Kite: Growing Up in the Prison Industrial Complex

When my father returned home from prison for the first time since my birth, I was a five-year-old kid from Brooklyn whose world consisted of navigating the pews of our storefront church and catching roaches with a plastic cup and a rusted can of Raid in our one-bedroom in Bushwick. Looking back, I’d like to think I had a kind of magical childhood, devoid of much of the burden of being poor.  Up until that point, I had a revolving door of family members in and out of the New York State Correctional system. Between my parents and older brother, I grew up getting to know and love my immediate family members through letters, cards, drawings, and collect calls that were often more than what we could afford. Still, my grandmother rarely put a price on family and allowed at least one call from them each, per month, no matter the financial strain.

It’s true that their distance left a void in our lives though, at that time, I couldn’t tell. My grandmother raised me as her own, strict and unrelenting about my safety in the streets of New York City. I rarely saw my parents or brother and, when I did, only by accident or in passing through. My grandmother protected me from the tragedy of my family that we had come to know on an intimate level; the tragedy of drugs, violence, and psychological distress that she feared would manifest in my own life without her protection of my innocence.

Over the years, my parents were in and out of prison, on and off the streets, weaving between addictions and brutal attempts at recovery and rejection that left them both with a deep longing for understanding and a cynicism about their ability to recover in a society which they were systematically excluded from. On my block and many others, they were called, “crackheads,” and with careful questioning and dismissive othering, few let my brother and I forget that we didn’t belong to a “normal” family. As such our parents’ absences were both unsettling, shameful, and mysterious. Being the younger of us by eleven years, unlike my brother,  I missed them both without ever having met them, only their voices and Polaroids. My father’s gentle voice betrayed his violent flashes of anger and pain. My mother’s raspy excitement about an upcoming “good behavior” release always seemed to be pleading for understanding. Between the two of them, several bouts of relapse and emotional breakdowns were mutedly spoken of by my grandmother. Only, “Your mama goin through some things, right now…” or, “He in the box,” referring to my father being placed in solitary confinement for cruel lengths of time. This was a sadness that she beared, not always with poise, but never without faith. My grandmother always taught my brother and I to respect our parents, in absence or presence. But there existed the shame of watching other kids receive hugs from their parents, have birthday parties, and be proud of where they came from. We had other siblings who we weren’t allowed to see because my mother was forced to give up her rights at adoption. My brother and I still wrestle with this loss.

When I was around four, my brother started following my father on the block. His teen angst and frustration with being a poor, Black boy funneled into rage at a system that pushed him through schools and special education programs without much concern for his education or wellbeing. Drugs were a path to prestige in our neighborhood, which was a way of acquiring the one thing that most poor folks desire, but that no one really wants or expects us to have: dignity. The contrast between my brother would become stark with age; our vastly different choices would eventually lead us in different directions.

I grew up in the church under my grandmother’s careful watch, watching my father and brother move work on the block. Ignoring her scorn and refusal of “drug money,” the two of them fast-tracked themselves toward financial gain and esteem among countless other Black men and women who were trying to survive our drug-saturated neighborhood in the late 80s – early 90s. Before I turned six, I had become skilled at addressing my letters to the various correctional institutions of New York State for myself and my grandmother. Since I always wrote the letters, I became a storyteller and messenger in my family, always knowing where everyone was located and carrying their messages to my grandmother. Even now, I contribute to my family by mailing ‘kites’, letters between inmates and those whom they love on the outside, as well as calls between incarceration and recovery periods for each of us. My grandmother’s pride refused the fast life that my parents and brother chose, but she missed her children dearly and spent a considerable amount of time and resources taking care of them from the outside so that we would all know each other when they were released.

Though my early memories couldn’t recall their physical proximity, I held their pictures and voices as close to me as my imagination would allow. Through my grandmother’s honest and sometimes abrasive responses to my childhood curiosity, I learned about the drugs, the alcohol, the physical violence in my family. I knew about my grandmother’s investment in keeping us all safe, her guilt in not having such power, and her protectiveness of me, as such. Not infrequently, we would go weeks, or even months, without contact when my father or brother were sent to solitary confinement for extended periods of time, each one longer than the next. My mother was on her own journey between the psychiatric wards, streets, and cell blocks of New York State.  Each time they returned, my father and mother were heavily medicated and/or restricted from balanced emotional engagement with the world. My brother was determined to make a life for himself in the streets. Between the three of them, anxiety about simple things such as finding shelter and food was increased and informed by their myriad experiences with the limitations of a system that, in essence, punished them for existing in the only ways they knew how.

In effect, my parents  seemed deflated and spacey on the three separate occasions that I met them, in-person. The system had labeled them dangerous, locked them away, and tortured them with the isolation of solitary confinement, harshly restricting their contact with other human beings. We called it, “The Box.” With this came hesitation about everyday living experiences and shame at the failures of their recovery efforts and the emotional and physical distance from our family. This indignity reinforced the traumas that they held within them and it perpetuated the psychological distress that they each felt.

Capitalism compromises personal autonomy and the emotional stability of those operating within its system. Often, the choices individuals make within the system, by force or by choice, reinforces public criminalization of the most marginalized groups in our society, thereby reinforcing a sense of internalized shame and resistance to it. The impoverished, women, and people of color, Black and brown people, in particular, are treated as disposable and are susceptible to having their freedoms restricted, their resources limited, and their emotional regulation compromised. Growing up in New York during the crack era, my father and mother were two impoverished Black children who fell in love and succumbed to the mystery and terrors of drug-addiction as teenagers.

What became real for us as we each navigated generational poverty, violence, racism, and the looming threat of the police state was that the only power we had was in god…and in shaping our own destinies, our realities. This led to the kind of existential anxiety and associated recklessness which almost always resulted in psychological compromise, retraumatization, and incarceration. As a family, our degradation resulted in and from addiction, abandonment, isolation, and uncertainty. As human refuse within the society that we sought to navigate, it was as if we became a microcosm of public ritual, social catharsis, and dissociation. It was as if we were all both seen and unseen within the grim reality of a penal system that perpetually punished us.

*

My family’s story is one of many similar stories of families within the prison industrial complex. The prison industrial complex serves to reinforce the aims of capitalism through behavioral regulation, terroristic policing, and profiteering. In Discipline & Punish, Foucault contextualizes the historical concept of the docile body, where constraints, prohibitions, and coercion were visited upon individuals, and determined how individual bodies were meant to function in service of wider social and economic mechanisms by being dominated. In such a system, the body could be managed from the outside by regulations which assumed the abilities of inmates to work and perform other physical tasks.

Similarly, within highly regulated systems such as public schools and prisons, those who are socially marginalized, such as the poor, are routinely managed by those regulating such systems such as school administrators, teachers, educational specialists, judges, and wardens, to assess the limits of their physical and psychological capabilities. Underlying these actions is the assumption that Blacks, brown people, women, the poor, etc. are the first in line to be exploited for profit, akin to a modern transmutation of chattel slavery.

In capitalistic systems, the frame of reference is generally that of boss or worker. In order to be a worker, one has to be able to assimilate and submit to softer coercion in order to avoid torture. Many of the Black men that I grew up with avoided this fate as a result of being tracked through special education and the school-to-prison pipeline or deliberately, seeing a life of financial dependency and wage slavery as one that fell short of their own dreams of freedom.  The way my father and brother saw it, the only difference between them and the men working in cubicles was opportunity and choice. Though they sacrificed the illusion of personal security in their choices, they felt more liberated from coercion within the context of being self-employed in a society that rarely provides reliable economic opportunities to Black men.

In an effort to control their undesired behaviors, my father and brother were both tracked through the special education system of New York City Public Schools. Rather than receive genuine assistance with developing basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills, the system was used in a punitive manner, separating them from traditional learning spaces and neglecting them until they either aged out or dropped out, the latter being the more desirable choice for young Black men who would learn their fates in the streets of New York City. They only needed to know how to count money. As such, they always managed. Thus, a system established to provide support became punitive, much like the jail cells and prisons they’d spend much of their early and adult lives traversing.

What I know is that several generations of people I love are mired in violence beyond their control, and that violent coercion is an inherent part of the prison industrial complex. It is used to keep incarcerated individuals complicit with the aims and methods of their punishments, in lieu of actual psychological treatment, which is what many of them require and are often denied. In fact, many inmates come into the system already dealing with myriad traumas in their histories and often face the exacerbation of standing symptoms and forms of distress as the structure of the punitive system relies heavily on physical and psychological violence.

*

Solitary confinement is a form of torture which relies on social isolation and physical neglect to manage incarcerated individuals.  As a management tool, it reinforces the notion of restricted autonomy and compromises the ability of incarcerated individuals to regulate their emotions and avoid severe mental distress. Oftentimes, after extended periods of incarceration via solitary confinement, individuals will exhibit symptoms similar to those evident in post-traumatic stress disorder, including heightened anxiety and suicidal ideation.

Both hired and incarcerated persons in for-profit  prisons must abide  by militarized rules and scheduling or face physical and/or psychological violence inflicted upon them until they submit. This is in stark contrast to the prisons that Foucault wrote about in his study of the early prison industrial complex of the 18th and 19th centuries. The actions of various departments of corrections throughout the United States counter any claims that the state apparatus occupies an altruistic role in individual rehabilitation.

With each release from prison came the shame that accompanied attempts to adjust to re-entry for my family. There was the difficulty in recalling how to use a telephone, or in remembering how to buy groceries or find a doctor when ill. An emotional trigger. An addicted mother or murdered friend. The fight-or-flight instinct that once drove my father to break a man’s jaw with his bare hands. The anxiety that drove my brother to so many moments of impulsivity and reincarceration. The intense pain that my mother felt in being rejected by her own family for her addiction and left to wander the streets in a cycle of relapse and nervous breakdowns. Each of them were individually labeled with chronic mental illnesses or developmental difficulties, noted as only treatable through medication therapy and little in the way of effective counseling, which left them only shadows of themselves when they submitted. The deep shame of addiction, of being part and cause of a broken family, of being anything less than a victor in a world that sees Black bodies as fodder, and of that which binds us to institutions and systems which decimate our personal freedom for lack of participation haunted my family over the last five decades. The U.S. prison industrial complex and mass mental health crises are observable phenomena of the downsides of how shame shapes the personal identities of individuals in capitalist societies, as well as how it drives them to the extremes of actions and social maladjustment.

Even though they serve different functions, both the prison industrial complex and its modern counterpart, the psychiatric industry, are repressive entities that benefit from the self-regulation of individuals who choose to reject actions and beliefs that would compromise their value as workers within capitalist societies. These regimes utilize medical management as a tool to maintain the equilibrium and continuity of these structures. When individual citizens resist physical and psychological oppression, they are often targeted within school systems, workplaces, and other institutional spaces. They are labeled ‘deviant’ and excluded in ways which compromise their social, economic, and psychological well-being. This leads to the increased likelihood of run-ins with the criminal justice system. It becomes vicious and cyclical pattern where shame, itself, is central to delineating the terms of liberty for the average citizen.

*

Rarely do we consider the countless genealogies interrupted by the prison industrial complex and the shame that we are forced to internalize because of the resulting trauma of interruption. The unknowing and undoing of the single greatest well of healing in our lives, our family systems. Rarely do we engage and commit to memory the ways in which we are collectively complicit in its construction and maintenance. It is through our beliefs and indifference, our passivity, that these systems are allowed to swallow our loved ones whole.

In Abolition Democracy, Angela Davis refers to the contradictory ethical premises of torture in our prison system by questioning the moral impetus of democratic action in our society. What is the burden of democracy in a system that systematically incarcerates and exploits individuals for profit in a punitive system?  We are increasingly incarcerating children at alarming rates. Addicted and abused and pregnant women are often punished via medical and psychological neglect within a complex system that reinforces our society’s rampant sexism and racism. Many of those women end up being forced to give up rights to their own children, permanently splitting their families if they have no relatives to step in and take responsibility for their kids. Any label of ‘felony’ can presently be likened to a racial slur; felons are far less likely to find stable employment due to discrimination and especially if they are Black men or boys. Millions of individuals who have served time for their crimes are prevented from full democratic participation in a system that promises full rehabilitation and reentry into society. It’s a highly contested and contradictory process, if ever one existed.

For those who are not directly impacted by its influence, prison remains an imaginary, distant, and mysterious space where people go to “reform” and “serve their time,” and “give justice to those they’ve harmed,” but as Black people in the United States, many of us know that the real motivation for mass incarceration is not justice, it is retribution for not fitting into spaces where our bodies, hopes, and beliefs forward them aims of a punitive, capitalist system. We’ve been here before. We never left.

*

As for me and my healing process, I look to my family tree. Unknown Mothership. Cowries & memory. Someone left me with something. Motion sickness. Endings & commune. Reef bones. Cotton & blood. Sing Sing. Attica. Downstate. Great Meadow. Front Street. Cornelia Street. Bushwick. Carolina. Howard University. Crack rocks. Starbucks. Hog maw. Turpentine. Bullets. Bandages.

I consider ancestry. I think about the times in my childhood when my grandmother promised us that our parents would recover and eventually be able to take care of us. I understand how my brother became tired of waiting. I can almost feel myself splitting from that child as the reality of poverty and separation began to take its toll on my hopes. I recall the day that my grandmother adopted me. The presiding judge said, “You’re a lucky, little girl, aren’t you?” Happy as I was to have a new last name and to stop fearing visits from social workers who I thought were coming to take me away, something settled in the pit of my stomach. It was unlikely that my parents were coming home.

Ours is a hard distance of many years. In our efforts to repair, we’re all learning what the system has done to us as a family, as people. I recently located one of my younger sisters via Facebook. I immediately recognized that face. It’s mine. We’ve since shared stories and laughter, bonding over our baby pictures  and remembering that there were times before the world hit us when all we did was smile. It’s been over  20 years since the last time I hugged my mother. It has been less than a year since the first time I hugged my sister. We were 23 and 26 years old.

My inner voice continues to guide me compassionately towards difficult questions. I continue to locate myself in different spaces across time and to, perhaps, attempt to bridge the wide, open spaces that remain.

They stare / across the space at me sprawling on my bunk.  I know / their dark eyes, they know mine.  I know their style, / they know mine.  I am all of them, they are all of me; / they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.

Etheridge Knight, “The Idea of Ancestry”

_______

Shakeema Smalls is a writer and therapist living in South Carolina. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in various literary outlets, including Blackberry: A Mag