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

I had never visited a prison before we went to go see Lele.

I had no idea what to expect. I knew what I’d seen on television was bullshit, and that was it. I was nervous. What if she thought it was weird that these people who she barely knows were all crowding in to visit her, what if she didn’t like us? Worse, what if they didn’t even let us in? I wasn’t sure I had enough of the right forms of ID, if they would even care, if they could just make up some reason to keep us away from her.

It was nine in the morning and already hot with the kind of heavy, swampy heat unique to the Midwest, but the car was air conditioned and Illinois is beautiful. We drank iced coffee and talked about what visiting her might be like, and made jokes about people we all knew and listened to ska. Halfway there we stopped for gas and changed into the shirts Erica had made and asked a man to take a picture of us in front of a corn field. We are all smiling in the picture, even though we were going to visit a young woman locked in a cage for an act of pure heroism. It’s weird how you can smile like that, even in the face of something so wrong and inhumane. I hid my brass knuckles under a pile of tangled braces in the back pocket of Brit’s seat. We hoped they wouldn’t search the car.

The town where Logan Correctional Facility is located is as small and shitty as you’d expect a prison town in southern Illinois to be. At a gas station not far from the prison, we stopped to put other clothes on over our t-shirts. Too much support for Alisha might be seen as too subversive, we weren’t sure.

In most shitty Midwestern towns, a group of tattooed punks walking into any establishment will garner a lot of quiet attention. You can feel people’s eyes burning holes in your head, the automatic distrust for those clearly foreign to the area. It wasn’t like this here, nobody gave us a second glance, it was, I guess, obvious why we were there. They saw people like us all the time.

Once we all looked as respectable as possible, we drove through more cornfields to the prison itself. The buildings were low and brick. The parking lot was made of broken asphalt. It was almost like any poorly-funded state-owned structure until you saw the signs warning you to drop to the ground in the event of gunfire, the parking spots designated for the warden, for correctional officers of the month and year.

The signs directing visitors were confusing; Probably, I thought, deliberately so, but whether it was a sin of omission or a sin of commission there was no way of knowing. We made it into the air conditioned lobby, none of us sure what to do. We filled out forms while the heavily pregnant woman behind the desk gave us vague looks of some kind of mostly-apathetic disgust. I ran back and forth between the car and the office twice, fetching information we needed, dropping off unnecessary identification, removing the bandana that covered the hair I hadn’t had time to wash.

If the woman at the front desk had been vaguely apathetic in her disgust, the men in the guard house were jovial about it. As we walked in one of them was complaining about his expensive weekend, laughing with his colleague. They asked about jewelry and looked at us all like they found their jobs amusing. I ground my teeth to powder trying to keep my mouth shut, trying not to back sass any of them, trying to contain my rage at the fact that they existed, that they were participating in the system that was designed to keep their own people down.

“Fucking class traitors,” Brit would mutter to me later when we were leaving.

You know it in your head, but until you see the guards at prisons you don’t realize how true it is, how they all hold their faces like I do, like my family does, like poor people do, because they were of us until they chose to hold the boots of the rulers down on their own people’s heads.

A woman escorted us to through the fence to the visitors’ center. She was all smiles as she warned us not to expect air conditioning. None of us were smiling.

“This is nicer than in Texas,” Brit said, “all the grass is dead there.”

The grass wasn’t dead at Logan. It was green and neatly trimmed and there were trees, as if that would be enough to make us all forget that people we care about aren’t free.

To say it was hot in the visitors’ center would be an understatement. We were sent over to a table in the corner with chairs arranged around it, their legs in a puddle of water dripping from an ancient and useless window unit that likely, even in its best years would not have been able to make a dent in the oppressive heat. My hair was wet with sweat before Lele even arrived, and I mopped my face with Erica’s extra shirt while we waited, my hands shaking from caffeine or nervousness or both, I wasn’t sure.

And then we looked over and she was there, at the other end of the room, being told by the guard where to go, that we were waiting for her.

The first thing I noticed about her is how tall she is. I’d read her rap sheet, but height, weight, hair color, those were never the things I noticed, too upset by her wrongful conviction, her sentences, the dehumanization that comes with all mugshots. I’m used to being the tallest woman in a room, but when I hugged her we were face to face.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, “you’re tall too!”

The second thing I noticed is that she is so beautiful. Not just physically, though she absolutely is, but immediately upon seeing her it is so clear how strong she is, how kind. There is no way of putting it but to fall into tired cliches and say that her very soul shines out of her striking pale eyes.

I am never very good at meeting new people. I am anxious and too concerned with being liked, but Lele has that rare quality that sets you at ease immediately. Even in that sweaty visitors’ center, across from the dirty, broken children’s toys spread out on mats in the opposite corner, surrounded by other people and their bittersweet reunions we could almost have just been a bunch of people in a living room. She told us about her roommate, how they’re best friends, how they do everything together. She showed us where they gave each other matching stick n poke tattoos on the backs of their necks, and I showed her all the stick n pokes I’ve done on myself. She told us about the clothing they made in their cells, finding ways to celebrate and nourish their femme-ness even in a place that puts all women in matching white polos and sweatpants. She oohed and ahhed over the three of us femmes’ nails while Aaron went to get her food from the machines, telling us how she and her roommate were going to get some paint and lacquer from the shop soon to make their own nail polish.

“I have everything a girl could want in here,” she said, “well, except for high heels. I miss high heels.”

At her sentencing they hadn’t even given her a pair, concerned that her already tall stature plus the added height of heels would make her look too much, too tall, too much woman, too much of a whore, as if she should be ashamed.

It was sometimes hard to believe that this was happening, that this was real, that we were all hanging out together, laughing about shared clients, listening to her stories of the ingenious, and honestly delicious-sounding recipes cooked up with commissary food, hearing her tell us about the other inmates, and the way they can see the men incarcerated in Lincoln from the yard sometimes, “if we’re lucky.” We told her about Slutwalk, how I was going to make a speech just about her, about her case, about how issues of consent affect us as sex workers just as much, if not more, than they do civilian women.

“When I get out,” she said, “I want to do what you guys do,” and if I was able to cry openly, that would’ve been what did it.

Our visit was too short, we’d just wrapped up a game of clue, cobbled together with makeshift pieces, when the guard at the front of the visitors’ center announced that our visit would be cut a half hour short. Visitors have to leave in shifts because the guards can’t be bothered to walk groups out individually, and we didn’t know how long we would have to wait if we were to go with the next group.

We hugged and promised to come back soon, as soon as we could. She had to wait until we were gone to be taken back to her cell, and as we walked to the guard house to get the car keys back and have our clothing inventoried again, I looked back to see her waving at us.

It wasn’t until we were in the car driving away that the reality hit me, how wrong it was that we had to leave her there, the fact that she wasn’t sitting in between me and Erica in the back seat, going home to her family where she belongs, how wrong it is that that amazing, brave, resilient young woman was, at 23, locked in a cage and not out making poor choices like we all did at that age.

It was hard to write this reflection, hard to remember everything outside of the feelings that seeing her, hugging her, talking to her, seeing how well she is doing (all things considered) inspired. It was hard to think about leaving her again. Prisons are terrible, prisons are immoral, and prisons are for burning but like the class treachery of the guards, it’s one thing to know it in your head and another to see someone you care about incarcerated and reduced to a number and a uniform and stripped, as far as the state is concerned, of their humanity.

-Cathryn Berarovich

If you want to support Alisha (commissary, visits, legal needs) & help us and her family continue to visit please contribute here: https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/alisha-walker-survived-and-punished–2

When I told my mother that a group of Support Ho(s)e and myself were
going to visit Alisha Walker at the Logan Correctional Center, I wondered aloud
about the correctional officers we would be forced to comply with prior to meeting her. My mother responded to my rhetorical question with something along the lines of, “you’d have to be a pretty miserable person to fill that job.” As much as I agree with my mother, I also believe prison staff may need only be apathetic, ignorant, racist or in desperate need to exercise a (false) sense of superiority over large groups of individuals.

This was my very first visit to any prison, however, I was not nervous only
anxious to finally interact with the woman we had been rallying behind over a
turbulent few months. After subjection to several correctional officers and multiple ID checks at two different buildings, the four of us entered the visitation room. We were carelessly directed to the back corner of the room towards two small, circular tables numbered 19 and 20. The wobbly tables were positioned in between a soda machine and what appeared to be an air conditioning window unit whether it had ever actually functioned as a reprieve from the heat was not evident during our 3 hour stay. The room was thick with humidity, without ventilation and in obvious need of repairs standing water on the floor, moldy ceilings and potentially hazardous dirty electrical equipment. The depressing assessment of our environment was momentarily put on hold when we witnessed Alisha walk through the door and check in at the desk before making her way towards us. There was an overwhelming feeling after she sat down not before embracing each of us with a hug and a greeting seeing
firsthand her welcoming, warm personality laced with the reality of a classist, misogynist, hateful and corrupt system of injustice and incarceration. There were a few initial moments when the mixture of emotion from anxious excitement to the weight of the situation and anger for a system that locks up sex workers for surviving began to emanate from my body.

Fortunately, Alisha’s kindness and outlook towards the future, as well as the
experiences she shared, kept us grounded and focused. Alisha spoke about a number of situations since her entry into Logan her awful first roommate who she fended off long enough before she could be transferred to a better situation, but not before having to plead and convince authorities that the cell situation put her in physical danger and emotional distress. We asked her about the power outage that Logan endured recently and were told that inmates went without power and without a sufficient water supply for 6 days in the midst of a muggy summer completely inhumane and easily avoidable situations. Another situation involved an officer spewing racist insults at a fellow inmate. In glorious retaliation to this racist scum, Alisha informed us that she was working in the kitchen when the surrounding inmates began chanting “Black lives matter!” and as she said this I looked across the shitty table at one of our Support Ho(s)e members and we exchanged looks of elation and solidarity. Aside from tales of courage and survival were her and her inmates’ creativity and ingenuity using the starved and scarce resources they had access to in order to bring some sense of self-sufficiency and joy to their caged and isolated existence. Alisha and her current roommate someone she has grown close with and works alongside in the kitchen help each other make their own clothes, find ways to stay cool inside their cell, utilize the slim pickings of their kitchen ingredients to concoct sweet desserts, and even mix raw materials to create nail polish. Some of these, if not all, are under inmate discretion and may or may not be approved by prison authority but it is because it keeps inmates like Alisha sane in a world that would rather see them suffer.

Speaking of suffering, Bruce Rauner and the state of Illinois are not only
causing great undue damage to public education, but also directly impacting the daily lives and futures of current prison inmates. Programs, like one Alisha had hoped to get into for cosmetology, have been suspended under Rauner, leaving folks without ways to develop or improve their skills and training for their release. If, or when programming is implemented once again, only 12 out of the 1,900 inmates will be able to register for the cosmetology program at a time. For now, Alisha will continue working in the kitchen full-time for her $19.20 USD per month. Yes, per month. Eventually we broke up the group conversation with a board game of Clue provided by the visitation room. We had expected at least another hour, with the announcement that the next dismissal would be at 4:30pm. At about quarter to 4pm there was an announcement that dismissal would be at 4pm without explanation. This cut our visit short and we begrudgingly began to pack up the game and say
our goodbyes.

By this time Alisha had shared so much with us, including a desire to do what we were doing for her outside the confines of prison walls resisting an inherently sexist, racist and classist society and building solidarity through direct action and personal involvement. Leaving the property without Alisha was emotionally draining and the drive home was surreal, painful and full of contempt for a legal system that would rather see humans rot than succeed.

-Erica Friscioni

If you want to support Alisha (commissary, visits, legal needs) & help us and her family continue to visit please contribute here: https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/alisha-walker-survived-and-punished–2

As we pull past the last of the cornfields, and the complex of chicken wire, squat brick buildings, and tinted-windowed towers emerges from the green, I am struck, in spite of myself, by thinking of definitions of two terms which are thrown about nearly indiscriminately in the modern vernacular: courage and heroism.  Each of these is, at this point, at best relative to one’s own threshold for discomfort or lack of imagination.  Everyone with a state-sanctioned weapon, anyone physically stronger than we are, each person who has overcome hardship in the public eye becomes a hero, is endowed with a reserve of courage which is difficult to comprehend lest we walk a mile in their shoes.  The terms are each watered down to the point where they are borderline nonsensical, and each leaves a sour residue as I consider what for me would constitute a hero, what courage would look like in person.  I am uncertain I have known either firsthand, truly.

I think of these things because I am afraid.  

As we park in the gravel lot, I am afraid not of the cars parked in spots labeled “Officer of the Year” and “Assistant Warden,” but the people inside, purportedly made of the same stuff as me, blood and guts and bone and hope and fear, whose job it is to render 2000 other people as close to animals as their own tiny imaginations allow.  As we try to follow the confusing, redundant, and self-contradictory signage to enter the place, I am afraid that the arbitrary rules and regulations of such a place will bar us from entry, that these are not visiting hours, that there is a lockdown, that today our friend is in segregation and cannot receive us.  The wan light from the stultifying sun and dim fluorescents above only serve to reinforce the crushing banality of the place, at once clinical and filthy, in every sense of both words.  The gatekeeper asks for information we do not have and then produces it herself, and each moment I feel as if I am being tested, which is not something of which I am afraid.  The only way in which this dim and gradually destructive place, this blight upon the middle of the state in which I have spent the majority of my life, can harm me is to prohibit me from bringing whatever I can from outside its walls and within myself to a person who has been trapped for months on months.  As we venture into the next house, I cannot shake images of work and concentration camps with each of their successive small offices and great dormitories, middle-managers clinging to a modicum of power and authority which, were the playing field leveled for even sixty seconds, would result in swift and unmitigated reprisal.  Justice, or something like that.  “Sit down when you hear shots fired” reads one sign, “Inmates approaching flying vehicles will be shot,” another.  We are inventoried, frisked, and shunted off to the next waiting room, with fellow travelers, for whom I am afraid as well, afraid of the news they might bring their loved ones, or what it would be like to reach across the table and touch the arm of a mother or sister or granddaughter, perhaps for the first time in weeks, perhaps for the first and last time for months.  As we traverse the final few yards, via a grotesquely well-manicured garden, to the last building, our actual destination, I am afraid I am not enough, that I should not be here and am out of place, that a person who deserves real solace will see through me and that something like pity or shame will emerge no matter how hard I attempt to stifle them.  

And the room itself, the visitation room, is certainly enough to solicit those unwanted, unnecessary, useless emotions of pity and shame.  I am sorry that the food in these vending machines is so vastly superior to that in the prison dining hall.  I am ashamed that the snot-green linoleum floor is covered in water from a prehistoric air conditioning unit which in its best repair would not cool a space one-fifth the size of this one.  I pity—in fact, I am chilled by—the small corner with overused and dirty toys for children and young family members of inmates, and I am ashamed at the brutality of the guards at the exits, the broken tables at which we sit and wait, and the heat, always the heat, which is damn near intolerable here, where the visitors come, and likely only alludes to what the women in sickeningly pristine white polo shirts and blue cotton pants surrounding us must contend with in their cells.  We are sweating instantly as we pull off our button-ups to reveal our sloganeering t-shirts and I am one last time afraid that I am caricature of bleeding-heart, paternalistic concern for a young woman I am meeting for the first time, any minute now, I hope.

But then again—I am here, and I am not alone.  I have at my side three absolute pillars of feminine strength and certitude, women who inspire me not out of what they have done, but who they are: equal parts ferocious and caring; angry (Brit will tell me she is perhaps a bit sad or scared, but mostly angry) and indignant; and, most importantly, demonstrably willing to lay out and give of what little material and nearly boundless emotional stores from which they draw.  If they are anxious, nervous, concerned, cautious, then I certainly have every right to be as well.

Alisha is utterly striking; I think the facsimile on my t-shirt averts its eyes when the genuine article strides through the door.  She is tall, with a tiny gold cross dangling over the top button of her over-bleached, spotless, unbranded polo, and, somewhat surprisingly, made-up: eyes, nails, brows.  It at first seems a petty thought: this young woman embracing each of us in turn at once calls out the utter indignity of the place by prevailing in her cosmetics, such as they are, and immediately outshines the wholesale dreariness of everything around her.  She is not of this manufactured, martial world, nor does she seem all that daunted by it.  There is no reason to put on a brave face for us: we are perhaps her advocates on the outside, back in the city, but we are not family, nor incompetent lawyer, nor racist, classist judge, nor vulturous media seeking an angle, nor parole board.  Alisha Walker could be anyone she wants to be in front of these four veritable strangers and is, as best I can tell, herself only.  She is immediately affable, neither obsequious nor standoffish, either of which, alongside a spectrum of other affects, would be entirely understandable.  I think it safe to include the others when I say that our worst traumas, scarring and brutal as they may be, do not announce themselves every morning when we open our eyes, peer out a window, and scratch off another of the hundreds of alike days to follow when we rest our heads in the same small space from the cycle began hours earlier.  She seems entirely pleased to see us, to answer our questions, to ask about ourselves, to make friends in the space of a few fleeting hours together.  I look at the women I love and respect at my sides.  One weeps and smiles in equal measure, another seethes with rage and consideration, the third, perhaps most important of all, fills in empty spaces with her easy conversation and ability to persevere through emotionally-charged moments and extreme heat with her distinctive and immediately attractive voice.  Equally vitally, Alisha, our junior by three to ten years, clearly wants us to be at ease. What does she say?

She tells us about the state budget holding up her access to education inside, as well as ability to move to a more desirable unit.  The general lack of programs available is directly tied to the legislature’s continued deadlock, which shows no immediate sign of loosening (I run through statistics concerning recidivism and institutionalized poverty linked to the lack of job training and education for inmates.  I grip the table and draw a deep breath of humid, stifling air: this woman, who has been punished on so many levels it becomes difficult to count, reveals only mild frustration at this latest indignity.  I want to grab the guard’s service weapon, drive to nearby Springfield, and convince our good Speaker and Governor to enjoy a Sierra Mist while they listen to Miss Walker’s calm, reasonable concerns.  I hope they’ll be allowed to bring in paper and pen rather than dictate from memory, as I am now forced to.).  In a mirror of the stunning success of No Child Left Behind, one apparently most benefits from Illinois Prison education by failing the GED, which Alisha unfortunately did not (I grip a little tighter).  She tells us about the superiority of these facilities to those of County, and that she was forced to choose between the more socially integrated dormitory style living (“a non-stop party” she jokes), and the comfort of her own space.  It is clear that Alisha is unwilling to sacrifice basic humanity while inside, cleaning her own toilet facilities daily, trading for the makeup she currently wears, including prison-manufactured nail polish.  Though there is a prohibition on anything dyed, she details her amateur seamstress work in making bed sheet dresses of various cuts and styles.  She details some of her favorite recipes, including one that sounds like a homemade cake roll (essentially prison ptitsa), and my eyes go wide as Alisha describes a complex sous-vide process to tenderize the proteins the State bestows onto them.  We talk about television a bit, and it is heartening to hear about her degree of investment in her favorite weekly program, how she and her friends talk as if the characters were real, narrating and recapping the action during and after each episode. She talks about a crazed, overly-possessive previous roommate who finally snapped and assaulted Alisha, who had to kick her across the room and appeal to every guard and officer until she finally received a transfer.  Her current mate waves from a few tables down with bright, indefatigable eyes and a smile which spells genuine happiness that Alisha has visitors (Alisha tells us “She says: ‘I’ll be out when I’m 70.  That’s not too old to party!’.”  Her cellmate is currently 25).  The infamous system of prison wives and pets is as real here as anywhere, though it seems Alisha has navigated a protected space for herself in her current block and employ.  She tells us of a trans woman who was found out after months of detention in a men’s prison to have had full transition surgery, which moved her across the way to the women’s prison.  Alisha laughs as she relates how much this person enjoyed the ruse, or mistake, depending on one’s perspective (“She’s a whore!”  A sex worker, on the outside?  “No, like: she’s just a whore!  She had a real good time!“).  Alisha works in the kitchen, where she is paid $19.20…per month.  She likes the work fine, but wishes she could enter the cosmetology program (13 women get in; 1900 are housed here), or really any sort of secondary education.  

This is all chatter—still rather amazing in retrospect due to the conditions and environment—very matter-of-fact without being strident or in any detectable manner complaining.  We are careful not to over-stress anything happening in the outside world, being uncertain the extent to which such talk is desired or in any way spiteful.  But we do not have much time, a grand irony in a place which is designed to crush its inhabitants under the brute, dull weight of ponderous time.  I want to know what Alisha wants, what she misses, not just so we can help her—the best we can do is make others aware and move in any way to hasten her release—but because I know the comfort of unburdening myself in confidence that my needs will not be misrepresented and no motives ulterior hamper the listener’s ability to simply listen.  The sole material absence to which Miss Walker admits?  High heels.  There is no prison approximation of this totemic footwear, which clearly bestows a combination of sex, power, class, habit, and home unto our friend.  Of all the disgusting, reductionist, bile to which Alisha has been subject, something about her very offhand anecdote about being forbidden from wearing heels to her trial because it would render her too tall, too imposing, too ‘hood, and too much a reminder of her profession, makes the blood behind my eyes boil and my teeth clench until my jaw cracks.  It is this unique detail of inhumanity which puts in sharper relief all of Alisha’s nonmaterial concerns, which coalesce around two figures: family and activism.  Of the former, she tells about her mother’s chattiness and righteous anger; all the idiosyncrasies which either slightly annoyed or she did not understand on the outside are cherished during their phone conversations inside.  She worries about little sister, threatening to “break out and take the seven years” if the latter’s man does not do right by her.  She speaks with equal parts pride and maternal care about little brother, her hope for the family, the precocious and preternaturally bright boy who will redeem any of her ills, make any trials suffered thus far or in the future worthwhile.  Of the latter, she says all she wants to do when she gets out is, referring to the ladies’ political activist activities, “what you guys do.  I want to tell my story to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”  I admit again: I am smitten by the strength and force of will of my partners in this journey, so it does not surprise me when someone else is too.  

Alisha Walker will be a powerful activist of her own stripe: she is direct, hyperaware and “woke” without any hint of bitterness, and genuine in her solidarity with others in her profession, or of her sex, or simply likeminded and appreciative of the dangers of a society which thrives on criminalizing and subjugating many, and attempts the destruction of those who check many of the boxes which landed her in this place: young, woman, person of color, lower class, sex worker, unwilling to be anyone’s martyr or, more likely and far worse, anyone’s sad statistic.

It is almost impossible to believe she has been in this place or others like it for a few years.  She is totally seasoned, understands her surroundings and the unique ecology of mass incarceration, and yet is outwardly unaffected.  She is gracious and caring, transitions easily between tough and sweet, seems to think nothing of the differences in our backgrounds, recognizes only the commonalities and what we share.  Alisha Walker did not seek to be any sort of hero, she makes that perfectly clear to the point where claiming any such status would be silly and almost insulting.  I am not convinced she would claim courage as her motivation; in many ways, her life outside the capitalist system through which she watched (and watches) her family battle was more courageous than the tragedy which robbed her of the middle part of her twenties (and hopefully not much more).  Make no mistake, though: there is no cause for regret in the act itself, and you’ll find no false remorse here.  Our friend was faced with death and survived, I am in awe of her will to live and her desire to do more than resume “regular” life upon emancipation, but to transcend her circumstances and, for lack of a better term, educate.

When I leave this place, I am shaken, and I feel for my compatriots, who surely must imagine themselves in the soon-to-be-again high heels of our friend.  Whatever lengths we go to free this woman are insufficient until the deed is done.  Alisha wrote me in thanks of our support for her in “this stressful time.”  If it is not courage which locks eyes with the malevolence of the prison industrial complex and labels it nothing more than “stressful,” then I am sure I do not know what courage is.

-AH

If you want to support Alisha (commissary, visits, legal needs) & help us and her family continue to visit please contribute here: https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/alisha-walker-survived-and-punished–2

I’ve visited people in prison before, but not since Texas really. It’s hard to describe the mixture of rage, anxiety, and excitement I was feeling at the idea of visiting someone I already loved, though I’d never met, in a place I think has no business existing.

I prepared myself the way I used to get ready to visit Livingston, TX (aka Hell, aka Death Row): packed a shirt that would cover my shoulders, a ziploc baggie to hold my ID and money to buy snacks for my friend (who I call friend but was still unsure if she’d like me, pen pal). I told those visiting with me to do the same, pack two forms of ID just in case, bring a piece of mail if you ID doesn’t match your address, etc–paranoid the COs would find any reason to turn us away.

We met at my place early, it was already raining. We’d be driving for almost 3 hours, we packed coffee and some breakfast food into our bags, cleaned out Aaron’s car, picked him up, pulled over for a smoke before we left the city and then we were off.

Erica brought the shirts she’d made for us, screened with the drawing Cathryn did of this woman we’ve yet to meet but admire, care about, write to, fund-raise for, talk about constantly, etc. We hope out loud that she’ll like them, her mother has assured us she will like the shirts, but more importantly, us. We’ve decided to live-tweet our trip, we take photos on our journey, but as we get closer to Lincoln our stomachs are in knots and we’re all pretty nervous–none of us have visited Logan Correctional before–we only have other people’s descriptions, and our given hatred of prisons to go off of.

We hide the accidentally brought along self-defense items three of us have on us (because we’re women and give the self-defense weapons little thought as anything other than necessary, like our keys, or lip balm) in case there’s a car search (I’m used to Texas operating standards). We discuss the humor and depressive aspects of this.  

We stop to piss at a gas station and change clothes. We are now visibly nervous to one another.

It’s in the middle of a cornfield. It looks like a concrete and redbrick plantation. We’re confused about where to park, the lot filled with signs designating spots for “Officer of the Month” and other various class-betraying positions of authority. This is infuriating. The signs are confusing, we walk around the back of the building before realizing where the check-in is. everywhere paint is peeling. The ceilings are leaky, it smells like mildew.

We’re told Cathryn’s bandana isn’t allowed (which we suspected), that we need to be verified, that we brought too many documents, too much money–we make many trips back out to the car. Then we go to another building where our appearances are inventoried. They laugh at our piercings and tattoos. We’re frisked, and left alone in rooms. We’re finally being led through a manicured lawn area with razor wire all around it, flower beds carefully watered–who the fuck is this for? Signs that tell us to sit if we hear shots fired, with little green stick figures squatting with their rounded non-hands behind their green dot head. We walked across this insulting lawn to a small redbrick building designated for visitation. This building is even more dilapidated than the last one we were in. We’re barked at by COs, and they tell us where to sit and “wait for the inmate.” They never use her name. Only her number and the word “inmate” or “offender.” We hate these COs. I can feel my comrades vibrating with anger beside me.

We assess the room. It’s filthy. There’s no air conditioning, the windows are sealed and there are two large fans pointed away from us–to say it’s hot is a serious understatement. It’s sweltering. There are puddles of gray-ish water on the cracked tiled floor, a crummy looking children’s play area in the corner. Every surface is sticky. Families are sitting around plastic tables, with loved ones who are trapped here. We wait for Alisha.

When she’s led through the door, we immediately stand up and start waving. We all hug for a while, some of us cry a lot, others will do that later. All of us are beaming, wide smiles of finally embracing someone you thought impossible to touch before this very moment. Her smile is big and brilliant. She’s smart as hell, but we knew that. She spends most of our visit asking about us. Three hours fly by filled with conversations about surviving behind bars, resourcefulness and what’s happening outside. She recounts details about her roommate, her job in the kitchen, the ingenious recipes and methods of sewing, tattooing, DIY air conditioning. The food in the vending machines is overpriced and junk–but way better (we are told) than what they’re fed in mess (same as Texas). We all swap stories, talk about working and what we’ll all do once she’s out and free. We’re angry that the COs basically get to dictate when you’re able to leave–this practice called “line.” They don’t like leaving their posts to allow you to leave when is convenient for you, so instead they do a “line call” at random intervals that they determine and this forces you to either leave your visit early or risk being stuck and potentially missing your time window for returning home to work, see other family etc. They make it so you remember you’re not free while you’re there. We hug, two times each, and make a promise to come again soon. The COs make her stay there after we leave.

We’re queasy with heat and hunger when we leave. You can feel our anger again. We’re walked down that fucking flowerbed lined sidewalk again. We wait, are inventoried, and have to return to the other building to check-out. We’re cursing as we leave. We change clothes again, and we trade-off crying on our drive back. We fantasize about the day we can bring her home. We message Sherri, we’re in a kind of shock. Still kinda are. She shouldn’t be there. No one should.

-Red

If you want to support Alisha (commissary, visits, legal needs) & help us and her family continue to visit please contribute here: https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/alisha-walker-survived-and-punished–2

Prisons seek to isolate & dehumanize. They want us to forget those who are inside. In an effort to combat this we’ll be sharing reflections from our visits with LeLe.

Alisha, a sex worker, was criminalized for both the work she did and for defending her life. As Support Ho(s)e, the main group supporting her in Chicago, has written, “Alisha Walker was working when she was attacked. 

Posted by Love & Protect, 2016.

Read the full post here.