On March 28, two days after my 39th birthday, I wrote a post about Darren Rainey’s death in a South Florida correctional facility. As often happens when one transitions from one year into another, I had been contemplating a number of things about life and all the things I have experienced and accomplished— especially this year as I mark the last year of a decade, looking toward the start of my forties and beginning life under what is certainly the most bizarre and whitest political administration I can remember.
Rainey’s story wasn’t new to me, but it was filed away in the recesses of my brain with other unpleasant stories about people of color who have met untimely deaths in police custody or correctional facilities. It reinforced my belief that our prison system is in desperate need of reform. It was then that I started remembering my own brief experience with the system—and since then I’ve been able to think about little else.
I stepped foot inside of a jail for the first time in 2008. I should remember the exact date and time clearly but now, almost a decade later, the event seems jumbled in my brain. Of course, it makes sense that I should want to forget and sometimes I think that it’s almost unbelievable that I actually volunteered to go.
My career in immigrant advocacy and refugee resettlement had offered me the opportunity to volunteer with the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and, one day during the fall of that year, I went to a men’s jail in Virginia to interview immigrant detainees about their cases.
I had never been to jail before so needless to say, I was unprepared for the immediate sense of loss of privacy I felt upon entering the gates.
Each of us picks up on unique things and experiences in these kinds of circumstances. For some it might be sounds or smells or the very real sense of danger or fear. All of those things were certainly there. It was definitely loud. There was a variety of strange smells and, yes, it was indeed scary to be one of a handful of women in a sea of men in correctional institution. But that wasn’t what most intimidated me.
In fact, while I expected to see hardened criminals, I mainly saw a bunch of really scared men, a great many of whom were my age or younger. For me, what stood out was the overwhelming lack of privacy. There were plexiglass windows everywhere—which I later found out was a specialized material made of a blend of polycarbonate, glass, and acrylic made to withstand high impact blows. It was extra thick and heavily glazed.
And it was everywhere. Everywhere so you could see where the detainees ate and slept and had recreation time and showered and used the toilet. There was literally nowhere they could go without being watched, not even to do the most basic bodily human functions. As I walked through, I imagined what it would be like for them to have every single thing stripped away, including their most basic freedoms and dignity. And that’s the part that felt the most inhumane.
And then of course talking to the detainees broke my heart. As a Spanish speaker, I was asked to work with the Spanish-speaking detainees who had limited means of communicating since guards most often weren’t bilingual and interpreters and attorneys for immigrant detainees are not required by law. I am not a lawyer so other than being able to answer a few questions and take information, I’m not sure I was all that helpful. Many of them couldn’t really understand the complexities of why they were being detained and one kept repeating to me over and over again that he just wanted to go home. It was heartbreaking and sobering.
And then, just mere weeks later, I found myself inside another immigrant detention facility—this time on a delegation visit with Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey. My organization was taking an active role in immigration reform and wanted to bring light to the conditions of immigrants in detention. There was a big tour, a press conference, a rally, lots of hoopla. There was lots of show but for a person doing work on the ground it felt empty, and it didn’t free a single detainee. I came back impatient and numb.
After that visit, my mind fixated on some of my relatives who were in various parts of their own immigration journey, and I couldn’t help put transpose their faces on the faces of the detainees I saw and talked to inside of the facilities. Who were their loved ones? What must it feel like to be separated and have no contact? My body was exhausted from the emotional roller coaster of it all. Though I cannot remember the exact dates of the visits, I do remember this was right around Thanksgiving because I inexplicably burst into tears at the Thanksgiving dinner table that year—helpless and frustrated about our mass incarceration system, angry about immigrant detention, and grateful that I didn’t have to go back if I didn’t want to.
Nine years later, after writing about Darren Rainey, I’m reminded of my brief visit to those detention centers. I keep wondering how many of those people have languished in those facilities without due process, how many have died at the hands of guards like Rainey and so many others have, how many have been falsely accused. I’m reminded of this violence, this gross, structural injustice in our system and I keep asking myself “Who’s responsible?”
Then I’m reminded that there is no easy answer. The United States has the world’s largest immigrant detention system, as well as the highest incarceration rate in the world. We’ve known this for years and some of us have silently accepted this as our fate, while the most abused among us have shouted that this was happening until their voices were sore.
In this moment of new awakenings, while we all seem to be paying attention, let’s ask ourselves some critical questions about why this is and why this is allowed to be—particularly when we know that the government allows detention centers and prisons to be contracted out for profit, and that blacks and other people of color are disproportionately represented in the prison system. This is an intentional strategy and it has done nothing but serve to stifle the social and economic well-being of communities of color for generations.
While we are doing the important work of organizing, educating, and resisting, this is an incredible opportunity to expose the harm that mass incarceration is doing to our society and work to build a better, fair, and more humane future. The time is now to hold us all accountable so that there are no more Darren Raineys, no more Sandra Blands, no more José de Jesúses.
No more hashtags and unaccounted for deaths due to this prison system that has no regard for human life.
For more information:
www.theatlantic.com/...
www.prisonpolicy.org
www.amnestyusa.org/…
www.aclu.org/…