Greetings, comrades and convicts around the world! I’m from Tennessee, and I want to thank the Vanguard Incarcerated Press (VIP) and say I’m glad to see more incarcerated women’s stories showing up. Lots of folks forget there are women prisoners, but we go through the same stuff as the men and sometimes worse. Our stories matter, so thanks to VIP for giving us our own voices.
This is about how bad our facility is here at the Debra K. Johnson Rehab Facility. Let me tell you about our water problems plus a little more. I’m up on the third tier, so water goes through miles of pipes before it gets to me. When it comes out of the sinks, it’s brown! It’s orange-brown, and that’s okay if you like your water chunky style, but most of us don’t think it’s safe at all. I’ve been here for three years, but many of the girls are long-term. They’ve been here ten or twenty years or more, so they’ve seen some stuff. My first prisoner-mentor was an OG who told me how bad things had changed since she came in. She explained:
“I got to this prison in ‘97, and the water was still okay back then. It was pretty clear even in the top floor cells, but by 2005, it was getting really gross. All of us girls got together and set up meetings between prisoners and the brass, but no one ever did anything. They just keep telling us they’re working on it, but nothing ever happened. Finally, in 2010, some special agents came in from the Tennessee State Water Department, and they did some kind of studies. We all thought that was it and that we would get clean water again, but nope. They just came through here and took all their notes and interviewed a bunch of us girls; then they straight up disappeared! They just keep lying and covering up for each other, and nothing ever changes. We’re still drinking mud up out the sink.”
My other girlfriend was on the prisoner/administration committee. She went to all the meetings and asked why none of the guards ever drank water from the fountains. They all bring water bottles! She said, “The sergeant even told me we shouldn’t be drinking this water. He told all his people to bring in their own water because what comes into the prison is contaminated. We’re not even on the same water supply as the town next to us. The folks who live there get all their water from the main municipal supply, the pipes under the city, but all our water in this pen comes from a reservoir two miles away. What’s that about? But no matter how many meetings we go to or even if our families write letters to the prison or the government or whatever, no one cares or does nothing. I think they’re trying to kill us, if you want my honest opinion. I’ve been here almost ten years now and seen half a dozen girls come down with all kinds of diseases in their kidneys or liver, but they were healthy when they got here. It’s definitely our grimy, infected water, and it’s serious.”
None of the girls I know drink the tap water anymore. We boil our water to make ramen or put a gallon away to drink daily. There’s one big industrial faucet outside where the water seems cleaner, so some girls fill their jugs there. Lots of girls even just shower once a week because they’re afraid to get skin rashes just from washing their bodies. But that’s not even the worst part.
There’s a darker side, too. Before my last cellmate was paroled, she finally told me the truth about stuff that went down during the COVID lockdowns. No one got let outside for anything, so she and her cellmate couldn’t get to that main faucet, and then they got desperate. This is what happened to her: “You know that one guard that works at night? The pervy cop? So me and my old cellmate “Stacy” asked him one night if he’d give us a couple of his water bottles, and he said, ‘What are you gonna give me?’ We just laughed it off, but we really needed water the next day, so we told him we’d make a deal. Thank god he didn’t ask us for nothing too crazy; he just wanted us to give him a little dance or whatever, some strip tease, but it was still humiliating. At 4 am, he puts two bottles on the table by the office; that way, if we got caught picking them up in the morning, it just looks like we’re stealing, so we can’t point the finger at him. That went on every night he was here for over three months. It felt kind of like we were being raped in a way. We never told anyone else about it, and we didn’t talk about it between ourselves. Stacy moved out as soon as we got off lockdown, and now we don’t even talk to each other anymore. It was traumatic. I tried to tell the psych about what I was going through from all of that, but he didn’t want to hear it. He said there was no proof because we never filed a report, so it wasn’t his problem. They all protect their own, you know?”
I got here right after Stacy moved out three years ago, but my cellmate just told me her story last month. She’s gone home now, but I still see Stacy around. Nobody should deal with abuse like that just to get fresh water.
I know there are lots of problems in men’s prisons, too, same as everywhere. I’m sharing some of what women go through because our stories do not get enough attention. It’s not just “all good on the girls’ side,” and we’re all in this together. Stay strong, folks.
