Ludlow County Jail:
2 to 4pm Visiting Hours

OME

            On Wednesday, I called the bus line to ask what it would take to get from Amherst to the Ludlow County jail. “That’s going to be quite a trip honey, it’s not a direct route. Let me see....” the old woman rasped, “Hum, Amherst center? Or UMass? From Amherst you gotta get yourself to Northampton, then there is a bus, number 48, it’ll pick you up and take you to Holyoke, from Holyoke you’ll get the 21 to Springfield. The 6 runs every two hours from Springfield to the jail.”

            I took the bus from Amherst to Northampton on Saturday, hoping it was a good day for visiting inmates. I didn’t know anyone at the Ludlow jail. I wanted to blend in with the other women. I was looking for a story I didn’t think I’d get looking like an outsider. At the first bus stop, in front of my college’s library, I double knotted my shoelaces nervously.

            Everyone on the bus to Northampton was reading.

            The average inmate at Ludlow has completed 9th grade, and reads at a 5th grade level. Only 15% of the offenders own cars.

            The bus to Holyoke costs a buck twenty-five. No one was reading.

HOLYOKE TO SPRINGFIELD

             As I sat down, a Latino man with light blue nickel-sized diamond earrings and a clean black sweat suit heaved himself over the bus steps behind me, and thrust his dollar toward the machine. He was struggling because he was carrying an empty baby stroller. A Latino woman got on behind him and sat across from me between her two daughters. She sat with an Abercrombie bag on her lap; when her girls whined, she gave them fruit flavored water and snacks. They caught me watching them, and lowered their voices so I couldn’t hear.             

             I pretended to write in my notebook. The bus driver had left his mic on., so we all had to listen. He hummed, he whistled, he breathed heavily, he beat time on the wheel.

            Someone tapped me on the neck so I turned around. A young, long faced, light skinned black man smiled and handed me an envelope.

            “I just wrote this. Do you want to read it?” It was a poem. The poem was about pain, and how humans should stop acting like animals. There was a line about how we should “start harder to communicate”. I looked up at the guy and said,

            “I think we’d be better off if we acted more like animals.” He liked that, and grinned.  I didn’t let him read the inventory of bus details I was writing. He told me about the letter he wrote to the editor of the local newspaper criticizing the government. He said that someone ended up paying him to stop writing critical articles. He told me his name was Nelson. He got off at the Save-A-Lot food store stop.

            After Nelson got off, Birthday Boy got on and took his seat. Birthday Boy was white, thick necked, and broad shouldered; uneven lengths of facial hair made him look dirty. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick gold chain that he slipped over his cap and onto his neck. Birthday Boy claimed his seat with wide gestures. He planted his sneakers four feet apart; he draped his arms across the backs the seats on either side of him. Birthday Boy had two gold earrings in his left ear; he had two cell phones. He set down a huge black duffle bag between us.

            The driver muttered about the cars blocking his way. Birthday Boy put a phone to his ear while he consoled the driver, “They don’t care man. They think driving a bus is easy.” Birthday Boy's call connected.

            “Dog,” he said to his phone, “Listen to this shit. Last night, I didn’t catch up with you, right? And I’m sorry about that, man, but it couldn’t be helped. I was with my brother, over there in his apartment; I’ve been staying there last few days, right, but last night he and I go out, drinking, and then go back to his place to smoke a blunt. We do that, smoke the blunt, and then we’re just hanging out, but his girl gets mad, something from the day before or some shit, and she hits him. I just said, ‘Let’s leave man,’ because she’s a woman and all, and all she has to do is call the police and wham. So we get out of there. My P.O.’s trying to violate me, man. I can’t get caught-up in that drama. Right, so I stayed at my cousin’s last night, and now I’m headed home to the wife to take care of a few things.”

            I asked the driver, “I’m looking to get to Ludlow, where should I get off?”

            “Ludlow Center, honey, or the jail?”

            “The jail.”

            Birthday Boy was off the phone by then. “I was just there,” he said quietly, and crinkled his eyes at mine.

            “You want to get off at the Springfield station. But that bus only comes every two hours, you’ll have to wait about an hour and a half.”

            Birthday Boy’s other phone rang. He berated the caller for dialing the phone with the weak batteries. He hung up and got out his good phone.  I wondered how to ask him about Ludlow. I waited for him to hang up.

            Birthday Boy was making plans for the night, to go to Hartford and “hit it...because it’s my Birthday, you know, so if you don’t go I still will because it’s my birthday, man. And I might be going back to Ludlow, yeah, so I want to have a good time.” This last part, the ‘I might be going back to Ludlow’, was tossed in like he had forgotten some eggs at the grocery store, and might be going back to get them.

             Birthday Boy wasn’t the only one who might be going back. The recidivism rate at Ludlow is thirty percent, which, as Public Relations officer Rich McCarthy later told me, means that two thirds of the offenders don’t come back after three years. 30% is better than the national average, which hovers closer to 50%, but not as good as the county would like to boast.

            Birthday Boy made another phone call. I waited. “Mami, start the car for me, will you? Why? Come on, just start the car. What? Yeah, I told you I’d get it, that I’d hook you up... didn’t I tell you? Then why you asking me? Of course. Don’t worry, I got it,” Birthday patted his duffle bag, “I told you I would. I’ll roll you a blunt of what I got. Yeah. Start the car, I’ll be home in ten minutes. Yeah, bye.”

            When he got off the bus, Birthday Boy nodded goodbye to me. He lifted the duffle bag in farewell.

SPRINGFIELD TO LUDLOW

            After an hour in the Springfield bus station, I looked up from my New York Times to see Nelson stroll through the front door. He saw me immediately and sat down. He handed me a job application form; on the back he had written another poem. This one was about blood on the floor and his how hands were ready to kill again. When I was finished reading I pretended I hadn’t so I could come up with commentary. I looked at him without a reply.

            “I’m weird, I know", he said." It’s just what comes to mind.” He began talking about his mother, how he was going to visit her. He didn’t like her much, but she had Christmas presents for him. It was late February.  I told Nelson that I was headed to Ludlow. He told me that he had visited the jail, to see some friends.

            “What are the conditions like, there?” I asked, “How was the food?”

             “Not bad, not bad, these guys are in there for five to seven years, so they got to get used to it, you know? But they don’t mind too much. Some of them have been a few times, in and out, you know? I don’t want to get myself into that.. I’m not interested in experiencing prison.”

            A jail, as opposed to a prison, is where prisoners go to await trial. Since there aren't enough prison cells in the state, Ludlow now houses people sentenced to two years or less. “Two years or less” means larceny, drug possession, breaking and entering, and theft. Murderers and violent sex offenders serve the bulk of their time in State facilities, but many of them are sent to Ludlow for their last year to “reintegrate”.

            When Nelson’s bus came, he left me sitting under a television screen that alternated ads for the Massachusetts State Lottery with ads for Gamblers Anonymous. An old lady with brick red hair and I were the only white women waiting for busses.

            I asked a stripe-shirted man where the bus would pull into.

            “You sure you want to go there? You look like an innocent girl.” That annoyed me. I smiled at him. I wasn't that innocent.

            The bus ground to a stop on the wet pavement.

            Three women and I got on the bus to Ludlow. I sat facing them. All were Latina. The bus ride was very quiet. I speak Spanish but I didn’t say anything. I had  a fresh pack of Trident I wanted to offer to the women but I clung to my large leather purse. I felt silly for having a bag. The other women’s hands were empty.

            The woman in the front was in her late twenties, she listened to music on headphones. She chewed gum, nodded her crimped and glossy hair, and read Ellen Dejeneres’s autobiography.  The woman in the center had gray hair up in a bun, and wore black. Her shoes looked uncomfortable. The woman towards the back sat with her small daughter, who wore a huge pink ribbon on top of her head. The mother had dark, sparking eyes. The little girl kept falling asleep against her mother’s arm. Each time her little head lilted against her mother’s arm, the mother would look down, mutter in Spanish, and jerk her elbow to wake the daughter.        

LUDLOW

            The driveway leading to the County Correctional Facility was newly paved, long and curving. It wasn’t raining, but the sky was grey and everything was wet— the sidewalk, the long buildings, the coils of barbed wire.

            Ludlow is a medium-security jail. It houses 1300 inmates; nine percent of them are female.

            I shortened my stride to stay behind the women. I tried to look like I had a legitimate reason for being there. I hoped that the guards wouldn’t kick me out for loitering. I had two hours to sit in the visitor’s waiting room before the next bus came.

                Between the double glass doors and the front desk were two rows of thinly cushioned chairs. To the right, a bank of gray lockers. The wall behind the long desk was made of glass.

            Eighty-three thousand visitors are processed in that waiting room every year. A visitor is allowed to visit twice a week for an hour.

             The women I was with went straight to the long desk to sign in. I slipped into one of the dark green chairs.

            The only other white woman in the room was wearing a flowered turtleneck that looked like one my mother used to own. There was a middle aged white man, nervous, motionless, sitting alone in the corner alcove near the desk. Everyone else in the room looked more comfortable than the two of them.

            Inmate ethnic demographics are: 45% Latino, 30% African American, and 25% Caucasian. Public Relations officer McCarthy told me that 85% of the inmates are from Springfield, Chicopee, and Holyoke. “The jail has always reflected the poor sector of that metropolis,” he told me. "It's the poor who are incarcerated; if you look at our records you can see that it started with the Irish. We don’t recruit, they're sent to our door step.”

             One of the women I had walked in with filled out her visitor’s form on the top of an ATM machine; another stooped over the bail bond company’s window counter. Above the third woman hung a rack of envelopes to be used to deposit cash into prisoner’s accounts.

            “School children can not visit prisoners during school hours on school days unless the officers call the school and get direct permission” read a NOTICE on the wall.

              A Latino man came in holding a baby seat. He was with a younger woman, a little girl in a pale purple jacket, and a 12 year old boy who wore a lip ring. The woman went to the desk; the older man took the baby out and held it up, cooing about his grandson in Spanish. The 12 year old got a bottle ready, then stood at the Plexiglas window, staring and sucking his finger. The little girl threw herself into the chair nearest the door and hid her face.

            A large black woman in maroon sweat pants filled out her form beside me. She called to a little girl wearing a pink leather jacket trimmed with fake fur. The girl skipped over.“Do you remember what year you were born?” the woman asked the girl. “Nineteen ninety-five, momma.”

            The woman wearing the flowered turtleneck had come to visit, accompanied by a brown haired man. The two seemed to have gone in together, but she had come out first. When the brown haired man walked out of the visiting room, he was smiling. She had been waiting for him for ten minutes and was sucking in her cheeks. As she was pulling on her coat, he explained, “... I had to wait until they took him away,” then he walked into the bathroom. Once the door was shut between them, she snapped, “Well, you didn’t have to wait that long.”

            A young black woman in tight jeans cradled a baby boy. The woman was chatting with several other women, catching up on what had happened since their last visit. The baby had a gold ring he might have choked on if it hadn’t been so tightly bound around his spitty finger. He woke with a start when a chubby little girl burst through the visitor’s room door into the waiting room, ran to the vending machines in the corner, and began pounding it, demanding juice and candy.

            There were two guards at the desk. One was fat and pink. When he turned his back to me, I thought he had a scarf on, but it was just a thick roll of fat. He wore glasses, and squinted, and told every visitor to bear down harder when they wrote on their forms. The other guard was younger, narrow jawed, and chocolately brown. He hit on all the hot young women, asked them all about their plans for the night. He crooned, “Let’s get it on,” loudly, over and over, encouraging himself and all of us to keep his shift grooving towards the switch at 4pm.

            A black lady with big breasts came through the door from the visiting rooms with her small daughter. The lady recognized the woman with the tight pants. The lady asked her daughter if she remembered the woman, and would she say “Hi”. The little girl looked into the woman’s face curiously, then said “No” and strolled to the water fountain. I snorted with laughter and smiled at her. Everyone around me turned sharply to look at me.

            Twenty minutes before the 4 o’clock bus I stopped avoiding eye contact with the guards and walked up to the desk.

            “I’ve got some questions.” The fat pink one looked at me. “About the prison. I’d like to know about ‘Community Involved Programs’ if there are any, and about numbers, if you know them... for example, what are most of these guys in here for? Drugs?”

            “Yup. Ninety-nine percent of the inmates are in here for drug related offenses. Even the thefts are drug related; they steal to get money for drugs.”

            Ninety-nine percent is not the official number. Officer McCarthy later told me that the number of inmates charged with possession and intent is just over forty percent. Officer McCarthy did add, however, that the number was near ninety percent if crimes committed for drug money were included.

            “What about labor?” I asked the fat pink guard, “Who does the work?”

            The other guard chipped in. “The prisoners get a dollar a day for their labor, which is cleaning, cooking; the women do laundry... plus they get good time. They get two and a half days of good time just for walking through the doors, which is pretty good.”

             A dollar a day is slave labor, I thought, but, as Officer McCarthy later pointed out, tax payers spend between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year to keep each prisoner locked up.

            Officer McCarthy also told me that money isn’t allowed inside the prison. Before the facility was nonsmoking, the inmates would use cigarettes as currency. “Five smokes for a haircut, three for someone to write a letter for you...” McCarthy explained, “But now it’s Ramen soup noodles, do you know what I’m talking about? If we do a cell search and find a hundred and fifty packets of Ramen, we know the guy is a gang member—or a gambler.” Ludlow’s population is about 25% gang members, McCarthy said, and the guards enforce a zero tolerance policy for all gang related possessions, conversation, and clothing.

            “Who owns the supply companies, where do you buy your food?” I asked the guards at the desk, “I know, for instance, that Sodexo runs a lot of prison cafeterias...”

            The pink guard looked at the brown guard. “Oh," said the pink one," we have different suppliers for different things... Where are you from, so I know who I’m talking to?”

            “I’m a college student,” I answered him, “From the Amherst area. An interested community member. I’m thinking about writing a story about Ludlow, so I’m trying to gather information...”

            The young one shook his head and grinned, “You didn’t know that?” He looked at the pink guard, “ I knew that, I could tell just by looking at her. Those buttons, and the kinds of questions she’s asking. Man, I sit here and do my job, I knew that...”

             I had a Black Panthers button on under my vest. My cheeks reddened.

             I asked how the prisoners spent their days.

            The cocky guard took over, leaving the pink one squinting over forms. “They’re only locked down four times a day. The rest of the time they get to go to the game room, play board games, or work out, watch TV. They get to eat all day. There are lots of programs. It’s almost too good- GED programs, but also full college educations, we pay for the books and everything. I’m thinking about getting myself locked up...”

            I laughed, obligingly. “Do you have solitary confinement?”

            “Yeah, we’ve got a hole. I have no sympathy for that, though. That’s when we become the maids- just sit around all day and we bring you your meals. We have great community programs— all the other correctional facilities come to copy our programs.”

            A young, smooth skinned brown woman with hips that swung, approached the desk, trailed by her halter-topped friend. The guard stepped over to them and I went back to my seat.

            Officer McCarthy later confirmed what the cocky guard had told me: Ludlow’s Reentry Program is a national model. Ludlow offers “Day Reporting”, which allows inmates to live and work at home, but requires daily check-ins. Restitution work, job placement, fathering and mothering seminars, and drug and alcohol treatment are also available.

            McCarthy said to me, “We are very progressive program oriented, here at Ludlow. We don’t believe in punishing our way out of crime.”

            Ludlow’s relative success is a result of strong leadership.

            “Have you heard of Sheriff Ash?” Officer McCarthy asked me, “No? He was elected thirty years ago. Been doing a great job. His platforms were progressive when he ran that first time. He wanted to prepare prisoners so that when they got back out in the real world they could work, and take care of their families. We focus on job skills here. 3400 GED diplomas have been awarded since Ash took office.”

            Officer McCarthy said that Sheriff Ash was running for another 6 year term. He told me that Ash loved his job. “He expresses himself through his job like any artist, a painter or writer or what have you. He has found a way to be creative, trying to solve problems. We’re starting from zero here, so he has room to experiment.” Officer McCarthy believed in his boss; he wanted me to believe in him, too.

            When I went back up to the desk, the cocky guard was singing about hot Saturday nights.

            “What about conjugal visits?” was my final question, “ Do the prisoners get them here?”

            “Hell no, no, oh no.”

Ludlow to Springfield

            “Do you think this place is good for anyone who goes in?” I asked out loud as the bus pulled away from the jail. The woman across from me looked up from her gray, sweatsuited lap. I had seen her sitting alone in the waiting room, picking at her long fake nails.

            “Maybe for the rapists, sure,” she began. “But for most of these guys it’s not doing much. Ain’t really a punishment. They don’t mind it so much. The father of my children is in there, this is his third time. He keeps going back. All of his friends are in there.”

             I leaned forward and studied the woman’s pale, chapped lips. Her voice was lost within her hunched shoulders.

            Her voice was thin, but she talked steadily until we reached Springfield.

            She told me she was twenty-one, and had been out on her own since she was twelve. She had a five year old boy and a three year old girl with the man she was visiting in jail. Her straggly black hair was in a high ponytail, held by an elastic, adorned with a clear plastic clip.

            “He was a gift from God,” she said of her son. “I was headed in the wrong direction. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know what I would have done. Probably ended up in jail like his father.”

            “Why is he in there?” I asked.

            “Well, a drug incident. He didn’t even sell to the cop. He was just there. The other guy sold it, and he was only in for three months. My boy was there for a year. I don’t understand that. He was an accomplice, the other guy ratted him out. When he got out, he was doing okay, but then he violated his probation. Now there might be a rat inside, and he’s facing ten years. He told me not to wait for him. It’s not that I mind waiting, but ten years is a long time.”

            I nodded, “Ten years is half of our lives.”

            “In August, yup. I’m glad I’ve done it all on my own though. I don’t need him to help me. When he was out, he visited our son every day. He only knew my daughter for three months, and then went in again. But I’m proud of myself for doing it alone. It’s hard, though. I’m going to school, too. I was up until three in the morning the other night with my daughter, she was crying and couldn’t sleep, and then I had to get up and go to class at eight.”

            “What are you studying?’

            “Radiology. All my family works in the hospital. I’m guaranteed a job, I just need to get the degree. I’m the first one in my family to be born in this country. The rest of the family is from Italy or Mexico. They don’t talk to me because of my kid’s father. His parents are good to me, though. I don’t like to take help from people. They yell at me for that. .”

            “Do you ever take your kids to see their dad?”

            “Not much. Sometimes. The last time I did, my daughter was young and she didn’t recognize him and started crying, so he started crying, and I thought, ‘Man I can’t take this’.”

            She paused, then spoke again.

            “I’d like to go out tonight. Sometimes I go out with my friends but I don’t have much time. Relationships are too much drama. I was with a girl for a while, too, but that just causes more trouble- now whether I go out with the guys or the girls, someone’s always jealous.

I can’t really drink any more because I always black out. They told me last time that I was chasing a girl around with a knife. A lot of clubs are just drama, and fighting. I try not to fight...

            “Yeah, even if he does stay in for another 10 years, and doesn’t help with the kids, I’ll still send him money. He wouldn’t eat enough in there if I didn’t give him money. And I’ll let him see the kids. That’s just out of respect.”

            We got off the bus together in the darkening rain. On the way through the doors into the terminal, she was stopped by a group of baggy pants boys her age.

            “Girl! What’s going on?”

            “Just went to see my baby...”