Cinderblock Sisterhood

The cell Suzanne has shared with one other inmate is sparse, even more so now that all of her belongings are piled on the floor, ready to be returned to the prison laundry or carried home. A box of toiletries, another box of books, three bags of prison-authorized clothing. Her bed is shoved into one corner against white cinder blocks. A hard pad and an even harder pillow are stripped bare. Her pillow, little more than a cardboard-covered rectangle, is supposedly the envy of the cellblocks for its “puffiness.”

About 40 other women in blue sweatshirts and jeans mingle in a common area. Each is enrolled in Coffee Creek’s substance abuse and addiction treatment program called Turning Point. For the past six months, Suzanne has spent every waking minute with these women, through a highly regimented schedule: wake-up call at 6:50 a.m., 14 hours of classes, head count at 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. every day, and bedtime at 10:00. It hasn’t been Alcatraz, but it’s still prison, and these ladies have weathered it together.

Huddling around Suzanne, the women line up for hugs and a taste of freedom by proxy. One girl asks if she can swap her sweatshirt for Suzanne’s. It’s nicer and newer. Suzanne obliges. After all, she can’t wait to get rid of that old thing anyway.

“Johnson, go get a cart,” a female correctional officer belts out.

Suzanne jumps up excitedly, a grin strung across her face. It’s time to go!

Parental Hurts

Suzanne was handcuffed in the courtroom as the gavel pounded out an exclamation point to her sentence of 36 months (she ended up receiving 42 months). It was as if the gavel came down on the entire family. It was the first time anyone in the Johnson family had gone to prison, and they all felt the strange stigma.

Still, in some ways Suzanne’s incarceration was a relief.

For Steve, Suzanne’s wild ways had hung heavily upon him. Suzanne would rarely come home before midnight most nights. Unable to sleep worrying about his daughter, Steve would retreat to work early in the morning. But his stressful position as a financial analyst didn’t provide much respite.

Dee, too, lost sleep. “I was always waiting up for her to come home, waiting for that garage door to open,” she remembers.

As Suzanne buried herself deeper into addiction and misery, Dee had to play mother to Kenny and Olivia while trying to maintain her own sanity. Suzanne’s silence kept her at arm’s length, but a mother’s heart ached for the nearness that the mother-daughter pair once knew.

When Suzanne’s crimes finally caught up with her, the weight of worrying about what would happen to their daughter fell off Steve’s and Dee’s shoulders.

“When she went to prison, it was such a relief,” Dee explains. “We felt so free.”