| May/June 2000
Women on the Row: excerpts
from the book by Kathleen O'Shea
I've been searched, scanned, patted, frisked, and locked in a tiny room alone for about forty-five minutes with an armed guard at the door. It is 1992, and I am at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to interview a woman on death row. I am a graduate student in Human Relations at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. I am allowed to keep a small tape recorder and a bottle of water with me. People often ask me how I got involved with all of this. And until my book, Women and the Death Penalty in the United States: 1900-1998 was published last year, my answer was simple: I love research. I couldn't find the information I needed about women on death row, so I decided I would prepare a reference book that I could use that would, hopefully, make it more available to others as well. Even though people asked about me personally, I always thought it was the women on death row they were interested in. The seeds for that first book were sown when I was a graduate student. After living what might be considered one whole lifetime, I decided to return to school and get a masters degree. I chose the University of Oklahoma because I had an urge to return to my roots. I had been born in Oklahoma City but had not lived in the state since I was thirteen days old. At first I thought I would get a degree in Spanish. I had spent eight years in South America, was fluent in Spanish, and had taught both English and Spanish for a number of years to high school students. After completing sixteen hours of coursework, however, I woke up one morning and realized that teaching Spanish literature for the rest of my life held little appeal. That was when I transferred to the Education Department. I signed up for nine hours, met all the white male teachers, attended two classes, and recognized that that wasn't for me either. My third sweep of available programs led me to the Human Relations Department. I didn't know much about Human Relations as a field, but since I knew I could relate to humans, it seemed a reasonable place to investigate. Concurrent with my arrival, Dr. Beverly Fletcher, a professor in the department, was engaged in a study of women prisoners in Oklahoma in an effort to determine the causes of the high rate of recidivism. She had organized an interdisciplinary group of professors and students to participate in a multi-year project. She became my advisor and invited me to join the group just as they were preparing to survey six to eight hundred women prisoners in three Oklahoma prisons. Dr. Fletcher had already met repeatedly with prison authorities to assure that we would be allowed into the prisons to work with the women one-on-one filling out the twenty-three-page questionnaires. For us, as students, this involved leaving the congeniality of a university environment for several days at a time and traveling to dusty, secluded Oklahoma towns, where we spent our nights in cheap motels with roaches and bedbugs and our days in prison cells with incarcerated women. Though every effort was made not to be disruptive, ten or twelve college students coming in daily, sitting with women prisoners on bunks and trunks, on the lawn, at dining room tables - wherever we could find space - was a little out of the ordinary. Before we actually spent time with the women we had visited the prisons and had met the wardens and guards, most of whom were pleasant enough but none of whom really wanted us there. The project also involved their being interviewed, and some who felt pressured into filling out a survey made our work difficult. To encourage women to participate we were allowed to set up tables in the middle of the dormitories with popcorn, homemade cookies, and punch. This was highly irregular since food generally was not permitted in the dorms, and even those women who did not participate in the interviewing were now free to take food. They stood around and chatted with us while they were eating. We also brought cookies and popcorn for the guards. We had been to several participant observation training sessions, and many of us furiously made notations about what was happening on sheets of paper we had conveniently attached to the clipboards where we carried the surveys. We also drew maps of the rooms we were in, where the cells were located, and what kind of privacy the women had. The guards often tried to intimidate the women who were filling out surveys by standing over them or barking orders at them while they were writing. There were shakedowns (full dorm searches) several times a day with guards sometimes ordering us off the bunk beds we and the women were sitting on so they could tear them apart. We also witnessed pat downs of women and had women taken away in the middle of interviews for strip searches. We soon realized the show of power was meant for both the women and for us. The atmosphere in the omens' prisons was oppressive, filled with tension and despair. More than one of us would be ill most of the night following a day inside the walls. It was from the women in general population at Mabel Bassett that we learned about the five women on death row. They asked us if we would be interviewing any of the death row women, and since we hadn't known they were there, we in turn asked Dr. Fletcher. That's how I eventually ended up locked in a tiny room in a women's prison in Oklahoma waiting for a condemned woman. At Dr. Fletcher's suggestion, I knew very little about the woman I was to interview, nothing about the specifics of why she was there. Only her name and that she was sentenced to death. Before meeting her I had never really thought about the death penalty, or how and why it is invoked. Since that day I have thought of little else. I don't know what type of person I expected, but I do know I was not prepared for the woman I met. I was surprised when two guards brought her in and she was about my height, slender with shoulder-length sandy brown hair. She was laden with chains. Her feet were shackled so that she could only walk with a shuffle; her hands were cuffed to a chain around her waist. Sitting knee to knee on chairs facing each other, the two of us filled the small space we had been given. I had already been told that our conversation might be listened to by prison staff, and the four glass walls surrounding us gave me the feeling of being small fish in a big aquarium. The thing that really struck me was the woman herself. She was younger than I and so ordinary looking, it would have been very difficult to pick her out of a crowd in any town in America. She greeted me with a smile and immediately began chatting, as if we were old friends and I had just dropped by to exchange Betty Crocker recipes. Instinctively, I felt warm and very next-door-neighborly toward her. We never discussed her crime, but we did talk about her education, her job experiences, and her family. She had four young children she had left behind and spent a lot of time telling me the things she felt were special about each one of them. Her eyes were tearful as she recounted how the children had been split up to live with various family members, but quickly recovered her composure to assure me that it was better than having to give them to the state. It was obvious that she was happy to have someone to talk to. As I listened and watched her face, I began to wonder if there were other women like her on death row, and if there were, why I had never heard about them. I left the prison with a lot of unanswered questions. After all the data had been collected, Dr. Fletcher let us know that she had a contract for a book, and that any of us who were interested in a particular area could take the data, analyze it, and if we wanted to, write a chapter for her book and be published under our own names. I immediately said I wanted to write a chapter about women on death row. Since I had very limited data from the women on death row in Oklahoma, Dr. Fletcher suggested I find out about women on death row in other states and do a comparison for my chapter, or, if that didn't work, try an historical overview of women who had been executed or given the death penalty. Doing the research for that chapter was what piqued my passion for the topic because I realized very quickly that little or no organized information about women on death row existed. As people became aware of my interest, they began sending me newspaper stories, references, journal articles, etc. pertaining to women and the death penalty. I used the Internet quite a bit to contact criminologists, librarians, prisons, and lawyers, and to do research in university libraries throughout the world. Family and friends soon were calling regularly to let me know when there was something about the death penalty on TV. Other people taped segments of shows about women and sent them to me. My personal library of information began to grow. Several years later, after my chapter had been included in Female Offenders: A Forgotten Population, and after I had become a doctoral student, it became clear to me that I needed to organize the considerable information I was amassing on women and the death penalty and write a reference book. The process by which the book evolved included a systematic attempt to contact every woman in the US on death row. I sent a letter to each of these women for whom I had an address introducing myself, telling them about my proposed book, and asking for their help. I only received a couple of responses basically stating that they were not interested and were, in fact, plagued with such requests and just wished that people would leave them alone. I continued working on my list of addresses, writing to various groups to get information about where the women on death row might be located in their states, calling prisons, picking other people's brains. Then I was inspired to write a second letter, somewhat different from the first. Again I introduced myself, but this time I told the women of my experience interviewing a woman on death row in Oklahoma. I explained that I was writing an historical perspective of women and the death penalty and that their story would be in my book. I gave them the choice of writing their story as they wanted it told or having me construct it from whatever information I could find on my own. I indicated that whichever way they chose was fine with me, but that one way or another their story would be in my book. I also included self-addressed stamped envelopes. This second mailing elicited a larger response, with a handful of women writing back. To those who responded, I proposed visiting them on death row and inquired how I might go about doing that. I thought a face-to-face meeting would give each of us more information about the other. I sent the material I already had collected about them: it was usually returned marked up and scratched out, or with the story as the woman knew it written out. At this point I started supplying a lot of women with stamps and envelopes. I spent considerable time establishing relationships through correspondence with women on death row, telling them of my life and asking them about theirs before I began visiting them. It seemed that once I got two or three women to understand what I was trying to do, other women contacted me on their own, asking to be included. Then there always seemed to be someone who knew someone. In this way, the circle continued to widen.
As we got to know each other, our correspondence was not usually about their crimes or their cases. Mostly they wrote to me about their families and children, about their lives before "the row," and almost always about how they wanted to help their children grow up to be happy, healthy people. Often they would ask me to send them things to read. This was not information I could use in my book, but how could I say no? They also sent me photographs including many of themselves as children. I would sit and look at the innocent, smiling faces and it was difficult to believe that the person in the picture was on death row today. I put the photographs up on my desk and around my computer screen until I had an overflowing gallery of women waiting to be executed. Often, when I felt I couldn't go on with the book because it was just too painful, those child-faces kept me going. The correspondence multiplied, and my involvement in the lives of the women increased. Looking back, I suppose since the women did not know about each other, each one probably thought she was the only one I was corresponding with. In reality, I soon was receiving a dozen or more letters a week from women on death row throughout the US. I was supposed to be writing a book, but I felt incapable of not responding to them. One woman wrote to ask how I had found her; she hadn't heard from anyone on the outside in seven years. Another said she didn't know that anyone knew she was there. Eventually I told some of the women they could call me. Of course I knew nothing about the arrangements the phone companies have with prisons for jacked-up prices. I did know that prisoners could only call collect and speak for no longer than ten to fifteen minutes. Although at first it seemed like something I could handle, it wasn't very long before I had an astronomical phone bill. I would get four or five calls a week. I didn't have it in me, though, to refuse a call. I was free. They were not. Once a woman called and said, "You are the only one I can ask this favor of, you are the only one I trust." Words like that always make me apprehensive - I couldn't imagine what she was going to ask me. How could I, a doctoral student with no money to speak of and a book deadline staring me in the face, be the only one this woman knew to ask? Her request was even more amazing: she wanted me to take her daughter, who happened to live with her grandparents not far from me, to buy her first bra. The book took four years to complete. By the time Women and the Death Penalty was published, the women I wrote about were people to me. It was no longer a question of whether or not they were guilty. I understood, in fact, that most of the women on death row who are guilty say that they are. They do not try to deny it. More important, as I got to know the women and the circumstances of their incarceration, death row conditions became a human rights issue for me. Although the book was finished, the women on death row continued to write to me and contact me and send me information about themselves. I knew I could no longer handle the volume of material I was receiving, yet I felt I needed to find a way to let people know about it. That's when I got the idea for a newsletter through which I could inform people about the women on death row and they, in turn, could contact the women themselves. So I wrote to the women on death row and told them that I was starting a newsletter, that it would be free, and that each of them would receive a copy. I decided to name the newsletter Women On The Row because one day I received a card from a woman on death row who wrote: The women on the row really appreciate everything you are doing for us. I also told them I would like them to write articles or poems or anything they wanted to for it. There are now 150 subscribers, and I am never at a loss for information each month - only the time to sit down and prepare it. I originally asked people for a donation of ten dollars a year to help with the costs of printing and mailing. In its second year of publication I am raising that to twelve dollars. The women on death row continue to receive it for free, as do many other men and women prisoners. Men in prison have written and sent me money from their commissary funds to help their "sisters on the row." One of the miracles of the newsletter is that the women on death row became aware of each other. Currently there are eight women who are the only women on death row in their respective states. That means they are totally isolated from everyone and everything except the guards they live with on a daily basis, mostly men. Even in states where there is more than one woman on death row, they are often not allowed to communicate with one another. But after they started receiving the newsletter and reading about each other, some of the women began writing to me as an intermediary. One woman on death row in California, for example, said she could not bear the thought that a woman on death row in a different state could not afford to buy shampoo to wash her hair. So she requested that fifteen dollars from her own commissary money be sent to me to send to the other woman. Women on death row supporting women on death row. Some prison authorities are clamping down, as they have in Texas, where the newsletter was recently banned for containing "material that any reasonable person would conclude could incite a riot." If I am praised for my "work" or thanked for my "mission" or sent donations for my "ministry" with women on death row, I am somewhat taken aback. What I "do" with or for these women is what I would want someone to do for me. I write to them, I talk to them when I can, I answer questions they ask if I am able, I tell them about my life, I read to them, pray with them. Nothing extraordinary. Kathleen A. O'Shea, writer, activist, lecturer, and a nun for twenty-five years, is a social worker who does research on female offenders, particularly women on Death Row. She published Female Offenders: An Annotated Bibliography in 1997 and Women and the Death Penalty in the United States: 1900-1998 in 1999. She is currently working on Hymns of the Revolution, a novel based on her memoirs of Chile, 1965-1973. Women on Death Row: Revelations from Both Sides of the Bars is available through Firebrand Books, 141 The Commons, Ithaca, New York 14850. (607) 272-0000. |
It
is essential to me that I talk about what the women on death row do for
me. My association with these women has been a life-altering experience.
After my first book was published, I received the following e-mail: THEY
GET WHAT THEY DESERVE. MAY THEIR NAMES BE ERASED FROM THE BOOK OF LIFE.
I keep that quote in front of me to remind me what the women on death
row asked me to say about them to the public. Say our names, they told
me. These women do not want to be erased from the book of life.