Reference Publications

For Casualty of Drug War, Coming Home is Bittersweet

Crisis, The, May/Jun 2004 by Gaines, Patrice

books

Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett

By Jennifer Gonnerman

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24)

Elaine Bartlett carried four ounces of cocaine from her native Harlem to Albany, N.Y., in 1983 for a drug dealer who promised to pay her $2,500. It was shortly before Thanksgiving and Bartlett, a 26-year- old single mother of lour children, could use what she considered "easy" money.

What she didn't know was she was being set up by the dealer. To get a friend's sentence reduced, he gave police Bartlett, whom he said was a Harlem dealer. Bartlett had never heard of the controversial 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, but under them anyone guilty of selling more than two ounces of drugs automatically received at least 15 years to life in prison. The judge gave Bartlett 20-to-life.

Life on The Outside, The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett offers an intimate look at what life is like for people returning home after years of incarceration. It is also a rare close-up look at the effect of incarceration on children.

Author Jennifer Gonnerman lets us see in magnificent detail Bartlett's struggle to adjust to life on the outside with no money, few job skills and no real counseling.

Bartlett immediately tries to become head of her household and create new relationships with her children - who were 10, 6, 3 and one years old when she went to prison - but they have their own pent-up pain, anger and feelings of abandonment. They were mostly raised by their maternal grandmother until she died and the older children stepped up to head the family.

It is anguishing to read how Bartlett's 6year-old son clings to her leg during visits, forcing guards to pull him off when visiting time ends. "F- that!" he shouts. "I ain't going nowhere!" This same son, determined to see his mother at age 10, sneaks out of the house and catches two trains and a cab to travel the 35 miles for a visit. We see his pain turn to rage as he at first throws erasers at teachers in school and later becomes a child runner for drug dealers.

The suffering of the children is evident in the letter Bartlett's daughter Satara, then 18, wrote to support her mother's application for clemency: "I am writing this letter to let you know that it's time for my mother to come home. Because I really need her. ...Sometimes I feel like killing myself because my mother lefted me and know my grandmother is gone (sic). ...Please allow our mother to come home and be with us for she has been gone too long."

After serving 16 years, Bartlett was given clemency in 2000. At age 42, she left Bedford Hills Correctional Facility with the standard $40 from the New York State Department of Corrections. She went to live with her children, who still resided in their late grandmother's crowded apartment in a decrepit housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "All those years she'd been away," Gonnerman writes of Bartlett, "she had never even considered the possibility that she might be living in better conditions in prison than her children were in the free world."

"I left one prison to come home to another," Bartlett says at one point.

In prison, she worked different jobs in the kitchen, in the children's center near the visiting room - and earned her GED and a two-year college degree. Once she was on the outside, it took her months to find anyone who would hire a convicted felon. After 53 interviews she landed a job at a homeless shelter for men. Today, she works for her youngest son, who runs a youth program, and is campaigning for the repeal of mandatory sentencing laws.

Just before sentencing, Bartlett married the father of two of her children in the judge's chambers. Nathan Brooks had tried to talk Bartlett out of making that fateful trip to Albany. When he couldn't convince her not to go, he went with her. He was sentenced to 25 years to life and remains in prison.

Bartlett's story is important because it represents millions of people who have been imprisoned in the United States since the 1970s when the nation began its "war on drugs." Now more than 600,000 of them are returning home annually; nearly two-thirds of them are Black or Latino.

"The reality is inescapable: America has become a nation of ex-cons. Thirteen million people have been convicted of a felony and spent some time locked up," says Gonnerman, a staff writer at The Village Voice. "Today a felony record functions like an invisible scarlet letter. ...By law, former prisoners in some states may be denied public housing, student loans, a driver's license, parental rights, welfare benefits, certain types of jobs, as well as the right to vote."

A disproportionate number of people of color and the poor continue to be sentenced under harsh mandatory minimum sentencing. Like so many others, Bartlett must bear responsibility for her decision to break the law. But you can't read this engaging, well-reported book without being left with questions: Did Elaine Bartlett deserve to serve 16 years in prison? Why didn't anyone consider the effect her sentence would have on her four children? Is this really justice?