When my children were born I worked in the prison. Wasn’t I scared, people asked, being pregnant there? No, I’d tell them. It’s fine. The officers run a tight ship.
The offenders, though they had to be careful not to say anything that could be construed as personal, behaved themselves for the most part. I think they enjoyed a glimpse of the outside.
Every week we had an intake meeting with offenders just off the chain, seeing them one at a time in a windowless room in the basement of the Medium Security Complex living unit. All of us, Sergeant Beard, Marianne, the lead classification counselor, Carol, a nurse, Jerry from Intelligence and Investigations, were parents, and we talked about our kids between offenders.
Some of the offenders, when they came, were cocky. “Perhaps you’re wondering why I’ve called you all together,” they’d say, from their assigned seat at the foot of the table.
Others were terrified. We’d reassure them and Sergeant Beard would say they were in the best unit in the state. Paying jobs, you can see pheasants from Big Yard, Friday night bingo, college courses, the Pop Shack, a room with a door you can lock, the Ritz-Carlton of prisons.
We asked about gang affiliations, housing preferences, medical and mental health needs, examine scars and tattoos. Once I spotted fresh shallow cuts on the inside of an eighteen-year old boy’s wrist.
Another time Jerry, the I and I guy, told an offender who’d indignantly denied gang membership, to take off his shirt. HCS was printed in big, dirt-colored letters across his abdomen.
Jerry played straight man. “What does HCS stand for?”
The offender smiled brightly. “Helping Children Succeed.”
Hilltop Crips. We laughed, looked solemn as Sergeant Beard told him what to expect if he engaged in gang activities here.
Disingenuous, I said, after the offender left. Sergeant Beard asked what that meant.
“Smarmy.”
“Lying piece of shit,” Jerry offered.
Sergeant Beard said disingenuous sounded more professional. “Spell it for me, Cathy.”
The last offender we saw that day, James Newman, was thin, small, just over five feet. I told him I’d be meeting with him. I was required to see every sex offender.
“You’re not a doctor, are you? A psychologist? I only work with the top people.” He snorted when I said I was a psychiatric social worker.
Marianne, the classification counselor, asked him if he needed protection.
He scoffed, held up his hands, palms out. “These are registered as lethal weapons.”
Your breath is the lethal weapon, Jerry said.
Mr. Newman continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Somebody wants to get stupid, I’ll say, Feeling froggy, Punk? Jump!”
She asked him if he had any interest in the sex offender treatment center on the coast.
“My dear young lady. I’m not guilty. Because of an infection I incurred while working for the CIA in Panama I’m incapable of sustaining an erection.”
He laughed again when Marianne said the legal definition of rape included the insertion of foreign objects in the rectum or vagina. “You’ll see I was correct when I’m released in the next few days.”
After he left, Carol interrupted the fun we were having calling Marianne “my dear young lady,” to point out Mr. Newman’s choppy gait, wondered if he’d had rickets as a child. She’d only seen pictures, she said, never an actual case.
At our first interview, during the psychosocial interview, Mr. Newman said he grew up in a big house across from Central Park, “in New York City.” A wine cellar stocked with ten thousand bottles of rare wine, red and white, a library full of first editions, an army of servants gliding noiselessly on thick carpets, ready to meet his every need. “Priceless jewels around my mother’s neck. Picassos and Michelangelos on the walls. Everything anyone could want except love.”
Harvard, of course, graduating with highest honors, then training with Bruce Lee, becoming his sensei. “Before he died.”
I could have told him when you lie you push people away. I knew this because I started lying when I was thirteen, didn’t stop till I was in my twenties, telling the kind of lies you’d expect, to avoid punishment, get out of things I didn’t want to do, but I also told self-aggrandizing lies, stupid stuff like saying I’d known Adlai Stevenson.
I stopped lying in my twenties, got my degree, made friends, fell in love with Jon, told myself I’d changed, deserved good things.
When I asked Mr. Newman what he wanted to work on, he smiled coyly. “Why don’t I ask you? What do you think I should do?”
Therapeutic goals, I said, are best if they address the source of your unhappiness.
But why would he be unhappy? He was getting out of prison soon, perhaps tomorrow. The state would owe him millions of dollars.
He hadn’t done anything wrong. One little swat on her fully covered bottom, that was all.
He’d been volunteering at a day program for developmentally disabled adults. The clients loved him, he said. They were like big kids, hugging, kissing, climbing all over him.
The part about his volunteering was true. Because he had a heart of gold, he said. Actually, it was a community service requirement, part of his probation for his previous conviction. Now you wouldn’t allow sex offenders access to potentially vulnerable clients but this was thirty years ago and people believed sex offenders wouldn’t stray from their usual choice of victims. If you raped little girls, for instance, you’d leave adults and little boys alone.
Any port in the storm, we said at the prison.
He claimed he’d seen a client, Jannie, take an extra cupcake. “I wasn’t going to let that little fatty get away with it.” A spanking was all she could understand.
He was in the center of a group of clients in the dining room when he grabbed Jannie, pushed her down across his lap, pulled her slacks and underpants to her knees, hit her with a wooden spoon, then thrust the spoon handle down, churned.
Jannie couldn’t speak. She made sounds the workers believed they could recognize, indicative of distress and fear. The police report was based on what the other clients said and the medical report.
He pulled out the spoon, held it up, “PU,” then holding the spoon by its dirty handle, he slid it under Jannie, stuck its bowl into her vagina. No one saw that but they heard her scream, saw the blood afterwards.
The employees and the clients blamed themselves.
There was no spoon, Mr. Newman said, no exposed bottom. The clients had been told what to say.
He was especially angry about a report written by a worker at the group home where Jannie lived. Jannie had been proud of learning to control her bowels and bladder, the worker wrote, was ashamed when she regressed. She became afraid of male staff and residents, took more valium. She didn’t want to leave her room, no longer enjoyed things she’d liked before, bus rides with clients and staff, watching Magnum P.I., listening to Duran Duran.
Even if he’d done it, Mr. Newman said, the use of a qualifier a sign of guilt, it didn’t matter. “Those people don’t feel things. All they’re capable of is feeding their faces and scribbling in coloring books.”
“Profoundly disabled individuals experience a full range of emotions and are often frustrated by their inability to express them.”
He shrugged.
When I asked him about an earlier victim, a five- year-old girl, he said it was the cover story he’d used when he was with the FBI and needed to infiltrate prisons to gather intel on gangs.
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one but the light bulb has to really want to change.
He said he’d continue seeing me; I seemed to find him interesting.
I should have told him no. It didn’t matter because two days later he was beaten in the shower room.
According to Jerry Mr. Newman didn’t see it coming. They’d used a rock or a bar of soap in the toe of a sock, probably, to hit him in the back of his head, then kicked him when he fell facedown onto the concrete.
When an officer came on to the tier for rounds, ten minutes early, she found Mr. Newman, alone and unconscious, on the shower room floor. “She may have saved his life, coming sooner than the perpetrators expected,” Sergeant Beard said.
Mr. Newman was subdued when I visited him at the infirmary.
You could barely see his eyes because his eyelids were swollen. He had concussion. His ribs were taped. If it had just been a few they’d have let them heal on their own but most of his had been broken. His nose and the index finger on his right hand were also broken.
His false teeth had been dislodged and he’d gagged on them. No harm done, he said, just a sore throat. The nurses here were so nice it reminded him of when he was eight and had his tonsils out at the old Cook County Hospital. There they also brought him all the ice cream he wanted, sat and talked to him while he ate it.
I didn’t ask him how he’d gotten to Chicago from New York or tell him I’d had my tonsils out when I was eight too, though my memories weren’t of nurses but my mother, who stayed with me the whole time.
At first I was too sick to even swallow ice chips. When I could, I was discharged. My father came to get us, carried me up the stairs to bed. Our Irish setter, Finn, ran after us, jumped into bed with me. He wasn’t supposed to, but I was so pleased and flattered he was allowed to stay.
Mr. Newman said he had a ball playing with his hospital bed, cranking it up and down. Kids aren’t getting their tonsils out so much now, I told him.
A shame, he said.
I&I had told him he couldn’t stay at MSC, but he liked it there. Next time he’d be on the lookout. Could I help?
Sorry, I told him. They’re moving you for your own protection.
He understood, he said, but he sure appreciated my coming to see him.
I thought of how much he’d liked hospitals when I was in the hospital myself the next month, giving birth to my daughter, Amy.
It was nice. Nothing to do but take naps and hold Amy, stroke her thin red curls, daydream. No laundry, no diapers, no night feedings.
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
When I went back to work I got an e-mail from a psychologist, a Dr. Thayer, at the prison where Mr. Newman was now housed. Great evaluation I’d written on Mr. Newman, he said, saved him a lot of time. He was surprised to learn I wasn’t a psychologist myself!
He wanted my help. Mr. Newman claimed I’d placed his hands on my pregnant abdomen, “So that I could feel the new life move within her.”
Was this true, he asked, because he wanted to confront Mr. Newman with my denial.
Of course it wasn’t true, but reading it made it seem as if it was and I was a liar again.
No, I wrote back, not adding I thought confrontation would make Mr. Newman more defensive.
Two weeks later I received a letter from Mr. Newman, written in pencil on the kind of lined paper we used for practicing cursive when I was in third grade. I hope you and your family die a horrible death.
I sent a copy to Dr. Thayer who called me on the phone, interrupting a session. I offered to return his call but no, this couldn’t wait.
When he’d seen the letter he’d infracted Mr. Newman at once. “That’s a major infraction, threatening a staff member. I recommended he lose good time.” The hearing officer returned the infraction, saying only the recipient of the putative threat could write the infraction.
Hope don’t float, I didn’t say. Instead I told him it wasn’t a threat because Mr. Newman didn’t have the means to make it happen.
“Is this just a joke to you? You think he should get away with this?”
Not a joke, I told him, and not a threat either.
He hung up.
The next year Mr. Newman was sent to our special housing unit for seriously mentally ill individuals. I didn’t think he fit the diagnostic criteria. My other objection, shared by other staff members, was his history of exploiting others.
But Mr. Newman was dying of bladder cancer, and the special housing unit staff considered him too weak to be dangerous. He might have asked for an early release on compassionate grounds, didn’t. God sent me here, he told Cyril, his case manager.
I figured he knew an early release was unlikely, given his criminal history.
Cyril said he was working hard. He’d accepted Jesus as his personal savior, wanted to make peace with everyone, before God called him home, so could I please come see him? Mr. Newman wanted to apologize.
Cyril prayed with offenders, offenders I thought would benefit more if they were encouraged to look at the discrepancies between what they said and what they did, wouldn’t have understood if I refused. I went to the special housing unit the next day.
I was early, went on a tier to speak to another offender I knew. Mr. Newman was further down, standing in front of another cell, telling the offender behind the bars God loved him. “I love you too, brother.”
We met in a conference room across from the tier. When Cyril brought him in, I heard Mr. Newman tell him Adam on F Tier, was looking pretty down. It might be nothing, but…
Junior staff, we called that behavior at the group home for teenagers where I worked when I was in college.
The skin on his face resembled tallow.
I’d hoped he might have been the way he was when I’d seen him at the infirmary, but he was smiling. Smug, I thought.
“How’s that baby? Getting big, I bet.”
I could have told him she was beginning to talk and, as for walking, she’d done that since she was ten months old.
“Fine.”
He blinked, said he’d been going through a rough time when he wrote the letter. “Please know I never meant to hurt you.”
I stood to go. “I see. Thank you.” For a minute he looked shaken, then clomped across the room to fling the door open with a sweeping gesture. “Kiss those babies for me,” he said.
On the way out Cyril asked how it had gone. “Jimmy was really looking forward to talking to you.”
His apologize was inadequate, I said.
Cyril was confused. “But he’s a great guy.”
You stupid fuck, I wanted to say. You stupid, stupid fuck.
But what was the use?
“You should be proud of yourself,” I told Cyril, who blushed, smiled. “He’s with people who care about him, thanks to you. He never had that before.”
It was true, wasn’t it, and if you can give someone what they want, you might as well.