by Crane-Station
Jail Art by Crane-Station
Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account.
Inmate names are changed.
Frog Gravy contains graphic language.
McCracken County Jail, Cell 107, April, 2008
Ruthie’s 49-year-old mother just died. She was obese, like Ruthie, and she chain-smoked. She lived alone in a trailer. No one checked on her the entire weekend. She was found Monday, sitting next to the air conditioner, with an inhaler in her hand. The air conditioner was off, so the skin on the body split open and turned colors; the funeral will not be open casket.
Ruthie sits next to me at a steel table with a no-shank pen and paper. She starts to write a letter to a treatment center:
“I’m writeing to see if I could get into your program
Im really own drugs bad especily crack cocane I started using when I was 12 years old and it was pot then I started dranking at 16 then started snorting cocane at age 17 then about 19…”
“How do you spell snortin’?” asks Ruthie.
“s-n-o-r-t-i-n-g,” I reply.
She thanks me and continues:
“…then about 19 crack cocane I stop using drugs there for awhile when I found out I was pregnet I had 2 little girls did good for awhile unlike the father of my kids, my old man, went to jail for about 2 years at first I stayed clean about 4 months after he got locked up.”
This is the first and only period in the letter so far. She continues:
“then things got hard for me, like paying bills, supporting my kids, just life in general, and everyone around almost did crack cocane, so I look for that for an axcuse, to start back smoking crack-cocane, I started smoking crack-cocane for about the first 6 months then started doing it all almost, But I never really been addicted to pills, like I’ll have a crack pipe and a meth pipe goin at the same time and my old man wuz sellin dope and doin weekins in jail…”
Ruthie giggles and says, “A crack pipe and a meth pipe at the same time, that is high, don’t you thank that’s high?”
She continues writing:
“…my reasons I looked up to my sister when I wuz a child is my sister took care of me when my mom wuz in and out of jail and on drugs.”
Ruthie never knew her real mother, the one who just died, until Ruthie was 18, and they met each other here in this jail. Until that time, Ruthie had a last name and a social security number given to her by her foster parents. Then, her real mother gave her a name and a social security number, since the foster parents had been sexually abusive.
I ask, “What about your father?”
“Oh, he was murdered,” replies Ruthie. “I got a tattoo of him right here, on my arm. Yeah, he was murdered. It was in the news.”
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“Oh, it was over money. They done hung him with his own belt buckle. This man and this lady.”
Terry says, “Well fuck me runnin’.”
“They tried to stuff him into the trunk of a car, but he was too big, so they done drug him back into the house. I saw his body. He’d been dead for a week. He was split open, and there was maggots everywhere. Seein’ that changes you. I ain’t been right after seein’ that. Don’t you think it changes you, Rachel?”
“I cannot imagine that,” I say.
Down the hall, a guard yells at a white man in an isolation cell to “stop acting black,” and further down the hall, Harry yells from his isolation cell, “HELP! Let me out! Helpmehelpme help. HELP!” The mailman comes and retrieves Sirkka’s outgoing trick letters that she has written in hopes of receiving some commissary money.
Ruthie says, “And Mama’s body done swolled up and busted. They cain’t have no open casket. They say the smell was awful.”
Terry asks, “Where did your mama live?”
“The trailer park out Twin Oaks Road by the church and down by the liquor store.”
I note that everything in Kentucky seems to be in relation to a church, a jail or a liquor store.
Ruthie says, “Yeah, and you know when that lady came by the cell with Brother Phillip?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She had me sign some papers to say they could sell Mama’s trailer, and car, and all her things, so they could bury her. They said that that burial insurance wasn’t no good.”
“Oh jeez,” I say. “It was probably a scam.”
“Now I ain’t got nowhere to go when I git out,” says Ruthie. “I ain’t gonna have nothing.”
Christie says, “You signed something?”
I ask, “Do you have a copy?”
“No,” says Ruthie. “I shouldn’t a signed it, huh?”
Christie says, “Ruthie! Don’t ever sign anything when you don’t know what it is!”
In the next day or so, Ruthie leaves the jail in handcuffs, to spend ½ hour at her mother’s funeral. One of the jail guards, Sally, knew Ruthie’s mother and sent flowers; they were the only flowers that anyone sent. The day after the funeral, guards come by and get Ruthie, and she returns to the cell in tears and in hives. She has been charged with two new felonies, each carrying a potential additional five-year sentence: giving a false name and giving a false address.
The address is false, because the trailer was sold, to pay for the mother’s burial.The name was false, because Ruthie provided both her foster care name and the name that her real mother had given her.
Ruthie was 9th-grade special educated and did not understand the forms. She is on disability and cannot even work a cash register because she cannot count back change. She is obese, because she does not know anything about nutrition or diet. She does not understand her own drug addiction, and she does not really even understand her original charges.
We again admonish Ruthie for signing forms that she does not understand. We tell her to go before the judge and explain her inability to comprehend, her education level and her learning disability.I feel a terrible sense of guilt, because Ruthie had initially asked me for help with the forms, and I told her that it was inappropriate for me to see her private information and help her with legal documents. I honestly thought that an appropriate person such as a public defender would help Ruthie.
I was wrong.
Interesting….
Kind of a pathetic situation where Ruthie, a mother of two, really needed help with many things in her life.
Crane, I worked the Nursing side of the Jail for 5 years in my local Correctional Detention Center. It is sad for us too. Starting off with inmates first appearance in the jail and their steady physical and mental decline as they continue in the life. Some try to break out with getting their GED Certification, reading courses, spiritual life and other self improvements the jail offers but they are few in number. In particular, I like the GED Classes – they pass notes to each other like we did in school, giggle, involve themselves in the Course Work. The food is 5th class, just awful as is the bordom. I always put bordom at the top of the list for “Worse things about jail” and the food second. In my jail at least, the Nursing staff did care about the inmates and did our best to help them. Of course, male or female, I never met an inmate that considered themselves quilty. I have heard every entrapment story known to man. It is a hard life in there. Glad you survived and can write about it.
Thank you for commenting and bringing your unique perspective and experience, and I commend you for having done this work. I spent time in two jails and in a prison, and the jail was, without question, counter-therapeutic at best, but also physically and mentally damaging. It is the harder type of time, and programs are disappearing. I tutored inmates for GED in prison, but then, all education and treatment classes were eliminated and the inmates were shipped back to the jails where there were few if any programs. McCracken, for example (at the time), banned all educational materials. (I wrote about all that). Elimination of programs is tragic, because when a person returns to the community with no skills or progress to show for the time, recidivism (return to an adult facility within 2 years of release in this area) is almost a given and I have seen it happen over and over.
Contrary to your statement above, almost every inmate I came to know, with rare exception, admitted to, talked about and in some cases even embellished or bragged about their crimes. Few people I encountered took cases to trial; the vast majority pled guilty and took pleas. I am certain that what I was hearing may have been very different than what staff was hearing, granted, and this may also vary by region or community.
On the food, which I have also written about, the prison daily calorie allotment is 2800 calories, and it is mainly starch and fat, so inmates typically gain a substantial amount of weight. This is very common.
Again, I do not know about the men’s side.
Thank you so much for the read and for the comment, much appreciated!
Wow, so I have been reading the essays on your site as well as this one. I suspect I will struggle with “work focus” until I am finished reading, they are quite good and very well written. You weave the injustice in each story n a very clever and telling way. I have been just enthralled with them all morning. They all deserve not only publication but significant diffusion in our country.
Many of us are so removed from his environment and this glimpse into the injustices (Ruthie’s story is heartwrenching) that are going on in our communities, our states, and our nation.
I am an adoptive parent. I have adopted and/or fostered four children that came from very rough situations in their birth families. It is easy for us, as adoptive parents, to get together and feel good about ourselves and the children we “saved”. I have never felt right about that. I am happy to have the children I have as they have made my life richer than I know, but I always feel emptiness and some guilt about the birth parents. Where are the programs for them?
In my case all the mothers were young, unmarried, and in a uniquely bad situation from different areas of the world. Many of them would have made amazing mothers had the situations been different….maybe had they been given the chances for education, love, and mentoring I have been blessed with.
Anyway, I am making no surefire point, but just wanting to say I appreciate the glimpse you are giving to “the other side” for some of us. Here is hoping something in these writings change the world for a young parent or woman who may be given a voice not previously heard.
Thank you for your kind comment and for sharing experience of being a positive and healthy foster parent, a very difficult job. To answer your question below, yes, the felony charges were dropped. I do not know Ruthie’s whereabouts today, nor do I know of anyone else’s current status unless they are incarcerated and I can look online, because I am not allowed any contact with anyone one the outside, who has prior convictions. This is prohibited while I am on parole.
On publication, yes, I am going to seek publication for Frog Gravy. I have a working manuscript that is approximately 70,000 words and a nonfiction proposal. That said, according to some things I have read on first drafts – ex: Anne Lamont “Bird By Bird” – it is best to put the first draft aside for several months and then come back for editing. I have done that and am working on the editing. Of course, the publishing business is fiercely
competitive, so I know it will be a long road.
Again, thank you for the read and comment!
Is it something maybe someone like Nandi Crosby could help with? Your efforts seem to align and she has several books out.
Yes, our efforts do align, and I have great respect for Dr. Crosby and her stated vision and goals. She has told me that hers is a small press and that she would be interested, but she also believes Frog Gravy has potential with a larger press. That said, I admire Dr. Crosby and have a sense of loyalty, so at this point I cannot say what will happen. I came to know her by submitting an essay to an open call for essays.
Was Ruthie subsequently given time for the two charges? They seem very explainable and easy to defend, but I am guessing her current incarceration was a factor in giving any leniency here?
The injustice of the situation is jarring.
@KA,
“They seem very explainable and easy to defend,”
That’s what I would think.
Crane,
Thank you for sharing more your writing work and experience. The most vulnerable groups of our society are often exploited and marginalized. I am sorry to hear what happened to Ruthie. To tack on new felony charges for someone in that type of condition seems quite cruel and counterproductive.
Yes, it was just awful to see them do that to someone who had just lost her mother, and who was just really so compromised in her ability to function. As I said, I believe the charges were dropped, but really, filing them was malicious and incredibly upsetting to this already-struggling woman.
I appreciate the read. Fred is working on another post, so I thought that while he was doing that each day, I would share a bit of the incarceration experience to let readers know what it is like from an inmate perspective.
He is just about done with a post about the scream, I believe.
OMG Crane, How very sad, we need to make more effort in society to be aware of situations where there are children destined to end up as these inmates are. In finding out the need, what it would take to not have women end up this way, perhaps you can, in time, put up suggestions that you feel will be helpful on the “outside” in our everyday lives to help someone, just one or two even, to a better way of life. It will be interesting to read, if any one of these women have something good to say about anyone in their lives that they felt was kind to them, that they have appreciation for. You are doing a great favor in bringing their story to us and as you well know your experience is just a bit of what there is as in the whole of it.
Boy, on the first part of your comment, I think this is something that we need to figure out as a society: prevention. Many of the women became entangled in ‘the system’ early and came from some very difficult circumstances. Perhaps a social worker could do more justice to such an essay than I could, or maybe someone knows of some promising studies.
I think that education is very important, academic and social. My future goal is to get books into jails and prisons, and I once spoke to St. Vincent de Paul thrift store about trying to help donated books make their way to the prisons. They were very in favor.
Not sure if they’d let me back in, but I would love to return and teach in a prison setting. Illiteracy and lack of education is over-represented in the jail and prison population currently. The prison library where I was was excellent, (not to be confused with the abysmal jails) and one thing I noticed was a large section with children’s books. The reason- many women could not read past this level. I met an inmate who had a father on the outside, but he could not visit her because he could not read road signs.
Great thoughts, thank you, and yes, women cared very deeply for loved ones. Thing is, the separation is so painful that the mantra was: You cannot live in here and out there at the same time.
I am most disappointed that there is not addiction assistance available to inmates there on drug related charges. It seems these women are released as unprepared for social integration and success as they were when they came in.
Is there allowances for NGO to come in and provide some of the addiction counseling, literacy, and life skills needed? Is there recognized literacy programs that utilize NGOs to teach inmates reading, writing, etc?
From what I observed, it varies. In McCracken, only religious-focus groups were allowed in while I was there. There was one GED class each week, I believe, one “Life Skills” class that was a religious service, no AA, and at that time only five women were allowed very limited work in laundry. Prison offered much more, but toward the end of my stay, all Class Ds were discontinued from school and treatment and shipped back to jails. The only reason I did not get shipped was, depending on who I talked with, my sentence was longer than most class Ds or I was ‘grandfathered’ in. SAP (residential substance abuse) was available to class Cs at the time, which I was not, and although I signed up for AA in prison, I was never approved to attend. I enrolled in school after working for a couple of months.
In McCracken there was one sort of not very constructive, one-hour drug class each week, and at Ricky’s World, there was a wonderful priest who was like a counselor, one AA meeting each weekation class each, and one basic adult education class each week.
It would be nice to see NGO, not religious, constructive and productive program geared toward an inmate being clean, sober and self-supporting through her own contributions upon release, but I did not see it in the jails. Prison was a lot better until the programs were cut. I do not know the status of any of the programs today, but I believe there is great need.
I read your story today. What a horrific, scary, and unfair situation. We had something not as terrible and extensive, but a situation of profiling and undue stopping from the police in a town where my son was a youth leader. He was stopped 7 times in 18 months while driving with a van filled with minority teens either to or from an event.
On one stop, they gave him a summons for court and no ticket and no explanation of what the court date was for. We had to hire an attorney. The officer waited 2 months to put in the ticket. It ended up “suspected drinking/drugs and careless driving” though no test of any kind was carried out at the stop and no mention of a drugs or alcohol. He also said my son was “weaving lanes” verses the “short stop” that the officer told my son at the scene. The attorney said we were lucky he was not in criminal court. My son was 22 at the time and did not drink. He volunteered his time leading a community youth group while in college.
There was nothing to present except reference letters to my sons character. Fortunately the “suspected impaired” part was dropped and we only had to deal with the careless driving.
It is amazing what a slighted officer will do and the power they yield. My son today is a child treatment counselor at a group home. Thankfully the other parts of the stop did not impair his upcoming career. It is awful yours did not turn out as fortunate. My only hope is this all happened for a reason of giving these women a voice and you will be redeemed and restored for the entire horrible ordeal.
Thank you for the comment, I take it you read the bizarre legal case that currently sits in the US Supreme Court. I may someday return to nursing (KY board is aware and they have told me to apply) but I am awaiting the outcome of this. At any rate, I will likely return through a 5-year monitored program, which I am more than happy to do.
For now, the writing is my path- giving the women a voice and presenting the reality of incarceration day-to-day. I harbor no resentment, and am grateful for the many things I do have.
I am not at all surprised to hear about your son, and he is very fortunate that he did not get entangled in bogus criminal charges. You must be so proud of him and his work counseling children today, what a remarkable young man, and I am sure he is proud to have you as a parent.
Again, thank you for the read and the kind comment.
I did read it and the appeal…I was literally mouth gaping open at the assumptions that were made and the resulting sentence. I am so pleased you are out now and able to make a difference.
I am truly sick at the essay on the pregnant young women. I cannot imagine.
The thing about the appeal is that the case is no longer about me. It can and will affect every future Fourth Amendment case in this state. Not much hope with the US Supreme court, but you never know. At any rate, I have a gigantic, scathing ineffective assistance of counsel claim if the higher court grants cert. They should. Longstanding authority is firmly split in my case. The whole thing is absurd.
I will place some the pregnant woman essays here at this site. Yeah. Sick stuff. Not unique either.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I administered GED test in two jails, once a month for each. Both had regular classes, on a daily basis with teachers on-site all day, all week. One had a library. The other had a gym and religious folks who came in. Most of those taking the test were men, some of them very young men, occasionally one or two women.
The smaller jail had COs that showed respect, but didn’t put up with nonsense. If it were necessary to remind about a rule, it was done conversationally, but firmly.
The larger one had some COs that were bustards. Even inadvertent minor rule violations were treated as major big deals with shouting and humiliation. In this jail, I tended to identify more with the inmates! Interestingly, many of the inmates, especially the young ones, had never been convicted of relatively minor crimes. They just didn’t have bail money but they were in there long enough to qualify to take the GED test.
Holy cow, I read the pregnancy entry. I am truly ill.
Hi Rachel,
Thank you for posting. I have a cousin currently incarcerated in a state prison. I’ll have to participate in this gut-wrenching series after he is released. It hits homes too closely right now. I’ve visited him several times but can’t shake the worry and anxiety about what he deals with while incarcerated. Hopefully he will be out by the beginning of next year.
I’ll keep all that you have encountered in my thoughts and prayers and hope to be able to take in your insights next year.