Elizabeth Greenwood - Love Lockdown: Dating, Sex, and Marriage in Americas Prisons

Dating, sex, and marriage in Americas prisons

Love Lockdown

Elizabeth Greenwood

Brimming with complexity and compassion, LOVE LOCKDOWN reveals the trials and triumphs of loving someone caught up in the prison system

SUSANNAH CAHALAN, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Pretender

Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud

Gallery Books

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Copyright 2021 by Elizabeth Greenwood

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935, from Leadbelly, copyright 2005 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Used with permission of the author and Wave Books.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition July 2021

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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

Jacket design by Jonathan Bush

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Greenwood, Elizabeth, 1983- author.

Title: Love lockdown : dating, sex, and marriage in Americas prison system / Elizabeth Greenwood.

Description: New York : Gallery Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020045850 (print) | LCCN 2020045851 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501158414 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501158438 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: PrisonersFamily relationshipsUnited States. | Prisoners spousesUnited States. | Conjugal visitsUnited States. | PrisonersSexual behavior United States. | PrisonersUnited StatesSocial conditions.

Classification: LCC HV8886.U5 G74 2021 (print) | LCC HV8886.U5 (ebook) | DDC 365/.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045850

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045851

ISBN 978-1-5011-5841-4

ISBN 978-1-5011-5843-8 (ebook)

For Scott

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935

By Tyehimba Jess

when your man comes home from prison,

when he comes back like the wound

and you are the stitch,

when he comes back with pennies in his pocket

and prayer fresh on his lips,

you got to wash him down first.

you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled

and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism

back into what he was before gun barrels and bars

chewed their claim in his hide and spit him

stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.

you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears

from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks

from ankle and wrist, rinse solitarys stench loose

from his hair, scrape curse and confession

from the welted and the smooth,

the hard and the soft,

the furrowed and the lax.

you got to hold tight that shadrachs face

between your palms, take crease and lid

and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water,

and when he opens his eyes

you tell him calm and sure

how a woman birthed him

back whole again.

N AMES AND IDENTIFYING details of certain people herein have been changed. The words we use to talk about people in the system are potent. Labels like felon and convict stigmatize and reduce people to their records, without taking into account the circumstances that placed them there or the transformations they may have undergone while inside. Academics widely prefer people-centered terms like incarcerated person, while some activists use prisoner as a political term to delineate an oppressed class of people. There is no universal consensus on terminology among people in prison themselves or those advocating for their rights. I use both terms in this book to reflect that plurality.

People who have served prison time are more than their records. I discuss convictions because they are what landed the incarcerated in the position to be in prison and to meet someone on the outside.

All the stories are true.

T HE BRIDE WEARS black.

An atmosphere of momentous occasion permeates Room 315 at the Rodeway Inn, nestled between two highways outside Salem, Oregon. Its the morning of the wedding. Mary Kay cosmetics, SnackWells popcorn, errant shoes, and water bottles are strewn across the room, where the bride awoke at four this morning, ready for her day. She spent some quiet moments of the morning outside, smoking, watching the sun come up over the highway, feeling the presence of her grandparents looking down upon her.

But now, Journey, or Jo, as shes known to friends, is a ball of nervous energy, pacing in bare feet, losing and being reunited with her cigarettes, phone in hand, overwhelmed by the messages of love and blessings coming through every few minutes. Friends have sent a bouquet to commemorate her nuptials, which the bride receives in grateful hysterics, so much so that Lisawho has flown in from Missouri to attend to all the bridal details, like forcing Jo to eat a slice of buttered toast and running out to buy a forgotten razor blade at the gas station across the streethas to redo her eye makeup.

Lisa is then tasked with fashioning an updo free of bobby pins, as theyd surely send the metal detectors howling.

Afterward, Jo practices walking in her high heels, up and down the carpeted hallway. She has brought two backup outfits in case the guards deem her black sheath too formfitting, or the color too close to navy blue, the shade worn by inmates and therefore forbidden to visitors. Her wedding band, which shed selected and bought herself, fits the prisons specificationsno gold, no embellishments.

Today, Jo will marry Benny Reed, who is serving a ten-year sentence for attempting to murder his then-girlfriend. Their wedding will take place at the maximum-security Oregon State Penitentiary, in the visiting room decorated in white and pink streamers and paper wedding bells strung up by the prisoners themselves. Their wedding cake will be powdered doughnuts, and they will toast each other with blue Powerade from the vending machine. It will be the third time they have seen each other face-to-face. It will be the first time theyve ever gotten to sit next to each other.

WHATEVER IMAGE COMES to mind when you think prison wife, Jo aint it. She is in her mid-forties but looks like shes twenty-nine and seems to be in perpetual motion. Shes a mother of three sons: twin seven-year-olds and a twenty-one-year-old. She often keeps her light brown hair pulled back when shes running around doing errands and shuttling her kids to Boy Scouts. Her years in the military have given her a knack for organization, ball busting, and punctuality. She stands five feet four inches, but her presence makes her seem taller. Shes a survivor: of multiple combat tours as an Army medic; of PTSD, pill addiction, and the fibromyalgia she came home with; of an abusive first marriage in her twenties. She runs on Jesus, coffee, and cigarettes. She reads novels and nonfiction and watches documentaries for fun.