In Prison with Martha Stewart

Chapter Fifteen - Penal Sexuality

Chapter Sixteen - The Mask

Chapter Seventeen -The Valley

Chapter Eighteen - Changing of The Guard

Part 3 - 12 Frequently Asked Questions

Acknowledgements

Note to The Reader

About The Author

Foreword

Writing about Martha Stewart kicked off my writing career. Before writing a book, I was a seasoned Grant Writer by trade. Martha walked me through the writing process. She had already authored a minimum of ten books at the time, and she knew the intricacies and obstacles of the publishing world.

Although America is a democracy, the federal prison system resembles all the negatives of a Capitalist society, and is engrossed in the ills of mass incarceration. We have more people in prison than the population of many small countries.

Federal conspiracy statutes do not exist in any other country. A large percentage of women serving federal sentences have been convicted of conspiracy. Non-violent or White collar offenders should not be sentenced to prison. Switzerland is one of the countries which allows non-violent offenders to remain employed, support their families and continue to pay into the tax base.

In America, who supports the large number of prisoners who remain inside the walls throughout the country? The taxpayers – either willingly as family members, or forced by the government. Prison system costs are a line item at the Department of Justice.

Even during an economy which is strapped for money, the prison population is over-crowded, and people continue to be sent to prison by the thousands each year.

In order for America to be the true, great democracy that it is known for, as a whole, it must stop preying on the poor or disadvantaged, and allow non-violent offenders an opportunity to release taxpayers from overwhelming support, for them and their families.

We have to do better in order to be better.

Prologue

When I arrived at Alderson Federal Prison Camp, there was no plan to write a book about Martha Stewart. I was in an emotional daze. To say that I was devastated would be putting it mildly. I did not think that I would see Martha in general population. I was worried about how I was going to do my own time, not how she was going to do hers.

I arrived on Monday, October 18, 2004, at ten o’clock in the morning, by six o’clock evening, the same day; I began journaling and walking the vast one hundred-sixty-acre compound. I didn’t want to waste any time feeling sorry for myself

Along with being upset about being in prison, I refused to allow a day of it to be dead or down time in my life. It wasn’t a matter of feeling negatively about my life, but quite the opposite. I felt that WI had to lay it down to do my time; I was going to stubbornly be constructive by any means necessary. In other words, I was too damn stubborn to go out the game like that. When you have a clear understanding of what the system is designed for, you have a better chance of overcoming the pressure.

At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the purpose of incarcerating human beings changed its focus. Before the new school of thought, jails were used as holding facilities for prisoners to await physical executions. The executions ranged from public hanging to severing limbs with an ax for stealing.

In 1789, a new trend started in many countries. A centralized prison system with written rules and regulations governing treatment and punishment were written and adopted by leaders around the world. The new system requested to leaders that the act of physically taking the body of a person and causing harm by way of torture be eliminated and replaced with mental torture. The laws dictated that prisoners be given food and shelter, but requested that law go deep inside the mind and heart of a prisoner. The new laws were set up to torture prisoners by confiscating their souls instead of their physical selves.

The business of torturing the soul of prisoners has expanded 200 years. It was not a complex act. With a prisoner’s loss of liberty, public embarrassment, deprivation of sexual fulfillment, rationing of food and other subtle means of degradation; many prisoners around the world suffered greatly; and to this day... still suffer. Minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, and for some, year after year, will easily break the average person’s spirit.

I was first exposed to deprivation of privileged and limited loss of liberty at a young age. The first to implement punishment in my life was my mother. Because I was always making my own rules, breaking hers while trying to govern myself, I stayed on punishment and under house arrest a large part of my childhood. Punishment as a child did not deter my hard-headed behavior. Perhaps if mom would have given me a good old-fashioned butt-whipping, I would never have met Martha Stewart; because maybe it would have kept me out of prison.

However, it is much too late to cry over spilled milk, as the cliché?? goes. I conditioned my mind to ignore punishment by retreating inside myself. By the time I was sent to prison for the first time as barely an adult, I was an expert at self-withdrawal.

During the early times of being on punishment in my life is exactly when my hobby of writing began. I liked to spend hours writing make-believe stories. I wrote from the mind of a child about everything from being a damsel in distress, rescued by her knight in shining armor, to my own ghetto version of Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews. As a child, I wrote to tell my parents and my feelings. As an adult and today, I write to validate my feelings

My family was quite used to my anti-societal false premise that I based my life on, telling myself I could make my own rules. During family gatherings and events, my paternal cousins would ask me openly, We heard you were locked up. What degree or certificate did you earn this time? When I was first asked this question by a family member, I got on the defense.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked. They had a quick side-bar in the kitchen of the house we were at to discuss me. They decided that although I had been to prison, it was still safe to be real with me; and that I wasn’t a crazed maniac like they had seen on T.V. in the prison movies.

"What we mean is that you are the only person we know who comes out of prison with more education in something than when you left." My cousin Toni, who was one of my favorite cousins explained. I realized they were not trying to insult me. It really was a compliment. Prior to the first time they asked me openly, I had never self-examined how I did my time.

When I dug deep with myself; I realized that the time attitude that had plagued me and kept me on punishment by my parents as a child had carried over into adulthood. I had never ceased taking the law into my own hands and deciding what my interpretation of justice was (which was consequently different from society) or should be. However, despite all odds, I did not give up hope in myself and neither did my family. That is how I was able to write these words today. To give up hope would have been to relinquish my soul. The system is very capable of breaking your spirits. The pain goes deep when you are in prison. Unlike any other pain, many don’t realize that the after-effects of going thru so much pain and psychological torture every day for extended periods of time, causes a person to give up on themselves. Many inmates released do not realize how deep the prison scar is. Recidivism is the physical indicator of how deep the experience went inside your heart. Some statistics indicate a large percentage of inmates return to prison within the first year of being released.

You go out, try to act as if the pain never happened. Try to pretend that you are once again normal and restored to mainstream society. Try to mend the gap between your children, family members and loved ones as if you never left. But then, there are constant reminders. It can be something as subtle as eating a cup-o-soup and remembering how you had to live on them while in prison; because of the quality of the food; to your parole officer being an idiot and worrying the hell out of you. It takes years to heal.

I was never one to let myself heal. I became a multi-state, international rebel in my own right. I was angry, feeling less than normal, dealing with bouts of depression and guilt, and needing to run like hell from the pain and the responsibility of dealing with the pain.

Even during my episodes of recidivism in my life, I wrote. I kept a private journal, sharing my writing and thoughts with only my Mom. As children, we learn to implement our own mechanisms of dealing with pain. Mine was writing make-believe stories. When life got too hectic to write, I relied on God to pick me up and carry me, like the Footprints in the Sand poem. There have been many times in my life that He carried me thru the storm. It has been to the point that when I look back on negative, adverse incidents, I ask myself, How in the world did you get thru that? It was always by the grace of God.

People have asked me or may have wondered if I had written anything in the past. The answer would be yes. I have written as a hobby. Throughout my years of school, I won poetry and short story contests, submitted pieces to journalism departments, and wrote in abundance poems, essays, and short stories to my fan club; which consisted of my Mom as my number one fan and my two daughters, Net and Tee; following mom with a close second place and my maternal grandmother, Annie in third place. Also, possession of an unquenchable thirst for any and all types I live to write. Long before I considered writing as a career, I wrote something almost daily.

Although my Mom literally begged me to finish many novels I started and to have some of the short stories that I wrote for her published, I never much believed in myself as a writer, or the marketability of my work. I figured that my family loved my work because of their deep love and respect for me. So the more my Mom told me to write and publish, the more I rejected the idea inside. I think that the biggest factor in not perusing a writing career was due to fear. I was afraid of failure. What would my family think if I failed? Worse, would failure damage my writer’s ego, and cause a permanent block? No. I was not ready to take all of that on. I have never come across as much raw, unexploited talent as I have witnessed in prison. I have seen the best poets, dancers, artists, and singers in prison. Like me, fear also stood like a nine-foot concrete roadblock between them and success.

After accepting the fear, defining its origin, and then laying it out to rest forever, I began to write with a purpose. It was the most intriguing, frustrating, challenging, exciting thing that I have ever attempted. Ironically, I came to terms with my newfound career inside prison walls.

Alderson West Virginia Federal Prison Camp was built and designed for rehabilitation. It was the first women’s federal prison built in the United States. Lucky for me, the designer was an advocate for learning and bonding with nature. From my first hour arriving there, the rows of trees, flowers, the shimmering lake and the shady mountains gave the place an aesthetic aura. For hours at a time, I could sit and listen to the sounds of the trees and leaves rustling, and the breeze bouncing off of the Allegheny Mountains.

For every question that I had, the answers came to me. Some non-believers may become frustrated when I say that it was god leading me and answering me daily prayers for direction. But what else could it be? I would go to the library and stumble across an answer. For example, I was reading an outdated copy of a magazine. The magazine stated that Shakespeare set himself a minimum of daily writing of 1000 words a day. At that time that I found the magazine, I questioned how much I should be focusing on writing per day. Shakespeare set the standard hundreds of years ago. There was my answer in black and white. Another time, I was walking with Sister Carol and Sue Spry. Out of nowhere, they started telling me about their friend who wrote a book while in federal prison.

Do you know the name of the book?" I asked, excitedly.

Yes. Clare is a friend of mine. She is the author. I have the book in my room. I will bring it to you when I go in for count, Sue said. Sue and Sister Carol also answered all of my questions to the best of them ability about their friends writing project as they knew it.

Yahida Clark, the author of two successful novels, answered a lot of the more intricate questions that I had about how to get a book published.

Yahida wrote Why Women Prefer Thugs, and Every Thug Needs a Lady, making the Essence bestsellers list from prison. She was able to share with me the inside scoop on the dos and don’ts of writing in prison, which was priceless.

My true mentor was Teresa Mason Browning, who also is an author of two novels. Unlike the other information I received, Teresa gave me pointers on how to publish my book from the streets. Both of her books were written and published before her arrival to prison. Teresa literally took me by the hand and walked me thru the complex task of getting your book published.

Adiam was not a writer of books;