For our second Book Talk selection, Ashley and Danielle will be discussing Inside This Place, Not of It edited by Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman. Follow along, and if you missed our first book selection and conversation on Angela Y. Davis' Are Prisons Obsolete?, you can find that here.
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Ashley:
Okay! So we had a really awesome reaction to our last conversation. So I think we're going to keep doing this this way.
Danielle:
I'm excited by the reaction as well! In my personal life, it has sparked many conversations around topics that friends and family were not even aware deserved attention.
Ashley:
My hope is that, eventually, maybe we'll be able to record audio in a better way so we can share the recording with our readers and potential listeners.. So hopefully that happens soon, but we'll see!
Danielle:
I love it.
Ashley:
I love it, too. This is really good for me. I like being able to talk about what we're reading this way. Talk about these concepts this way. And I'm especially really grateful I have somebody to talk about this book in particular. I'm just glad I'm not alone with these stories, if that makes sense.
Danielle:
Absolutely. Yeah. We've talked about how it's hard work to read this book because it's heartbreaking work. But you have to be willing to feel what you need to feel as you read through the stories of these women and their narratives. So you can learn what you can do to be supportive, that is impactful.
Ashley:
We talked about wanting to have a bit of a content warning about this book. There's sexual abuse, there's domestic abuse, there's abandonment, there's mental health issues, there's suicide, etc. There are depictions of terrible things happening to people when they're incarcerated and when they're not.
Danielle:
Absolutely.
Ashley:
Quite often. And I wouldn't say in any of the stories are these people, are these women unscathed, before they enter the system. So if this sounds like the kind of thing that would be triggering to you in the kind of way that isn't useful, or helpful, or productive, or that harms you, best practice is to just always feel free to take care of yourself, however that looks for you. We'll be doing this a lot and reading a lot of different kinds of books. So maybe this will be something that you could come back to in the future.
Danielle:
There's one quote particularly from the book that I think is a perfect way to help readers recognize exactly what kind of stories you're going to be learning about and what kind of narratives you're going to be reading. And it says, "It's simply an attempt to get the stories from an improvised battalion of survivors." So these women are survivors, and those warnings you were talking about are also labels for situations where people have had to survive. So I think that's the important part, too. The living part of it, not the broken down, beaten part of it, but the bravery to tell their story.
Ashley:
It takes courage to tell those stories, and to survive the way these women have survived their circumstances. In the introduction, the first line is "The stories in this book may haunt you," and I kept thinking about that, because haunting is not always something that is necessarily painful. I think it may begin that way usually, but ends up being the lingering feeling of pain. It just becomes something that we can't deny, a reality that we cannot deny. We no longer get to retreat into the bliss of ignorance because we know this thing.
So I was wondering, when you finished this book, did you feel haunted? And if you do, what do you feel haunted by?
Danielle:
Throughout the book, each of the survivors, as they tell their stories, they talk about how these experiences haunt them or are currently haunting them. The thing that haunted me the most is that I could have been them if any one little thing had shifted in my life. Not that I have the same type of traumas that they've experienced, but if I hadn't had a certain person for support or lived in a certain place, that maybe my story would've been more aligned with theirs and how they ended up in the circumstances that led them to be incarcerated. So I think that's the part that I'm taking away from this. I'm no longer going to stand in this ideal that, well, I did everything right. Because some of these women did everything right, but they were made an example of, and judges literally said that within their arraignments and within their convictions.
Ashley:
Yep.
Danielle:
So I stop and think about that. And I think what haunts me is I can no longer, as you said, live in the ignorance of, well, this wouldn't have happened to me. I think I now have to accept this could have been anybody, including me.
Ashley:
Yeah. I think that my realization was also that stunning, and for a lot of reasons. I've grown up knowing or being constantly reminded that the circumstances of my life would, statistically, put me on a track toward self destruction, or incarceration, or something like that. But that never really felt close to me when I was growing up.
Danielle:
Same.
Ashley:
I never actually felt like I was in danger of any of those things happening to me. Because when I was growing up, I was just like, well, I would never do anything that would put me in a position where that would happen, or for whatever reason, I just felt like it would not be me. It could not be me. But then, as I started getting older, I realized that a lot of people around me, or more than a few people around me who I thought would never be them either, suddenly it was them.
Danielle:
I think that's a really important point to make, because a lot of these women were still children and young adults when certain types of situations started leading to them being a part of the criminal justice system. And, as you said, they saw even some people around them starting to get into trouble, and even themselves thought “that would never be me.” And yet their stories are included in these narratives because it became them. So you're absolutely right.
Ashley:
This is not even halfway into the book, but the woman named Terry Hancock has a section of her story that just says, "I felt like I wasn't worth anything." And you read about her being terrorized, just violently terrorized, by her stepdad. And her mom is not only doing nothing, but at times, just staring off into space and not answering. That will always haunt me, I think, now, because I remember times growing up where my mom's boyfriend would say something to me, or to her, or he would behave a certain way, and I would look at her and be expecting her, to be perfectly honest, to blow up on him the way she would blow up on any of us, me or my siblings. And I remember she would just stare like she wasn't even there. In that moment, she would just be staring out a window, or staring forward, or looking down or something. And it would be like she wasn't even in the room anymore.
And I read that part of the book and a part of Terry's story, and I immediately thought, oh my God, yeah, it feels like you're not worth anything when a parent does not protect you or defend you. It feels like it's because you're not worthy of being protected or defended. And, oh, man, that really does mess with you. And I'm like, so what's the difference between me and Terry, and really as far as I can tell from our stories, the only difference is that people intervened on my behalf. Other adults intervened on my behalf and made sure I was protected. And I think that there was also a certain place, hopefully, that my mom was just not willing to go or to allow someone in our lives to go.
Danielle:
Terry even talks about that in her story. Just like you were saying, she just learned and expected to be in dangerous situations, or to be abused, or not to be cared about. And the ironic part about all of this, just as you talk about adults intervening in your life, the first time an adult intervened in Terry's life, was in juvenile detention. That was the first time she says that she felt like somebody cared about her as a person and cared about her wellbeing.
And that part makes me just so terribly sad because I can account for dozens of times by the time I was 18 where I felt like adults did care about my wellbeing. And even as an angst-y teenager, there's times wherewe may have felt "Nobody understands me," but at the core of who you are, you know these people will intervene on your behalf in dangerous or compromising situations.
I think it’s interesting that you talk about your own experience in feeling like you just wanted somebody to step up for you, and then the only difference between you is that an adult intervened. And I think about Terry and how she would've wanted the same thing, but it took her becoming part of the juvenile detention system before an adult would intervene on her behalf. And it did change her. It changed her to be somebody who wanted to seek vocational training, to be somebody who wanted to think about themselves as a person rather than just existing.
Unfortunately, Terry's story got a lot worse before it got better, as is the theme with a lot of these women's stories.
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Experiences like Terry’s are just the beginning of where we learn about women and incarceration. Over the next two weeks, we will continue to focus on the differences between women and men in incarceration, but most importantly, we want to point out that even within a prison’s walls, life events, personal advocacy, and unheard medical needs for women draw a haunting parallel to what women in general experience within society. The overwhelming difference is that women who are incarcerated are made to truly believe they deserve the treatment and traumas they endured.
