BAD CHECKS
The large majority of women in prison are addicted to one of two things, drugs or money, sometimes both. Looking down a list of 120 female recidivists incarcerated at the women's correctional institution I visited, I counted sixty-one in jail for theft/forgery. In plain English, that charge translates more often than not as "bad checks," their own or someone else's. I'd asked that inmates with drug related offenses be left out when the computer picked out the list. These days, there are too many crack addicts in and out of prison three times in two years, as if they were caught in a revolving door.
Charlotte, who tells her story here, was more ambitious than many of the women I talked to. "These other women come in here to prison on misdemeanors. I never have misdemeanors. I won't waste a check. It's got to have zeros on it, if you're going to do it. Why would you go in and write a check for twenty-five dollars when you could write it for two hundred fifty dollars? I mean, get real! If you get caught, one's no worse than the other. The county can jail you for the misdemeanors. Who the hell wants to do up to fifty months in county jail? Come here to prison and do the time, that's how I look at it. You see girls up here who have bad checks out for $9.38. One girl wrote a check for socks at Sears for a little over three dollars. I won't waste a check for that. Checks are too valuable. You have to use them right."
She's blonde and a little overweight, which she blames on prison food. Charlotte refuses to eat in the institution's dining hall, because she says she worked in the kitchen and saw the bugs. So most of her meals are bought at the canteen -- packaged soups, sodas, candy, and cookies. "Believe it or not, we got canteen jackers in this place. Yeah! Steal your stuff from the canteen. Give me a break! You're in prison. You're going to get caught."
Thirty-three years old, she's in prison for the third time. She has three children, the youngest born at the beginning of this prison term. "I've got one who wasn't quite a year old when I got arrested. The other one my mom's had since he was two days old. Then I have a twelve-year-old, and I haven't been home in two and a half years."
Unlike many of the other women in the institution, Charlotte has had all the advantages a young person could want. From a well-to-do family, she was spoiled rotten with cars, clothes, vacations. No one ever told Charlotte no.
"Money is an addiction," she says. "I've never been a drug addict. I've snorted a little cocaine here and there, stuff like that. But my addiction was always money and nice things. I was so cheap, I would never waste my money on drugs. I cringe when I go in a store, because I don't want to spend money. I hate to spend money. Why give them cash, when you can give them paper or plastic? Why pay three hundred dollars for this, when I can write a check. It's just a piece of paper. Now, it's hard for me to identify that paper with money." When Charlotte gets out, she's even considering starting Bad Checks Anonymous for women with similar problems.
Men commit over 90 percent of all crimes in this country and an even higher percentage of violent crimes. Just because many women criminals are in prison for nonviolent crimes doesn't mean they can't be violent. I was told stories of nasty confrontations on the streets with butcher knives, an ice pick, high heels sharpened to points, and a golf club. One woman told me she used to carry a thin sword that could be drawn from the shaft of her cane.
A polite, petite young woman I talked to has always come to prison for assault charges. The incidents almost always start with petty theft. The last time, she stole a carton of cigarettes. She hates the police and is deathly afraid of them. Whenever she has been stopped, she refuses to cooperate. If the police touch her, she fights. When she is restrained, she bites, hard enough to carve out a hunk of flesh. She described doing this twice.
Gail, a quiet, but self-assured woman, told this story about the first time she came to prison as a juvenile. "I was at a lounge drinking Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull, but I was putting gin into it. I was really tore up, but I wasn't so tore up that I didn't know what I was doing and who was around me. This woman was talking with her friend when I came into the ladies room. She called my name and said, 'That bitch, she don't want none of me.'
"I looked at her, and I throwed my head in the air. I went on and used the bathroom. But when she came out, the door almost hit me in my face. I told her, 'You could have said excuse me,' because I don't bother with nobody and ain't nobody going to bother with me.
"She starts in about me messing with her husband. What would I want with her husband when men don't even appeal to me? After I got turned out by my girlfriend, I didn't even want to be bothered with no man. Then somebody hollered to her, 'Snatch the purse! Snatch the purse!' What good was it to snatch my pocketbook?
"She had a switchblade. I had a knife in a garter holder around my thigh. So I came out of my shift and my see-through dress. I didn't have nothing on but my negligee under there. The next thing I knew, I was stabbing her. I stabbed her until she hit the ground.
"The judge said, 'You're lucky you didn't kill that child, because you came this close to her lung.'
"You know what I told the judge? I told him, 'Kiss my ass. I don't give a damn. As long as I'm out there, and I feel like someone is trying to hurt me, I'm going to get them first. If you was out here in the same position, you can't tell me you'd just walk away. She had a switchblade, and you can get killed just by turning your back. If she's got a bone to pick with me, I'd rather pick the flesh off of her before she picks it off of me.' I've always been very sensitive, and I don't like nobody bothering with me. I was about fourteen when that happened, using false I.D."
A corrections officer at the men's institution about a mile away, who has worked in both prisons, told me that she prefers working with the male inmates. She's friendly, good-natured, big enough, and strong enough that she could probably break me in half without too much effort. She said, "First of all, every one of these men has a mother, so they are generally taught to be polite to women. But if one of them gets mad and decides that he wants to do something to me, he's going to wait, and plan, and try to do something sneaky where he won't get caught. If one of those women doesn't like something you say, they'll just pick up the hot iron they're ironing with and throw it in your face. The women are more direct."
Charlotte thinks prison is a breeze. She has a good job as a secretary for one of the prison administrators, and she lives in the wing of her dormitory, which is divided into two-person cells, so there is some privacy and quiet. The wing on the other end of the building is one huge room, where forty to fifty women live and sleep together in a bedlam of television noise, singing, arguments, and loud conversations.
Charlotte's relatives send her money. "If I want to buy some yarn and do hobbycraft, they'll say, 'Okay, I'll send you ten dollars.' I don't even do yarn. I buy it, and pay other people to make bears, afghans, and stuff like that." She claims there is some sexual harassment from male guards, but she just tells them, "Why would I want to have anything to do with you. You work for the state. I know how small your paycheck is."
Charlotte says, "Truthfully, I don't think I can live with a budget. But I'm going to have to try. My grandparents are eighty years old now. My mom and dad are in their late fifties. I mean, who's going to take my kids if I get in trouble again? You have to think about that. Plus, this place will make you age. This last year and a half, I've got some gray hairs. I've got my beautician all lined up. The day I get out, I'm getting my hair and my nails done."
***
I was going to college, and living with my daughter's father, although this was years before I even had any kids. My grandparents had cut off my money again, because my boyfriend was black. I met Louise through a neighbor of mine who I was friendly with. I knew Louise and Mary had been making money, but I didn't know how they were making it. When Mary and Louise sort of fell out, Louise and I started hanging out a little bit. One Saturday afternoon she came over, and we were talking. We had a few drinks, and she was telling me about what she did. "You know, I'm going to the bank this weekend and make some money." I wasn't shocked or anything, what the hell?
"If you sign these checks," she says, "I'll give you five hundred dollars." I'm not doing anything but sitting at her house signing checks? What a deal! Then it got so easy. I could look at a signature and do it. If it was some signature I really couldn't reproduce, I'd put it up on a sliding glass door, put paper over it, and trace it. There are all kinds of things you can do. You can't imagine how lax banks are with signatures. Sometimes when I just couldn't copy it, I'd just scribble and pass it on through. The bank would take it.
Pretty soon, I'm signing checks, and she's handing me two thousand dollars here, three thousand dollars there. Louise tells me that if I wanted to help her pass checks at the banks, on a good Friday, we could make ten thousand dollars apiece. Before long, I was all the way in.
During the week, we would go to real nice subdivisions where the houses were set back from the street -- and the mailboxes -- and we would check their mail. We steal their checking statement. It would have their account number in it, their signature on canceled checks, plus their balance. At night, working with three or four other people, we would go to bars and other places and pick up purses. The guys would break into cars, and get us other I.D., plus checkbooks.
We know the balance in this well-to-do person's account. We have her signature. We picked accounts in chain banks with a lot of branches in our area. We write one of the checks we stole in a bar to this rich person in the amount of say forty-five hundred dollars. I would forge the endorsement on the back of the check. I go to the bank, deposit fifteen hundred dollars of the check and ask them to cash the rest of the check against my account. All the teller would check at the time is whether or not there is enough cash in the account to cover this check, plus she'll glance to see if the endorsement signature is right. We would hit six branches, one after another. Six banks for three thousand dollars apiece, that's eighteen thousand dollars off each account. Then we'd split up the money.
The best time to go was on a Friday evening when most of the banks stay open to six or seven o'clock at night. Everyone has paychecks. All the tellers want to do is get you in and out. I go to the drive-in window. I've got the account number. I know the people have money in the account. The signature is halfway what they want to see, and they throw the money out, just like that. We were going from bank to bank to bank. I was making a killing.
When you ran out of checks, you'd run across a credit card in somebody's mailbox. It was nothing to get a card with a credit line on it of five thousand dollars. You go stay at the Hilton, just party for the weekend like you could afford to do this. I rented cars from Thursday until Monday. Had a guy at the rental agency rent me cars, no problem. I don't think he knew exactly what we were doing, but he knew we weren't doing something legal. He always had a car ready, so we had a different car every weekend. We'd wear wigs and different color contact lenses, and just have a good old time.
When I got bored with the forgeries and the credit cards, when I couldn't get any mail, then I'd just resort to my own worthless checks. It's really amazing, but I can go somewhere, open a bank account for twenty-five dollars, and live for five months on that bank account -- for nothing. I can shop anywhere in the mall, go to motels and stay. I mean, it's amazing.
It was nothing for me to stroll into a big, fancy department store and spend six hundred dollars just on perfume. You go in, and you ask your kid, "What do you want?" My oldest daughter is a spoiled brat. Oh, yeah. She's got one-hundred-dollar tennis shoes, eighty-five- dollar jeans with the holes ripped in the knees and the butt. How can you tell your kid you gave her this stuff before, but she's not going to have it anymore? It's hard. It was nothing for me to go away to Disney World, rent a motel room in the park, and stay all week long. I'd spend thousands of dollars on just bullshit. I'd go to a little carnival at a shopping center parking lot and waste five hundred dollars. But when you get used to doing that, who cared about the bill? You didn't have to worry about the bill, with all these checks. I knew I'd always pay my bills. Just write them another check.
Groceries? I'd spend four hundred to five hundred dollars a week on groceries. I'd go to the expensive supermarkets. Go to the deli and buy the best cold cuts, the best steaks. That's because I never had to pay for any of it. Passing a check in a grocery store is the easiest thing in the world.
Winn Dixie prosecuted me on an organized scheme to commit fraud. I had thirty-two thousand dollars' worth of bad checks just to that supermarket. See, I had a friend who had a restaurant. He's buying everything I could bring him. So it was a nice method of converting lettuce, beans, and smoked hams into cash.
When I go to jail, I might have eighty or ninety felonies at one time. They block them together, and that might kick it down to six. I've come in and been charged with 357 checks at one time. For the first five months, I went to court every day, even on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. One check from here, one from there. All of sudden, twenty might come in.
One time, I was so embarrassed. I had forty-something checks at once. They had to read each charge off. I'm sitting there, and they kept on reading them and reading them. People in the courtroom start giggling and whispering. I thought, "Is this ever going to stop?" They're reading the amounts, the places they came from. The judge said, "You didn't ever write anything little, did you?"
"No, your honor, my hands just can't write a little check."
It's just a revolving door. Once you get in trouble, it's hard to get out of trouble. They put you on probation. The stipulations are that you pay beaucoup bucks in restitution. They're charging you fifty dollars a month to babysit you, plus they want outrageous amounts for your probation. Who the hell can go out and get a job paying three or four dollars an hour with these people asking for this kind of money? You can't do it. So you get back in trouble trying to pay them. It's a never-ending cycle. Once you get on probation, you never get off. I'll probably be on probation until I'm fifty years old at the rate I'm going.
Nobody wants to hire you. Someone who knows about your record sees you on the job. That someone then calls personnel, and they fire you. When I got out the first time, I got a job at a bakery, decorating cakes. It only paid six bucks an hour, but it was a straight job, and it kept the probation officer off my back. Someone called personnel and told them that I had been in prison before, or at least in jail. My supervisor told me, "Don't worry about it. I don't have a problem with you." But the big boss came in, pointed to my name on a piece of paper and said, "You've got to get rid of this girl." My supervisor tried to talk him out of it, but he said, "No, no, no. I can't do it." The next day, he turned around and asked, "Where's that girl with the red hair?"
"That's the one you told me to fire."
"Oh, my God. She's a good worker."
I went and talked to my lawyer. "How can these people keep doing this to me?" The lawyer arranged for me to meet with the owner of the bakery. I talked to him. He hired me back. I never actually took anybody's money. It is taking money, but it's not like I reached into a register and took anyone's money. So he gave me a chance, and I came back to work.
I worked for him for a year and a half, until it just got to where people were constantly aggravating me, and the probation officer was constantly on me, so I asked for a transfer to another state. I moved to my mother's house in Ohio. Very conveniently, my probation officer lost the paperwork for me to go out-of-state. The next thing I know, a year later, he violates my probation, saying I didn't have permission to go. The cops come to my mom's door, "We have a fugitive warrant for your daughter's arrest for violation of probation."
But they couldn't extradite me immediately, because I was pregnant. The doctor told them she would not allow me to fly. I was a high-risk pregnancy, and I could lose my baby. She told them, "You're going to have to send somebody to get her. I only want her driving six hours a day."
They sent this little Spanish lady. She shows up, and she's being real bitchy to me. She handcuffs me. I'm seven months pregnant, and my belly is out like this, and I'm saying, "What the hell can I possibly do to you?"
She was a bitch to me, so I was a bitch to her. We leave the jail, and we're driving down the road. She didn't know how to get on the Interstate, and I wasn't going to tell her. We rode around Cleveland for two hours. I finally had a heart, and I showed her, "You have to go this way." But then I rode her through the part of town I wanted to see. I had her riding all the way around the other side of town through my old neighborhood.
When we got on the Interstate, she was still pissing me off, so I let her go North. The next thing you know, she's looking out the window, and we're headed into Chicago. "Oh, my God, we're going the wrong way."
"Oh, you didn't tell me which way you wanted to go." I was playing stupid. She started yelling at me. I said, "You know what? It will be all right. You can make this pleasant, or you can make this unpleasant. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you." She had a better attitude after that. She even took off my handcuffs. I had her stop every ten miles, "I want to pee. I want juice. I'm thirsty. I'm this. I'm that." We ate fifty times a day. I don't think I missed a restaurant on that drive. She had to stop, because the doctor told them she had to. I drove her crazy.
We got back, and that's when the fun began. My lawyer was good. He made sure I wouldn't stand up in court. He had a wheelchair for me to sit in. He wouldn't let them put me in a cell. He tried everything. My grandfather offered ten thousand dollars cash bond for them to let me out. An officer had to escort me to a special clinic three times a week, because I was toxemic, I had gestational diabetes -- everything. I gained 133 pounds. I was up to 281. I had them crazy in jail. The doctor gave me a prescription for crushed ice. They had to run and get me ice. I couldn't drink the water. I had to have bottled water. I had to have everything. I was a pure bitch, because they were mean to me.
I had my baby on a Tuesday, and they brought me back to the jail in two days, on Thursday. My lawyer went to the court and arranged contact visits with my kids. I got visitation time for bonding with my new baby, feeding, and changing; three hours once a week, in addition to the regular visitation, which was twice a week.
I got to court for sentencing, and the state attorney throws me an envelope in the courtroom, telling me I'm to be sentenced as a habitual offender. This is only my second time to go to prison. They offered me twenty-five years minimum mandatory, which means I would do sixteen years of that time. I was freaking. Hey, I'm thirty years old, and they want to take my life away. They want me to stay in prison until I'm old.
I sat there in jail for fourteen months before my lawyer and my grandfather could get a bargain. They knocked my sentence down to fifteen years. I told my grandfather, "I'm going to kill myself. There is no way I can contend with this. I just had a baby in jail! I can't deal with this!"
Money talks. My lawyer arranged a private hearing, just the judge, the prosecutor, my lawyer, and my grandfather. He offered to pay them for some of the things I'd done. He gave them a cashier's check on the spot for ten thousand dollars. They still weren't satisfied with that, so he added another seventy-five hundred dollars in restitution and court costs. Court costs are outrageous. Once they had the $17,500, I wound up with three and a half years as a habitual offender, minus time served, waiting in jail. I have been here in prison for two and a half years. I go home in eighteen days.
I'm going to talk to some people when I get out of here. I really think they need to offer self-help programs for check writers. You have Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous. People who write checks have the same kind of problem. You would not believe how many women are in here for bad checks; they're clogging up the prison system for checks. People are out there killing, robbing other people, and they're getting away with it. There's this one girl in the same dorm building as I am, who has been here three times for possession and sales within two hundred feet of a school zone, in the two and a half years that I've been in prison. She just went home again. There's no method to the madness. Us check writers, yeah, we did something wrong, but we didn't molest your child. We didn't kill your grandmother.
You know what pisses me off? The people I stole from got their money back from the banks, and yet I'm still paying restitution. All that money was insured. They got it back, but I still have to pay. My mom and I talked, and she said, "You have to knock on wood, because if you got caught for everything you did, you'd be away for ten lifetimes." She's right, I can't complain.
It's always the little things that I go to prison for. I get caught for a two-hundred-dollar forgery of my own worthless check. I've scammed one hundred thousand dollars on this one forgery, working with these other people, and we don't go to jail for that. I got to jail for something ridiculous.
Really, what I have to do when I get out is learn to live on a budget. That's hard, but I've got to do it, if I want to stay out of here. This isn't the place to be, now that they want you to serve all your sentence. If I knew I was going to go out there, make a killing, and then come back to prison and only do a little bit of time -- three or four years ... but I'm getting life if I come back here. My grandfather says now that he isn't paying any more money, but he says that all the time.