Interviewing Shelli Madden by Tallulah Smith

The Eddie Warrior Correctional Center is a mostly minimum security facility. From the outside, it looks more like a small community college than a prison.

The buildings where the women live are made of brick and arranged in a "U" shape with a grassy area in the center. Beyond the housing units, there are buildings where inmates eat their meals, take college courses, or work out.

I interviewed Shelli Madden, a petite, attractive 40-year-old woman with shoulder-length hair. Her eyes were bright. As she sat down in front of me, I could tell she was an easy-going person.

Shelli is from Disney, a small town on Grand Lake. She remembers a good childhood there with her younger sister. She said she's still close to her family and misses them all, including her dad who passed away seven years ago from cancer.

Shelli's in prison for drug trafficking of methamphetamines.

She explained: "[With] drug trafficking, the way they determine if it's a trafficking charge is by weight, by actually how much of the drug that you had. And I had enough for it to be classified as a trafficking charge instead of just possession with intent."

Shelli was going through a divorce at the time and let a man move in with her. He was trafficking meth in her house and she knew he was doing it.

"So, I mean, yeah. I guess I'm just as guilty as he was. I allowed it to happen in my home," she said.

For Shelli, meth started out as a recreational drug but then became addictive. "And actually," she continued, "making money probably became more addictive than the drug itself."

Her total sentence is 20 years, she said, "10 years in [prison] and 10 years on paper."

I noticed that she was wearing a light gray military-style uniform with a yellow braid on her left shoulder. Shelli explained that the uniform was part of a regimented treatment program that will increase her chances of being released earlier and suspend some of her paper time.

The program follows a military pattern. The women march everywhere they go and are segregated from the general prison population. "We're like a community within a community," she said.

Shelli has four months left in the program. In June, she hopes to go home.

"My son wants to get married, so he's waiting for me to come home," she said with a smile.

The best thing about prison, Shelli said, is the treatment program. "I'm blessed to be in this program. Because this is a long-term substance abuse program and obviously that's what I need."

"That's my goal: not to be high anymore."


Tallulah Smith is a film studies student at TU.