Scenes of Prison
34. A Mother's Horror
A t the Lincoln Correctional Center, first shift begins at six o’clock in the morning and ends in the middle of the afternoon at two o’clock. Second shift begins at two and ends at ten o’clock at night.
In the middle of the afternoon, in the world outside the prison, people are busy and preparing to wind down their days when second shift at the prison is getting started. Parents will soon be picking up their kids from school, and most people are working on afternoon tasks at their jobs. These activities will soon be wrapping up, and then they’ll be done for the day. When they’re finished, they will go home for dinner, clean up, and play until it’s time to get ready for bed.
Inside the prison, it’s the same pattern in the afternoon. Inmates finish up work and school assignments and report back to their units for a late afternoon count. Then they eat dinner and pursue evening recreation activities until we call in the yard and lock the outside doors at 8:30. Inmates have thirty minutes to get ready to spend the night in their rooms, and we conduct a deadlock count at nine o’clock.
When I worked on second shift, I left home for work when the kids were still in school, and I got home from work after they had gone to bed. I wasn’t sleepy until well after midnight, and I wasn’t up for early morning activities getting the kids off to school. It was a pattern that didn’t allow me much room to be a parent, but fortunately, my wife was home, and she did her best to fill in for me.
It was not that way for one of my co-workers. Sally was a woman in her mid-forties. In most respects, she was average: not too fat, not too thin, not too tall, not too short, and brown hair. But she did have one distinguishing characteristic. She was worried. Her brow was furrowed, and her posture was slightly stooped as if she were carrying a great weight. She seemed distracted, as if something at a distance was weighing heavily on her mind.
Soon enough, we would all learn that she had good reason to worry.
Sally was a single mother, and she had a single child, a teenage boy. He was a high school student. He was old enough to drive but not old enough to inspire confidence in his ability to manage himself at home alone. His name was Steve. She worried about Steve.
Every day, second shift staff assembled in the guard mount room fifteen minutes before our shift began at two o’clock. That was shortly before Steve would get home from school. Sally would not get home from work until nearly ten thirty.
When Steve left school, he came home to an empty house. He ate dinner alone, and if his homework was going to get done, Steve would have to settle himself down to the task without any prompting from his mother.
Every evening, while the inmates moved freely around inside the unit and outside to the exercise yard, Sally found time to settle into a chair, call Central Control on our staff phone, and ask for a telephone line to make an outside call so she could call her son at home. (There were no cell phones at this time.) Staff rules limited such calls to emergency situations, but this rule did not slow down the frequency of her calls or reduce their length. She was one worried mother, and she often plied us with questions we couldn’t answer: “How was Steve entertaining himself?” “Who were his friends?” “Who else was watching him and noticing that her son was alone?”
One evening, her nightly phone call brought only distress. Steve was not answering the phone. Again and again she called Central Control to “try her call once again.”
“Where is he?” “Why isn’t he answering?” “What am I going to do?”
She repeated these questions to me and to anyone who would listen, but we had no answers for her, and we felt her rising anxiety. Ten o’clock could not come soon enough, and when it finally arrived, she hurried out of the Unit and out the front door and into the parking lot to her car, and she raced home.
We would not see Sally for a few days, and we wondered what had happened when she got home. When she returned to work, we gathered in the office as soon as we arrived on the Unit to begin second shift, and we listened to her story.
When Sally got home, the horror she so feared unfolded right in front of her eyes in the living room. Steve was not home. Where was he? Who was he with? What was he doing? Was he in danger? She searched for him. She disturbed the sleep of all of his friends, teachers, and acquaintances with calls and visits: “Have you seen Steve?” “Is he safe?”
Sally would not sleep this night.
Sally’s concerns that Steve was in danger were well-founded. He was.
An older man had noticed Steve and saw that he was alone much of the time, and he struck up a friendship. On the night Steve did not answer the phone, he wasn’t home. The older man was entertaining Steve at his apartment. They drank together. They watched videos together, and in one of the beers that Steve consumed, his host had mixed an animal tranquilizer. Soon, its effects hit. Steve knew what was going on, but he could not control his movements. He couldn’t call out in pain or in alarm. He couldn't do anything to protect himself or to help himself, and his host took full advantage of Steve’s weakness and vulnerability, which was his intent all along.
He raped Steve.
Sally paused as she said this. Tears glistened in her eyes, but she added this: “and now, Steve was in jail.”
How could it be that Steve would now be in jail!? We were dumbfounded, but tasks on the Unit demanded our attention, and Sally was weeping softly and not able to continue, so we left her alone in the office to gather herself.
Many hours would pass before we could gather again in the office so Sally could continue the tale she had begun to tell. I thought of Steve often during the day, and I wondered how it could happen that he would be in jail. When we completed deadlock count at nine o’clock and waited in the office for count to clear, Sally resumed her story.
At some point during the rape, unconsciousness interrupted the ordeal, and Steve slept. When Steve woke the next morning and memories of the past evening crashed into his morning, a murderous rage swept over him. He heard the sound of running water coming from the bathroom, and he went to the kitchen and searched for a large knife he could use as a weapon. Next, he followed the sound of the running water and found his attacker in the shower. That’s where he set upon him.
Steve murdered his attacker and left him for dead in the bathtub. This rapist would rape no more children, and when he next left the bathtub, he would have to be carried out so the police could load his remains into a body bag.
When Steve carried out his attack early in the morning, it must have caused a great uproar, because the neighbors heard the commotion and contacted police. They soon arrived and discovered the crime, and they took Steve into custody, and that’s where Sally found him later that morning.
We lived with Sally through her son’s trial. She insisted upon mounting a strenuous defense, and she borrowed heavily to pay attorney fees. After his conviction, she searched mightily for another five thousand dollars to pay up-front fees to his attorneys to file an appeal.
Steve was found guilty of murder, second degree, as I recall, and he was assigned to LCC. Steve could not live in a prison where his mother worked, but it was easier to move Sally than her son, so we said goodbye to Sally, and we said hello to Steve. Sally became a caseworker in another facility, and Steve was segregated away from adult offenders until he reached eighteen years of age, and then he settled into the inmate population to complete a term of imprisonment with us on a unit different from the one where his mother and I had worked.
Steve was very quiet as he served out his sentence, and as soon as he was eligible, his custody was reduced, and he left our maximum security prison. He did not live on my Unit, and Sally worked at a different prison, so when he left, I lost track of him, but I thought of Steve from time to time and wished him well.
When Steve arrived in our prison, he came with a lot of emotional baggage. He had been through a trauma. Other inmates also often arrive with emotional baggage; some, similar in intensity to Steve’s. These are some of the people who live in our prisons, and Steve is an example of the delicate and important work we do to get to know our inmates, so we can place them in settings where they can live successfully.
If Steve had not killed his attacker and been incarcerated, his rapist may have been the one to receive the prison sentence and come to our prison. In many cases, that’s exactly what happens, so if we aren’t careful, the Steves in our midst would likely find themselves forced to manage themselves in situations with another inmate who had committed the very same crime Steve had endured. Imagine the trouble it would have caused for Steve if we’d assigned him to a room, and when he carried his property into his new cell, he had found himself living with a child molester as his roommate.
It’s a lot to ask of a prisoner like Steve to control himself when he must interact with other inmates who have committed crimes targeting him. We work to help prisoners like Steve.
Discussion
- This description of Sally’s experience is a horror story for single mothers, but every murderer has a mother and every victim of murder has a mother, too. Describe personal experiences you have had with violent crime.
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