that is worth recalling at the instants when my own creative life feels threateningly vacant.  It is cause for hope that the worst that can be done cannot extinguish what is, yes, magical in these caged women.

-AH

This weekend we got to celebrate with Alisha as she nailed her performance in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream! This year she acted instead of playing cello in the band! (She tried to do both, because of course she did.)

We’ll have visitation reflections as soon as we can…though it was an amazing performance, the COs and Warden were in extra terrible form for this visit. We all dealt with the painful reminders of what prison is (isolating, regulating, surveillance, violence, etc) even on a rare day of artistic expression involving folx both on the in/outside.

Alisha and her fellow performers/prisoners were truly inspiring in their rendition of this play. We are so thankful to have been able to travel from NYC and Chicago to see these performers light up that stage.

Here’s to more plays and no more prisons.

Alisha Walker is a 25 year old sex worker from Akron, Ohio. In January 2014 when she was 19 years old, Alisha was attacked by a client, Alan Filan, in his Chicago home. Filan had become angry when Alisha refused unsafe services, punching her in the face before grabbing a knife from the kitchen. Alisha managed to wrestle the knife from Filan, stabbing him. Filan was found dead in his house three days later.

Alisha was arrested and charged with second-degree murder despite no physical evidence being recovered. At her trial, the prosecutor portrayed Alisha as a manipulative criminal and spoke disparagingly about her profession. A jury convicted her of second-degree murder, and Alisha was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Alisha is in prison for self defense and because sex workers are treated as disposable. As groups like Support Ho(s)e and the Sex Workers Outreach Project assert, sex work is work, and sex workers have a right to safe working conditions, bodily autonomy, and self defense.

The group Support Ho(s)e Chicago has rallied around Alisha, organizing rallies and providing emotional and material support. Alisha’s legal team is appealing her sentence. Her supporters are asking people to join in a petition drive and letter-writing campaign to Illinois governor, Bruce Rauner and to send messages of support to Alisha.

TAKE ACTION!

Sign the petition for Alisha here: https://www.change.org/p/bruce-rauner-clemency-for-criminalized-survivor-alisha-walker

You can access information for letter-writing and other ways you can support Alisha at https://twitter.com/supporthosechi or at https://www.facebook.com/StandWithAlisha/

She is such a positive force in our lives and she should be free to heal and grow with her friends and family! #SurvivedAndPunished #FreeLeLe

Today we will celebrate Alisha’s resistance, her strength to survive and fight her criminalization. Please consider supporting her with one or more of the ways below:

GIVE directly to Alisha’s commissary: https://www.jpay.com/PMoneyTransfer.aspx
Alisha’s Inmate# Y12381 and the state is IL

DONATE to her family fund here: https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/alisha-walker-survived-and-punished–2

SEND BOOKS by checking out her wishlist: https://www.amazon.com/registry/wishlist/1N7KZRAVXH19Z/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_ep_ws_OFSuAb7BA926P

WRITE to her:
Alisha Walker – Y12381
Decatur Correctional
PO BOX 3066
Decatur, IL 62524

On Monday, February 12th we will be beginning a new online campaign for Alisha with the help of Survived and Punished and folks from Barnard Center for Research on Women – BCRW. We will celebrate Alisha’s birthday this coming Sunday and the next day launch into a petition and letter writing drive demanding clemency for LeLe.

This couldn’t come at a more crucial time for Alisha. She is being targeted for harassment by COs and her mother Sherri is still being barred from visitation. Alisha constantly challenges tickets she is given, writes grievances and reports on her harassers. For this she is consistently re-targeted.

Stay tuned for how you will be able to help circulate petitions, write the IL governor and continue supporting Alisha and other criminalized survivors.

On February 11th LeLe will be celebrating her 25th year around the sun. Unfortunately, she will be spending in behind bars. We are organizing so that this is the last birthday she will ever have to spend incarcerated. Support Alisha. Support Survivors. Support Sex Workers. Help us celebrate our comrade a few different ways:

GIVE directly to Alisha’s commissary: https://www.jpay.com/PMoneyTransfer.aspx
Alisha’s Inmate# Y12381 and state is IL

SEND BOOKS by checking out her wishlist: https://www.amazon.com/registry/wishlist/1N7KZRAVXH19Z/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_ep_ws_OFSuAb7BA926P

WRITE to her:
Alisha Walker – Y12381
Decatur Correctional
PO BOX 3066
Decatur, IL 62524

DONATE to her family fund here: https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/alisha-walker-survived-and-punished–2

What it gets you:

Knowing the enemy and which is the weaker sex.  “I have been around men for too long” to be taken advantage of ever again.  She can be afraid and she can be wrong, she can be beaten and, apparently, caged, but only for so long.  There is no further margin of error, and the learning curve which takes some of us decades, an entire adulthood, or longer than a lifetime, seems to have been eclipsed.  She knows which COs beat their wives, sleep around, are powerless in their state-sanctioned power (nearly all), are powerful in their understanding the tenuousness of their position in this microcosm of social control (perhaps one or two; they’ll resist the least when their backs are literally up against the wall).  She knows what they do behind the barbed wire, bulletproof plexiglass, office doors, and cell walls.  The white officers are simply reproducing constructions of whiteness well-remembered from the outside world, playing a part which is now one with their identity, worldview, and even faith.  The Black and Brown officers are no longer confusing to her, either.  They are “dogs,” “rottweilers,” and she speaks to them in the language she knows they understand: “grrrr…arf arf arf!”  Hers is a look reserved for a special kind of dismissal—ain’t got time for any of that, where time is the main currency and there is at once an endless supply (inside) and an unfair and diminishing ration for all that ought to and must and will happen (outside).  The keepers are the animals here, they’re the underclass.  It gets you knowing who exactly is the enemy, clear as day and without exception, only degree of danger.

Long arms and longer lashes.  The tighter the confines, the harder fought the power; the more stifling the controls, the brighter burning the heroine.  Boredom and confinement might make you forget, for an instant or far longer, that you are a person and a (wholly undernourished) soul: bring your tired dramatics and petty relationship games to this woman at your own peril.  Clout is making sure you’re last in the food line, you don’t get your linens cleaned, no one speaks to you for days on end, commissary is suddenly out of necessities, or, should you press the issue, something more…corporal.  For the keepers, the stick being out of the question as the State still has the upper hand (at least regarding the body) in here, the carrot becomes the only recourse.  If the women officers have any pretense of heart or shred of empathic dignity left in their traitorous beings, then perhaps they appreciate friendship, being considered “on the level,” it makes their jobs less drudgerous and may make their sleep easier, allowing them to forget the despicable business in which they are engaged, that is, reproducing patriarchy and gender- and race-based enslavement at the behest of a master which would just as soon throw them beneath the same wheel, given a reason or opportunity.  The officers who share this happenstantial biological commonality with the inmates are subject to the false-but-never-saccharine wiles of women with relatively little to lose through momentarily suppressing their rightful hatred to exchange a pleasant word.  The men, as mentioned above, remain men.  A coquettish flip of the hair, a knowing batt of an eyelash, drawing upon the playbook which once extracted remuneration for services, all the same affects, gestures, tones, and caresses—literal as well figurative—operate in this universe.  You get a reminder of what you are capable of.

Grown up in the face of every incentive not to be.  If it seems incongruous to have it noted, as someone closer to forty than thirty, by a 24 year-old how much they feel they’ve grown, then just imagine being that 24 year-old and saying as much.  It’s difficult, to say the least.  It’s banal, and simply untrue, to assume that this place makes one “grow up fast,” or whatever other cliches might originate in the minds of creatives and content makers who have no firsthand (or even secondhand, as the case may be) experience.  People don’t grow up because they’re caged, threatened, starved, deprived, oppressed, discriminated against and criminalized; people can be every damn one of those things before they ever up inside, continue to be them during, and emerge again being equally so with the added albatross of a record which will hound their every move like a shadow.  Any growing up occurs due to the person themselves, and perhaps the company they keep and how they keep it.  The incentives not to grow are many: avoiding hurt when those you care for—inside and out—disappoint you, living up to what is expected of you by your keepers, trying to find some bliss in ignorance, making it easier to pick up where you have left off when you get back out, the last of which might make it seem like less time has passed and less has been stolen from you while inside.  So grow up at your own peril.  Forge relationships, cling to them and give them meaning, be hurt when disappointed, try to learn, and steel yourself for the next one while remaining open to its possibilities.  See through the whims and weaknesses of professional race and class traitors and bend them as much as you are able to keep yourself safe and in some relative modicum of comfort.  Be ready not to accept but to command the reality into which you will reemerge, not soon enough, but soon.

What it damn well doesn’t get you:

The culture you want, and that which you learn you need.  There is no one to show you what to read and how to read it, no matter how much time there is to do it.  There were no performances, no theater, movies, concerts, readings, galleries before entering, and there certainly are none here.  There is the vacuum of somehow better understanding how little you had and got to do before you entered, and how much more there must be outside of which you’re only dimly aware.  She played the cello, drew bow to strings and felt the resonance of the body against her hands and throughout her body.  She’ll act in Shakespeare, desperately absorbing the lines totally divorced from context or instruction, perhaps just the way they were designed to be learned those centuries ago.  She’ll defy every empty, self-contradictory platitude which holds that this is a place of rehabilitation rather than one of class control and publicly sanctioned extension of slavery.  All the culture she ought to absorb on the other side of this experience should reinforce that her life was worth living, and thus worth defending.

Automatically radical, all our prayers to the contrary.  The prayer is perhaps one for silver linings which cannot exist without tailors to sew them in.  Everyone who enters prison should become Mumia or Angela or Huey or Marissa or a Soledad Brother or Sister, dismantling the system brick-by-carceral-brick from within and then from without.  But that ain’t how it works, any more than Black and Brown and poor white folks don’t become cops or workers organize and seize the means of production.  Class consciousness takes on an entirely different register when your class is prisoner, and no longer discriminates, or at least in quite different valences, according to where you’ve come from and what you know.  The responsibility of political education in this case falls to two white people from working-to-middle class backgrounds, who struggle to keep the lights on but will not go hungry, and will likely only be in front of judges on behalf of others or standing between vulnerable co-conspirators and aggressors.  If my heart sinks when she confuses communism with totalitarianism, it soars when she instantly comprehends what seems to take so many so long: this place does not need to exist if workers take care of each other, fighting alienation and distance from one another.  You can understand there is a better way far before embarking on the journey of figuring out how to achieve it.

What it takes from you:

Every damn thing it can.  It’s nearly limitless, and almost unchecked, and very few (though some very motivated) have a care in the world about it.

What you keep from it:

Your heart, stupid as that sometimes sounds.  If you make your heart inviolable to it—this almost insatiable, disgusting beast of punishment—eventually it seems like it gives up, which should give anyone who has ever needed it, hope.  I wonder if she sees in my watery eyes the reflection of the heart she has protected from it.  I wonder if she knows the unconscionable strength that has been required of her, or if it has become routine and does not mandate the same force of effort.  It actually doesn’t matter either way, at least not for the purpose of this brief guide.  What I see is a heart which has protected itself, so I am forced to conclude that is what you keep from it: you let it control your movement, your sleep, your diet, your communication with the outside world, your relationship to the inside world, because you have to.  You keep your love and the sense—nay, the certainty—that you’ll overcome and supersede it the moment you pass through to the other side of the barbed wire and evil brick for the last time.  It’ll be high heels and the life you now understand, if there was any doubt previously, that you deserve.

-AH

(This is the 6th visitation reflection from AH, from a visit on 1/3/2018.)

We drove through snowy desolate bullshit to see our friend on January 3rd.

Thankfully our visit lasted for over 4 hours and the heat was working in the visitation room at Decatur. Our conversation was stream of consciousness, chaotic, excited, it later morphed into reflection and pause while we imagined things to come. She had a lot of news for us, as we had for her.

Shakespeare auditions and rehearsals are on the horizon. Alisha is beside herself with happiness over this. She is determined to act this year, and if they let her, also perform cello. She’s vying for the “lead horny guy” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she says, Lysander. I know this play well but all of us get stuck on his name. We list off all the characters and count them trying the account for each and it occurs to us how absurd and hilarious this activity it. We’re talking Shakespeare inside. Dope. We laugh.  

There’s some pain too though, but it’s coupled with a resoluteness. Alisha has just (again) separated from her partner. So-and-So had become whorephobic and jealous, not wanting LeLe to write to pen pals who might offer some monetary security. LeLe put her foot down: “If she can’t handle this small hustle while I’m in here, how the hell is she gonna be when I’m at work outside?!”

This lead into a discussion where she outlined the way in which other folx inside have been latching onto drama in the face of boredom or lack of control, constant picking at each other, getting people “sexuals” (the term for getting a ticket or citation for suspected sexual activity). But beyond this, the social minutia, the rumors etc, have been freaking Alisha out, and as a result she’s been isolating herself from others. In talking about tickets we started to discuss her active grievance writing against a number of COs who have been continually harassing her. She caught a goddamn ticket on Christmas. These sorry assholes wrote her a ticket on Christmas! She elaborated by listing their names and aggressive behaviors. She said the Black and Brown COs (like cops on the outside) exhibit worse behavior toward inmates. This really infuriates and depresses Alisha, and we talk about the way that white supremacy and abuse of authority creep into people (specifically cops/COs/detention workers etc). The political climate is confusing and terrifying to her, she brings up hearing about Trump and the Kim Jong-un bickering and threatening each other, she asked, very seriously,  if we would be safe in NYC, because the North Korean leader had alleged his warheads would reach the east coast. This was a truly bizarre moment, very surreal.

We then discussed Cyntoia Brown’s case, LeLe wants to send words of love and support and is frustrated by the lack of rights prisoners have with regard to writing to one another. She also can’t write her cousin jay because the warden has deemed he isn’t “immediate family.” We talk hunger strikes in North Texas prisons, the heating going out in Tennessee detention centers. I tell her about other prisoner actions planned around MLK Day. I’ve told her about DRIVE (DEATH ROW INNERCOMMUNALIST VANGUARD ENGAGEMENT) long ago but it never ceases to be such an amazing example of inside organizing.

This spurns a whole take-down of complaints about prison policy. Apparently Mp3 players are going away, the prison will be moving to tablets, which means no more buying music. The only option will be a very expensive Pandora subscription for $32 a month. Alisha has already said fuck that. She’ll stick to her radio. There are still no college classes being offered. The COs we ask on our way out are less than unhelpful about timelines. The only functioning program is the dog grooming work and it has an exceptionally long waiting list. Alisha can’t get work. Which means she can’t earn days. This climate has cause rumors to circulate. Rumors about time served laws, for every 1 day you get 7 back? No one at the prison has been able to confirm anything to her.  

In 11 days, it will be the half-way mark before parole. This means it will have been a full 4 years of incarceration for LeLe. Her birthday in also upcoming on February 11th, she’ll be turning 25 years young. This prompted us to recount how we found out about her case, and we all shared this moment of shaking our heads in disbelief. She’s family now. We have big plans for a new campaign launch on her birthday. She’s excited for our collective actions to come.

Then came the rush of “freedom plans.” Tattoos, movies, swimming, choreography, fashion design, this intense creative energy, travel, take out a goddamn credit card! We laugh as we brainstorm all the possibilities. She’s committed to organizing, and as she calls it, “giving back.” “I wanna be in the streets with y’all. I wanna show them I won’t be broken. I wanna free people.”

Her creative energy is palpable. She was able to release property to us, a poster, which won second place in the DV Awareness month poster competition the prison held. The irony was not lost on all 3 of us. Second place because, the survivors breasts were too big. “I made her too thick like me, and they haaaaated that, but it was too fire not to place.” On the poster are the words strength, support, Survived & Punished, Black & Pink, among others.

We update her about Sherri, her momma, having to send another letter to the warden about visitation. The prison still hasn’t reconsidered Sherri having access to visits to be with Alisha. We talked about communism, socialism and anarchism. A lot. (insert tilted laugh/cry emoji)

Her former pimp is now in Cook County she tells us, Alisha celebrates his comeuppance. I’m conflicted. I hold her hand, happy that she feels like he can’t access her in any way, but devastated another person has been added to the county’s cages.

It was around this time that one of the counselors walked by, she’s notorious for backing up COs, always siding with prison, and never believing Alisha or her fellow prisoners when they challenge the tickets or try to file counter statements.  

LeLe asked for a full run-down of the December 17th actions for International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. We reported on the vigils in Brooklyn and in Chicago. We shared that her poem was read in both cities to mourn and express collective rage. We talked about rallying for Yang Song and how the NYPD was responsible for her death.

As our visit drew to a close, Alisha shared that she was really beginning to see her priorities come into view; she could feel her own personal growth. She nodded decidedly, saying that she knew what she was about. She used the words solidarity, supported, loved and powerful to describe her various states of feeling. We hugged a lot. We blew kisses. And we were back out into the frustrating landscape of nothing.

-Red 

We heard from Alisha earlier today. Decatur’s medical unit is refusing to give her a blood test to screen for the cause of severe joint pain and swelling she’s having for no damn reason. Offering her advil only, not approving doctor visits even tho she’s paid to see one. She described unbearable pain when speaking to Red on the phone today. We are beyond enraged. We may be asking folks to call the warden soon if Alisha hasn’t been given an appointment for blood work by the end of the week.

Pictured here are our xmas presents to her based on her requests (she loved them!). All in all Alisha was in good spirits and looked great! We were able to spend just over 4 hours catching up and she was able to do a property release for a poster she created for domestic violence awareness. It’s beautiful, heartbreaking and powerful. She also gives a s/o to Survived & Punished and to Black & Pink Chicago on it!

We’ll be posting photos of that piece of art and visitation reflections soon! Stay tuned!

Perhaps this is the difficult center now.  The span when the drive down doesn’t seem so long, and we know the highway exit names, when we inadvertently make the same stops on the way down, and deliberately on the way back.  We do not need to bring any particular agendas to see Alisha, and there are no updates directly related to her case which would bring any particular solace, just the same resounding unfinished finality of the lawyers: don’t call us, we’ll call you.  They do not like to lose, sure, and they like good press, of course, but they also do not like to waste their time on menial concerns like the well-being of their clients or the campaign to release her.  We could tell her about the horrors and casualties of the continuing war against those who participate in the same vocation she did a few years ago, the one that nearly got her killed and for which the state continues to try to drain her vitality by inches.  We can always update her on our lives, or talk about her family.  Discussing what the other side of the razor wire and brick, away from the glacial, witless, unfeeling monsters who personify the banality of evil and keep vigil over her every move here is more enjoyable when it is a dream of what we will all do together.  So we, my other component part and I, can ride down without concern over how we will pass the hours.  That is not the difficult part.

The longest timing nightmare yet, which delays us multiple hours and is frustrating beyond any simple expression, is not really the difficult part either.  There is little they can do at this point in service of keeping us from our LeLe which surprises me, though perhaps the guard who watched as I inverted my shoes and who smoothed my pants over my inner thighs actually caught a piece of my gritted teeth in his eye.  Maybe he’ll go home wondering what the overdressed white boy was so pissed off about, and experience the dawning realization that he participates directly in an industry which destroys his own people, is in fact fueled by making them into criminals, defining them as such, and throw himself in anguish off the roof of his apartment building.  Perhaps unlikely, but I’ll grit my teeth and cast fire out of my eyes directly into his just the same.  I don’t think I could take him, so at best he’d have a broken nose, I’d be beat within an inch of my life and meet him again in court.  The defense of “resisting institutional racism” coming out of my counsel’s mouth, while satisfying and accurate, is improbable.

So part of the difficulty is Alisha herself: effusive, truly interested in my life the same way I happened to take an interest in hers those months ago, and, for want of a better term because it remains nearly unthinkable to me how she remains so: alive.  Our time with her has been shaved to the very quick, it is as much as I can do to hop up and get some palatable food for her and exchange a few laughs before we’re forced back out of the door and to the car.  

I am writing this reflection on December 17th, which is at once fitting and at the same truly dispiriting.  How many other industries require a day to end violence against them?  How many other lines of work require so much skill and emotional labor, harm no one, in fact help many, and face the sort of stigma, censure, harassment, and threat of physical danger as this one?  I would actually prefer if my mental inventorying could yield even one, so that I might consider how its lessons would benefit my friends, loved ones, and those more distant with whom I stand in solidarity, sadness, anger, and, ultimately, resolve.  But I do not think another such industry exists.  So each next embrace with my adopted little sister gets a little longer, and a measure more difficult to detach.  I could say I would sit in those small, dirty rooms and eat that rotten food, stare at the painted brick walls and seethe at my captors who will go home to their miserable-but-technically-free lives after ending watch over my expansive-but-confined existence, but LeLe would never allow that even if it were possible.  So what exactly grows more difficult, if not the ride down, the red tape and the despicable congeniality or dismissiveness of the COs, the conditions I observe someone I care about trapped in, the unjust and almost surreal reasons they are there…?

It’s the ride home.  It is looking in the rearview and not seeing Alisha in the back seat, flipping her hair out of her face and cackling with laughter, raising up her mouth in a playful pout or her eyebrows in a serious “you know I’m not messing around with that” expression of disbelief.  It’s when her voice doesn’t echo in my ears anymore as I turn the key and return to all my own troubles and obstacles, minor triumphs and great joys, earnest attempts to make the world into which Alisha will someday be re-delivered even an iota better, and occasional realization that though it will remain in many ways awful, it will certainly benefit from her presence therein.  Because right now her most active existence outside is in the thoughts and transmitted words of her friends and family.  And I am sick to the back teeth of having to dream about someone as if they’re dead or, closer to the current case, unborn, when I know damn well they’re in a small room, in a place that shouldn’t exist, for reasons that never made sense to begin with.  It’s the vacant back seat that gapes back at me for being too much of a coward to break my sister out, or at least too impecunious and lacking the influence to hasten her release.  It’s where Alisha isn’t that is the difficult part now, and it gnaws at me.

We stood in small circle tonight, the sex workers and I, in Transmitter Park off Greenpoint Avenue, in Brooklyn, by the water.  We wore a lot of black and some red, because we were attending a vigil and a remembrance.  As such, we were sad, but it was important to show one another we were strong as well.  We told stories of workers we had lost, either to death, the state, the medical industry, or to time.  There were three candles in red glass in the middle of our circle, and Manhattan observed us from across the water with its millions of people, and I felt small, as one does and is meant to in the city.  I could not help but think about how the water on the other side of the island held Marsha, and how Sylvia had lived along its shore for a dark interval.  These people, in this circle, were and are not desperate, and they neither required nor rejected my shared sorrow and genuine care.  We heard Alisha’s poem and we held each other, literally and figuratively, because there wasn’t anything else to do.  We all held our own candles, and we trembled from the shared weight and the cold, but we did not bow.  I stared hard at the candles before we processed away, perhaps because I am frustrated when something seems so dearly to require explanation, even when the explanations are so well-rehearsed and unmysterious, and so it is pointless to explain.  I am frustrated by pointlessness, and unwarranted death.

For the moment, though, I’ve had entirely enough of my time without Alisha being free, and, though I know it is no proxy, for all sex workers being free, from incarceration and the cloud of impending potential harm hanging over them.  I’m so lucky to have and have had you workers in my life, up close and from afar.  I miss you, LeLe.

-AH

How did I get here? What wrong did I do?

Defending myself? I guess was the wrong thing to do.

They said I should have laid down, that I should have gave up and quit.

Should have been a compliant little whore. Gave into a trick.

That I have no right to say no, I dont deserve to choose

“Shes nothing, shes useless, whats she going to do?”

My escorts, workers, my family, you feel my pain, as I do you.

Listen

They have a plan: “take away our little security,”

Kill us off, decrease our numbers, divide and conquer

But they forget, we are mothers, daughters, partners, and friends.

We have our own army.

We will never end! We’re survivors!

When you knock us down, it makes our skin tougher See….

We are a different breed

They fucking envy us! So they try to make us bleed.

We’ve lost so many in this war

Just to name a few 

Desiree  Robinson

Yang Song 

Alloura Wells

Sisi Thibert

Alphonza Watson

So listen up, We as a community have shit to do.

Stand! In solidarity!

Because this is a fight for our lives

WE WILL NOT LOSE!

Y’all! Solidarity all the way from Seoul, South Korea! Organizers from Survived and Punished traveled to work with Rainbow Action Korea, an amazing group of queer and trans activists, to do workshops on supporting criminalized survivors and they featured Alisha’s case!! We are so thankful for this support and love! Printing out these to send to LeLe asap so she can see that her struggle for freedom is global!

We got some good news, LeLe is doing alright and expects to be off of “D Grade” in just four days! That means she’ll be able to spend normal commissary amounts, receive and send electronic correspondence, and make regular phone calls again!

LeLe let us know that they received word that programs are coming back to Decatur starting January 1st. She’s not sure what they’ll offer yet but is hoping for college classes, though admittedly she says she’ll “take any and everything that they offer.” Programs mean contracts, and contracts can mean reduction in time inside–so this is exciting news on a couple of fronts. Especially since the State is still delaying its response to Alisha’s appeal.

She’s also celebrating her love’s birthday today! She was in good spirits to hear from friends and family and of course had tons of positive words and encouragement for us (because she’s always concerned first and foremost with her fam).

She sends her love to SxHx folx and everyone on the outside who’s keeping her in mind.

(image via SWARM; credit SWOU Sex Worker Rights Festival, Glasgow 2013)

We have some updates now about her “d graded” status. Even though Decatur COs have heavily restricted LeLe’s calls, commissary, access to gym/rec, and taken away her electronic correspondence she is doing okay with the support of others inside.

Sherri let her know how much money we’ve been raising and that folx on the outside still have her back. Alisha sounded good and in happy spirits even to be talking with her momma and to hear about all the events we’ve attended recently to talk about her case!

Alisha also let us know that the COs said her “d grade” should be over by September 10th. We’ll keep y’all posted if we need calls to put pressure on the prison to keep to this.

Erica, Aaron and I were visiting fresh on the heels of Alisha being released from Segregation; punished for articulating she would defend herself if attacked, and naming the COs who had been targeting her for continued harassment. We wanted to be sure to bring her some things to brighten the visit and made a stop to snag some magazines. None of us could remember how many we were allowed to bring, and of course the website for Decatur Correctional was of zero help. We grabbed Teen Vogue, Cosmo, Bust, Ms., and The Nation just in case. LeLe likes reading up on current events and fashion (she’s an amazing designer herself). Aaron has already ordered a couple of books to bring, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson and Theif’s Journal. So we were banking on bringing the whole shot in with us like we had done at Logan Correctional.

Our drive always takes us past racist/sexist billboards, corn and soy fields and lasts about three hours. Every time we make this trip, without exception, we complain about the city economies that establish themselves around prisons–the false promises of “good jobs” which entail keeping people in cages, working in the trade of dehumanization.

I was anxious like always to see my friend. I have memories of how bad some of my other friends had been roughed up while in “the hole” and I was nervous to see Alisha’s physical condition.

I saw the same damn COs I always see at that front desk. I remind myself not to fall into the learned convenience of smiling at their familiar faces. I never smile in that place until I see LeLe. When I’m getting shook down I explain again about my small orthopedic lift (one of my legs is shorter than the other) in my shoe. I shake my hair out to confirm I’m noting hiding anything in it’s tangles.

She’s escorted to us so much faster than usual! We all laugh and scoff when the CO makes Aaron sit across from LeLe instead of beside her–her self-professed hardcore “dyking out” coupled with the fact that Aaron is her “big brother,” is more than enough to make our eyes roll at this arbitrary rule.

We spend most of our visit talking about what kind of new aesthetic she wants when she’s free of this place. She wants a new long and wavy weave, maybe with purple and blonde highlights. She’s got big plans for body art–a full leg sleeve (a comprehensive piece that twists and turns on her curves). She wants to wear high heels every day, and she wants to walk out of that place wearing a long flowing white dress. I can see her in and with all of these adornments as she paints this picture for us. I love hearing my friend talk about things that make her smile and feel beautiful. I wish I could give her all those things right then. I hate that she has to wait, stuck with ill-fitting white tees and grey shorts.

We’re not allowed to go outside on the visitation patio even though it’s vacant and the weather is beautiful outside. They claim someone was caught having sex out there… “good for them if they got some” we all say. But it seems like a bullshit claim by the COs, another thing to take away. We talk about her love, her sneaky tat, how legit that vending machine cheesecake might be (turns out she’s pleased with it), family updates, what’s been happening on the outside, and finally the hell that is Segregation. I don’t mean to make our conversations sound linear, they are everything but. We bounce around, joke about music, she dabs when she’s showing off and playing around. It’s really something else to see someone laugh while locked up. Talk about resistance. 

Four hours flies by. It always does. We leave knowing the names of the COs who have been fucking with her, and having a better sense of just how insidious their policies can be regarding what inmates can/can’t say on phone calls or during video visits etc. We also leave knowing our grrrl is in love and resilient. She is full of fight and life and refuses to let that place stifle her. My next visit will likely be via the Video visitation service (I’m relocating to NYC) so I hug her three or four times, extra long, not wanting to let go. I already miss her before we’re out of the room.

I do not ever want to know this trip, completely.  I want the exits to remain foreign, the buildings along the way to stay strange.  I never want to recall that the first entrance to the parking lot doesn’t go anywhere, and so I’ll always be just about to pull into it, and then continue on to the actual entrance, the one that leads to the nearly vacant lot in front of a place full of cages, rules, dehumanization, sadness, and listless, wasted human love and energy.  I do not want to know how the lockers work as I watch others fumble with them, how to load money onto the little card to buy food for my friend while newcomers comment that there was nothing on the website about needing a five dollar bill to buy one, that I can only bring five books and periodicals (combined) for someone with nearly limitless time but no access to any sort of education whatsoever where she is trapped for surviving an attack on her life and for whom even the best representation imaginable is swimming upstream against a system which detests, numbers, and ultimately forgets her for being young, femme, black, poor, and a sex worker.  I hate that I recognize COs, other than in the way one simply recognizes enemies, and I hate that the visitation room is now familiar to the point where I can confidently comment that the selection of sugars, trans fats, and partially hydrogenated soybean oils I can fetch for someone whose normal daily intake is far worse is slightly more varied today, even though they are out of water, napkins, and sporks.

It’s a nice day, but we can’t use the patio, which seems to have been built and designed simply to give the illusion that people are ever allowed to be out of doors with their loved ones.  Alisha tells us two people were caught having sex out there, and so the assistant warden had to order it closed.  There are a lot of people here this Sunday to see family and friends, and one of the collective and I catch each other in the unavoidable station of emotional voyeurs as one inmate’s small children catch sight of her coming around the corner from the vending machines, screaming “mommy” and springing into her arms as only ones so motivated are capable.  It is at once an undeniably affecting scene and the site of absolute revulsion at the reminder that we perpetuate a society which mandates it will occur again and again, wrenching people apart and allowing them a gasp of air for a few hours to be back together, a heart-rending recidivism which is a natural side effect of a completely unnatural institution.

Alisha is Alisha, which is to say: a fucking beacon of passion, curiosity, swagger, and hope in the greyest possible fog against which for such things to persist. She is freshly out of segregation (a despicably fitting term for the entire enterprise), due it seems in no small part to our repeated calling and advocacy as we had planned this trip far in advance.  If there is a theme to our conversations today, it is something like psychological survival, as LeLe is a master at discovering exactly which buttons can be pushed and how hard, how to create a sense of power and authority of her own in the face of all the checks on her individuality and self-persistence which exist inside.  LeLe has carved out her personality, one honed in part by too long at County and a stint at a much “looser” facility, which left more room for interpersonal conflict.  She has a quick comeback for any situation (with another inmate, irritated by one of LeLe’s pranks: “You need a cape?”  “What would I need a cape for?”  “So you can be Super Mad!”) and looks out for her own.  She inserts herself “all up in” the guards’ business as much as she is able, knowing which ones are not to be at all trusted and the one (singular) who may actually help her out in a bind, the most recent being the prison staff hiding her writing supplies while she was in seg so that she had absolutely nothing to pass the time.  Her description of the initial descent into partial madness when put in isolation is frightening, but her ingenuity is almost more harrowing: she lets herself go off medications so that she withdraws and sleeps through the vast majority, even as they attempt to freeze her out with full blast air conditioning and no access to additional blankets.  She threatens, and then carries out, wadding up wet toilet tissue and jamming the vent just to stem the flow.  As we read stories of prisoners being burned alive in other states, this tactic is hardly surprising, simply a different twist on cruelty upon cruelty.

But what I am perhaps most struck by in the course of this visit is a different sense of a concept which in my experience often separates the best feminist/femme-centered activism from other activist spaces: radical care.  I am not personally aware of the origin of this phrase, either academically or within social justice activism, but I have been in a position to think about it a great deal as the collective has had its successes and challenges, and I’ve been given entree to a new world of incarcerated survivors and sex workers, looking after one another, sometimes heroically, in the wake of backpage and rentboy raids.  What I have come to observe is that radical care is not necessarily care which surpasses the kindness and generosity of which people of various means are capable.  Saving someone from a burning building or accepting blows and harms on their behalf may be a wonderful act, but it is not automatically radical care.  Neither do I see radical care as necessarily entailed in caring for one in radically awful circumstances, such as Alisha’s.  Again, our own purposes may be motivated by radical politics in conjunction with loving this person we have come to know, but this still does not strike me as radical care per se.  I believe, and my experience has come to suggest, that radical care is that given in spite of, in the face of, in excess of one’s own circumstances and person.  When someone says to check your feelings in organizing, they miss the point altogether: feelings are what it is all about.  It is feelings which govern my sense of injustice and transmute it into righteous anger, and it is feelings which allow me to even conceive of the peril and urgency of LeLe’s situation, or that of others who have survived and been punished, those whose day-to-day existence is seen as a threat which is to be avoided or extinguished.  Radical care must stem from an at least situationally increased capacity for feeling. What I have in mind here is, for instance, Alisha’s blossoming relationship with a fellow inmate, one she sees as seminal in her life as it is based on trust rather than possession, freeing her in a way which is obvious in her affect even as she describes traumas recent and past.  Radical care is endeavoring to love freely while not free, to feel beyond oneself, to be magnanimous in the truest sense.  Love does not trump hate anymore than right de facto trumps wrong, but a community built on radical care has capacities far beyond those of its component parts.  I am convinced LeLe will get through this time because she radically cares for her current flame, for her family, and for us.  Another component of radical care is memory: memory institutional, organizational, familial, and personal.  To choose one’s company is not a radical act unto itself, but to make them family often is, and Alisha describes the deep disconnection from her past which this time away has revealed, a thought at first chilling but ultimately just another fact which must be embraced, ignored, or succumbed to, and our friend seems to be progressing towards the first of these.  There are no other friends, there is no other contact.  There is immediate family and there is we three, nothing more, a clean break from 19 years of life which will not be renewed in the same form upon exit.  So whither memory?  I bring my darkest experiences into that place every time I shudder at the razor wire and the thick metal doors, buzzing as we enter one and then the next, each grimace I cast at the officers snickering at us from behind the inches of glass of which I wonder at the strength when faced with a heaved metal stool.  I think of when I have been most afraid, when I have been persecuted, and of course the comparison largely pales, but it gives me something to work from.  Alisha, on the other hand, must reach into a reservoir of care for herself, her lover, and those few of us on the outside fortunate enough to receive it when every sign, signal, and person around her shouts in her face that there is no care in this world, and you wouldn’t know what to do with it even if there were. Alisha’s care is radical care; the best we can do is reflect it and do our damnedest to maintain and ultimately return her to the outside world which truly needs her.  We’ll knock this system over with wit, guile, and strength, but we are damn well going to need feelings as well.

-AH

Alisha was in much better spirits during this visitation (aside from her cello performance) and that may have been due to the fact that she had been released from segregation after 5 days. A conversation with her mother, Sherri, resulted in her placement into isolation- not an incident, an altercation or any type of “misbehavior” on her part. We were afraid we may not be able to see her on Sunday, but with the help of some callers inquiring about Alisha’s whereabouts, she was released on Friday. Sometimes it only takes outside pressure from our comrades and a major law firm to help reverse a rotten decision. 

I was feeling pretty giddy on our way to Decatur Correctional since their visitation process is less arduous than Logan and the environment is a little less abysmal. After making a quick stop at a Barnes and Noble to grab a few magazines for our girl, the three of us sauntered into the building with our IDs and some cash for the vending machines. The amount of time it took to get from the entrance doors to the visiting room wasn’t much more than 5 minutes and Alisha met us almost immediately. There was a rendition of musical chairs before we could settle at a small, square table adjacent to the supervising C.O.’s desk. Aaron could not sit on either side of Alisha- the rule is women must sit across from male visitors. (I do not know how this would apply in the eyes of this facility for folks who do not fit into the gender binary or are/have transitioned). 

We jumped right into personal updates, stories, and conversations about Alisha’s desires and goals upon her release. Although Rauner finally passed a state budget, there is still a lot of catching up to do from the damage created over the past 2 years. Alisha dreams of cosmetology school and fashion design- honing her artistic abilities and getting creative with her hands. However, there are no such programs for her to enlist and she has been trying to keep busy through reading, working out, styling hair for other prisoners, and developing personal relationships with her roommates. She has even found a couple of C.O.s who make her life inside the prison slightly less intolerable. One of these C.O.s happened to be working the desk next to us and Alisha, much more at ease during this visit, was bantering back and forth and even joking around with her. This friendly exchange would not have been something we would have ever witnessed at Logan. Unfortunately, we were also given the names of C.O.s who have made Alisha’s day-to-day very uncomfortable and difficult- officers that have singled her out for harassment and bullying. Decatur has a documented history in regard to male prison guards abusing their position, so this is not abnormal behavior. 

During her time in segregation, Alisha was suffering from too much cold air blowing in from the cell’s vent. The cold air was causing her to tremble and shiver throughout the day and night and multiple requests for an extra blanket were denied. To relieve herself of serious discomfort, Alisha wadded up wet balls of tissue and stuck them in the vent- a trick that worked, to the dismay of the C.O.s. We then lamented over the recent news out of the St. Louis workhouse jail- prisoners calling out in desperation from the insufferable heat, extreme temperatures, and no A/C units. The St. Louis prisoners screamed for help out of the small windows, hoping folks along the closest public road would hear their calls. A video posted to facebook captured the voices inside the jail and A/C units have been installed- without temperature control, causing the opposite extreme of too much cold air. Red chimed in about the typical practice of prisons to use climate as a punishment- making folks miserable and prone to sickness and physical exhaustion. Shameful. 

Of course, we talked about Alisha’s family and how much she misses them. Since most of them live in Ohio, it is not easy for them to visit- it is both expensive and hard to get time off for the whole family. Alisha especially misses seeing her mother who has not been permitted to visit Decatur due to some arbitrarily enforced rules. Sherri has accompanied her family members for visits but has had to sit and wait in the car just outside the building. Another shameful and heartbreaking aspect of prison. The four of us considered ways of trying to convince Alisha’s family to relocate to Illinois so frequent visits and greater connection could be possible. We also guaranteed that Sherri would have an established solid support system if such a move was made. This led to an emotional moment of appreciation and pause for how lucky each of us was to have one another’s back. Alisha was in near tears while she disclosed to us how much we meant to her and her family and she insisted, “god must be watching out for me.” 

Throughout this visit there was plenty of shared food and soda from the vending machines- better food than Alisha can get from the cafeteria during meal times. We also spent more time laughing and joking- a clear indication of our strengthening relationships with one another. Our girl is quick witted, silly and much better at dabbing than myself (although my dabbing is done ironically, it’s still not good). Since the visitation room at Decatur is one large, open room (similar to Logan), you inadvertently witness incredible displays of raw emotion from the other prisoners and their visiting families. A couple of us caught one of these moments and I felt an intense sense of invasion into another’s very private encounter: a mother reaching out as her three small children rushed into her arms and an unrestrained release of emotional turmoil poured out of her. I could hardly imagine another type of situation that could produce the same magnitude of relief this woman felt when reunited with her loved ones.

Nearly four hours had flown by when we realized we needed to begin our trip back to the city. Before leaving, I collected a pair of Alisha’s shorts from the “nice” C.O. It is still unclear why she could not keep them- something about having one too many pairs than she is allowed. We all took turns hugging our friend and comrade and walked out of the room to check-out with another officer. Again, this process is simple and relatively pain-free compared to the medium security of Logan. The three of us, however, won’t be satisfied until she is FREE. 

-Erica

-Dab definition (urban dictionary): “Atlanta term used to describe dance move (bowing head into elbow) which represents confidence, accomplishment, and pride.”

We just got a call from LeLe! She has been released from Seg!

They released her a couple hours ago! She has been in there since Monday ( approximately one hour after her phone call with her mother). She said it was unbelievable cold where they had her, and it took days of pleading with them for her to get an extra shirt to wear.

They’re still citing that she sounded “threatening” on the phone when talking about the COs that have been targeting her for harassment. She was didn’t go into anymore details of the phone with Red and Sherri at this point, as a precaution.

Thankfully we will be able to visit the weekend after all!

She sends love to all those who called Decatur on her behalf to ask about her well-being.

We received word early this morning from Sherri, Alisha’s mother, that Alisha might be in Seg. We were finally able to get through to Decatur correctional to confirm this though they wouldn’t tell us when, why or for how long she would be removed from General Population and be in Segregation. This is typical, but still infuriating.

LeLe has been dealing with targeted harassment for some time now from two particular COs. She was telling Sherri about this bullying via the phone on Monday and was given a “ticket” (a written citation/infraction) for reporting on what was happening to her and naming the COs on this phone call.

We think that this ticket ended up resulting in her being put in Seg. We think, based on when the phone call took place that she was moved to Seg on Tuesday.

This is absolutely inhuman punitive behavior on the part of Decatur (which we have come to expect). No prisoner should be punished for reporting on their mistreatment! No prisoner should be put in Seg!

We are incredibly saddened by this and enraged. We had planned a weekend visit to see our friend and now are unable to do so. Seg visits are “no contact” visits, only allowed Monday – Friday from 10am until 2pm for 1 hour, conducted in tiny rooms with plexiglass and phone separating you from your loved ones. On top of that, you can’t bring your group to visit because of the room size. So only 2-3 (max) people are allowed inside the room.

They refused to answer Red’s questions about LeLe’s condition or “infraction.” They refused to answer any questions about the duration of the Segregation.

With funds that we raised from selling our zines Chicago Zine Fest, Alisha was able to purchase a small multi-media player from commissary! This means she can send/receive emails via jpay and listen to music! These things of course come at a cost and are very expensive but we’re so happy that she has music for the first time in ages!

Here’s a message she wanted us to share from her last email to her momma.

Getting updates from Sherri, LeLe’s momma!

The fam had a wonderful 6 hour visit with Alisha! Apparently LeLe held Voni (her new nephew) the whole time! She really appreciated her momma making the sacrifice to come down with the family even though the warden still won’t allow Sherri to visit Alisha (something we’ve been organizing around, but there’s very little to do since prison policy is arbitrary/petty).

Here are some photos from their trip thus far. Unfortunately the CO who was supposed to take visitation photos never showed up so Alisha’s family couldn’t get pictures with her even though the prison said they could.

Sending them all our love and well wishes for a safe trip back home.

This is a link to her fund, moderated by her mother Sherri: https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/alisha-walker-survived-and-punished–2/x/16154967

Please consider making a donation so that her family and friends can afford to visit her, and so that Alisha may be able to have necessary commissary funds.

Alternatively, you can find LeLe through the JPay system with her “offender number” Y12381 this way you can donate directly to her commissary. However, there are taxes/fees associated with donating this way FYI. 

While we wait for the state to respond to her legal team’s file for appeal we’ve gotta do all we can to make sure she know she’s not being disappeared. She’s not being forgotten.

Alisha should not be punished for surviving.

I spent the day preceding our visit being transferred around on the phone into oblivion, from one CO to a Major, to someone who was “supposed to know what’s goin’ on with that.” All the while biting my tongue, the inside of my cheek, hearing myself use a sickly sweet tone so they wouldn’t hang up on me—which is common practice if you at all let on you’re being mistreated or that they’re frustratingly ignorant. I said I was a member of the press, was bringing art students with me…I am directed to someone who will call me back later…

My goal: ensure that the three of us visiting our friend were in fact on the correct guest list for this special occasion. Unlike a normal visit, we couldn’t just be on the regular approved visitation list, no, we had to be on a special guest list this time.

The occasion: to see LeLe play cello (hell yeah, she plays like three instruments) in the “Shakespeare Corrected” adaptation of As You Like It (one of my personal favorite plays).

When the person who was “supposed to know what’s goin’ on with that” finally got in touch with me she said I needed to send an email verifying who I was along with the others. I did this. We sent 8 emails back and forth before it was apparent she would not confirm one way or another if one of us was on the list or not.

I was furious—hours of effort, still no answer. Were we about to drive three hours only to be turned away and miss our friend’s show? Something that she had been writing and calling about how dope it had been for her, getting to practice, rehearse, feel a little freer for those 4 hours a day. I’d have to wait until the day of our trip at 8am to try calling again to confirm these things.

I called, was transferred twice, finally got connected to a new Major (after being told to call back in 20 minutes) I had not spoken with previously. She informed me that the initial lists had been misplaced. She couldn’t find any information or record of our intended visit anywhere. My stomach dropped. I name dropped everyone I had spoke to, said how I understood “these things happen” (I simultaneously punched the glove box in front of me) but that the trip was crucial for me to bring these “students” to and that I had a deadline from an editor, could she “please make an accommodation?” It worked. “Whites whiting to whites,” who’s surprised? I used the only language I knew would convince this person. She conceded and would leave all of our names at the front with passes; we would be allowed to see the production. I felt fucking angry and gross and like I should get a goddamn Oscar. I was also relieved. We wouldn’t miss seeing LeLe.

The experience getting inside the prison was also vastly different this time. The front lobby where screening and signing-in take place was teeming with people. Tons of families and friends had come to see the production. It was chaos. None of the COs knew what to do, each looking at the other, shouting blame, waving people through in varying degrees of being checked-in. We were some of those fortunate. I name dropped the Major, said our passes were waiting, they interpreted this as us being volunteers for the production. We nodded when they implied this. We went through without being screened. Without being shook-down. I had to roll down C’s sleeve on her shirt, but shit, that was it. This was new and uncharted territory for us. We were silent in disbelief as we walked through the corridors toward the auditorium.

Once inside the auditorium there were no COs around at all. We erupted:

“Holy shit!” “What did you tell them on the phone?!” “We could have brought a phone in!” “We could have brought shit in for our girl!” “Fuck that was weird!”

It took a while for us to settle down. We were watching the women busy themselves with costumes, the set, setting up the mics, the lights, talking with each other. The auditorium was small, but we were all amazed it existed at all. There was a nice size stage, with backstage area, auditorium seating (like in a movie theatre) and a dark red crushed velvet curtain. The women performers would peek out from behind the curtain and wave. It was weird. It felt like we were in a high school or college, not a prison for just a few hours. We were informed (by a really lame, “do-gooder” as Michele Wallace would call him) that after the performance we would be able to visit with our friends and family and take photos (to be purchased with commissary of course) in the auditorium without them having to be stripped searched and escorted into the visitation room. Our collective hearts leapt!

We got to see LeLe before the show began with her cello and the rest of the production’s band. She was beaming. They were set up at the back of the house, and the final light adjustments were made, the do-gooder spoke about himself from the front of the house, and then the show began. It was a very full house, babies and extended family, abuelas, cousins, aunties, all got to see their fam give a truly incredible performance.

Alisha played that giant cello, her long resonant bowing creating these deep beautiful sounds, leading the band.

The pride you feel when you see your friend totally fucking slay is a damn good feeling.

I’d be remiss not to say that I have seen this particular play performed professionally and by amateur but nonetheless trained actors at least a dozen times (I got a damn degree with a focus in Shakespeare studies) and this production put all those to shame. These women lit that stage up. We were laughing, so hard we cried. We were clapping, so hard our hands hurt. My face hurt so bad just from grinning so damn much. Seeing good theatre is one thing, seeing people who aren’t meant to feel good, feel good, that was unreal. The poise, the hood, the understanding of all those lines, they fucking blew us all away. I’m still thinking of the stage presence between Orlando and Rosalind. Pure magic.

The play ran about two hours without an intermission. When it ended we all gave a standing ovation, they had to do another full curtain call cause none of us would calm down or cease clapping! It was amazing. After an announcement was made again about getting to mingle it was like two giant waves crashing and collapsing into one another. Us pouring from the audience onto the stage, the women jumping down off the stage and rushing toward us. Alisha ran back stage to deposit her cello, we hugged and hugged, we got to take hilarious photos (overpriced but we were gonna put more on her books soon anyway and who knew the next time an opportunity like this would happen). I was heartsick Aaron couldn’t be with us for this, so was Alisha.

We sat in the auditorium talking with her friends inside and their families for another half hour. LeLe was telling us about some new dirt, updating us about getting fired from the kitchen because she was “fraternizing too much with the Black inmates.” Yeah. That was a real fucking thing a CO said to her. She lost her job because this racist CO didn’t like her talking with her friends. Of course she was livid. She talked a lot about how cool the experience of the play had been. At one point the artistic director, a lady do-gooder, came up and said hello, Alisha told her how awesome this was, that she wished they could do plays all the time, that it helped, a lot, and the do-gooder replied, “Well you can do it again next year!” I shot back, “No, not if she’ll be free by then. That’s our goal, getting her out of here.”

Back to reality. This is a prison. Our friend won’t get to do anything else remotely like this. That do-gooder gets to redefine these folks by their being trapped here. Our next visit won’t be like this. This is a one shot deal.

We talked until we were told we had to leave, which was way too soon. We hugged a lot more, blew a lot of kisses as Alisha had to return to her block. We waived until we turned a corner and couldn’t see her. Standing in the parking lot, changing back into clothes we preferred, we smoked cigarettes and marveled at the bizarre experience. I responded to a text from a friend who was dealing with some whorearchical garbage from a fellow sex worker, tweeted an update about our visit, and googled the nearest Culver’s for our car-dinner.

On the drive outside of Decatur we wondered out loud about what it would be like, if say you did fuck up, harm somebody, whatever, and you were just compelled to learn Shakespeare and talk to the people you harmed. It was a weird and abstract conversation but it was us trying to process and translate our impressions about what had just happened, how different it felt—up to a point.  -Red

     I was not able to make it to our last planned visit- the first visit to Decatur, following Lele’s transfer from Logan- so I was beyond excited to hear we would be watching her in a theater performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

     None of us knew Lele had played the cello when she was younger and the prison wasn’t even sure they would be able to host the performance until some last-minute monetary donations were made (see: Rauner State Budget). Shakespeare Corrected was inspired by Shakespeare Behind Bars program in Kentucky and their mission is to “create a theatrical experience intended to inspire transformation and redemption in students, participants and their families.” Alex Miller is responsible for this particular program at Decatur Correctional Center, and he made sure to drill that information into the audience when he delivered his self-congratulatory monologue, prior to the performance.

     After wrestling our way through a crowded, yet lax security line, the three of us immediately made our way to the front of the stage for the best seats. Its funny, when someone you love is featured in a production, you instantly picture them at center stage- the star of the show- regardless of their role. I had imagined Lele sitting upright in a formal, black orchestra chair, sheet music in front of her, in plain view of the auditorium. Reality struck when she came in through the back doors with the rest of the musical performers and was ushered behind the stadium-style seats. It was early enough for us to change seats towards the back so we could at least crane our necks to watch our girl deliver the soundtrack.  

     Before everyone had settled, Lele snuck up on us for some big hugs and gave us the few treats she had in her sweat pant pockets- 2 peppermints and a grape jolly rancher. I took the jolly rancher- a reminder of my elementary and middle school days when teachers passed them out as rewards for good work. We were all in great spirits and Lele RADIATED- a much healthier and happier glow than when I had last seen her at Logan a few months ago. She motioned at the other members of the orchestra and exclaimed, “they’re all my friends!”

     Decatur is certainly less abysmal, cleaner and less depressing than Logan Correctional. Lele let us know that the food was significantly better- none of that awful soy-based product that was making her sick. However, the rules are different at Decatur and Lele has not been able to visit with her mother as she had at Logan. The folks working on her case are trying to overcome this arbitrary hurdle, but for now her mother is not able to see, laugh with or hug her own daughter.

     After the performance we were given the opportunity to take individual and group pictures with Lele. A faulty digital camera, operated by an incompetent dude with wrap-around sunglasses on his backwards baseball hat, was used to take the shots- each of us posing with Lele- being silly, cute and full of feelings. After the photos (which must be purchased by the inmates separately- not complimentary gifts) we again took seats and surrounded Lele as we all chatted and tried to catch up with the little remaining time we had left. Some of the other performers approached us and Lele introduced us all- making sure to compliment them on a truly impressive performance. Lele gestured to her close friend, a fellow inmate, who came by with her visiting 8 year-old daughter to say “hello.” It was awesome to have the ability to move around inside the auditorium, mixing with prisoners and their families, in comparison to the heavy monitoring and isolation of the visitor’s room at Logan.

     We could not stay as long as we would have liked this time around. Since the process of separating inmates and visitors to be escorted into Decatur’s visitation room is never quick, we eventually had to say goodbye to our friend. A C.O. appeared through the door and we were told we had to clear the theater. Once we were back in the car, Red posed a question to us.They asked us to imagine having been through trauma or committed a crime which resulted in incarceration. They then asked to imagine what it would be like to have art, group projects, creative processes and reflection as a predominant form of healing and personal growth, rather than cell blocks, unpaid labor and miserable confinement. We all confidently agreed it would be a much better world if that were the case.

-Erica 

I’ve said it before, but really, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been to see someone in prison, you never get used to it. It never becomes routines. It never gets “easier.” Not that you’d want it to get that way, but it not ever being that way reminds you of how fucking wrong a place like prison is. It’s a place dreamt up of the most un-human stuff. You can prepare for the screenings, the attitude of the guards, the inane rules and the strict dress code all you want and still it will find a way to knock you on your ass when you arrive to visit a loved one.

This Sunday (March 12th) was my first time visiting anyone at Decatur Correctional. I didn’t really know what to expect considering folks had told us it was “very different” from Logan, where Alisha was previously held. What struck me immediately was that the prison was wedged right between a trailer park and an apartment complex amongst gas stations and people. Our trips to Logan sent us out in the middle of nowhere– dropped in a field. It felt weird seeing people (likely COs) live right next to this abomination.

Here we needed 2 forms of ID, here the clothes we had visited Alisha in last time weren’t good enough, here they counted the number of bobby pins in your hair. But unlike Logan here at Decatur they didn’t make you shake your bra out and there were lockers for your extras, you couldn’t wear a jacket/cardigan/sweater inside the visitation room, and apparently there exist the possibility of photos with your loved one but no one could explain that policy…

We had to leave to go find a Target to buy a new article of clothing for Cate because her shirt didn’t cover her ass and her pants were deemed “too tight.”

These assholes.

She wore these same pants to our last visit. So she bought a dress and kept the tags–we’d go back to return it later.

The screening did seem to take less time and we were finally ushered into a visitation room that looked way less like a health hazard than had the one we’d been going to previously. I was anxious, my stomach was in knots. I had spoken to Alisha just a few days ago and she wasn’t digging the transition to this place at all.

Within minutes we were hugging and laughing with our friend. This was definitely one of our longer visits (because at Decatur, unlike Logan you could remain or leave when you wanted to within hours as opposed to the guards making you end a visit early because they felt like “calling line”) lasting well over four hours.

First, the snacks.

Alisha wanted ice cream, we debated the vending machine options and settled on a vanilla fudge cone, and later a Häagen-Dazs bar. There was also strawberry pop, one of those Special K strawberry cheesecake bars, Cheesits, and some sort of “meat” item masquerading as a philly cheese steak. We dragged the prison’s profitable use of vending machines, the gross over-pricing and lack of fruits and vegetables or like, I dunno, more good junk food.

We also discussed my vegetarianism (which Alisha found confusing and yet hilarious), growing up on farms and what family she does and does not speak to. We all shared our stories of how we found our chosen family and how we came to terms with our blood kin.

Then her work inside.

Alisha gives thanks for working in the kitchen and “teaching some fools about seasonings.” She’s able to be more creative in this kitchen and it’s helping her pass the time, but her labor is nowhere near fairly compensated, and the long hours (12 hour shifts sometimes) standing on concrete leave her feet and ankles swollen and sore, her back hurting.

Passing the time has been slow-going here. She’s bored and has fewer creative outlets because of how strict “conduct policy” is here. No paints, no tattooing, no clothing alteration, no dating. If you get snitched on, ratted out, or just wrongfully reported on as some kinda revenge–you’re in the hole.

She has been reading more. She finished Memoirs of a Geisha, and part of Men Explain Things to Me, but she got pissed at men and had to put it down, it was “too real.” She tried to get into Slaughterhouse Five, made it a little ways in and got upset again. She said she’s gonna switch gears and tackle Assata Shakur’s autobiography next.   

And lord the practical jokes this woman plays….she had us in tears from laughing so hard at her pranks.

Then the heartbreak.

We talked relationships and breakups. LeLe was reeling and you could hear the feeling of betrayal, confusion and hurt when she spoke about her ex. We talked abuse and forgiveness, why we fall back into these patterns and how to prioritize ourselves; basically how to survive having big hearts. We held hands, touched shoulders, and shook our heads.

Then ho life and work outside.

We swapped client stories and listened to Alisha recall some of the most epic shit that had transpired when she was working as an escort. Obviously I won’t recount those stories here but suffice to say we were all demanding she start writing a damn book. We talked about movement organizing, how (strange/terrible) work has been since the Backpage closure, and what we felt like we needed to work safely: decriminalization. We talked about this at length. Alisha was impatient with ideas, “Let me outta here so I can get to work!” This extended brainstorming session lead us to talking about our mental health and what support and wellness could/should look like.

I’m always in awe of how uncompromising she remains in the face of inhumanity. I learn a lot from Alisha every time we talk on the phone, exchange letters and meet. Learning from survivors is something we should be doing, collectively, a hell of a lot more. I’m not gonna mince words, I hate visiting prisons. I hate that my friend is in prison. I hate that your friends or family might be in prisons. I fucking hate prisons. We’ve got to imagine a better way- a better world without all this harm and punishment. I think LeLe is gonna be one to teach us how to get free.

-Red

        Home again, whatever that means exactly.  Moving for most people is terrible because it involves putting a bunch of small things into larger boxes, carefully wrapping delicate items—heirlooms, art, instruments, televisions, anything which is not really designed to be packed into a van or truck or other vehicle and moved any distance.  It also can mean uprooting oneself, which obviously cuts both ways: no more favorite diner down the street, no more garden in the back, no window which catches the light in the morning just so, no paint on the walls which has been redone to suit moods or fancy, no immediate physical access to friends, family, and work left behind, all to be exchanged for comparable or better versions. 

        Our LeLe’s move shares variations on many of these characteristics.  She moves from maximum to medium-minimum security, from 2000 fellow inmates to 500, from a facility housing people who will live out their natural lives within to those who will be there nine years or fewer. She leaves behind an ex-partner to become “fresh meat” at a new facility.  She sacrifices friendships and a place where anything might be obtained to one where inmates are far more cautious and the state’s control is more ironclad.  She cannot bring her paints, for which her nails have (temporarily) suffered, but the kitchen has a fryer and not everything is made of soy, by dint of which her skin has immediately cleared.  She exchanges the promise of contract work to reduce her sentence, the possibility of working with animals or cosmetics for a kitchen job which pays next to nothing (from 15 to 20 to 30 dollars a month as she moves up the ranks, rapidly), and layoffs in prison labor which do not allow her sacrifice herself to menial labor to move towards swifter release.  It’s a new place and there’s not much going on.  We sometimes think of our jobs, our relationships, our apartments, the very contours of our lives as prisons, and it sometimes feels as if we move from one to the next.  Alisha Walker’s situation has in some ways actually gotten worse with this move, and I can tell, and it tears at me, which in turn makes me feel dumb, because it tearing at me does nothing for her.

          It is hard not to imagine what it was like for her arriving as we do, pulling through a proper town and into a different sort of stone and barbed wire hell.  There is a funny little hut with some tables at the entrance and I momentarily lose track of where I am, thinking: “this would be a nice spot for Alisha to sit with her family.”  The presence of the eerily immobile guard standing beneath a strangely folksy, wooden sign proclaiming “Staff Only” quickly dispels that notion.  These are places of utmost control and power over, and any person who leaves them not wanting to smash, kill, and destroy after serving their time is either an incredible model of restraint from whom we all could learn that lesson at least, or else has had their spirit so utterly broken that it must take many soul-searching hours to find themselves anew outside.  This being our first visit, we brace for different regulations and novel layers of arbitrary command to fight through to gain entry.  We are not disappointed in this expectation.  Our first time through the double glass doors finds paperwork and, interestingly, more people of color behind one desk than we saw at the entire facility at Logan.  We are informed that one of our membership’s attire will bar her from entering, despite it being identical to what she wore on our last visit, and so I run back to the car to find something else she might wear, to no avail.  After a trip to Target to buy something less revealing than thick black tights and a hooded sweatshirt (the dead cops t-shirt is fine, mind you), we make our second attempt, now being told that we need a second form of ID each, which I dutifully return to the car again and procure. The third try reveals that the hooded sweatshirt cannot be worn in, nor can my cardigan.  When we finally make it through the metal detector, we’re left to peruse the scenery outside the gendered shakedown rooms, then left again to our own devices until we realize we can walk into the visitation room on our own accord.  The distance from the visitor’s entrance to the building to the door behind which we’ll spend the day with our friend is perhaps thirty feet, entirely indoors. This is emblematic of an entirely different, arguably even more nefarious affect of the Decatur facility.

           The entry desk is opposite a giant set of plaques devoted to employees of the month and retirees, each of which is clearly hand-carved, burned, and painted as if we were in a backwoods hunting lodge such as one might find just a few miles away from town.  There is one calligraphed sign for “Warden,” one for “Guard on Duty,” and a variety of smaller ones for the time clock and a key rack. There is a hand-etched lithograph commemorating a mother and children reunification program, to help reintegrate ex-offenders, which is distastefully hung next to a prison-staff lotto game of some variety where officers can put in their names for a monthly drawing for cash prizes.  I’m uncertain which is the more disingenuous of the two.  The guards interact with us in a generally saccharine tone (“It’s always more complicated the first time, sorry.”), wholly opposite the gruff, put-upon affect of the previous set.  I detest them and their complicity in this system, and I do not want to muse on this being a better work environment than the previous facility, that they get on better with each other and perhaps even the inmates, I want them to feel the full gravity of the despicable institution in which they are cogs, and I want them in turn to be as miserable as possible as they help make this needless societal scourge for the women inside.

           But this is not the place for any more of this particular screed.  I am privileged to see and hug and laugh with and hold and update a friend who has gotten closer and closer, and I want to know she is as all right as is humanly possible in a place designed to rob her of her humanity at every turn.

           We know each other a bit better now.  Alisha knows which one of our troupe she’ll have wild parties with and learn about the tough edge of the anti-fascist struggle when she gets out, which one will take her to tiki bars and teach her about the subject position of being a queer femme and all its responsibilities and travails, and which one will laugh too hard in spite of himself at all her jokes and make sure she’s well-fed when she needs home cooking with her Chicago family (I’m the last one, if you were wondering).  LeLe is her usual combination of vivacious hilarity and genuine interest in what we are up to on the outside.  As has been the case throughout, some of our mail has gotten through (all her birthday cards) and some, infuriatingly and arbitrarily, has not (two of our members’ last letters), so there is some general updating to be done on our end.  But we are, as anyone would be, curious about our friend’s move, and it is safe to say Alisha is at least a little wistful for the, shall we say, woolier world of Logan, a place better suited to her bawdy, mischievous, and social personality. In short: our girl is bored.  But I am reminded more acutely in this visit also: our girl is easily but deeply funny.  She tells us about the first set of clothes she got at the new facility, the crotch and thighs stained (“somebody had like a toxic vagina or something!  Just burning through!”), and how she soon found that there was no fashion scene to keep up with here.  We comment on how clean the clothes she has now look, and how she has clearly lost back some weight from the—marginally—better food and find that she’s wearing her “special occasion” polo, pristine and white, and her pair of shoes from Logan that “nobody else got.”  At the old facility, she’d be altering clothes and getting the new garb whenever it came in or else risk ridicule, which would result in mouthing off, which consequently would result in something worse.  We comment this sounds like high school all over again, and Alisha’s eyebrows go up as she busts up laughing: “It’s worse than high school!  They’re criminals!  You get your ass beat!”  She tells us about the sort of pranks unique to a place where people are already on edge but used to certain routines which mark out the time.  There is the regular practice of lining up to receive prescription medication, which LeLe naturally thought was worth crying wolf at, at least once: “MEDLINE!”  The effected inmates, of which there were many, all piled out of their cells to line up for drugs, furious at the false alarm.  When one of the older inmates got especially angry, Alisha responded with the natural question of the nonplussed prankster: “You mad?  Are you big mad or little mad?” knowing full well this would be the end of the incident.  In this “minimum security” place, loaded with contradictions, the restrictions regarding fighting and sexual relationships are vastly harsher than the previous: either will get you cited and likely put in solitary confinement, in the hole.

           We ask her a few questions on behalf of a reporter friend who is doing a profile on Alisha, one of which we already have a sense of the sad answer to, but ask anyway and receive a classic LeLe answer.

           “How are you passing the time at Decatur?”

           (slight pause) “Dyking out!”

           She goes on to explain that she is “talking to” three people, but there are ten more interested.  We get into a discussion about how “everyone is gay” on the inside, because there’s nothing else to be.  As mentioned before, she has been separated from the partnership she had begun to build at Logan, which we assume would be difficult, but as it turns out, not for the reasons we guessed.  Suffice it to say, Alisha had her heart broken while she was still at the last facility, subjected to the same sort of amplified betrayals that anyone who offers up herself to another, who feels she has forged a connection through the harshest of obstacles, who takes a calculated risk knowing separation is immanent, would find themselves susceptible.  The classic coping mechanism of “needing to spend some time alone” is drawn into brutalist relief in a place like this where one is at once in a uniquely profound solitude and at the same time never more than ten feet from another person or fifty.  Alisha proclaims she is “manic depressive,” a diagnosis about which we are all concerned and interested in how it is made and treated in this environment.  It turns out that a formal diagnosis has never been made, and Alisha explains how there is no intermediate state for her, she is either hyperactive and excited, sociable to the point where she kids with the guards in the dining hall and pushes buttons just to get some kind of reaction from the subdued and tamped-down inmates, or else utterly depressed. Not just sad about her lost girlfriend, the absent opportunities which were available to her at Logan, her missing family and friends, the wrongful nature of the system which reminds her daily it would have simpler if she had just died that night, but a purer, simpler low, resultant from the basic realities of being a giant spirit and personality cordoned off and hidden away from the society she would choose and which would, I am certain, choose her. 

         The time is more real now, she says it and I can see it, because this will be the final destination before release.  She bargains with us for all the things she would give up to be able to step outside, or do anything positive for herself at all, and then we hit the crux of the matter.  Alisha tells us she is not used to—and at this point, there’s no reason to think she’ll ever get used to, which is fine—having to ask for everything, and being powerless to help those she cares about.  Among the myriad motivations for doing sex work, the at least potential command over one’s income, how often and what sort of work one wants to do, was clearly foremost for our girl.  Her mother, brother, sister, and new nephew need her, not simply financially or even emotionally but—and I do not use this term lightly—spiritually.  Anyone who meets Alisha and finds favor with her would comprehend this sort of need; she is magnanimous not because she is a saint but because it is clear that when she cares it is wholesale and not easily vacated. She will never become accustomed to be so dependent on, having to ask for things from, her mother, having to be shaken down to use the bathroom, finding nearly every step, of which there are only so many which can be taken anyway, requiring official and explicit sanction.

           It does no real good for me to soften the situation in these reflections: our dauntless survivor is hurting, each next forced renegotiation of her dignity and creative power taxing the underground wellspring of strength from which she draws.  The tiny gold cross she wears around her neck borders on satire; this is no cloister for the likes of Alisha Walker, and there’s no spiritual quest or fulfillment concealed within.  Just the full, indifferent weight of the state’s corporal fetish borne down on a young woman full to bursting with creative potency.  I, insignificant and impotent in the face of such forces, have two options, with only the first being at all viable.  Either LeLe will emerge from this place, sooner than later, intact and excited to make good on all the plans we make every next visit, or I do not want to go on existing in the world which not just allows but applauds her forced sacrifice.

           Alisha is disappointed that one of our members does not eat red meat, having raised cows in her youth and, accepting this reality, turns to me in mock-frustration:

           “Aaron, please tell me you eat steak.”

           I do, LeLe, I do, and I don’t know if it’s going to taste right again until you’re on the opposite side of the table from me for the first time.

-AH

I was a little less nervous going into our visit this time, but still on edge. I hate having to see my friend in clothes she doesn’t want to wear, her movement limited, her freedom denied. I hate having to talk to COs.

We each bought a book at the Joliet Barnes & Noble to bring LeLe, the titles included:

Memoirs of a Geisha, Slaughterhouse Five, Men Explain Things To Me, and Assata: An Autobiography.

Alisha has always remarked that she loves to read and has been devouring books while inside.

 Our drive was much the same, we made a depressing game out of spotting the various Confederate flags we saw (in the form of bumper stickers, gas station paraphernalia etc), we made sure to turn our respective t-shirts (which were emblazoned with various FTP slogans) inside out in preparation for screening and we swapped stories about travel, school, clients, people we don’t fuck with.

 We arrived to Logan Correctional just before 2:30pm. We gathered the books, and doubled checked our clothes. Upon entering the foyer, which was just as dingy and dilapidated as it was on our previous visit, we were told the last visitation line had gone out and we would not be admitted. Cate and I freaked out. Maybe a little too much. The others calmed us down, well calmed me down, Cate was still fucking pissed. I was calm enough to ask what this meant for the rest of the day. Visitation is supposed to be from 9am-8pm. The CO told us maybe if we came back by 4:30pm we would be admitted. They can do this. They can keep you from your loved ones on a whim, because they feel like it. We didn’t have a choice; we’d just traveled three hours from home. We were so close to her and yet there were still gates, solid metal doors, chain-link, razor wire, shotguns, and their bullshit policies between us.

 Fuck.

 We left, angrily. There was a lot of screaming in the parking lot, in the car, in the fast food joint we holed-up in for a couple hours…We didn’t even know if going back guaranteed a visit.

 We waited. We went back.

 It took over an hour to process us, even though we were already in the system. Once through with full searches and screening we waited for about 40 minutes in the visitation room (disgusting as ever, but not as cold as we expected it to be) before they brought Alisha to see us.

 The visit, like last time, flew by. We bought snacks, shot the shit and caught up on her new housing unit (which has been such a huge improvement for her). She was bright and bubbly, her usual self, that’s so amazing to me. I don’t know if I could be such a positive person. Alisha always exudes care and consideration. I would totally understand if she cried or ranted the entire time, I’d expect that even. But, she never does. She talks about getting free, her desire to work with animals, to go to school, to organize. She talks about the high heels her feet miss, and the femme accessories she craves, and creates substitutes for inside. She asks to see all our fingernails, what varnish is on them, what designs. She talks about the nail polish someone made and how she created the perfect Chanel logo for them on their toes. We all collectively “yaaasssss!” These light moments feel good. Seeing her laugh and smile feels good. We talk shop, we talk organizing, we talk about the latest article that’s being written about her case. Cate and Erica explain memes, it goes right over mine and Alisha’s heads. Aaron sweet talks the CO on duty to check the other vending machines for the snacks Alisha wants. She likes salads but of course the machines haven’t been restocked so we make due with other things. She can’t eat much at regular mess hall because the food has been making her sick. She said it’s basically all soy-based stuff and garbage. Not surprising.

And just like that, these assholes in uniform decide when we have to stop talking with our friend. We all hug, a lot. The COs take us away and LeLe’s gotta wait there until they release her. We’re angry, again. I cry in the car and it’s really late when we get back to the city.

 -Red

         Speaking to another of our collective members upon returning, I found myself having difficulty expressing just what this most recent visit to Alisha had impressed upon me.  The arbitrariness of prison regulations was hardly a surprise, and the length of the drive and waiting around were, at least for me, vastly condensed by knowing that the person we were going to see was so appreciative of the visit, and vice versa.  Even discovering that the corrections officers had failed to mention our having arrived to her for half an hour, though despicable and infuriating, was not enough to cast a different pallor on the visit.  What was different from our last trip was my experience of the time itself with Alisha: it truly seemed to elapse vastly more quickly, though I was no more or less excited or anticipatory to be with her.  We met last time, overcoming the oddity of all of us having a sense of her appearance, she having no idea of ours.  We got a sense of each other’s personalities beyond whatever our letters—necessarily few, with long gaps between, and even in some cases returned undelivered—might have conveyed, nervously tried to balance being real with being comforting (she as much as we!), and came to whatever terms we were able with the fact that even with a great deal of luck and our very best efforts, this young woman had survived an attempt on her life and would continue to be in prison for at least months, but more likely years.

           So it may not be that the circumstances or affect of this visit were all that different, but instead that I was in a slightly different frame of mind and able to concentrate of different things. My revulsion at the place and the situation were much the same, but I was unwittingly prepared to have a different kind of interaction.  What this meeting yielded was the distinct feeling of ease with another person that I, we, still really hardly know, however hungrily we ask questions of one another and laugh with disbelief and anger and pure mirth at the same circumstances, from inside or outside.  I was struck by just how easily Alisha fits in with our collective, which is drawn from a fair diversity of experience both within the sex work profession(s) and in life in general.  We have each had our experiences with violence both sexual and otherwise, and have in some cases had to overcome fairly damning and difficult experiences as such.  But, I think I can claim without fear of contradiction, we have had to encounter nothing in the range of that with which Alisha has been forced to contend—a struggle to survive within a struggle to survive in a life of struggling to survive, as a near homicide victim, as a sex worker, as a poor black woman, in the face of a drunk, rich, white, “pillar of the community,” whom she had reason to trust. Fuck.

           But this story we have some sense of, and I am not the one to retell it, nor does it in any way hang over my experience of and with Alisha.  And that’s what I picked up on all the more acutely at this visit.  This woman owes us nothing, really, and I would not blame her if all she saw was differences, and privilege (at the very least, the privilege of not being punished for attempting to stay alive), and saviorism. To be clear: I do not think Alisha Walker needs a savior.  I am as convinced that she could handle this time with aplomb if we had never come across her case as I am of anything in my life.  Furthermore, I cannot say with total confidence what she does see when we four wait for her at the plastic table adjacent to the filthy children’s play area, next to the frequently-visited Pepsi machine.  But I do know that she is one of us.  She is my friend because she is warm and cares about what I do and what I have to say.  She gets genuinely excited about the Assata autobiography I bring for her, and the hugs she gives are no put on, they are as serious as death.  I feel as though I’ve just seen her despite the fact that it’s been five months, and when we leave I immediately regret—this is the correct word, though I know damn well nothing can be done about it.  As we walk back between the buildings, having been brusquely booted at the end of visiting I hours, I regret that she is not crammed in the back seat of the car with us.

           Alisha would be right to be angry, and in some ways she is.  She would be right to be despondent, because the authority that is supposed to hold together some version of justice has utterly trampled on her.  She would be justified in being sad, hopeless, lost—but these things she is not.  I do not know if she is a saint or destined to save others from the succession of miserableness that landed her here.  I cannot say what her life will look like when she is finally released, or even necessarily what the best version of that would be.  But I can see in her eyes, her demeanor, and her gentleness with us a resilience which is more inspiring the easier it gets.  When I finally got home Saturday night and tried to put to words what I felt about this visit, what it was I was so surprised at, I think “ease” is as good a word as any.  Alisha was easy with us, and all I can do is hope that when my own frustrations threaten to make me act outside the way I want or ought to, I am reminded of that ease. When we finally torch the prisons and hold people accountable to a different sort of justice for their laws and procedures, I don’t need fire and brimstone.  I want Alisha’s ease.

-AH