Prison

Prison

I recently got a text from someone I know from AA.  She told me that she was set to go on a prison Committment and needed another person to go with her and would I consider it.  I thought about it and said that I would.  Later in the month she told me that she would not be able to go but that she would put me in touch with another woman who had been doing it for a while.
I contacted this lady and we agreed to meet in the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts near the prison and go onto the grounds together in one car.  It was dark when I got there and I was getting more and more uncomfortable with my decision to do this.  I had to go into a women's prison with someone I didn't know whom I was meeting in a darkened Dunkin Donuts parking lot... Um... Perhaps not my most thought-out decision.
To my immense relief the lady who pulled up was a petite, grandmotherly type who chatted happily away as we drove the short distance to the gates of the prison compound.  We had to hand over our drivers licenses and were then waved through to the parking lot.  As we headed for a space, I was unnerved by the site of a number of German Shepard guard dogs in runs along the perimeter topped by barbed wire.  The dogs were running the length of the enclosure and barking angrily as we got out of the car.  For some reason this made me think of World War II.
We entered the building and went through a series of checkpoints and searches.  We were not to wear jewelry or open- toed shoes or layers, they even took my elastic hair band.  They found our names on the approved list and we signed in at the last checkpoint and metal detector and were waved down a long corridor with a metal cage-like door at the intersection of two corridors.  There was a metal door at each opening of the hallway making four in all.  It was at this point that I realized that we were not in fact in a women's prison but a co-ed facility.  We were behind this metal door barrier and to our left were a line of male prisoners behind another metal barrier.  I assumed at this point that they would open the door for the prisoners and let them pass closing the next barrier behind them before opening our barrier to let us through, this keeping us separated...  That was not what happened.  They opened both and we were in this small space pretty much together. It was at this point that I noticed that we had no escort and I was starting to sweat.
We made it down the corridor going straight and the men crossed the other way.  We stood in front of a locked door on the left hand side of a long corridor and looked up into a camera waiting for the door to be opened.  We stood there for a solid three or four minutes waiting.  All the while my companion chatted amiably about a nut shop she knew of near where I now worked and how she loved their gift baskets.  She talked away while I eyed yet more male prisoners passing behind us on their way to another section of the prison.  I have not been that uncomfortable in quite some time... Not since passing out condoms under a bridge in North Philadelphia to a community of homeless heroin-addicted men during my practicum.
Finally a female guard opened the door from the other side and escorted us to a room labeled "classroom".  The room was not very large, but had a table at the head of the rom with two chairs and stacks of chairs around the perimeter.  Women started filing in and they were of all shapes, sizes, ages and colors, many of them tattooed.  Again I was really uncomfortable as the guard had left us alone at this point while the women installed the chairs and made a tight circle which included the two of us.
The petite grandmotherly type started the meeting and asked me to speak given that she had been there many times before and her story had been told often.  I nervously began knowing that I come from a privileged background and I was guessing that many of the women in there probably did not.  Nonetheless I told them about my life and the things I believed played into my becoming an alcoholic and about my struggles with trauma, the death of Liam, Frank's cancer bypass surgery and then alcoholism.  I talked to them about my journey into recovery so far and a number of women were crying by the time I was finished which I had not at all expected.
We opened the floor for them to ask questions or just share what they were struggling with.  There were a number of women who had lost children who spoke of how the depression that followed had driven them to use.  There were a number of women who faced leaving prison with little or no support to lean on.  There were a number of women who had experienced the same sort of sexual trauma as I have.  There were a number of women who wanted to know how I had found a way to forgive.  And at the end a very sad, bedraggled woman who was missing several teeth raised her hand with tears running down her cheeks who said in a really quiet voice, "I'm supposed to leave here soon.  I don't want to go.  I'm safe in here and I won't use.  When I leave I have nowhere to go and I just know that I will use again.  I just don't want to leave."  My heart broke.
I realized that even though I was uncomfortable in the setting, that these were just women after all.  They were just women who had had many obstacles in their lives and, who, like me, had made bad decisions.  They were just women and regardless of our different backgrounds we share a common problem.  I was uncomfortable, yes... But will I go back?.. You bet.