The town of Taft is a despairing place. Broken-down homes and fields of brown grass line the crumbling streets. Drive down one of the town's road and tucked away you will find the Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a women's prison.
Despite the town’s bleak prospect, Raquel Wahlenberg has hope.
Wearing her baggy gray uniform and a smile, Raquel’s dark attire hardly matches the warmth of her face.
With her long shiny black hair, bright white smile, and kind brown eyes, it hardly seems possible she could be capable of any crime.
The Eddie Warrior Correctional Facility has been Raquel’s home for the past seven years. She was incarcerated for drug manufacturing, a business she had been working in for 14 years.
“I just got in with the wrong crowd,” she says.
She was initially charged with a 47-year sentence, but is up for parole this month.
When Raquel first entered the correctional facility, she says she was a completely different person than she is today. She came to Eddie Warrior feeling angry, but today has unshakeable optimism for a new beginning to her life.
“If you don’t change yourself you’ll come back,” she says.
Change is exactly what Raquel has done at Eddie Warrior. She is continuing her education and anticipates getting her associate's degree in business administration next fall.
Raquel says that her education is one of her biggest priorities if there is any hope for a successful future once after she is freed.
“Knowledge is power,” she says firmly.
When she isn’t studying, she is hard at work in the saddle shop and learning more about the business, a business she one day hopes to own.
Raquel regularly attends SAE classes, a program designed to help inmates like herself with drug problems.
“It was an addiction,” she says. “I knew I would get caught one day.”
Raquel says after being sober for the past seven years, she has no plans on returning to a life of drugs.
With a full schedule, she still has time to lead the prison's Indian club. She has been the club’s president for the past three years and says it’s her kindness towards others that has helped her earn this position.
She has made the most of her time at the correctional center, but misses the everyday things that now seem like luxuries.
“I can’t wait to have chicken and a cheeseburger,” she says, laughing. For Raquel, microwave burritos have become her specialty.
While Eddie Warrior has helped her gain a new lease on life, Raquel says that the separation from her family has been the hardest to cope with. She left behind three children and five grandchildren, including three she has yet to meet, since her incarceration. Raquel only sees two of her three children every six months.
“It’s just not worth it,” she says with a tear in her eye.
Looking up at the ceiling, her eyes suddenly filled with tears, her past seems to be flashing in her mind.
“I wasn’t expecting to cry,” she says with a nervous laugh.
Raquel is confident that life after Eddie Warrior will be positive. Other women don’t have the same positive attitude, she says, which makes her the remarkable woman she is today.
With an unwavering hope, she makes clear her determination: “I refuse to leave the way I came in. I refuse.”
Angela Filicicchia is a communication senior at TU. A video interview with Raquel Wahlenberg is posted below. It was produced by Chris Galegar, a film studies student at TU.
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