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These stories are from one employee’s perspective during 1980-2008 with the California Youth Authority (CYA).Training, classifications, and agency have significantly changed in the last 10-15 years. There is no longer a CYA, it merged with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Any names are fictional. This is the first post.

After a couple of days of shadowing my co-workers, I met other staff members who worked on and off the living unit. There was the unit cook, the night dwellers (staff who worked the graveyard shift), the Senior Youth Counselor, Youth Correctional Officers, Institutional Parole Agents, Supervising Parole Agents, Social Workers, Teachers, Lieutenants, Treatment Team Supervisors, and more.

I soon learned that a correctional facility had a hierarchy of staff titles and roles. In the very early ’80’s the facility I worked at had more of a ‘rehabilitative’ environment so the result was two ‘branches’ working together (most of the time): the custody part and the treatment part. During one week, I heard several euphemisms for these two sections: the goon squad and the bleeding hearts, the guards and the social workers, security and the hippies. The advice was most often given by all:

Don’t Act Scared

Three days later, I met the seven girls (wards) assigned to my caseload. There we sat, in a loose rectangle of chairs in the dayroom of the unit, with the noisy washing machine and dryer running in the room behind us and twelve feet from the staff desk with the incessant ringing of phones and door buzzers. The Senior advised me that after I had a few groups in the dayroom I could move to the kitchen.

Before I sat down I caught some of the girls staring at me, others turned their bodies away from me and began chatting to the other girls, and another sat with her head down, biting her fingernails. (None of them looked as interested in small group as the women in the photo above).

This could not be more difficult than being in the small group with the adult felons from Lompoc Federal Penitentiary so I took a deep breath. Not only were the girls watching me but the staff at the desk waited to see how I’d respond.

I stood up. “Everyone up, pull your chairs into a circle, and then we’ll begin,” I said in the firmest but polite, non-shaky voice I could muster. The eyes that had looked elsewhere focused in on me heads raised, and the girl stopped biting her nails. They stood up, not quickly, not cooperatively but eventually they all stood up.

The first rule of supervision is to establish who you are and your expectations.

The introductions took several minutes and reminders that we had to use their proper names, not their nicknames. The girls ranged in age from fifteen to eighteen and their crimes varied from a drive-by shooting, robbery, sales of narcotics, theft, prostitution, assault with a deadly weapon, and accessory to murder.

Like most teenagers the girls wanted to know who I was, what I was about and why was I working in a ‘place like this,’ instead of being married and raising kids. The small group could have been any social gathering at a high school except these were girls who had histories of drug use, abuse, bad decision-making, and…wait, doesn’t that sound like a few high school teens you may know?

The difference was these girls committed crimes and serious ones that called for more than the one-year maximum term is given at their local Juvenile Hall. The average sentence, in the early ’80’s, was fifteen months with the maximum of seven years.

I survived my first small group, eventually made it into the kitchen for a quieter environment, and established a rapport with the girls and staff. Two months later and right when I was getting acclimated to the place I received a letter to report to the Correctional Academy in Northern California, two weeks after my marriage date.

from CDCR website

After I showed my letter to my supervisor she said, “Now get ready to unlearn everything we just taught you.”

Backyard by Pascal Campion

Most of you know that April is Poetry Month. I don’t know why April was selected but that doesn’t matter because the beauty, intimacy, and power of poetry is brought to the forefront during the next 29 days. Several bloggers have wonderful poems and events going on this month. Two you may want to follow this month, or continually, are Andrea’s Poet Tree. She has 30 (and more) ways to celebrate Poetry Month. And at Book of Kells, Kelli has a huge giveaway where you can win books of poetry.

There are poems that resonate with me that were written hundreds of years ago and others, like this morning, written on a Celestial Seasonings Tea box:

“Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”George Bernard Shaw

Some of the poems that resonant with me are about family/familia. This month I’ll share a few about grandparents, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, children and those we love like family.

A poem I recently came across made me think of my own heritage and gave me an understanding and appreciation for the history all of our parents bring to our family.

Movements By Marion Gomez

I hear my father’s Spanish

as the Dunkin Donuts’ cashier calls

back my order to the kitchen staff—

her skin the color of the fried cake donuts on display,

her hair and eyes the chocolate glaze.

Having my mother’s complexion

lets me go unrecognized.

How can I prove to this woman

that I am a sister, a Latina?

I could speak Spanish,

but like her English,

it is broken.

And really, what is sisterhood

when ice to me are cold cubes

I put in my coffee on hot days,

not men with guns

pounding on the door…

that is my father’s anxiety.

In the twenty six years before

Reagan granted him amnesty for the crime

of wanting to be in the U.S.,

his prior attempt at citizenship denied,

he held on to his green card

for dear life.

Can I blame him then for marrying a white woman,

not passing on Spanish

in the hopes I would flourish,

speak the language,

be accepted? But I did.

In college I learned about el vendido,

the sellout, an anglo-fied Latino,

saw my father as a traitor,

not realizing I myself have moved towards whiteness

by trying to pass as middle class,

refusing to date the trailer park boys

I grew up with:

they would only keep me

where I didn’t want to be.

My father speaks so rarely of Colombia.

A witness to war, he has seen the unspeakable,

but like a repressed tree, its seedling lodged in the lung,

light calls everything to the surface:

once he told me of the only protest

he attended. He was seventeen

and a friend invited him to a march

in downtown Barranquilla

to support the work of Fidel y Che.

The year was 1958.

My father confessed he went

because he thought it would be cool

to walk down the middle of a street

usually filled with buses and cars.

Suddenly, soldiers jumped down from their convoys

and started firing on the crowd.

His friend, walking beside him,

fell to the ground

and died in that street

Marion Gomez is a poet and native Minnesotan along with her mother, whose heritage hails from Scandinavia. Her father is an immigrant from Colombia and came to the U.S. in 1960. She currently lives in Minneapolis, MN

Now make like the picture above by the luminous artist, Pascal Campion, and take out your favorite book of poetry and enjoy a few minutes of intimate time-just you and words.

Tell me, what type of poetry resonates with you? Which poem prickles your skin? Makes your heart sigh?

What I Learned in Prison: Women in Front and Behind Cell Bars #4

Why Poetry Matters

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