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

Chapter 10. Cycling through the System: Zelda & Clinton

Chapter 10 Cycling through the System: Zelda & Clinton Clinton is one of thirteen children, although he is in regular contact with only two of his sisters and is close only to the younger, Zelda. He has one daughter, Janet, and is still close to her mother, Pat. Janet recently gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named after her father. Following a long string of drug-related arrests and prison terms, Clinton was paroled two years ago, and he moved in with Zelda. After twenty years of selling drugs on the street, both saw his release as an opportunity for him to go straight. He had previously stayed with Pat, but the neighborhood where she lived presented too many opportunities to become involved in hustling again. Of the families described so far, theirs inhabits the economically most marginal neighborhood, one in which incarceration is especially prevalent. In this respect, Clinton’s story is comparatively typical. Hustling from an Early Age While most of their siblings were raised in Virginia, Clinton and Zelda spent most of their childhood with relatives in the District. After Clinton was born, his parents hit ‹nancial dif‹culties, and, when their fourth child was born, they sent Clinton, then ‹ve years old, to live with two of his mother’s sisters in D.C. Clinton’s extended family had troubles of their own. The older of his two aunts was blind and diabetic, the younger was an alcoholic, and together they had responsibility for their elderly, housebound grandmother . The only person with whom Clinton remembered developing Doing Time on the Outside 136 a signi‹cant relationship was his uncle, whom he began to see as a father ‹gure during his ‹rst few years in the District. In Clinton’s mind, the decisive turn in his life was his uncle’s arrest for a murder when Clinton was about eight years old.1 Largely unsupervised by his two aunts after his uncle’s incarceration , he came and went as he pleased, quickly getting into trouble: I was in Simmons, Simmons Elementary, and I got to smoking marijuana . . . . and one thing led to another, you know. It’s like, once I got high off of it . . . whatever the guy said to do, I was ready to go do. And I graduated from Simmons, and I went to Terrell [High School, though I didn’t graduate from there.] I started playing hooky at the age of eight and started smoking marijuana, and I wanted, I wanted to go stay with my mother and my father, and, you know, I felt ostracized. Clinton Janet Pat Zelda male female incarcerated most affected deceased primary household secondary household romantic marriage separated divorced Fig. 12. Zelda and Clinton’s family Clinton started his relationship with the criminal justice system early and has been in and out of correctional facilities since he was twelve. He managed to parlay his ‹rst arrest at the age of eleven into a short return to his family in Virginia, which he remembers vividly: The of‹cers caught me, and they [sent me to] Junior Village was what it was called, and I stayed there for about a week. Then I got the longing for being home. I missed home, so I ran. . . . I left and I came back home, and my aunt and them sent me to my Mom’s and them, so I felt better. . . . So when I got in school my grades got to picking up—I had more focus then. My focus was broken by being in Washington, but when I got back there, my focus was better because I felt better. I felt good. I was back with my family, my sisters, and my brothers, and my mother, and my father, so I felt good. While it may have felt good to be with his family, for his parents it meant another mouth to feed and more expenses than they could manage , so they sent him back to D.C. at the end of the school year. As he told me, even though his mother and father explained that it was a ‹nancial decision and that they still loved him, “at a young age . . . you’re not concerned about that.” Instead, he felt the sting of rejection. Thinking back on his return to D.C., he told me, “I just couldn’t maintain a focus, a concern for myself, because I...