I’d heard she was a healer, but I didn’t know what that meant. We met in a small room. I hadn’t been in the high-security unit before, but this room was like all the others where I’d conducted interviews: white walls, hard plastic chairs in burgundy or blue, too cold in winter and too hot in summer.
Her face was flushed when she walked in. She’d been cleaning the unit, she told me. This is what she’d done every day since she’d been in prison. There were spirits around, she said, which weren’t bad but should be encouraged to move on. She would sweep them out to give the other women a little peace.
I was there to talk to her about why she was in prison and whether the rehabilitation program she’d just finished had helped. At the end of the interview she shook my hand and told me she could feel that I carried the dead within me. “I got a buzz from you at the start,” she said. “This just confirms it.”
In every prison there is a boundary you must cross that brings you into the other world—a metal cage or an automatic glass door. Beyond this point prisons are mostly corridors. Some are long white tunnels where officers watch from hidden rooms and unlock each door with a click as you approach it. Others are tight tubes with latticed metal doors, each of which must be opened by an officer with a ring of keys. In one prison I visited, the corridors in the low-security section were all outside. Along the paths strolled women in tracksuits, going to class or work. Some walked around with prams and puppies. This prison was as unsettling as the rest, because of its similarities to the outside world.
I developed a ritual for moving in and out of a prison. I would always wear the same outfit: a navy top that cut across my collarbones and black pants that would dig into my waist during a day of interviewing. After I got home, I would always shower, watch Friends if it was on, and drink wine. All of this was to trick myself into thinking that what happened in there could be left behind.
To interview someone is to cross a threshold, to attempt to exit your world and enter theirs. That was my job almost ten years ago, at the age of twenty-seven: to arrive in small rooms with panic buttons on the wall and ask women I’d never met what had led them to commit a crime. I worked as a researcher for the New Zealand government, writing reports about why people were in prison and whether they thought rehabilitation programs would help prevent them from returning.
There was a set framework for the beginning of every interview. A woman would walk into the room, where I’d be sitting at the table. Sometimes she would ask, “Who are you?” The women were always free to leave. If they stayed, they would sign a consent form, and I would offer them the Tim Tams I had a special permit to bring in. After the forms were signed and the biscuits were opened and I’d made the same joke I always made about my pen being a voice recorder, we’d begin.
The framework was designed to protect the person being interviewed, but the routine of it calmed me too. Once the conversation got going, my nervousness burned away, but in those initial moments, even after hundreds of interviews, I never lost that feeling of arriving at the top of a roller coaster before the drop.
Often I knew almost nothing about the woman before she arrived. That was preferable to knowing too much, because then hanging over me the whole time would be the question How am I going to ask her why she killed her dad?
Most of their crimes were not murder. Mostly it was selling meth or stealing laptops to feed their kids. But sometimes women stabbed their sons or masterminded a meth ring that targeted pregnant women. It wasn’t all just stealing food.
People tell the stories of their lives in different ways. With some women I talked to, the story emerged slowly. Each question I asked elicited a small piece of information until finally my last “And then what happened?” was met with a confession. One woman quietly told me that she took seventy-six dollars’ worth of petrol from BP.
The full story, which she told me later, was that her older sister had died, and then her mum too. When they were kids, her sister had tried to protect her from their abusive stepfather, and later, after this woman had finished a prior prison sentence, her sister had found her a job as a dishwasher at a café. It had always seemed like a miracle to her that her sister had come out of their childhood unscathed, but when she got the call about her sister’s suicide, she saw that really her sister had just carried the trauma differently.
There was so much death in the lives of the women I spoke to. It was what surprised me the most in this work—their stories like vast graveyards of people lost along the way. Grief became complicated when feelings were conflicted and there were no rituals to process the losses. Take this woman: the death of the mum she’d never forgiven for not protecting her from her stepfather; the removal of the children she’d tried so hard to keep. There’s no condolence card that fits that situation, no funeral for kids who still exist. So the grief remained unresolved, turning into anger, a balled-up fist in the chest.
That’s why she’d taken the petrol. She’d needed money, but there was something else she’d needed too: a rush, a feeling that would take her to a different place, which stealing had always done for her.
“How did it feel?” I asked.
“Good,” she said, “like I was free.” Then there had been some more thefts—three iPhones, a grill, $429 worth of groceries—and a burglary committed with an old boyfriend. And now she was here.
With another woman I asked a seemingly innocuous question—“So you did a drug program last year?”—and she replied, “Well, it all really started when I was twelve, and they took me from my mum and put me into CYFS”—Children, Youth, and Family Services. I just followed along until her story ended up, twenty years later, with her standing in her living room holding a hammer.
She noted here that she could have handled things differently. She’d gotten revenge before in less-violent ways. She’d put eggs in the motor of one guy’s car, for example. She told me that, if I was ever in the position of wanting revenge, this was the best option. She had other advice for me too, like to never put my stuff in Total Storage, which is easy to steal from, and that it’s good to try meth just once.
It was obvious to most women that I had not used meth, and some would try to shock me with their stories. It was fun for them, I’m sure, but I think it was also a test. A woman might lay her whole history out in the first five minutes to see how I’d react. If I flinched when she said, “I stabbed him,” or I looked too distraught when she told me about that uncle, she’d know I couldn’t handle her story, and she’d be gone.
This woman’s time in CYFS had been hard. She was moved from foster home to foster home. When one foster parent did something bad to her, no one seemed to care. She ended up on the streets, where she had to look after herself. Violence wasn’t new to her. She’d learned when she was young to pass the bruises she got from her dad on to anyone who crossed her: the girl at school who laughed at her spelling; the men who got too close, including a red-headed teacher. “I wish I hadn’t done that one though,” she said. This was the incident that had ultimately landed her in CYFS.
On the streets she joined up with some other girls who lived by the railway station. The brother of one girl came looking for her, and they did him over. It was one of the better times of her life, she said, laughing. But she was still angry, a kind of rage she said made her body sting. It only got worse. She shouldn’t have beaten her sister up so bad—all those bruises—but the sister was calling her crazy and didn’t know what she’d been through, because the sister had gotten to live with their auntie.
Then she’d gotten together with some guy, as you do. He’d started trying to control her, as guys do. She wasn’t having that. He didn’t expect her to be so good at fighting back, but she’d had practice.
“So it was equal?” I asked.
“Kind of,” she said. “He was stronger, but I’d use weapons.”
It might take a long time to get from the twelve-year-old taken into CYFS custody to the thirty-two-year-old with a hammer in her hand, but it always made a kind of sense.
Recently I went through a short period of intense anxiety. I have anxious tendencies, but this felt like I was suffocating. I dreaded going home but felt no better when I was at work. Sitting at my desk under the fluorescent lights, I could never get enough air.
I divided my workdays into fifteen-minute cycles. I would hold myself in my seat as the horror built, trying to stay focused on the paragraph I was writing. When I couldn’t type anymore, I would walk to the bathroom, where I would do one round of box breathing: four breaths in, hold for four, four breaths out. I did this four times an hour, eight hours a day.
I’d felt like this twice before. The first time had been when I was twenty-five and working for a women’s organization in Ghana. We got a new boss who turned out to be a bully. She accused the driver of stealing money and the finance guy of not being able to properly account for the organization’s funds. She slowly whittled down the tasks staff were allowed to perform until most of us were banned from pulling paper jams out of the printer because we might do it wrong.
One afternoon the boss walked into my office to complain that I’d misquoted her in a report I was writing. She accused me of doing it on purpose.
“I didn’t,” I said in a shaking voice. “I must have just gotten it wrong.”
“You can fix it now,” she said and leaned over to watch as I typed. I felt her breath on my cheek. The air in my chest thickened, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. After she left, my hands were shaking so much I had to type with only one index finger, guiding it onto the keys with my other hand.
In those days of dread I would spend hours mentally cycling through every person I’d ever seen bullied, thinking about how they must have felt: the girl who’d wet her bed at school camp; the kids who’d lived in a yellow garage and all had names starting with Z. But it was a friend from high school I thought about the most. Her mum would buy us bottles of Passion Pop sparkling wine and cans of Woodstock cocktails, and the friend started drinking so much we didn’t know what to do with her. Once, she vomited all over my car, the chunks getting into the crevices of the seat belt holders. The next day, outside the grocery store where we’d all just worked a ten-hour shift, the friend kept apologizing and offering to wash the car. We told her she probably needed help. But then we never helped her; we just slowly edged her out of our group.
In anxious times I feel like the barrier between myself and others thins, and my nerve endings fray and fuse with theirs. One theory of empathy suggests that, when we feel for others, we physically experience their emotions. Our brain attempts to mimic the bodily sensations the person feels: the pit in your stomach when you see your vomit on a friend’s car seats, the raised heart rate when you ask for forgiveness.
Whenever a period of anxiety subsides, I feel a relief akin to diving into the coldest pool on the hottest day, but there is something I miss about the intensity of the empathy. During those anxious times, when I am more alive to the feelings of other people, it feels like I am closer to touching the truth.
But this also feels somewhat pointless because, despite my heightened feelings, I’m too paralyzed to do anything. I might think about the old high school friend, but I’ve never reached out to ask how she is now.
To be a government researcher in a prison is to straddle two different roles. The women I talked to understood that I worked for the institution that incarcerated them. In this way I was just like the corrections officers who locked them in each night. But I was different too. Women would sometimes tell me they liked talking to me because I treated them like people.
Life stories were a currency for these women. They had to tell their stories to probation officers to make the case for lower sentences, to program facilitators to be admitted to alcohol and drug or violence-prevention programs, and to the parole board, where telling their story right could get them out.
Women were frustrated that the program facilitators didn’t understand them. They didn’t like that the facilitators learned about their drug addictions or abusive childhoods “from a book,” not from personal experience. “Just like me,” I would sometimes say. I would cringe hearing this on the recording later. I was clearly fishing for one of them to tell me that, although I was a middle-class white woman, I wasn’t that middle-class white woman. The women would often humor me. One told me I wasn’t like the facilitators because I never claimed I was qualified to help her. This was true. I was qualified to help no one.
The stories I heard started to work their way into the walls of my house and the streets I traveled. Cutting onions in my kitchen, I would think about the argument a woman had described that had begun with onions and ended with her boyfriend’s hands around her throat. I could see it unfold, just like all the other stories of near-stranglings I’d been told. In the shower sometimes I’d find my hands rising to my neck. Walking through the city, I’d remember the fights I’d heard about as if they’d been my own. Once, a group of teenage girls yelled at me outside a party, and, bourbon-hardened, I yelled back. The girls ran at me, and one of them grabbed my hair and started to pull me along the street in a crouch. I was silent as our mass of bodies moved quietly through the dark. Nothing more happened; they let me go. For a while I told this as a funny story of the time I’d almost gotten beaten up, but after I stopped working at the prison, the memory changed shape, and the leader of the group of girls turned into a woman I’d interviewed, tearing at my hair in a rage at all that had been done to her.
One night I was at a bar with some friends. My body was filled with other women’s anxieties that had started to become my own. To escape this feeling, I had several shots and then danced on an almost empty floor, head back, arms wide.
I ended up in the toilet stall with some guy. The bouncer barged in, storming across a floor sticky with spilled drinks, and yelled at us to get out. He was just doing his job, but there was something about his disdain that flipped a switch inside me. I would not leave the stall, I told him. He marched me out of the building, and all the feelings I’d suppressed earlier coalesced in a thick vein of anger. I grabbed him by the shoulder, ready to hit him, but he shrugged me off and told me to watch it.
For weeks afterward I fixated on an alternative outcome in which I’d punched him in the face: the curve of my knuckles hitting the flesh of his cheek before stopping at the bone, the thrill and the fear of it.
If I’d actually tried to punch him, I likely would have missed. I’d had quite a few drinks, and I’d never punched anyone before. And even if I had hit him, there probably wouldn’t have been any consequences for me except shame. But in those early years of working in prisons, it felt like anything could happen, like a momentary loss of control could spiral into a whole other life.
The name for all of this is “vicarious trauma”: a by-product of empathy in which the brain searches for a way to make sense of what it’s hearing and starts to behave like it has experienced the trauma too. When I hear a story about a woman whose boyfriend tried to strangle her, a picture of it appears in my mind. My neurons start firing. My muscles tense. My heart rate increases. It’s nothing close to what she felt in the moment, but it’s there.
The effects don’t come from hearing just one story. They come from the repeated stories: the heart rate raising then lowering, raising then lowering, and finally struggling to lower at all. I spent months in a state of anxiety, which was eventually replaced by a numbness that spread throughout my body, a growing sense of separation from other people who walk down the street unaware of what’s going on all around them.
To enter a prison is to enter a haunted place. There are so many ghosts to sweep away.
There are the ghosts of those who died in prison. And there are the ghosts of major life events the women missed, the lives that went on outside without them.
Then there are the ghosts of the former selves the women are trying to leave behind. When the healer told me I carried the dead in me, she said this was a good thing, that it meant I had a light that attracted spirits, which helped unburden others. Perhaps this was true. When women told me about the things that had been done to them and the things they had done to others, they were often trying to make a break with that old self. The interviewee was like a snake shedding its skin to make way for something new. But these skins piled up within my body, forming something I needed to grieve but didn’t know how.
It’s been five years since I last spoke to someone in a prison, and although I got much better at managing others’ trauma, it all still sits within my body. During that time I’ve worked through many versions of this story, trying to find the best way to live with what I heard.
The first version is about connection. I cannot hold the women’s stories, so I go to a therapist. “When have you felt similar anxieties in the past?” she asks me, and I tell her about the bullying in Ghana. The stories I’ve been hearing are overwhelmingly stories of powerlessness. “When have you felt powerless?” she asks. I tell her about some minor assaults: A boy who got me stoned and drove me to the black mouth of a harbor and kept kissing me even though I didn’t want it until I opened the car door and vomited. A group of boys who held me against a corrugated iron wall with their hands everywhere while the sun was setting. Some other incidents like this—not good, but never as bad as what I heard in prison.
When we listen to stories, the brain compares them to experiences stored in our memory. A stress response can kick in as similar incidents come back to us: How my hands shook while the boss yelled at me. How the blood rushed through my body as I was held against the wall and wanted so much to get away but could not. Trying to empathize with the women’s stories of powerlessness, I merged their stories with my own.
Empathy can be comforting. It can feel like doing something in a situation where it feels impossible to do anything else of use. But empathy can also distort. It presents an idea of shared pain, when what I feel is overwhelmingly different than what the women I interviewed felt. You need only to compare our circumstances to see this.
My job was ultimately to write a report about what the prisons could do better, but sometimes women would tell me things that required intervention. There was a line I repeated to all of the women: “Confidentiality is assured unless you tell me something that suggests you or someone else is in immediate danger.”
Someone I’ll call Kim once told me a story that fell into a gray area. She wasn’t at risk of suicide or hurting someone, but something had happened to her that may have been serious enough to warrant being reported. It wasn’t until after our interview, when I was walking through the never-ending locked gates, that I fully clocked the implications of what she had said. I should have asked Kim whether she wanted me to report what she’d told me, but I hadn’t.
People have so little control in prison. Every meal is regulated. They cannot go outside except during specified times. In one prison the women were allowed to flush the toilet only a certain number of times a day. I didn’t want to start a process that would take away any more of Kim’s agency.
I got back to the office and, without identifying Kim, told the woman in charge what I had heard. She said I needed to give her the name of the woman so an investigator could talk to her immediately. I told her I wanted to wait until after my next visit to the prison in a week, so I could talk to Kim first. We went back and forth like this. “What would you do if she killed herself?” she eventually asked, frustrated. There was nothing to suggest this would happen, but I handed over Kim’s name.
I did this ostensibly for her benefit, but it didn’t feel that way, because there was no space in the process for her to say what she wanted. It felt like a breach of trust, a breaking of my bond with Kim, who’d told me she’d liked talking to me because it made her feel like a person.
I told myself it was important to show compassion in a system where it is so often lacking, and maybe that was enough. But when something like this happened, I felt like just another guard turning the key in the lock.
This is a story not of closeness but of distance. It’s a story of the impossibility of empathy, of empathy as a lie told to gloss over the inequalities that hide beneath.
I got so used to doing these interviews that somewhere along the way I forgot what a strange thing they were: Two strangers meet, and one asks the other about a topic that would be taboo under most circumstances. What it is not normally possible to say can be said. What it is not normally possible to hear can be heard. In that small, cold room, the strangers become something else to each other for a brief time. Afterward they will likely never see each other again.
After I handed over Kim’s name, the woman in charge called me to say she couldn’t get an investigator until the following week, so I could speak to Kim first. She would send the investigator regardless of what Kim wanted, but at least Kim would know they were coming.
The following week I waited for Kim in the same room as before, my wool pants sticking to my thighs in the burgundy chair. My hands were shaking so much I had to hold them together under the table. Kim looked confused when she came in; we hadn’t talked about another interview. I rushed to tell her why I was there.
As I explained, she watched me blankly. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I finished, and she sat quietly for a moment, then said, “I think I’ll tell the investigator what happened. Maybe it will help.”
After I was finished with my interviews for the day, I went outside. Some women were playing volleyball in a recreation area. Kim was one of them. Another woman called out to me, “Hey, you should come play!”
“Sorry, I can’t,” I said. “I have to go to the airport, and I’m wearing this.” I gestured to my pants, which would surely rip if I jumped, and my leather shoes, which were already blistering my feet. Kim didn’t look at me. The connection we’d made inside the room didn’t exist outside in the sunlight.
“All good,” the other woman replied, and they went back to their game, bodies moving freely in their cage. I walked back through seven locked doors and exited the prison at the gate.
This is where the story ended for Kim and me. I tried to find out what the result of the investigation had been, but no one would tell me, and I never saw her again. Sometimes I think about how I should have stayed to play volleyball. I should have just missed my flight, ruined my pants, blistered my feet.
I keep returning to these hundreds of moments when those women and I tried to span the distance that separated us. Those conversations still live in my body: the missteps and misunderstandings, the inane talk about the weather, the long silences and rushed confessions, the woman who stood up to leave because she could not stop crying. All the moments I should have done something more.
But I have to believe that chasm can be crossed. I have to believe that if you can see a crime as a story about what someone needed but was never allowed to have, that is a step toward understanding. I have to believe that when a woman who was furious at the beginning of an interview paused at the end to say she enjoyed it, she was telling the truth.
That woman who told me that I carried the dead within me said she carried them too. Then she showed me how to ask them to move on. “Do this with me,” she said, standing up. She reached toward the ceiling of the icy room we were in, her fingertips grasping for the hidden sky. Then she moved her hands down toward the ground, pulling the spirits with her, and shook them out onto the floor. “You’ve got to pull the lightness in,” she said, gathering air around her feet and drawing it up into the space where the dead had been. “You can do this anytime they gather again,” she told me. Then she banged on the glass and told the guards to let her out.
The women’s stories as presented in the interviews are informed by several hundred interviews I did, and none represents any one person or includes any specific details from their lives. Details of interactions outside of those interviews are accurate.—M.B.
