Brought to you by the imagination of Neal

I’ve got a HUGE stats test going on right now–and by huge, I mean, a take-home portion (which our professor said would take between 4 and 30 hours), a testing center portion, AND an in-class portion.  But can I get myself to think about statistics?  Not when I have a little girl to think about and pictures to boot!  Neal is about to crack down and ban me from discussing, contemplating, and viewing our baby girl.  But before he does I wanted to post the note that Neal wrote on Facebook announcing our daughter to his friends.  If you don’t know Neal or don’t know him well, it is so Neal and gives you a little window into how I fell in love with him (which was actually via some of his writing that was published online).  I just cherish knowing that someday our daughter will hear from both our perspectives just how much we loved her from the first moment we saw her.

“So, we’ve got a little girl on the way. And also, I’m on a quest for a $100 grocery month”

Lindsay thinks one of these topics is more important than the other, but why choose one when you can have both?

Lindsay and I went to her 20 week ultrasound on Friday, and watched our baby girl twist and writhe like something awesome and beautiful that twists and writhes. It was very cool. Lindsay cried (all the way through), and I might have had something in my own eye as well. The due date is February 11, and it seems so far away – now that we have actual video footage of a tiny person shaking her booty in very adult fashion. How can it be still so far away? Lindsay’s been way sick, and still is, so it was nice to have that sweet reward for all her suffering. And now we wait for the next ultrasound in 8 weeks. And we wait 4 months for the final countdown. I wish I could fast-forward time for Lindsay’s sake.

In the meantime, we thank every night Lindsay is able to sleep. And when she doesn’t sleep, we don’t thank the night. That’s just the way it’s got to be. Sorry night. Luckily, Lindsay has the heart of a champion. I think she’ll go the distance, maybe catch the final touchdown pass of a highly anticipated football game. In slow motion, with sappy music playing. And then she’ll point to the stands, and there I’ll be, in an oversized jersey that spells out Lindsay’s name, crying and clapping and mouthing silently (this is still slow motion, so you can’t hear the words, just lips moving) “I love you!” and maybe “Olive oil,” so that after the fact, I can ask her if from her vantage point she could tell when I started referencing an essential cooking ingredient. And sitting on my shoulders will be our little girl, and Lindsay (the slow motion is over now – back to regular motion) will whisper to herself, and the camera will cut to an extreme close-up, and she’ll say “I did it for you. I did it all for you.” Somehow we’re all still able to hear what she says over the screaming of the crowds, ’cause that’s how it works in movies. Amazing sound equipment they’ve got these days. You can pick up anything. And everyone watching the heartwarming movie is bawling and Lindsay, sitting next to us on the couch cradling her newborn baby shrugs her shoulders and says “Yeah, well, that’s what it was like. They hit it right on the head. Just multiply it by 100.”

If you’ve read Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, you may be able to tell that I’m coming down hard. I finished it a few days ago. Well, that’s what I would daydream about if I was in Lindsay’s place. So, really, you’ll have to ask her what’s in her movie. Maybe it’s something about an artist struggling to survive or a social worker who changes the lives of the people around her. But for both of us, we can’t wait to get to the end of the movie, just past the part where things are at their lowest, and to the next scene where suddenly everything seems possible, and everything that happened in the past is okay because the present is so wonderful. So, day-of-birth, we await you with eager anticipation! Don’t dawdle. But please keep our girl safe until then. We’d give the world for that.

*Neal has only allowed me to post this on the condition that I eventually post the second half of his note on his grocery-budgeting quest . . . so stay tuned

Neal’s significantly significant experience, Part IV

For Part I, click here.

For Part II, click here.

For Part III, click here.

And now for his summation…

The thing that surprised me more than anything else was how normal, and how friendly the men were. Outside of the cell-block fishbowl, they were regular people just like me and my fellow researchers. They shook our hands, laughed with us, told jokes, cried. They talked about wanting to invest, wanting to provide for their wives, their girlfriends, their kids. More than anything else, it was their kids that made them want to be better people. They loved their families. They prayed. In talking to these guys, I couldn’t help feeling they were just like me, except without the privileges. Most didn’t have father figures, or if they did, they weren’t good. They just never had someone to steer them like I had. Most had not made it to college. Some lived in tough neighborhoods. But they were real people; most of them were good people. Good people who made mistakes, not bad men who deserved to be cut off from humanity. Interviewing with us, they could let their guard down. And when the interviews were done, they put their protection back on, their swagger, and steeled themselves for the hell of the cell block.

When I watch TV now, it’s hard to watch the news and see a mug shot of a man flashed on the screen, and the terse blurb of his charge. Inevitably the picture is terrible; they’re not smiling, they look like a bad dude. Drug charges, assault, failure to pay child support. Whatever. I used to see those mug shots on the news and be glad one more bad dude was off the streets. But now I know the likelihood is that that mug shot is of a guy who is just like me but he just didn’t get the breaks, a guy that’s scared. A guy that needs someone to be a mentor, to help him do it right the next time.

By Neal Call

(I had to throw in this pic of my dreamy husband)

Neal’s significantly significant experience, Part III

For Part I, click here.

For Part II, click here.

Another guy we interviewed sat across the table from us, fidgeting constantly. He cried after nearly every question we asked, always apologizing. “I’m sorry, guys. I don’t know why I’m crying so much. I hardly cried at all last week.” We asked if he had a good relationship with his parents, and he cried. We asked if he understood how compound interest worked, and he cried. He didn’t know how it worked. The jail nurse came in and gave the guy a paper cup with his pills in it, and one filled with water. When she left, he explained, “I’ve been in solitary for like three weeks now, and I swear I’m going crazy. I just needed to talk to someone.”

We interviewed guys that were in jail for drug charges, for moving vehicle violations, for grand theft auto, for conspiracy to commit armed robbery, for driving under the influence. We interviewed guys that were charged with murder and sexual assault. One white guy who we met with had a completely shaved head and long goatee beard. Like most of the guys we met with, he was muscular, filling out his uniform. He had tattoos and his arms behind his back. But he wasn’t handcuffed like we thought; it was just his way of strolling. He’d been arrested for dumpster diving.

We never really knew whether many of the men had actually done what they were charged with. Our research was not concerned with guilt or innocence, just with gathering specific financial data and personal feelings about jail and family member relationships. But some admitted guilt without hedging. Others admitted they deserved to be in prison, but that the charges actually brought against them were bogus. Others said it was their first time, and they were scared. Far fewer than I expected actually said they were innocent.

Neal’s significantly significant experience, Part II

For Part I, click here

We, the undergraduate researchers, entered the jails with some degree of trepidation. The female researchers had been asked, awkwardly, not to dress provocatively. A guard took the entire team on a tour of the jail, and when we entered the cell blocks, every eye was on us. Men sidled up to the glass and leered. Others goaded each other into calling things out to us. “Hey, sweet thing.” “Hey, look over here.” Some men barked.

The first interview I took part in was for a young black guy, about 22 years old. He wore the standard issue uniform, black and white stripes. Scraggly beard hair. He sat comfortably, but with good posture. He smiled, and shook our hands warmly. We asked about his family relationships, and about his children. We asked what he was charged with. “Armed robbery,” he said. What did he expect to do when he got out of jail, we asked. He wanted to cook. He had a passion for the restaurant business, and just wanted to get back home so he could go back to his cooking. When we asked how often he felt lonely in jail, he said “every day.” Depressed? “Every day.” Like it’s an effort to get going? “Every day.”

The next man I interviewed was ripped. He was one of the older guys at about 38, but he was easily six feet tall and 180 pounds of pure muscle. He walked into the room cautiously, shook our hands carefully. We thanked him for coming in to do the interview, and he waved it off. “Hey, I’m not doin’ anything else. And this research is gonna help people, right?” We said it was. “Well, let’s get started,” he said. He thought for a few moments before answering any of our questions. We asked a series of questions starting with “How often do you feel…?” He didn’t feel lonely. He didn’t feel depressed. But he admitted that he sometimes felt fearful. And when we asked if it was a good thing that he came to jail, he laughed, and then was silent far longer than for any other question. “Yeah,” he finally said. “It had to happen.”

Neal’s significantly significant experience, Part I

Alright, enough of celebrating me…

One of my avid readers (one of the very few that will brave blogs without many pictures ) chastened me for not posting enough.  I blog non-stop in my head, but don’t always find the time to put it in writing.  But tonight and for the next couple days (in installments), I’ll be featuring something Neal wrote about his experience this summer. It is really interesting for me to see him writing about his experience–seeing how he views my work and what left an impression on him.

My wife has just started her second year in her Master’s program for MFHD. Though she did her undergrad work in history, she developed a connection with vulnerable populations after doing Americorps work in Washington, D.C. (where we met). She wants to help people in transition learn to manage their finances better. She hopes to create programs that would benefit men and women as they leave jail or prison, battered women as they learn to support themselves, and others who are in a position both logistically and emotionally to better their lives through sincere, concerted efforts at change. She paired her financial literacy work with a University of Illinois researcher’s work in fatherhood among incarcerated males, and we spent the summer going between the Champaign county downtown jail and satellite Jail.

As part of the IRB protocols for working with an incarcerated population, we had to protect the well-being of the “jailed individuals” (the preferred term over “convicts” or “inmates”). There are a series of requirements that must be met for work with vulnerable populations, which amount to safeguards against the sorts of non-voluntary experiments that were often tested on incarcerated or minority populations in the middle part of the 20^th century. One of the things we had to verbalize to the guys coming in for interviews was the possibility of benefit weighed against any risks involved. We stated that talking about financial matters can be a “very emotional topic,” but that any topics our questions brought up were not anticipated to be more difficult than what they would normally experience during their stay in jail.

Before anyone went in to do any interviews, a friend of the Illinois researcher spoke with all of the Jail Study workers about what it was like to be in jail. He was an LDS convert (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) who a few years earlier had a warrant out for his arrest on drug violations. Rather than go to jail, he left the state, eventually marrying a woman from New Mexico and having several children. When they both decided to join the church, the man voluntarily returned to Illinois, walked into the jail, and asked to be booked so he could serve his sentence. He served six months in the Satellite Jail, which he called “the cushy jail.” Before completing his presentation, he showed us the scars of stab wounds from pens and pencils in his arms, hip and side. He talked of guards that allowed him and several other men to congregate in the LDS guy’s bedroom for what he assumed were KKK meetings. They were, in fact, scripture study sessions.