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Life Inside
A First Visit
Karl's British friend Maggie, who has visited Karl at Polunsky a number of times, writes about the nervousness of her first visit.
I am often nervous and rarely scared, but on this occasion I am really scared. The only times I have been into prisons in the UK I have gone is as an official visitor, invited in as part of a church group, or studying prisoner education. The warders have been polite and helpful, explaining little points about the system as I have gone round, joking a little with me when, in Reading Jail, I mistook a prisoner for the teacher. Well, how was I to know? They were all in mufti and this guy seemed so intelligent and welcoming, like a host with his guests.
This time it is different. For one thing, I am not on home territory. At home I can send out little signals, by my body language and the things I say, and I know I will be accepted and treated with respect. In the States even everyday human transactions are liable to be a bit tricky. People use different body language, and fundamental attitudes to things are, to this European, unpredictable. Nor am I at all sure of my welcome. After all, I have travelled – what? four thousand miles? – to visit a prisoner on death row. Is there an implied criticism in doing this? Don’t we have prisoners of our own to visit, instead of coming all this way? And I have spoken to enough people who had already visited, in Texas or elsewhere, to have heard stories of guards who go out of their way to be awkward, who are rude, who enforce petty rules for no other apparent reason than to make the visitor’s life difficult.
I have hardly slept the night before this visit. I am in a motel, the traffic rumbled by all night, the Country and Western radio station sang stories of love and loss, and I lay there half wishing I were back in the UK. I have heard it is best to go early. I have booked a taxi for 7.30am and I eat breakfast from a Styrofoam plate and cup. It is Texas in July and already hot. I have my clear plastic ziplock bag, a jacket because the visitors’ room can be cold, my room key, my $20 in change and my passport, nothing else will be allowed. The taxi arrives. “Visiting your husband?” the driver enquires genially.
We drive past fast food outlets and a Wallmart, and turn into a smaller road with little clapboard houses clustered at intervals set back in green clearings, the paint often peeling, cars jacked up on bricks outside the houses. I will never know, never have a clue what it is like to live in a little community like these. Then the prison appears on the right hand side. We turn in and stop at a guard post. The guard is armed. He checks the taxi, looks in the boot and on the back seat, and lets us pass with a curt nod. The taxi drops me off by the entrance.
Already, at 7.50am there is a little group of people. Most are women. A few know each other and talk, prison talk. From their accents, I gather that maybe half the people there are non-Americans. There is a bench, but three people are already sitting on it, and it is full. I stand feeling conspicuous to those watching eyes, my mouth dry, my heart hammering. Then someone smiles at me, “Your first visit?” and I nod, feeling better.
They let us in and we each in turn go through the security procedure. I try to remember to be polite, but the guards, all female here, are at the same time brusque and inattentive, like Saturday girls in a store when the boss isn’t looking. I hand over my passport and receive, in return, a number to wear round my neck. I follow the others through locked doors and gates, across some open space and into a corridor with the shiniest floor I have ever seen. More locked doors, operated by people I cannot see, and I report at the desk in the cold visitors’ room. “32” the guard tells me, so that I know to which cage Karl will be delivered, and then I wait for an hour, talking a little to others, trying not to look at the woman weeping in the corner, until at last someone says, “Here’s your man!” and I turn and see Karl for the first time. I sit down on the plastic chair and pick up the phone. “Hello” says Karl, in his quiet voice, and smiles.
This is why I came.
