I am once again walking towards the Inmate Visiting Area. The cement floors are grey, smooth and
polished to a shine. The silence of this corridor is pregnant with pain and despair.
As I walk down this hallway which is perhaps the length of a football
field, I find my breath narrowing in my lungs as it makes it way up to the back
of my throat.
I slow down, pull up my breath from my stomach and stop
in my step. I close my eyes while I
roll my shoulders, pull my shoulders back, and breathe deep into the
lungs… The air in county jail is laden
with a heavy dark element that enters the human soul and grabs the light within
for sustenance and survival. “Breathe” I
tell myself.
The muffled and muted noise of steel rolling doors
opening and closing periodically can be heard through the walls of this giant
detention facility. The only constant is the white noise of the air
conditioning which blows icy air with an unremitting persistence. The hallway stretches longer under the
clippity clop of my heels, one of which is worn to the metal creating a bad
syncopated rhythm.
Hundreds of empty pinkish beige plastic chairs line the
walls. Like the cemetery, there is a presence.
Yet no one can be seen… Today is
not public visiting day. But as I walk
down, I see them, I see their faces, I hear their voices, I feel them inside my
bones… The little girls with their curls all fancied up in ribbons, the little
boys wearing their lighted up sneakers, the wives, the baby-mamas, the
girlfriends, with their fabulous manicures, their lipsticks, their meticulously
applied make up, the Sunday dresses made for church, worn with a world of
expectations, hope, and dreams on visiting day move invisibly around me in this
hallway.
I am still walking down this long corridor…. And finally arrive at Unit 800. “Turn left”, they told me at the security
check point. I walk into a beehive of
compartmentalized glass booths each equipped with a telephone and a short
stationary metal stool… I sit and wait for my client to come. The graffiti etched on the chipped paint of
the booth chronicles monograms belonging to shattered lives, tragedies, hopes,
love, deceit, failure, survival, resilience and faith.
He walks in. He
has jet black eyes, deep set in the bone, with dark circles under as if they
were lakes gulping in the moon’s reflection.
He sits down, flashes a huge smile and picks up the phone from behind
the glass pane.
We talk. We discuss strategy. We discuss defenses. And we discuss the harsh realities of life,
of the possibilities and probabilities laying ahead in the case. Do we roll the dice and risk losing and
getting a 150-year prison sentence? Do
we take the offer that’s in front of us?
He is 32 years old now, and by time he is done with the proposed offer,
he will be in his 60’s.
How does a man end up here? What child ever dreams of growing up with
ambitions of spending a lifetime behind bars?
I am lost in thought as he talks about trivial details of the case. I raise my hand, palm facing out towards the
glass pane, and wordlessly ask him to stop talking.
“What’s your earliest memory from your childhood?” I
ask. The businesslike expression in his
face changes to a somber one with quizzical furled eyebrows. Pain washes up in his black eyes. He looks down and inaudibly says on the other
side of the phone: “my father kicking me
in front of the bathroom door”…
“How old were you?” I ask.
“4 years old… maybe 5”.
“Where was your mother?” I ask.
“She’d watch.
Couldn’t do much. He’d beat her
up as well. He was an alcoholic”.
Mom was a special-ed teacher. Dad, carpenter or something or other, turned
into an alcoholic, a wife beater, an eventually a heroin addict. He, as all
other heroin users, used and lost all family savings. Ultimately, he abandoned the three kids and
the mother. And this single income
family, this nth statistics, unable to meet expenses, soon found itself on the
streets only to be rescued by the limited generosity of the neighborhood
church.
With mom struggling to make ends meet, no permanent
address to call home and a shamed sense of self as his zip-code, he took to the
streets with his friends and his skateboard.
How does one run away from pain and shame? Soon enough, on the streets, he learned to
numb the pain with pot, alcohol, and eventually, heroin. And how does one buy more drugs to escape
one’s shame? One must then steal. And then one gets caught, and slowly one goes
from being an abused child to a drug addict to a thief to a burglar to a
convicted felon and eventually to a prison inmate facing over 20 counts of
armed robbery charges.
The progression is undeniable and sometimes
inevitable. How does an innocent child
turn into a “discardable” or “disposable” member of the society?
Twenty-five years of Criminal Defense. 25 years visiting different detention
facilities around the country, and each time I am awash with the same
overwhelming sense of being flummoxed….
How can anyone own his present if he was deprived of his childhood? How can he own himself, if during his
formative years he was dispossessed of himself? He learned early on to disengage his soul
from his body when his dad beat him to a pulp.
And then, when he learned to survive in face of abuse by the hands of
his loved ones, he’ll soon learn that survival in jail, prison, dirty sidewalks
and vomit-filled beds is easier than surviving a tortured, tormented and
twisted childhood …
He will steal. He will lie. He will betray. He’ll do whatever is necessary to get through
and survive. He will transfer the shame of
the abuser unto himself, and with time, he will learn to transfer that into
anger to destroy those who try to love him and protect him.
He keeps talking… I have to lower my eyes and I can no
longer keep his gaze. My thoughts are
fixed on his mother. I feel her
devastation in having lost this child to the sad fate of her own life. I can only imagine her desperation in
watching her son slowly spin out and down the vicious cycle of
crime/abuse/drugs/jail like water spinning down the drain… her inability to
stop the train wreck and her ultimate capitulation and submission to “what
is”. The guilt of having failed a child,
like a rope must have wrapped itself along her neck…
I feel the shavings of the rope around my neck, sliding
up to my ears.
“Where is your mother now?” I ask.
“She hanged herself a few weeks after I was arrested.” He
says.
The noose tightens around my neck. Unconsciously, I bring
up my hands to my neck and pull away at the tight collar that I am not wearing.
……….
Alaleh Kamran, Attorney at Law
A Professional Corporation
15760 Ventura Blvd, Suite 1010
Encino, Ca 91436
ph: 818-986-6222
Lecturer, Radio Host, Citizen Journalist, Blogger
15760 Ventura Blvd, Suite 1010
Encino, Ca 91436
ph: 818-986-6222
Lecturer, Radio Host, Citizen Journalist, Blogger
