City Lit: Inside and Out

Bartlett's first P.O. was willing to loosen the rules to allow her space for rebuilding a life under difficult circumstances. He overlooked the occasional missed appointment and the chaos in the apartment she shared with an ever-changing array of family members. He relaxed the curfew so she could work a night shift, and let her blow off steam with harmless acts of rebellion. A later officer used a much different approach--shoving into the apartment in an effort to intimidate her and her family, escalating small arguments into threats of arrest, and generally daring Bartlett to screw up. Confronted with her own powerlessness, Bartlett reacted by picking fights with the officer, and nearly ended up back in prison.

Parole restrictions weren't the only pitfall Bartlett needed to avoid; legislators and bureaucrats had deliberately limited her options. From employment to voting rights, ex-offenders face a series of legally sanctioned privacy invasions and restrictions on what help they can get. Perhaps the most frustrating barrier for Bartlett was the ban on former prisoners living in public housing. Since 1988, Congress has passed a series of laws authorizing and aiding local housing authorities in evicting people with criminal records; New York City aggressively enforced them.

Gonnerman also shows how the record of the state's Urban Development Corporation added to Bartlett's housing troubles during Governor Mario Cuomo's administration. The UDC was set up in 1968 to build affordable housing; under Cuomo, between 1984 and 1989, the UDC spent 80 percent of the $1 billion in bonds it issued on prison construction.

With her housing options limited, Bartlett had to depend upon her daughter's willingness to secretly put her up in a corner of a crowded projects apartment. That complicated the already precarious process of reviving relationships with children she hadn't been around to raise. For all her legal troubles, this was the most difficult challenge of post-prison life for Bartlett. She desperately wanted to reconnect with her kids, but they only knew their mother as an idea, not a demanding physical presence.

Again, Gonnerman affectingly illustrates the disconnect. During one of the family's many fights--this time over who would get to sleep in the largest bedroom--Bartlett's teenaged daughter called the cops to report a domestic dispute. Bartlett knew the stakes: It could lead her back to jail, or at least make her parole officer tighten the rules. But as she read the police report, with her daughter's name under "victim" and hers under "suspect," she felt not fear but sadness. She understood how far apart they had grown during her lengthy prison sentence. And she realized that the freedom she had so longed for in prison had not yet come, because the distance prison created still held her family captive.