Prison experiences: I've learned a dark truth about the women in solitary confinement

This story is published in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education. Subscribe to College Inside, an Open Campus newsletter on the future of postsecondary education in prison.

“Whatcha doing?”

I ignore my 20-year-old neighbor.

She bangs on our shared vent with a cup.

“Hey, Ms. Detroit, whatcha doing?”

“The same thing I’ve been doing the last five times you asked me.”

She disturbs me nonstop. Whether it’s singing aloud, screaming, yelling, arguing, or beating cups on her desk to accompany a rap, she gets on my nerves. All of this has turned me into the “get off my lawn” guy. This time was no exception. I answer, “Reading! Reading! Reading!”

“What’s it about?”

I sigh. “When I’m finished I will pass the newspaper to you, like always,”

I wasn’t always a curmudgeon. I’m just tired of witnessing the harms of isolation. It’s best for my emotional health not to get close to anyone.

Five minutes later: “Did you call me? Did I hear you laugh? What’s funny? What’s it about?” I rush to finish my newspaper and roll it up and slide it into a sock attached to a string and fish it to her. Shortly after, I notice the sock passing back by my window on its way to someone else. I’m seething. “Don’t ask me for nothing else. I give you something and you don’t even read it?’”

Reading has been my lifeline after seven years in solitary confinement. With my earplugs jammed in deep—sometimes too deep—I’ve read books, magazines, and newspapers and found respite amid tortuous conditions. That includes no air conditioning, TV, or recreation. Cold showers. Frequent water and power outages. An overrepresentation of people with mental illness.

The hole is all trouble, easy to get into and hard to get out of. While male prisoners in the restricted housing unit are often there because they have been identified as belonging to gangs, that’s not the case in female prisons. Women are assigned to live here for different reasons. It could be a consequence for behavior, like having phone sex with a partner; for violence, like assaulting staff members; or for rule violation, like having contraband (even if someone set you up with it). Sometimes, it’s outright discrimination: I’ve seen women get sent to the hole for speaking in an Indigenous language while talking to their parents on the phone.

Many of the young women living in my pod in solitary are transfers from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department. In this state, children as young as 14 can be charged as adults for certain serious offenses, and all 17-year-olds who commit misdemeanors or felonies are considered adults. Most of them are youth of color. If these kids have a history of assault, solitary confinement is often their ultimate destination.

The average education level of the women at my unit, Lane Murray, is seventh grade, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. I suspect that number is much lower for many of the young women held here in solitary with me.

Although incarcerated young people 21 and under are guaranteed an education under federal law, that doesn’t always happen in practice. People in some restricted custody levels here are low priority for educational programming, while others aren’t allowed to participate at all.

Several days pass. A guard writes my young neighbor a disciplinary infraction. The 20-year-old asks me to file a grievance to get the case overturned. When I look at her paperwork, I realize that she doesn’t have more than a third-grade education.

I feel like shit. Immediately I’m flooded with flashbacks of other young women: The 23-year-old who always “forgot” her glasses, or the one who brushed off the chaplain when he asked her to read a Bible verse aloud. The incidents might seem unrelated, but these women were trying to distract from the truth. They struggled to read. I had missed all the signs.

Tameka, for instance, had been incarcerated since she was 14, but was in her late 20s when I met her. She once had a teacher tell her: “If you shut up, maybe you’ll learn to read.” She was so embarrassed she began fighting staff and writing escape letters in hope of being placed in solitary so she wouldn’t have to go to school anymore.

Many of these girls who came into adult prisons as children have been criminalized and traumatized their entire lives, and when they get to prison, the trauma often continues. Most also have mental health issues and learning disabilities. You can’t learn when you’re in survival mode.

In solitary confinement, “school,” when it is provided, often consists of a packet of education materials dropped at your cell door. There are no teachers for us here. If there are, I’ve never seen or heard them. In response, the girls often rip the packets into small pieces and push them back under their doors. And you can’t teach yourself from packets when you can’t even read the instructions.

But you would be highly mistaken to conflate literacy with intelligence or even a desire to learn. In 2017, when 23-year-old Moriah discovered I was a nurse, she asked me to teach her the names of the major bones. I helped during rec time—we started at the toes and went up the body. Other girls started coming out and those who didn’t watched out their windows. We have some great artists who began sketching the skeleton. Eventually, everyone had a sketch in their cell, taped on the wall. Moriah was eventually released and is now a certified nursing assistant and home health aide. The craving for knowledge doesn’t stop at the prison gates.

Moriah is an example of how people learn in different ways. A peek inside her background reveals the common denominator in most women’s stories—poverty. Walking in her shoes is to live in dilapidated housing, breathe asthma-inducing air, reside in a food desert, and self medicate to deal with it all.

And our one-size-fits-all approach to educating children doesn’t attempt to address these challenges. The Moriahs and Tamekas of underfunded schools have always been the convenient scapegoats of legislative budget cuts and victims of our non-existent social safety net. As if the solution for getting a high-quality education is to be born in an adequately funded ZIP code.

In the meantime, I can’t wait for the state of Texas. Now, I stand at the vent again reading aloud to the young women—smiling as I complain.

Editor’s note: The Windham School District provides education for students incarcerated in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, including high school diplomas, high school equivalency, life skills programming, and career and technical education programming. According to department spokesperson Amanda Hernandez, the “Windham School District provides a free appropriate public education to eligible students under the age of 22 in the restrictive housing setting in accordance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and for students under the age of 18 in accordance with Texas law. Students receive individualized instructional packets and have the opportunity to interact with teachers in their housing units.”

In Kwaneta’s experience, that doesn’t always happen.