In June last year, sometime after I arrived at the holding area of the Jennifer Road Detention Center, outside Baltimore, I was directed into a room with three male guards. I stood there, in a windowless holding room, unsure of what was about to happen, feeling exposed and overwhelmed and full of foreboding. I had never been detained in a jail before, didn’t know anyone close to me who had.
In that room with those men, I sat in maddening silence. No one gave me a clear explanation as to why I was there or what would happen next. The male officers patted me down. What if they strip-searched me? Eventually I spoke up and requested the presence of a female officer.
Fortunately, the male guards obliged. Then I kept waiting until a woman arrived. After that, I was placed in a holding cell, where I remained for nearly 12 hours. No food, no shower, no phone call.
Following an ugly dispute with the father of my child, I spent 14 grueling days in that jail. (My case remains pending.) My stay in jail was disorienting and isolating, reckless and cruelly indifferent. I am no longer incarcerated, but even in that short period of time, I learned something disturbing about justice in this country.
While the experience was new to me, many Americans cannot say the same. At any given moment, around 657,000 people are held in jail across the United States; 5.6 million people land in jail each year, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And over half of Americans have at least one family member who has been incarcerated, according to FWD.us.
Not me. I grew up in a religious household, attended Catholic schools, maintained straight As, and never had any run-ins with the law. I was mostly unaware of the profound and sprawling reach of incarceration in this country. So I encountered jail like a foreign land, with no idea what to expect.
The unit
After I was released from the holding cell, a guard transported me to the women’s unit.
The room I stayed in had four bunk beds — room for eight people — but up to 11 women slept there, with three people sometimes sleeping on the floor. We shared one toilet.
Christopher Klein, the spokesperson for detention centers in Anne Arundel County, wrote in an email to a PJP editor that the room was designed to hold 10 or more people.
“We have noticed that some individuals might not prefer the top bunk and attempt to sleep on the floor,” Klein wrote. “However, that is not authorized and staff correct those situations when they become aware of them.”
During my stay, staff never corrected or addressed people sleeping on the floor. The room was overcrowded, with every top bunk occupied, leaving the floor as the only available place for some to sleep.
The jail constantly rotated women in and out of cells. Harsh lighting remained on through the night, and the shuffle of bodies created constant noise. No one slept.
There were no ladders to access the top bunks, and at no point did staff provide guidance or assistance on how to safely access the top bunks. To climb up, I had to step onto a narrow metal frame and pull myself up, repeatedly hitting my legs against the edge. Over time, my legs became covered in bruises that remained long after my release.
Privacy was nonexistent, even though there were policies in place that were supposed to protect it. Doors opened without warning. Male officers are required to announce themselves before entering the women’s unit, a policy confirmed by Klein. In reality, they seldom did.
Suicide watch
Some of the women around me appeared to be struggling with significant mental and physical illnesses, but they received little support. With so many bodies in one space, the struggles of each woman affected us all. The jail did not seem equipped to handle people’s complex medical needs.
Relative to many of my peers, I was healthy. But on my second day in detention, I was placed on suicide watch in an isolated cell by myself. I was not suicidal.
Klein declined to speculate why I was placed on suicide watch, citing privacy regulations. However, he did say that there are “numerous reasons why an individual might be placed on safety precautions or suicide watch. This placement is strictly a medical decision; security personnel do not assign or remove individuals from this status.”
The isolation cell was entirely concrete, with no windows or natural light. I was told the person who had been there before me had soiled themselves. The smell of bleach permeated the room and gave me lasting headaches, even though the combined toilet-sink had not been cleaned. Food was strewn across the concrete walls. Ants and cockroaches crawled on the floor.
Klein said he could not substantiate those claims, but insisted that the detention center does have a cleaning protocol and a contract with a pest control company that regularly treats the facility.
Time blurred. I had no pen and paper, nothing to use to chalk tallies on the wall. Besides, no one told me how long I would be there. I was constantly surveilled but also isolated. When I tried to ask officers polite questions through my tiny window, they just walked past me.
Over 48 hours later, I was suddenly released, with little explanation.
My time in isolation was much shorter than many detainees and prisoners, who are held for days, weeks, even years at a time. But it only took two days for me to begin to experience the fear and disorientation from isolation that I have heard others describe.
Minimal accountability
Several days after I returned to the unit, a verbal argument broke out between two detainees. The guards responded swiftly, instituting a 32-hour lockdown for the entire unit. One officer threatened to spray us with Mace if we didn’t comply.
In the wake of the lockdown, additional attention seemed to be paid to the women’s unit. Guards conducted “shakedowns” — tossing everyone’s minimal belongings around — and strip searches three nights in a row.
The message seemed to be one of collective responsibility; we were punished as a group for the actions of individuals.
But that collective responsibility only flowed one way. The detention center had maintained a grievance system in which detainees could make complaints or requests through written forms. But the grievance path never seemed to arrive at accountability. I filed grievances about the presence of bugs and the fact that detainees with clear medical needs were not being housed in the medical unit, among numerous others. I never received a response.
In his email, Klein wrongfully claimed that I only filed a single grievance. He said grievances must be processed from initial receipt to final disposition within 180 days, adding that I was discharged “before a response could be issued.”
The act of filing a grievance itself was tinged with fear. Interactions with guards were almost always adversarial, with communication often giving way to collective mistrust. I worried that filing a grievance would lead to not being believed at best, or reprisal at worst. This anxiety was shared among all the detainees. One woman warned me not to file at all, for fear the jail staff would retaliate against me. Many officers appeared overwhelmed, even burnt out; I worried they would not take feedback or complaints in stride.
I was only detained for 14 days — less time than many of the women in my unit — but that was enough to understand the way this detention center impacts the people inside. Detention centers are not prisons. They are meant to operate under the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” But from the moment I arrived, it felt as though I had already been condemned.
