The New York Times op-ed: "The Prisoners Time Forgot"
By CAROL MUSKE-DUKES, Published: July 1, 2007
THEY called it “falling off the calendar.” It was the kind of phrase that I came to understand while teaching a creative writing workshop at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island in the 1970s. I learned, for example, that a “pelican” lawyer — black suit, large scoop beak dripping torts? — was an appellate lawyer and that the dreaded syllable “bing” was the term for solitary confinement, calling up the sound of a slamming cell door.
But falling off the calendar was the scarily evocative and precise metaphoric phrase for being forgotten by the court system. It meant that the person, unseen, unheard of and uncharged by any judge, had been abandoned behind bars for weeks, months, sometimes years.
When I first heard it used, I pictured a woman arrested for a “victimless” crime falling through the air. There they were, prostitutes, shoplifters, drug-users, teetering on the brink of an Aug. 19 or a Dec. 17, a Feb. 1 or a June 6, tumbling, then plummeting into uncharted, calendarless space.
The women in the workshop wrote about what they felt, having fallen from numbered, eventful days into numberless days and weeks. They wrote poems and stories in which courtrooms popped up like mirages in a parched, windswept desert. Habeas corpus, had anyone ever bothered to explain its importance, did not exist for them; the Bill of Rights did not seem to apply to them.
A woman arrested for turning a trick or stealing a radio or arrested by mistake or by malice for no crime at all might experience, for a while, random trips to court in a Department of Corrections van, hour after hour of sitting in the “bullpen” talking to a pelican, waiting in vain to see a judge, waiting in vain for a formal charge, followed by a long exhausting trip back to the detention center. The explanation detainees were given was that the courts were “backed up,” the judges overworked and the dockets jammed.
For some women, the trips to court would stop altogether or became so infrequent that there was no more hope on the calendar: no chance to draw a red circle around a court date or a possible release. Women would lose whatever occupation they’d had on the outside and many who tried to protest would become prison drug addicts, snowed or “penguined” out on Thorazine or chloral hydrate.
They would also often lose their families — children of incarcerated women routinely were sent to foster homes. The detained women were not told where their children had been sent — and when they were finally freed, they had no way to get them back.
These inmates had no advocate beyond the pelicans back then, no one to write their names back on the calendar and often no one to argue effectively for their rights. They had to ask teachers and social workers to phone their children.
Most of us maintain a calendar with dates cheerfully circled and notes scribbled in. But for some, the absence of habeas corpus is nothing new. This is not just a problem in New York. An article last fall in The Lone Star Iconoclast, a weekly newspaper in Crawford, Tex., by Diana Claitor, a co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, quotes a recent releasee from a women’s prison there: “The women in this jail are predominantly African-American or Hispanic and young and very poor. Most of their offenses are nonviolent, for things like traffic tickets or soliciting or a line of cocaine — yet they are forced to remain in the cell without counsel for long periods of time.”
About four years ago, Carina Montes, a 29-year-old with a history of mental illness who was arrested and accused of stealing lipsticks from a drugstore, committed suicide while at Rikers. She had been in the detention center for five months awaiting a court decision on theft charges.
The day of her death was presumably noted, though not made public — like the many other suicides on Rikers Island. Someone remembers the day she died; it is recorded on a tombstone. The term for suicide, in the bitterly imaginative lingo of prison, is “hang-up,” as in noose, as in limbo, as in stopped time, as in off the calendar.
Carol Muske-Dukes, a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, is the author of the forthcoming novel “Channeling Mark Twain.”
