'Get Used To It'

"After a few generations of it, people get used to poverty." The stranger on the plane had just put the finishing touch on a conversation we were having about U.S. military aid to El Salvador. This was his crowning argument for helping the brutal Salvadoran military maintain the status quo in the embattled Central American nation.

His words came back to haunt me my first night in the D.C. jail following our Peace Pentecost witness at the Capitol in May. I was unable to sleep that night, a woman in the cell below punctuating her moans of despair with a regular banging of her cell bars. Through the night I pictured her, hands clenched around the bars, moving back and forth with all her might in a plea of desperation.

"She'll be handcuffed to her bed tonight," a guard told me after I expressed concern for the woman the next morning. "She really doesn't belong here, but the mental hospital is more overcrowded than we are—she's lucky she's not just wandering the streets like most of them."

Later that morning the guard moved us—a group known to our fellow prisoners as simply "the protesters"—out of our intake cell and into the cellblock's gym area, which in these days of overcrowding has been converted into a sleeping area with 16 beds. The inmates who talked toughest during the day were the first ones over on our bunks that night wanting to share about their families, about the children they missed so, about their hopes. Most were serving time for prostitution, and, in many cases, drug charges.

One young woman told how she had been forced out of her broken home as a teenager because her father couldn't afford to keep her, and how she had to go to the streets to support herself. Another, in on a fraud charge, said she stole some checks from the office where she worked so that she could afford to keep her young sons in a parochial school. "It's the first chance they've ever had for a decent education," she said as she began to weep, "and they're so smart." Her sobs were interrupted by the radio that blares 18 hours a day over the prison intercom: "We hope you're enjoying your Memorial Day weekend."

The long holiday weekend meant that the women who had just been brought in had to wait until Tuesday before a friend or relative could post bond to get them released. Some talked about the picnics they knew they were missing. "My folks will never understand why I'm not there," said one woman in on a parole violation she didn't know she had committed. "The police just came and took me away. And I've been trying so hard to go straight. My daddy's so sick, this may just kill him."

A young woman with cigarette burns on her face and hands joined us and told how her father had burned and abused her as a child when he lost his job and stayed home all day angry. Another had recently suffered a miscarriage after being raped. She lost so much blood that the doctors felt she needed a transfusion, but her veins were so ruined from her heroin addiction that they couldn't give her the blood.

The day after Memorial Day, as we were leaving the cell-block to go home, the radio was blaring again: "Now that summer is here, it's time to consider a luxury cruise to beautiful Tangier Island. Go for the pleasure ..." The guard's voice interrupted, "All those going for 'meth' [methadone treatment for heroin addiction] get ready to go." They were not going for pleasure.

We turned in our prison jumpsuits and were handed back our own clothes, then waited in a room with four other women. Two guards stood over two inmates in their last stages of pregnancy. The young inmates were trying on thin prison robes; the guards handed the robes over one at a time and then took them back, searching for ones that were large enough to cover the women. One of the guards said to the other, as she surveyed one of the young women's nakedness, "Isn't it amazing how much the human skin can stretch?" I shed a tear with the young mother at her feelings of shame and degradation at being put on such display. This is no easy place to hold on to one's dignity.

I remembered hearing of a woman who gave birth unattended in a prison cell here. And I sent up a prayer of protection for these two women and their babies. I thought about those unborn children who will begin their lives separated from their mothers in prison and said to myself bitterly, "Maybe this will be the generation that gets used to poverty."

The common denominator for all the women we met on the inside is that they are poor. They cannot, as most of the rest of us can, simply wait for a moment's tragedy to pass and look toward the day when things are brighter. They inhabit a state of grief and calamity that has been their inheritance and will be their legacy. With this generation, this era of Reagan, their plight has dramatically worsened.

We must all make choices, and poverty should be no excuse for making the wrong ones. But the notion that "everybody has options" is less and less true. The poor have fewer and fewer options; and those of us who are well fed and well loved have no right to judge those who act out of desperation.

Poverty is so completely alien to the human spirit that people will never "get used to it." To suggest that they should is a crime.

Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.