Monday, February 18, 2008

Meeting Crystal Campbell by Ben Hauser

Crystal Campbell is a model inmate at the Eddie Warrior Correctional Facility in Taft. When I spoke with her, she was mannered and respectful, and her behavioral record is so clean that her case manager calls her a “ghost inmate.”

She described herself, however, as young and ignorant when she got involved with a man who abused her child. Campbell turned him in to the authorities, but she was arrested too for enabling child abuse.

Campbell was incarcerated at the age of 20 for a 10-year sentence, and has since served seven years. She’s up for parole in November 2009.

Campbell entered the facility with a seventh-grade education. Deciding she had nothing better to do with her time, she enrolled in the available high school classes and graduated with a near-perfect GPA. She had since taken all of the prison's college classes, but the facility offers very few courses past freshman level.

“Since I got my associate’s degree, there’s no more funding for me at all, so I’m trying to fight for that right now," she said.

“They figure once we get our degree then that’s enough of a life-changing experience for an inmate so that when we get out then everything’s going to be great and okay. I don’t know if they want to say that’s the highest expectation they can warrant for us or not, but I know I want to go a little bit higher.”

Campbell has been involved in several other activities since her stay as well. For two years she helped facilitate a behavioral program called “Thinking For a Change” and for the past three years she worked at a job making saddles for 35 cents an hour.

Her involvement and obedience with the establishment has raised her to the status of a level four inmate.

“You get an evaluation every month," she explained. "They evaluate you on your communication skills, how you work with other people, your signs of discipline and listening to orders.”

Level four is the highest an inmate can attain. So what perks come with it? Campbell says that they get to sleep in a two-person cubicle, which is a comfortable alternative from the dozens of bunk beds lined up in the center of each dorm.

Otherwise, however, Campbell feels there are few privileges she’s awarded for her good behavior. Sometimes she’ll return from work to find that the whole dorm—herself including—has been collectively punished for noise violations. She described how officers will treat level fours with little discretion when it comes to misconduct.

“One of my friends made parole, and she was a methamphetamine cook. She was cooking one night, and she left a glass of pure lye in the refrigerator and her 9- year-old son thought it was water and he drank it, and the only thing that saved his life was his 12-year-old cousin who dragged him out in the front yard and put a water hose down his throat. It ate the lining in his esophagus and stomach.

“She was crying one night and I felt like she was going to cause herself bodily harm; I felt like she was a threat to herself. She ran into her dorm and I ran in after her and I was caught by an officer.”

Campbell was reduced to level three for entering a dorm where she wasn’t allowed. It took her four months to regain her level four position and eight months to get back in a cubicle.

Since her stay, Campbell has become more educated and more ambitious than she had been on the outside, but must continue to deal with the reality of being a prisoner. Not until her sentence has finished will she be able to put her aptitude to good use.


Ben Hauser is a film studies student at TU.

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