Two Days In September
Two days in Shakopee Women’s Prison with Elizabeth Hawes.
September 18th, 2023
My roommate Kat and I are sitting at the second cafeteria table, the one closest to the exit. The table has twelve chairs. I am at the end, sitting in the sun.
I just got off a ten-day Covid quarantine. It is my first meal outside my cell.
I know, I know. No one is quarantining anymore, and if they are, they’re not doing it for ten days. But this is the Shakopee Women’s Prison. Everything is overkill.
We eat our lunch off of trays. I eat the alternative meal: vegetarian fried rice. Kat eats regular: a chicken quesadilla. The quesadillas smell of onions and things that go bump in the night. I don’t really know what that means, but I don’t know what’s in them either. What I do know is: we will both reek of quesadillas when we leave the cafeteria.
We are a minute into our lunch when I notice my tray vibrating and my water moving like waves inside the plastic cup. I look across the table. Two seats down, a woman is having a seizure. The woman next to her jumps up and starts to push the table away from her convulsing form. People are starting to panic. I stand up and in a measured voice yell “Hey! Hey! Hey!” really loud.
After the first “Hey!” the volume in the cafeteria drops to quiet. People stop eating. People are looking at me. There are three guards about thirty feet away. They look at me too. I point at the shaking woman. The guards run over. Another woman is trying to help get the shaking woman off her chair and onto the floor.
I sit back down. Kat, who has remained seated, looks at me with a glint in her eye. She smiles. Kat is the woman you don’t want to sit next to at a funeral. Or maybe you do. She has exceedingly bad timing and tends to laugh at inappropriate occasions. I blame this on her being raised in a violent environment and experiencing an appalling amount of loss. Overdoses, suicides, knives, fists, car accidents, a school shooting. Everyone copes differently.
“That is an inappropriate response to a seizure,” I say to her. Kat looks away so she doesn’t laugh.
Someone from medical comes and a guard brings a wheelchair to take the convulsing woman away.
Ten minutes later it’s like nothing ever happened.
When I tested positive for Covid, I was taken from my cell and put in a different cell with another woman who was Covid-positive. I felt super sick for two days. Hot, cold, dizzy. It hurt to move. Then I felt fine and sat around for another eight.
My Covid roommate was an ex-heroin and meth addict. She had used since the age of twelve. She was now forty. Every day she cried and said, I can’t take being locked in this room about fifty times.
I learned three things about her life outside of prison:
1. She is a tree-trimmer in Colorado and really loves her work.
2. She is the mother of three teenaged boys.
3. She is a hardcore Broncos fan.
She is now saving money to get more tattoos.
September 20th, 2023
There have been ICSs called all day. An ICS is an institutional alarm when all movement of incarcerated people stops because there is a situation that needs to be addressed—a medical emergency (like a seizure) or a problem (like someone disobeying a directive/order).
It is now one o’clock. A woman in the cell next door—who has been acting weird for days—is not responding to our unit’s sergeant. The sergeant is standing outside her cell and keeps saying things like Look at me and I’m telling you to pick up your ID and come to the door.
Days before, her roommate had told unit guards that this woman hadn’t left the cell in three days. That she had been hearing voices. Her roommate thought this woman was having a schizophrenic episode.
I don’t think the woman is “not responding to a directive” to be an asshole. I just think she is not able to respond. She is having a mental breakdown.
I don’t think the woman is “not responding to a directive” to be an asshole. I just think she is not able to respond. She is having a mental breakdown.
The sergeant tries to engage with her over a dozen times. Multiple guards come to the door and try to get her to do what’s being asked, but she doesn’t respond to any of them.
The situation gets increasingly ugly.
Kat and I can hear everything because we share a wall.
Kat says, “They should tell everyone on this wing to go down to the day space—they are going to mace her and it’s going to come straight through our vent.”
She is right.
But no one calls us to the day space. More guards gather in the hall. One has a video camera. As far as I can tell, without actually looking, there are about eight of them.
I put towels under our door. I hope the staff’s protocol will include calling someone from mental health before guards charge into her room, but this does not happen.
Finally, they open the door and mace her. There is fighting. She fights back. We hear coughing and a scream. Mace comes through our vent.
Kat and I breathe into our folded blankets. For ten minutes it sounds like heavy furniture is being thrown around a small space. Hard surfaces banging on the floor. Wrestling. The sounds of a brutal brawl. The only furniture we have in our rooms is one plastic blue chair.
Eventually, our neighbor leaves for segregation, hog-tied with a spit mask tied to her face. She is bloody, with a ripped shirt. Wearing one sock.
Kat says, “That’s the sound of fists hitting skin.”
Eventually, our neighbor leaves for segregation, hog-tied with a spit mask tied to her face. She is bloody, with a ripped shirt. Wearing one sock. The woman’s roommate, who’d been removed to the day space prior to the altercation, sees her departure.
Staff leaves us in ours cells, breathing in mace. Each cell has a window to the outside but the windows are screwed shut. There’s no way to get fresh air.
After about forty minutes, our wing is told to go sit in the day space. We sit there for about two hours as staff videos and photographs the woman’s cell and packs it up.
While we’re sitting there, they give us Covid masks. We are told that the institution’s Covid cases are rising again. Even though nobody else wears masks anymore and our masks are ineffective anyway, we have to wear them. It is now just theatre.
At four o’clock we are told to return to our rooms, and we’re locked in for the night.
Our room’s window faces east. It overlooks three untrimmed oak trees with several dying lichen-skinned broken branches. This is where incarcerated Native people smudge and do pipe ceremonies. There is a rounded half-dome structure made of ironwood. It is used for Native sweats once it is covered with blankets. There is a large pile of wood and a fire circle ringed by cantaloupe-sized stones where larger stones are heated for the sweats. To the right is a frontage road and on the other side of the road is a cemetery.
I like to think that between the smudging and sweats and headstones, this view is full of prayer.
Across the yard in another building sits a bruised and bloodied woman alone with schizophrenia.
Elizabeth Hawes is an award-winning prison writer and former editor of Reflector, the prison news magazine at Minnesota Correctional Institution (MCI)-Shakopee, where Hawes is incarcerated. She is a winner of the 2023 Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize.
Powerful piece!!