And one about visiting family in prison
May. 20th, 2005 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
*sighs*
On the Outside, Busing In
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
The Friday night bus was late. The Friday night conversations were well under way.
"I remember our wedding day," Chantel Lewis Campbell, a 32-year-old from Brownsville, Brooklyn, said to several friends at a crowded bus stop last week. "I wore a veil and a gown, even a garter. He wore a white collared shirt and a tie, and those ugly green pants."
Victoria Deltorro, 46, of the South Bronx, nodded. "We were married there, too," she said.
The two women spent their wedding nights at the same motel - the Sunset Inn in Malone, N.Y. - without their husbands. Shortly after the bridegrooms marched down the aisle, they were marched back to their prison cells.
Mrs. Campbell and Ms. Deltorro have come to be known in their bittersweet corner of the world - 34th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, where they wait for the bus - as the Bare Hill brides, a reference to the Bare Hill Correctional Facility, the upstate prison where they were married and where their husbands are doing time.
The Bare Hill brides are two lonely faces in a tired but dedicated weekend travel group with round-trip tickets to a perpetual heartache. On Fridays and Saturdays from 10 to 11 p.m., hundreds of women and a handful of men and children, all eager to visit loved ones behind bars, board chartered buses to various prisons in the far reaches of New York State.
Most in the crowd, some cradling newborns, others holding bags of food and clothing, or photos that tell stories of broken homes, wait patiently for their bus in the usual position, with their backs against the wall.
"It ain't easy raising my children on my salary alone," said Mrs. Campbell, a mother of four who works as a janitor at the Surfside Gardens housing project in Coney Island. Her husband, Gregory Campbell, has been locked away for six years for possession of drugs. "He's supposed to come home next month," she said. "We can sure use him around the house again."
Standing beneath a lottery sign, the weekend crowds contemplate numbers of a different sort: How many more years will a boyfriend have to serve? How many days before a husband comes home? How many hours before a new baby gets to meet his father?
"The people who come out here, we understand each other," said Mrs. Campbell, avoiding eye contact with streams of curious out-of-towners and fellow New Yorkers, many holding hands and carrying playbills on their way to Pennsylvania Station. "We're all in the same boat, in the same predicament. We can all feel each other's pain."
As Mrs. Campbell spoke, Kim White began taking attendance. Roster in hand, Mrs. White began checking off the name of each person who had booked a reservation on the soon-to-arrive buses. Each adult pays $50, children half that, for a round-trip ticket to prisons like Attica, 30 miles east of Buffalo; Clinton, in Dannemora; and Bare Hill, tucked away in the Adirondacks.
Depending on the destination, the trips can take eight or 10 hours one way. Visitors get to their designated prison early the next morning, allowing ample time for the slow procession past the checkpoints at each prison. Visitors then spend a good part of a weekend afternoon with family and friends, sitting at bubble-gum-streaked wooden tables, catching up with hard lives on each side of a solid wall. By late afternoon, the riders are back on a bus to Manhattan, where they sometimes arrive well after midnight.
Mrs. White, who lives in Jamaica, Queens, and conducts phone surveys for a telemarketing company based in Long Island City, knows the system all too well. Nearly every weekend for the past nine years, rain, shine or too much snow to want to get out of bed, she has boarded one of the chartered buses to visit her 35-year-old husband, Lance.
"I love him to death," she said. "I just need to know that he's doing O.K." When asked what crime her husband had committed, Mrs. White said flatly: "It wasn't murder, but it was enough."
As a veteran on the prison-visiting scene, Mrs. White is often asked by Alfred D'Acosta, the owner of the Flamboyant Bus Company, which charters the buses, to lend a hand in organizing the roster and seating charts for the four or five buses that arrive each Friday and Saturday night. Each bus is relatively new, holds 49 to 57 passengers, and is equipped with reclining seats, screens for showing movies, and a toilet.
Mr. D'Acosta, 55, who lives in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, said he had been chartering buses to prisons from 34th Street since 1986. His business is not the first of its kind in New York City. A prison bus service that picks up passengers at Columbus Circle, called Operation Prison Gap, has been in business since 1975.
Still, Mr. D'Acosta said, with prison populations swelling in New York State, his service is in demand from people who want a relatively inexpensive way to visit loved ones.
"We're full, even in the dead of winter," he said.
Mr. D'Acosta said that for years he drove many of the buses he now charters. He gave that up for a number of reasons. One of them, he said, was too many hours spent staring in the rearview mirror at all the tortured faces in the seats behind him.
"A tremendous amount of sadness and pain," Mr. D'Acosta said between puffs on a cigarette, waiting for the first of his buses to arrive. "To see all of those people like that, especially the little children who would not stop crying because they were going home without their fathers, was a lot to deal with."
Within minutes, the first of Mr. D'Acosta's buses arrived. "This one is going toward Buffalo, to the Collins Correctional Facility," he announced.
By now, the Friday night conversation included Shawntay Snell, 32, of Brownsville. She was on her way to visit her boyfriend, Tony Davis, who is serving five years at Bare Hill for robbery.
Ms. Snell, who has five children, arrived not only with canned foods and new socks, but also with an announcement: She, too, would soon become a Bare Hill bride. "I'm getting married in June," she said, trying a brave smile that did not quite succeed. "There's so much planning to do."
The Bare Hill brides offered congratulations, and soon all three were talking about what Ms. Snell might wear on her wedding day. Ms. Campbell joked about there being "too many uninvited guests" in the visiting room where the marriages take place, and then their laughter drowned in the squeaky sounds of another bus pulling up to the curb.
The Bare Hill bus had finally arrived, and the three women climbed aboard, disappearing behind tinted windows. Another group on a weekly rite of devotion rolled off into the darkness. The Friday night conversations had only just begun.
On the Outside, Busing In
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
The Friday night bus was late. The Friday night conversations were well under way.
"I remember our wedding day," Chantel Lewis Campbell, a 32-year-old from Brownsville, Brooklyn, said to several friends at a crowded bus stop last week. "I wore a veil and a gown, even a garter. He wore a white collared shirt and a tie, and those ugly green pants."
Victoria Deltorro, 46, of the South Bronx, nodded. "We were married there, too," she said.
The two women spent their wedding nights at the same motel - the Sunset Inn in Malone, N.Y. - without their husbands. Shortly after the bridegrooms marched down the aisle, they were marched back to their prison cells.
Mrs. Campbell and Ms. Deltorro have come to be known in their bittersweet corner of the world - 34th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, where they wait for the bus - as the Bare Hill brides, a reference to the Bare Hill Correctional Facility, the upstate prison where they were married and where their husbands are doing time.
The Bare Hill brides are two lonely faces in a tired but dedicated weekend travel group with round-trip tickets to a perpetual heartache. On Fridays and Saturdays from 10 to 11 p.m., hundreds of women and a handful of men and children, all eager to visit loved ones behind bars, board chartered buses to various prisons in the far reaches of New York State.
Most in the crowd, some cradling newborns, others holding bags of food and clothing, or photos that tell stories of broken homes, wait patiently for their bus in the usual position, with their backs against the wall.
"It ain't easy raising my children on my salary alone," said Mrs. Campbell, a mother of four who works as a janitor at the Surfside Gardens housing project in Coney Island. Her husband, Gregory Campbell, has been locked away for six years for possession of drugs. "He's supposed to come home next month," she said. "We can sure use him around the house again."
Standing beneath a lottery sign, the weekend crowds contemplate numbers of a different sort: How many more years will a boyfriend have to serve? How many days before a husband comes home? How many hours before a new baby gets to meet his father?
"The people who come out here, we understand each other," said Mrs. Campbell, avoiding eye contact with streams of curious out-of-towners and fellow New Yorkers, many holding hands and carrying playbills on their way to Pennsylvania Station. "We're all in the same boat, in the same predicament. We can all feel each other's pain."
As Mrs. Campbell spoke, Kim White began taking attendance. Roster in hand, Mrs. White began checking off the name of each person who had booked a reservation on the soon-to-arrive buses. Each adult pays $50, children half that, for a round-trip ticket to prisons like Attica, 30 miles east of Buffalo; Clinton, in Dannemora; and Bare Hill, tucked away in the Adirondacks.
Depending on the destination, the trips can take eight or 10 hours one way. Visitors get to their designated prison early the next morning, allowing ample time for the slow procession past the checkpoints at each prison. Visitors then spend a good part of a weekend afternoon with family and friends, sitting at bubble-gum-streaked wooden tables, catching up with hard lives on each side of a solid wall. By late afternoon, the riders are back on a bus to Manhattan, where they sometimes arrive well after midnight.
Mrs. White, who lives in Jamaica, Queens, and conducts phone surveys for a telemarketing company based in Long Island City, knows the system all too well. Nearly every weekend for the past nine years, rain, shine or too much snow to want to get out of bed, she has boarded one of the chartered buses to visit her 35-year-old husband, Lance.
"I love him to death," she said. "I just need to know that he's doing O.K." When asked what crime her husband had committed, Mrs. White said flatly: "It wasn't murder, but it was enough."
As a veteran on the prison-visiting scene, Mrs. White is often asked by Alfred D'Acosta, the owner of the Flamboyant Bus Company, which charters the buses, to lend a hand in organizing the roster and seating charts for the four or five buses that arrive each Friday and Saturday night. Each bus is relatively new, holds 49 to 57 passengers, and is equipped with reclining seats, screens for showing movies, and a toilet.
Mr. D'Acosta, 55, who lives in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, said he had been chartering buses to prisons from 34th Street since 1986. His business is not the first of its kind in New York City. A prison bus service that picks up passengers at Columbus Circle, called Operation Prison Gap, has been in business since 1975.
Still, Mr. D'Acosta said, with prison populations swelling in New York State, his service is in demand from people who want a relatively inexpensive way to visit loved ones.
"We're full, even in the dead of winter," he said.
Mr. D'Acosta said that for years he drove many of the buses he now charters. He gave that up for a number of reasons. One of them, he said, was too many hours spent staring in the rearview mirror at all the tortured faces in the seats behind him.
"A tremendous amount of sadness and pain," Mr. D'Acosta said between puffs on a cigarette, waiting for the first of his buses to arrive. "To see all of those people like that, especially the little children who would not stop crying because they were going home without their fathers, was a lot to deal with."
Within minutes, the first of Mr. D'Acosta's buses arrived. "This one is going toward Buffalo, to the Collins Correctional Facility," he announced.
By now, the Friday night conversation included Shawntay Snell, 32, of Brownsville. She was on her way to visit her boyfriend, Tony Davis, who is serving five years at Bare Hill for robbery.
Ms. Snell, who has five children, arrived not only with canned foods and new socks, but also with an announcement: She, too, would soon become a Bare Hill bride. "I'm getting married in June," she said, trying a brave smile that did not quite succeed. "There's so much planning to do."
The Bare Hill brides offered congratulations, and soon all three were talking about what Ms. Snell might wear on her wedding day. Ms. Campbell joked about there being "too many uninvited guests" in the visiting room where the marriages take place, and then their laughter drowned in the squeaky sounds of another bus pulling up to the curb.
The Bare Hill bus had finally arrived, and the three women climbed aboard, disappearing behind tinted windows. Another group on a weekly rite of devotion rolled off into the darkness. The Friday night conversations had only just begun.
