It was ninety-seven degrees outside so I didn’t take a sweater, but I regretted that the moment I sat down on the cold steel stool. Twenty minutes later, David sat down on the other side of the glass and picked up the phone. This isn’t the first time my godson’s been arrested but it is the dumbest.
He was both surprised and embarrassed to see me. He said he didn’t call because he knows that he needs to pull up his socks and start solving his own problems. Which is true, but isn’t true enough for me to let him do this alone.
I warned him months ago that the tickets wouldn’t go away and it turns out that if you don’t pay them for long enough, they turn into a suspended license. And that suspended license comes with an appearance date. And a failure to appear on that date leads to a bench warrant. What happens next? That’s when the real adventure begins. David should have been released from court the day after his arrest but he’s now been in jail for twelve days and no one knows quite why, which means that no one knows what to do about it. So far, this has cost us as taxpayers almost $1500. As a family, it’s cost us eleven nights of freedom. If I can’t sleep because I’m worried that he’s hungry or scared or angry or cold or not brushing his teeth; how must he be sleeping?
Here’s what’s supposed to help: I’m a lawyer. I’m a civil lawyer and not a criminal defense attorney, so I don’t represent him. But I’m not afraid of the process and I can usually get people to return my calls. Never mind that, though, the important part is that despite this, he’s still in jail. Another important part is that he’s Latino, and I am white. I don’t want to hide from that because it permeates every part of this story.
I’ve known David for most of his life and I have helped to raise him and his brothers when their mom needed some extra hands. We watched Finding Nemo together when he was 9. I was there when we buried his twin brother at 16. And three years ago, I was the only defense witness in his older brother’s criminal trial. None of us know how to do this, but we keep trying to get better at it.
I grew up in Hawaii, where there is a cultural practice of hanai. Hanai is very different from Western adoption or foster care. It’s an unofficial shared parenting arrangement where kids only add caregivers, they don’t lose them. “The wonderful thing about hanai is that it recognizes aloha in any form it takes. Hanai simply says, ‘Look, these people love each other; they are taking care of each other’—and, after all, that’s what we want.” Having these kids who both are and are not mine feels natural to me.
When he wasn’t released from court as promised, we decided to give it a day for the paperwork to catch up with him. That day was Friday. No paperwork. No release. No one works on the weekends. So on Monday morning, I called a friend from law school who works in the public defender’s office. He had just been transferred to a new region and didn’t have a phone yet so he gave me a “front desk” number to call. I called that number and with David’s case number (retrieved from the public online database), I got the name of his public defender and the phone number of that office. I called her next and left a long message. My friend suggested emailing her as well and gave me the address. So I did that too.
24 hours later, I called again and managed to catch her at her desk. She’d gotten my message but couldn’t understand why he would still be in custody, five days after his hearing. That makes three of us. Meanwhile, he was asking the corrections officers out at the jail for information and all they would tell him was that they didn’t know why he was there. Their computers didn’t show any case but there he was, bar-coded bracelet on, so there he was gonna stay.
“Hailly, this is bullshit. My horoscope said I was supposed to have a dynamic day today.”
“David, what does ‘dynamic’ mean?”
“I thought it meant really good, like, ‘dynamite.’”
“So it actually means something that changes a lot, it doesn’t stay just one way.”
“Aw, fuck. This morning I was happy because I thought I might go home today but now here I am still. I did have a dynamic day.”
The public defender called the next day to tell me that he was being held on a warrant for the same license suspension but from another jurisdiction – this one was for failing to appear at an arraignment that happened while he was in custody for this case. She gave me that case number – a case number that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else in the known universe – and another phone number. This one was for the public defender’s office in that courthouse.
I called over there and when I gave them the case number, the woman who answered the phone told me that he didn’t appear for his arraignment. Yes, ma’am. He was in jail. And now he’s being held on this case. We’re gonna need you to get him ordered to appear so that he can be brought to court to resolve this. Diana was her name. She said she’d take care of it. That was on Wednesday. Seven days in jail.
On Thursday, his girlfriend went to court to turn in some paperwork for him. She explained to the mystified judge that he was in custody and that no one knew why. Right there from the bench, the judge looked him up and couldn’t see why he was still in custody. Her computer showed no orders, no cases, and no holds. The judge said that she would order him to appear in her court to try to sort it out. Hopefully before next Wednesday, she said. Eight days in jail. Now we wait.
California is in the middle of a massive prison crisis with overcrowding, health care breakdowns, and human rights violations threatening to bring the weigh of the federal courts down on the state. The jails in LA County are no better. The FBI is investigating them. So is the Justice Department. Who cares if I am?
He calls every night – collect – and it sounds like an old war movie in a foreign language: lots of unintelligible shouting. I tell him to stay calm and be patient but I know that makes me part of the problem. If it were me in that dungeon, I would have split a seam by now. But I’m a White woman with a law degree and designer seams to split. He’s a Latino teenager still trying to finish high school and his seams have already been mended three times over.
On Friday, he’s called to the next courthouse for the other appearance—on my request. He takes care of that one with another public defender and is ordered released. Again. But he calls me in a panic because he’s still sitting in lockup. They won’t actually release him until the Sheriff’s Department gives the OK and they still see a hold on his file.
I drive down to the courthouse to try to sort this out and I end up in the courthouse office for the Sheriff’s Department, they tell me that the release instruction has to come from downtown – the Inmate Reception Center (IRC) which is, to be clear, just a different department of their office. I ask the officer at the window if he can tell me anything about the origin of this mysterious hold. A case number? A court? A county? Nothing.
He says that IRC would have that information, not him. And then he just looks at me, like a dare. When I ask who it is I should talk to at IRC to find out, he tells me that he can’t give me any of their internal phone numbers but does give me the number for the switchboard for the jail. It’s 11:30am. I drop my ID and bar card on the desk and ask if I can see David so that I can explain to him what’s happening. He tells me that because they’re in the middle of transferring inmates on and off the bus, I’ll have to wait until the noon bus leaves. I ask him if David is leaving on that noon bus. “Good question,” he says. He calls downstairs to confirm that yes, David is in fact getting on the bus as we speak. No point in waiting around after all.
My next stop is IRC. I figure that it’s not worth wasting time calling, I’ll just go down there and bother people until someone talks to me. The IRC “information” desk is a closed pillbox sitting between the cashier windows and the property claim for the Men’s Central Jail. Two TVs tuned to different channels blare from either side. The officer is nearly invisible behind the reflective glass and talks to me through an ancient intercom.
When I explain the situation, his first call is down to the courthouse where I just left. Then he tells me that he’s going to call someone else and if they call him back, he’ll call me back up again. So I sit on a concrete bench and wait. People, mostly women, come in a steady stream up to the cashiers’ windows to deposit money for inmates to spend in the jail on toiletries, snacks, and coffee. Small groups of men are released to waiting representatives from nonprofits and drug treatment programs. One man dressed in a paper jumpsuit, newly released and alone, shuffles up to the property claim and then takes his plastic bag of clothes and personal property into the women’s bathroom – the men’s room is closed.
About an hour later, the officer at the information desk bangs on the glass to get my attention. He tells me that he has a phone number for me to call to get more information. No doubt this phone rings somewhere just down the hall behind him. I call from the stairwell where it’s a little quieter. No one is expecting me. I tell the story again and am transferred twice more. Finally, finally, I get to the person who actually has hold of David’s file. It’s a literal paper file. I tell her that he’s been ordered released on both of his cases but that there seems to be an unidentified hold that’s keeping him in custody. It takes less than three minutes.
This woman has had this file in front of her for a week and this is the first time anyone’s called about it. She tells me that the hold originated with the case that he appeared for that morning and that as soon as they receive the release paperwork from the court, that will clear the hold and he’ll be processed out. Great news! Don’t fall for it.
But I guess no one got around to it before quitting time on Friday afternoon. Now it’s Sunday and David is still in jail. Twelve days. We hope that it will happen on Monday and if not, one of his public defenders offered to have him called back to court so we can try to get this sorted out in front of a judge.
No one’s doing this on purpose. There’s no conspiracy and there’s no bad guy. It’s just the routine machinations of an antiquated system that continues to chew up the lives of young men of color without a second thought. Without a first thought, really. Everyone I’ve had to call to make these wheels turn is bored with it. This isn’t a crisis to them; this mundane, this is business as usual. The part of this story that should keep you up at night isn’t about me or David, it’s the much bigger one about everyone else.
On Monday, when David still wasn’t released, his public defender and I called the Sheriff’s Department again. They said that they were aware of it but that it can take up to 72 hours – business hours – for a release to process. A few minutes before midnight, David was hustled out of the jail by the watch commander in an expedited release and handed a statement for payment of $90, in compensation for his overdetention.
He hasn’t decided yet if he wants to accept the payment or refuse it and file a complaint.
