Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America

Introduction

Introduction There is only one sure basis of social reform and that is Truth—a careful , detailed knowledge of the essential facts of each social problem. Without this there is no logical starting place for reform and uplift. —W. E. Burghardt Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill When Davida was born, her father, David, was seventeen and serving his ‹rst adult sentence on a drug conviction.* A small-time drug dealer in Washington, D.C., he has been in and out of prison for his daughter’s entire life. For all the anger and disappointment that come with having a father who is addicted to and sells drugs, Davida loves him and cherishes her ‹rst memory of his return home from prison. She was getting off the school bus and saw him waiting for her outside her grandmother’s house. “I just looked, and I was, like, ‘Daddy!’ And I just ran.” “At that time,” she says, crossing her ‹ngers, “we was like this, you know?” Thinking back on the time when she, her father, and her grandmother all lived together, she smiles, shaking her head: “I mean, it was just so much that me and my father did. I missed that when he got locked back up.” Her father’s subsequent arrest remains a similarly vivid memory: I remember the night the police came. They chased him in the house, and I was sitting there screaming, like, “Daddy! Daddy!” And he ran to the back door, but the back door was locked. The police came, and they pushed him down on the ›oor. He got up and pushed them off and ran through the front door, so I ran behind him, and I was just running *A more detailed account of Davida’s story and that of her family is given in chapter 6. right behind him . . . running right behind him. I seen the police behind me, and my father ran in through the alley. And I came, and I seen the police coming, so I ran behind the gate, by where my father was at. They didn’t see us. My father, they came and pulled my father from under the car and started beating him. And I was standing there looking at them beating my father with night sticks, and they dragged him through the alley and put him in the paddy wagon. So they took my father. The effect on Davida was, by her own assessment, powerful: “I was upset by that,” she says, emphasizing the point. “I started hanging out more, started drinking. I wasn’t going to school. I was, like, ‘Forget school.’ In sixth grade I dropped out of school completely. I didn’t want to go no more.” In the next four years, Davida would be sexually assaulted by her stepfather, do time in a juvenile facility for girls, sell her body to help support herself and her grandmother, and be con‹ned in a psychiatric institution. She hid what she could from her father, knowing there was little he could do for her from prison, but his inability to protect her makes Davida both angry and sad. “I try not to fault him, but I am a child still, and he wasn’t there for me when I did this. He wasn’t there for me when this happened to me. He would tell me, ‘I can’t do this for you. I can’t do that for you.’” “Still,” she says, “I love him to death because that’s my Dad.” At the age of sixteen, as she and her grandmother watch the landlord remove all their belongings from the apartment they shared, Davida looks on incredulously, shaking her head, surprised not so much by the eviction as by her entire life: By me not being old enough to get a regular job that maintains a stable place for us to stay, and my grandmother’s retired, she only gets one check a month, we don’t have much money to do this, or, you know, food or whatever. She’s not with Section 8 yet, public housing, food stamps, so it’s, like, my father needs to be here. . . . I’m bending over backwards trying to keep everything intact while he’s not here, and by Doing Time on the Outside 2 me being my age it’s hard, you know? I’m going through a hell...