Oh, hell nah!!!

After I awakened to my roommate swearing, "I hate you! Stupid ass bitch! I will fuck. You. Up." I jumped up and turned on the light. My roommate was sitting on the concrete floor with her dingy shorts pulled aside, exposing her vagina, screaming at it.

On the outside, you'd have options. You could call a crisis hotline. You could dial 911 and request a mental health intervention team. You could pack a bag and stay with family. You could break your lease, lose your deposit, and move. Hell, you could at least lock your bedroom door. But none of this happens in prisons and jails, America's largest psychiatric facilities, where the most vulnerable are warehoused with the most desperate, and the Constitution promises only that you won't be beaten to death by guards.

In Texas, we live in one of two arrangements: either cellblock (actual prison cells with bunkbeds and a toilet) or an open warehouse with cubicles separated by short walls for each person. I've only lived in an open warehouse space for one out of 18 years of my incarceration. During my time, I've lived in cellblock. The worst thing about cellblock is a roommate.

We don't get to choose who we live with. A good roommate is one who doesn't argue with the voices in her head. Doesn't pace the floor while you're asleep during her manic phases. One who showers daily. Many women are so traumatized that even removing their clothes to shower triggers their sexual trauma. As one roommate who never spoke above a whisper warned me, "Don't wash it. They take it if you wash it."

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Most of the women here have a mental illness. But because Texas does not pay incarcerated people to work, the medication is usually sold to those who can afford to purchase it due to family support. They misuse psychotropic medication to self-medicate and mentally escape prison. So the schizophrenic goes unmedicated while someone with situational depression takes her Risperdal to sleep through her sentence.

Even when you have a good roommate, it doesn't last. A disciplinary infraction or a mammogram appointment are ways to lose that good roommate. I've had roommates who have told me they were vampires and begged to lick my toes as part of their ritual. Roommates who have accused me of cutting their toenails as they slept. Roommates who have worn chicken bones in a handkerchief around their neck. Roommates who washed their bowls and clothes in the toilet.

Texas has a compatibility rule for roommates, one that they observe only when it's convenient. You must be no more than fifty pounds of weight and ten years of age in difference. Rumor has it this was due to a scrawny teenager in the men's prison for arson. He set garbage dumpsters afire. He had a roommate three times his age and weight assaulting him. The teenager committed suicide, and his mother lobbied for weight and age requirements for roommates. I get it. But I would've focused more on lobbying for legislation not to put sixteen-year-olds in prison for lighting dumpsters on fire. Period.

This age and weight requirement doesn't look the same in women's prisons. Many of my 300-pound-plus friends are self-described "weeping willows," "crybabies." And the 70-year-old friends prefer to live with 19-year-olds to guide them. The younger ones want to help the older ones by being their legs: carrying and unpacking their heavy grocery bags from the commissary, finding lost items (glasses, pens). It's a grandmother-granddaughter dynamic that works until administration decides it doesn't.

It can go wrong too, especially when guards play God. I've seen guards deliberately put a roommate in the same cell as the person they snitched on during trial. I've seen them laugh as they put two exes in a room to cause problems in their current relationships. They placed my friend Tony, who's in prison for killing her abusive stepfather for assaulting her daughter, in a cell with Gina, a woman who remained silent as her spouse abused their grandchildren. The same folks who thought this was a good idea were shocked when Tony beat Gina up for snoring.

It gets worse. I've known Jelly for over a decade. Not once have I heard her or heard about her raising her voice or fighting. Jelly is the kind of woman who mediates disputes, who talks younger women down from doing something stupid that'll add years to their sentence. Two months ago, they put her in a cell with a woman in a full psychotic break. The woman didn't sleep, just paced and muttered and occasionally shrieked. On day four, Jelly (gentle, patient Jelly) snapped. She had to be pulled off her roommate by three guards.

The great irony is that prisons have become our nation's largest mental health facilities by default, not design. We closed the psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s and '70s, promising community-based care that never materialized. Now the seriously mentally ill cycle through county jails and state prisons, and we act surprised when the results are medieval. We've essentially criminalized mental illness, then acted shocked that crazy people do crazy things.

So here I am, 18 years in, an amateur psychiatrist without training, a crisis counselor without resources, a hostage to someone else's untreated illness. I've learned to sleep with one eye open. I've learned to spot the warning signs of an approaching episode. I've learned to talk someone down from the ledge while simultaneously protecting my own sanity. These are skills I never wanted, diplomas from a university I never enrolled in.

The cruelest part isn't the vampires or the toe-cutters or even the woman screaming at her own vagina. The cruelest part is knowing that with proper treatment, with medication, with therapy, with dignity, most of these women would be okay. They'd be someone's funny aunt, someone's quirky coworker, someone's beloved grandmother. Instead, they're my roommate, and I'm theirs, and we're both just trying to survive a system that's already forgotten us.

Tomorrow, I might wake up to a new roommate. Or tomorrow, my current roommate might wake up to a new reality, one where her medication kicks in or her delusions quiet down. Or tomorrow, nothing changes at all, and I'll lie in my bunk, staring at the concrete ceiling, wondering what fresh hell awaits at 3 a.m. Because in here, "mental health care" means hoping your roommate's demons are quieter than your own.

Oh, hell nah, indeed.