PRISON IS A MEMBER OF THEIR FAMILY (Part A)

Since Nina was born, Lolli has been dressing her for prison. Nina wore new
baby clothes for visits to her 16-year-old father, Toney, in a juvenile
detention facility not too far from their Bronx neighborhood. As Nina grew,
Lolli dressed her daughter for the rarer afternoons in faraway New York
State maximum-security visiting rooms. The gaps between visits gave Lolli
time to save and shop for the brand-new outfits on layaway. In the inner
city, being "dressed" has always been important: it means you are provided
for, a part of bigger things. Sloppiness and stains were physical evidence
of failure, of poverty winning its battle against you. The night before
visits, Lolli would spend hours doing Nina's hair in her father's favorite
style -- Shirley Temple curls. Nina groaned and grimaced. Lolli tugged and
yanked. Nina winced whenever Lolli cleaned her ears (Toney sometimes
checked). In prison, as on the street, a well-dressed family enhanced
Toney's stature. Interactions were public, and appearances mattered.

On a cold morning early last month, Nina, who is now 12, stood on her
stoop, dressed, waiting to visit her father. She was glad about going to
see him, eager to go anywhere, to get away from her boring block in an
upstate New York town and the chaos of her house. She has been an upstate
girl for more than seven years, but like her mom, she still rocks a city
style. Nina's thick, dyed blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she
flashed a new pair of silver-and-pink Nikes. She was wearing a dark blue
velvet sweatsuit Lolli bought for the day. The sweatsuit came from a corner
store, whose Bronx-born proprietor imports the New York City ghetto style
upstate.

As long as Nina could remember, the prison system held uncles and cousins
and grandfathers and always her father. Nina, like Toney and Lolli, was
raised in the inner city; for all three, prison further demarcated the
already insular social geography. Along with the baby showers of teenagers,
they attended prisoners' going-away and coming-home parties. Drug dealing
and arrests were common on the afternoons Nina spent playing on the
sidewalk as she and her parents hung out with their friends. People would
be hauled away, while others would unexpectedly reappear, angrier or
subdued. Corrections officers escorted one handcuffed cousin to Nina's
great-grandmother's funeral; her favorite uncle had to be unshackled in
order to approach his dying grandmother's hospital bedside. The prison
system was part of the texture of family life.

Since 1974, the year Toney was born, the incarceration rate for young men
in America has quadrupled. In his Bronx neighborhood, as in the poorest
communities around the country, prison is now a well-established rite of
passage. A 2000 study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that about
half of the nation's inmates are parents of children under 18. The study
also found that almost 1.5 million children had a parent in prison, an
increase of more than 500,000 children since 1991.

Many inmates lose touch with their families -- more than half of all
fathers in state prison report having no personal visits with their
children. But the family that maintains a significant connection must
arrange and rearrange their relationships -- their lives -- around prison.
The fact that so many young minority men spend time in jail is "felt
acutely at the street level, and influences dating patterns, parenting
patterns, the way people do or don't connect to work, the norms of social
interactions," says Jeremy Travis of the Urban Institute. These
abstractions are the reality for Nina and Lolli and Toney, with whom I have
spent countless hours hanging out and shuttling back and forth to prison
during the last 10 years. (To gain such access to their lives, I agreed to
use only their street nicknames when writing about them.) For them, as for
many poor American families, prison and the street are where family life
unfolds.

1988-1990: Toney and Lolli Fall in Love

Love is a place to go in the ghetto. Like thousands of inner-city
teenagers, Toney and Lolli met on the street. It was 1988, and drugs had
rendered their precarious home situations untenable. Home meant cramped
places where too many people and never enough money erupted in too much
fighting and sadness and partying. In their Puerto Rican neighborhoods on
the eastern and western ends of Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, drug dealing
was a mainstay of the local economy.

Lolli wasn't a church girl, and she wasn't much of a schoolgirl either. But
she wasn't truly hardened, and she had family. She liked action, although
she preferred to watch from the periphery. Boys called her Lollipop because
she liked to tuck lollipops in the topknot of her ponytail; her teachers
called her Motor Mouth because she talked a lot. After school, she liked
watching the boys fooling around in front of a nearby bodega: boys talking
to other boys, boys eating Cheez Doodles, boys idly bouncing basketballs,
boys on bicycles.

Toney called attention to himself just by appearing. He sported a red
leather jacket with a collar trimmed in what looked like real rabbit fur.
His clothes were pressed and clean. He squinted as if he had just sucked on
a lime and had a hop in his sexy walk. He was 14 and looked like a boy
headed somewhere.

What Lolli didn't know at the time was what Toney was running from. His
mother's life was spiraling out of control, and her longtime boyfriend, a
workingman who had given structure to Toney's turbulent household, had
recently moved out. Toney usually retreated to his homeboys -- Four-Man
Posse, as they called themselves, or F.M.P. As Toney remembers it, within
no time he went from playing tag to hiding drugs in his pocket to carrying
guns. F.M.P. had an M-1 rifle, a .45 and a shotgun. They hunted for victims
on the subway and did a daylight robbery at a sporting goods store.

Toney caught Lolli's attention immediately. "Damn," Lolli remembers saying
to her best friend the day she saw him. "That guy looks good."

At first, Toney later recalled, he'd noticed Lolli the way he noticed all
kinds of girls. She was pretty, "real short and thick." He wanted to have
sex with her. Having sex with girls was for Toney a daily goal, one he met
fairly regularly. "Different girls gave me an opportunity to experience
different things," Toney said. But Toney found himself actually liking
Lolli, and they started speaking every day. They talked and talked and then
they kissed and kissed. When they began to make love, Lolli was silly and
happy, not scared and sad like other girls he'd been with. Some
neighborhood girls moved like somnambulists through the haze of their
depressing streets, but Lolli was playful, ready to try anything. Toney
said, "She had this vitality."

Toney was a player, and even love wasn't going to stop a boy's
philandering, but Lolli was the girl he came back to, his "wife." Toney
also spent less time robbing and mugging once he had Lolli. It was common
knowledge in the neighborhood that a girl could save a boy from the dangers
of the street, but Toney wasn't looking to be saved, and Lolli wasn't
looking to rescue him. She liked the adventure and wasn't thinking further
than that. She started cutting school.

By the fall of 1989, Lolli was pregnant. She was hopeful: both she and
Toney said they believed the relationship would go on much as it had, and
that they would get help from their moms. Lolli's mother, who had her first
child at 14, was less worried about the pregnancy -- lots of girls had
bellies -- than about the extra hardship Toney's hoodlum lifestyle
guaranteed. She had cousins and siblings who'd been in and out of prison.
Her own longtime partner, who was addicted to heroin, managed to stay out
of jail, but even with him at home, raising children was a struggle.

Within weeks, Lolli's mother's fears were realized: Toney was arrested. His
crew was involved in a shootout. Toney took the blame -- he knew he'd get
less time as a juvenile; his best friend, Pee Wee, also took the rap as a
gesture of solidarity.

In 1990, Toney was sentenced to two-to-six years for attempted murder and
shipped to Harlem Valley, the juvenile detention center in Wingdale, N.Y.,
50 miles north of the Bronx. By this time, Lolli had quit school. She was
now not only a pregnant 15-year-old, but a jailbird's "wife."

1990-1991: With Bars Between Them

Toney didn't know it, but Harlem Valley would have the best conditions that
he would experience during his prison years. In the early 90's, juveniles
were still treated like older children who might turn things around. In
addition to offering Toney a chance to get his G.E.D., the institution
encouraged connection with his family. He had easy access to a phone. He
could shoot his own rolls of film with a camera that the staff let the
teenagers use. He mailed Lolli pictures of himself sitting in his
cinder-block room on his Ninja Turtle sheets. Toney ate the home-cooked
food that his mother brought for visits, which she made often, because
Metro-North trains ran from New York City to Wingdale.

Toney's mother hoped that jail would teach her son the lessons she had not
been able to. Prison wasn't safe, but it was safer than the street, though
you had to establish that you could take care of yourself. Early on, two
bigger boys beat Toney, and while he was getting stitches, they stole a
pair of his sneakers. In a move that would establish his reputation in the
system, Toney did them one better: he waited a week for one of the boys to
wear the sneakers, jumped him and took the sneakers right off his feet.

For Lolli, prison made the relationship hard instead of fun. Face to face
in the visiting room with full hours stretched out before them, Lolli and
Toney had to figure out new ways to communicate. The unborn baby became
their strongest link. Toney hated the idea of being an absent father, like
his own father, who moved out when Toney was 2 and was in and out of
prison. "For the next four years I'm going to have to handle it," Toney
wrote to Lolli. "But anyway at least I have something that's mine and will
never stop loving me. My kid."

In April 1990, a healthy, full-term baby girl arrived. Lolli mailed Toney
his own baby book. They charted their daughter's progress. Toney wanted
Lolli to document with photographs each day he was missing. He stopped
asking Lolli questions about herself and wanted to hear only about the
baby: does she still have that rash? That bump on her chest? Was Lolli
changing her diapers enough? The more controlling Toney became, the more
Lolli avoided him. She let Toney's mother take Nina to see Toney on
weekends instead. Toney fed her and changed her diaper. When the baby
cried, he said, "I ain't letting go till you get used to me." He badgered
his mother to keep a close eye on Nina, and promised to take care of her
when he got out.

Lolli's mother also helped with the baby. Lolli welcomed the break. It was
summer. Her friends were hanging out and going for midnight swims at
Roberto Clemente State Park. She missed having sex with Toney. One night,
she and an ex-boyfriend got together. Within three months of Nina's birth,
Lolli was pregnant again.

Toney was devastated -- and furious. He didn't want Lolli to turn out like
his mother or his oldest sister, having babies by different fathers. Lolli
loved Toney, but she could not go through with an abortion. Toney still
called regularly to check on Nina -- Lolli would hold the receiver to
Nina's mouth to capture sounds -- but Toney's inquiries quickly turned into
diatribes. He promised to make Lolli's life miserable once he got out.

1991-1993: Back to the Neighborhood

In October 1991, after completing the minimum two years of his sentence,
Toney arrived back home in the Bronx. He stripped at the threshold of his
mother's apartment door. His prison clothes formed a puddle at his feet.
Prison clothes were believed to bring a house bad luck, and his mother's
house had already had enough: Toney's oldest sister, who had contributed to
the household, had recently been arrested on a drug charge, leaving behind
three little girls.

A condition of Toney's parole was that he either get a job or return to
school. He attended Bronx Community College, thinking it would be easier to
skip. The B.C.C. campus was on the west side, close to Lolli's mother.
Toney and Lolli soon started sleeping together again. Lolli would leave her
new baby girl, Che Che, with her mother, and wait with Nina for Toney after
class. Watching the students, Lolli wished she had never dropped out of
school. Toney shared whatever he was learning -- math, new words. Lolli
liked math the best. Within a couple of months, though, Toney stopped
attending college. His mother's latest boyfriend was arrested; she was
getting high, and someone needed to pay the bills. Toney took a job
overseeing crack sales and tried to keep his mother in check.

Toney still loved Lolli, but wanted to punish her for becoming pregnant by
someone else. He brought other girls into his bedroom at his mother's
house. Lolli waited out his company. Sometimes, she and Nina slept on the
couch. Even after one girl moved in at his mother's, he regularly saw
Lolli; he would pass by her mother's apartment at bedtime to tuck in Nina.
Lolli accepted his divided attention as punishment for having another boy's
baby. But Nina, who was 2, wasn't having it. She fought on behalf of both
of them. Sometimes Toney would drive Nina around in his car. If he offered
a girl a ride, Nina refused to relinquish the passenger seat. "My chair!"
she'd say, or, "Mommy's chair!" and the girl would have to sit in back.

The repetitiveness of drug dealing quickly bored Toney, and he started
robbing again with F.M.P. He was hardheaded and 17, bursting with angry
energy. He understood that his actions had consequences, but in his world,
the consequences seemed less determined by action or intention than by the
luck of the draw. That Christmas, after robbing a drug dealer, he came home
with $25,000, intoxicated with the ease of the job. He paid his mother's
overdue rent, stocked the shelves with food and bought presents for his
nieces. He outfitted himself and his live-in girlfriend with sneakers and
jewelry and coats. He always made sure Nina had everything she needed, and
with his new money, he bought her a black leather shearling. He even bought
things for Lolli's other daughter, Che Che, a gesture that Lolli
interpreted hopefully.

But Toney was stopped one night and charged with driving without a license;
he spent the summer of 1992 on Rikers Island for violating parole. By the
time he got out that fall, his mother had been evicted. Toney quickly found
a new girlfriend. One night she had a party, and everything was upended again.

Toney's friend Pee Wee became deadly when he partied, and on this night,
after drinking, he got into an argument with a group of boys at a White
Castle. Toney arrived and tried to calm Pee Wee in the parking lot, but
couldn't. He then accompanied him inside. The trouble exploded instantly.
Guns blasting, Toney and Pee Wee backed out the glass front doors.

Pee Wee had a habit of stepping in front of Toney whenever they got into
shootouts; he was shorter, and Toney fired over his head. Toney had
repeatedly warned Pee Wee about this habit, but it was also a testament to
the trust between them. But this time, Toney tripped. He doesn't remember
pulling the trigger, but he remembers his friend going down, his chin
lifting toward the sky as the bullet tore through the back of his head.

Toney, anguished, spent those first hours after the shooting at his
girlfriend's, muttering incoherently and threatening to kill himself. For
the next several months, he lived on the lam, staying with her and with
other girls. When he thought it was safe, he met with Lolli and saw Nina.
These stolen moments between other girlfriends were the closest Toney and
Lolli ever came to conventional family life. In January 1993, the police
picked up Toney. He pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter.

Around the same time, Lolli's mother suffered a nervous breakdown. By the
time the authorities transferred Toney upstate, Lolli and her two young
daughters were living in a homeless shelter. And Lolli was pregnant by
Toney again.

1993: Toney Hedges His Bets

By the fall of 1993, Toney was 19, an inmate at the Coxsackie Correctional
Facility in Coxsackie, N.Y., facing 9 to 18 years. Most of Coxsackie's
inmates were young, so there were lots of stabbings and cuttings and
robberies. Some inmates called it Gladiator School. Toney promptly immersed
himself in the mix -- conning and fighting, the prison version of
inner-city streets. In the yard, he ran into his old friend Ace from the
F.M.P. crew. They hung out and spoke of all the girls they'd known, or
wished they'd known, and wondered which girls would answer the letters they
floated into the world -- inmates called them kites.

"The whole thing is about getting women to write to pass the time," Toney
said then. If you were a boy with a long sentence, letters reminded you of
what was out there, what else was possible -- which was why some lifers
preferred no letters at all. Toney cast a wide net. For starters his
correspondents included Lolli and the girl he had been with right after he
killed Pee Wee -- he had gotten her pregnant, and she had just had a baby.
He wrote another girl named Ily, whom he knew from childhood. He wrote
other girls in care of friends, because he remembered only their nicknames,
buildings or blocks. He recalled telling Ace, "We shoulda kept their
addresses if this was the kind of life we was gonna lead."

Toney feared that no girl would stick by him. He didn't doubt Lolli's love
as much as her ability to remain faithful to him.

Lolli herself was overwhelmed, with two toddlers and her and Toney's new
baby, Tati. Her life was a string of appointments -- recertification for
welfare, screenings for public housing, the sign-ins to collect vouchers
for the federal food supplement program, W.I.C. If she wasn't dressing the
girls for an appointment, on the way to an appointment or on the bus ride
home from one, Lolli was sitting in bleak rooms crowded with women and
children in the long yawn of waiting to be seen.

Toney went through periods of writing Lolli every day -- love letters,
angry letters, letters brimming with baby instructions and fathering
commands. He was constantly after her to bring the children to the prison,
so that Nina wouldn't forget him and so that Tati, the baby, would get to
know him. He also wanted Lolli to make arrangements to bring the daughter
he'd had with his girlfriend, who had dropped out of contact. But getting
upstate was much harder than hopping the train to Harlem Valley; the
shuttle bus cost $60, which had to be saved in advance. Often, after using
her welfare check to buy her daughters what they needed, Lolli had to make
$5 stretch for the last two weeks of the month. Sometimes she borrowed fare
from a loan shark, but with the 100 percent interest, the loans left her
weeks behind.

When Toney wasn't writing Lolli, the possibility of conjugal visits
preoccupied his restless mind. His adult designation made him potentially
eligible for the Family Reunion Program, known inside prison as "trailers"
- -- for the trailers on the compound where an inmate could spend a few days
every three to six months with his family in relative privacy. (Although
some researchers believe that strong family ties may lower recidivism
rates, New York is one of only a handful of states to allow trailers.) But
to qualify, wives had to be legal wives. If Toney wanted sex, he had to
marry; and trailers required a girl with resources -- money for the
traveling and the three days of food, persistence to assemble all the
necessary documentation and fill out the required paperwork and stamina to
withstand the duration of her husband's prison sentence, or "bid."

Toney needed a pretty-enough stand-up girl who did her job -- brought his
children regularly to visit, gave him sex, sent him monthly food packages
and put money in his commissary account. He hoped for a girl who would
understand him and also check up on his mother, but he wasn't expecting
that. Lolli was disorganized and easily distracted, and she was always
letting him down. He considered Ily, his childhood friend. Each weekend
Lolli failed to visit increased Ily's appeal. Ily wasn't enamored of the
hoodlum lifestyle. She used to warn Toney to tuck in his gold chains
whenever she passed him on their old Bronx streets. Prison life was
familiar to Ily -- so many of her relatives had been in prison that her
mother had inherited nine children. Like Lolli, Ily wanted to get out of
the neighborhood, and although she was also a single mother on welfare, her
family situation gave her a chance. She had only one child, and her
ex-husband and mother helped out.

Lolli couldn't fix the past, but she did her best at mothering. She didn't
visit Toney much, but she bought Father's Day cakes, read his letters aloud
and decorated her space in the shelter with his prison Polaroids. She
kissed his image at night before she tucked the girls in bed. Whenever she
could afford to, Lolli took pictures of Nina and Tati and mailed them to
Toney. Nina, who was now 3, posed gangsta style, like the Polaroids of her
father and his F.M.P. friends -- hands on bent knees, with a menacing look,
or standing, arms folded across her chest, her expression intently grim.
Lolli worried about Nina's toughness, because she was already getting into
altercations with her classmates at preschool; her favorite TV show was
"COPS." But Lolli encouraged it -- she wanted to keep alive Nina's
connection to her father.

1994: In the Hole

By early 1994, visiting Toney had gone from being difficult to almost
impossible. The authorities had moved him four hours farther north to a
prison called Southport -- nearly seven hours from the city, an unwelcome
relocation that he'd earned for injuring a guard during a riot in the
Coxsackie yard. Southport was an isolation-unit facility in Pine City,
N.Y., where inmates were sent if the isolation units of their own prisons
weren't punishment enough. Toney could still receive visits, but otherwise
he faced endless days of 23-hour lockdown in a single-man cell, or box. He
was desperately lonely. He started suffering anxiety attacks. The endless
hours with nothing to do gave him the chance to think about the way he had
lived his life. To his surprise, he missed playing with Nina more than he
missed hanging out with his friends. He spent most of his time writing
letters to Lolli and to Ily. Ily's mobility placed Lolli's passivity in a
harsher light. But he begged Lolli to visit and to bring the girls.

One cold night that winter, Lolli, Nina and baby Tati boarded a bus at
Columbus Circle, one of several private buses that haul families and
friends of prisoners upstate. Without them, the visits would have been
impossible; few neighborhood people had cars. Passengers often recognized
one another -- from other routes, from the long hours spent together
waiting in prison processing or from the neighborhood. Some of the women
became friends.

On the bus, veteran visitors had equipped themselves with rolls of quarters
and crisp dollars for the vending machines, clear plastic bags for locker
keys and change. Some brought along pretty outfits, whose perfection they
preserved in dry-cleaning bags. The cost of the trip used up most of
Lolli's money. Toney's mother's new boyfriend sent along $20 to deposit in
Toney's commissary account, and Lolli had budgeted an additional $20 for
the vending machines so that Toney and the girls could eat.

About half an hour from the prison, the bus pulled into a truck stop. The
women gathered themselves and crowded into the cramped bathroom. They
didn't want to dress in the prison bathroom -- that would take precious
minutes of their visits. They tucked and scrutinized and tightened, sharing
compliments and lipstick and complaints in the toasty bathroom air.

In a stall, Lolli slipped into a conservative outfit one of Toney's sisters
had lent her -- a beige turtleneck and matching skirt, topped by an
embroidered vest. Her own style was sporty, but she wanted Toney to see
that she had matured. She wore sheer stockings beneath the slitted skirt,
so she could show Toney a new tattoo of his name that she'd gotten. Inside
the visiting room, Lolli followed Nina, who searched for her father among
the inmates in an interior cage in the center of the dreary room. As they
headed to their seat assignment, Toney shuffled toward them, despondent,
chin down, shackled in leg irons and handcuffs attached to a chain around
his waist. Nina looked terrified. "Come out!" she said desperately. "Over
here."

"Can't you see I'm chained up?" he said, lifting his wrists slightly. "I
can't move."

"Take them off," she demanded. "Take them off! Take them off!"

"I can't."

"Play patty-cake!" Nina pleaded.

"Nina," Lolli chided.

Suddenly Nina brightened. It was as if she grasped that her father couldn't
tolerate the view of himself that her panic reflected. "Wanna hear a song?"
Nina asked. Toney squinted, as if he had suddenly recognized her voice from
far away. Then she sang. Her father was smitten by her performance until
she said, "That's Che Che's daddy's song," referring to the father of her
half-sister, and puncturing the moment. Toney looked away stonily.

Toney often smarted at reminders of Lolli's infidelity, but solitary
confinement magnified his need for a reliable family. At other prisons,
Lolli and Toney could bridge their troubles by hugging and kissing, but the
cage between them at Southport made what was always hard more difficult.
Lolli busied herself with Tati. Toney didn't tease Lolli affectionately the
way he used to, or compliment her dressy outfit. He said nothing about the
special Weeboks Tati wore. Nina provided distraction by exploring the
visiting room, collecting compliments. Lolli didn't dare say anything; she
didn't want to ruin what little time they had together with their kids.

Around noon, Toney reached through the slot and held what he could of
Lolli's hand. Touch did what only touch could do. Lolli's words poured out.
She told him about a new girl at the homeless shelter who was sharing her
prison expertise. The girl had had a prison wedding. She had told Lolli
about all the right things to bring for trailers -- satin sheets, and cream
and strawberries.

Toney waited for her to finish, then said tenderly, "Sex ain't everything."
The box had forced him to do some thinking. If they were going to marry,
they needed more than a physical connection. They needed to communicate in
ways that didn't require privacy. At best, they'd have trailers three or
four times a year, and fewer if Toney didn't improve his disciplinary
record. Lolli bit her lip. His new hopes came across as a reprimand: "I
want it to be you love me and I love you. Where happiness comes in is when
I'm making you happy and you do things to make me happy." Neither of them
was clear on what those things could be.

All around them, couples were whispering. Some were laughing, others were
scolding increasingly restless kids. Next to them, a young black man placed
his head down near the slot so an older white woman could braid his hair
through the wire that separated them.

"I'm starting to think about going back to that cell, and it's got me real
depressed," Toney said with an hour of the visit left. The pending goodbye
wedged between them as the remaining minutes dwindled. A guard called time.
Chairs scraped the linoleum. The men tried to stretch. Children's hands
clasped the grating like small claws, and men and women tried to kiss
through the mesh.

"You better come next week, or I'll punch you in the face," Toney said
miserably. "You got my hopes up."

Shortly afterward, Toney wrote and told Lolli to limit the girls' visits.
He didn't want them to see him caged that way. He later admitted that not
being able to play with Nina and hold the baby during the visit hurt more
than not seeing his children at all.

Continued: Part B http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03.n057.a01.html